by Arunabha Sengupta
As a young lad, Lord Peter Wimsey was a fantastic cricketer. “Plenty of Eton men will remember his performance against Harrow.” And while at Balliol he scored two successive hundreds for Oxford in 1911, the 112 at Lord’s in particular was of such pedigree and brilliance that it all but blew his cover twenty years later.
Indeed, in Murder Must Advertise, the intriguing plot involving the advertising world with ingenious methods of murder and drug peddling, there is not only the description of a cricket match in exuberant prose; the game also forms an integral part in the puzzle, from nearly unmasking Wimsey who is masquerading as an ad man to handing him the final clue in the scheme of things. The entire chapter dedicated to the game is titled Unexpected Conclusion of a Cricket Match.
The game pops up when ‘Tomboy Toffee’ engages Pym’s Publicity to develop a series of cricket linked advertisements with slogans that run: “Yah! that’a a Yorker!” to “Lumme, what a Lob!” — featuring eleven famous cricketers.
For advertising reasons, Wimsey, undercover as copywriter Death Bredon, explains the intricacies of a googly to Miss Meteyard, first with pencil and paper and then in the corridor with a small round tin of Good Judge Tobacco, with which he almost catches the copy-chief responsible, Mr Armstrong, on the side of the head.
The personal experience of Sayers in the advertising world comes in handy. It was she who supposedly coined the phrase: It pays to Advertise
Later, the elderly gentleman watching Wimsey unwillingly bat at The Oval for Pym’s Publicity in a corporate office match wisely tells a disgruntled batsman, “I have attended matches now for sixty ears my dear sir, and that goes back to a time before you were born or thought of, and I’ve never yet known anybody to be really out lbw — according to himself, that is.”
When, stung by a rising delivery on his elbow, Wimsey plays an unintended and brilliant innings, the very same gentleman is puzzled, “Bredon? I don’t remember hearing that name. You have a late cut which is exceedingly characteristic, and I could have taken my oath that the last time I saw you play it was at Lord’s in 1911, when you made 112. But I thought the name was Wimsey — Peter Wimsey of Balliol.” Wimsey’s cover is almost blown.
Murder Must Advertise is not the best Sayers novel, but it is a delight for cricket lovers.
Cricket is also mentioned elsewhere in the canon. In Teeth of Evidence, for example, Wimsey visits the dentist Lamplough, someone he has shared the cricket field with during his Oxford days.
But as far as Sayers was concerned, Peter Wimsey and other mystery novels and stories were more of a diversion, perhaps lining up bookshop windows while she stared into the face of more serious matters of life and beyond and her more serious work were presumably to be found somewhere in the obscure recesses of the store.
Her literary gift extended bountifully to the realms of poetry, plays, theological essays and translations. She considered her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy to be her best work.
Here we may add that Sayers, even in the most serious of her writings, showed glimpses of her fascination for the noble game.
The Mind of the Maker is a most profound book on Christian Theology dealing with the subject of creativity under the light of Christian doctrine about the nature of Trinity; penned in 1941 after all her Wimsey novels and stories had been done with as remnants of a frivolous past.
Even in this deep and meaningful volume, the very first chapter ‘The Law of Nature and Opinion’ starts with a paragraph about the word ‘law’. And after speaking about the general scheme of the universe, arbitrary regulation made by human consent and the Roman laws of civilised warfare, it touches upon laws of cricket.
“Thus, if the ball (correctly bowled) hits the wicket, the batsman is ‘out’. There is, however, no inevitable connection between the impact of the ball upon three wooden stumps and the progress of a human body from a patch of mown grass to a pavilion. The two events are readily separable in theory. If the MCC chose to alter the ‘law’, they could do so immediately, by merely saying so, and no cataclysm of nature would be involved. The l.b.w. (leg before wicket) rule has, in fact, been altered within living memory, and not merely the universe, but even the game, has survived the alteration.”
How many books on theology refer to the MCC and the lbw law? One would perhaps have expected CT Studd to pen such lines, not Dorothy L Sayers.
Or on second thought, if anyone penned these lines it had to be Dorothy L Sayers.
She was born on 13 June 1893.
Illustration: Maha