Lord Wimsey’s sleuthing sets hearts aflutter

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This article was published 22/10/2009 (6126 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the pantheon of literary crime fighters, Lord Peter Wimsey stands tall as the epitome of the glamour and allure of the SSRq30s whodunit.

The aristocratic sleuth is the most famous creation of Dorothy L. Sayers, doyenne of the golden age of the mystery book in England between world wars. The monocle-wearing Wimsey makes his dashing Manitoba Theatre Centre debut tonight in Sayers’ romantic potboiler Strong Poison, which should play out like an extended episode of CSI London circa 1930.

Chicago director/actor Frances Limoncelli adapted the Sayers book for the Windy’s City’s Lifeline Theatre and discovered Wimsey was a more seductive figure than popular rivals such as Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot or Father Brown.

"To me, Lord Peter is a three-dimensional Prince Charming," says the Connecticut-born Limoncelli, making her first visit to Winnipeg to catch the Canadian première of her 2004 script. "He’s got it all. He’s brilliant and hilarious. He’s sensitive, plays the piano and quotes poetry. He’s athletic.

"He’s much better than Sherlock Holmes, who was scary. If you are Watson, you want a best friend like Holmes. He’s fascinating and idiosyncratic and makes life never dull."

In Strong Poison, Wimsey, performed by Toronto’s Greg Ellwand, falls in love with Harriet Vane (Miriam Smith), who is on trial for murdering her ex-lover. She strikes him as incredibly special and honest, and he decides to come to her rescue by finding the real killer. Vane is an unconventional mystery writer who is being railroaded to the gallows because she lived with the victim outside marriage.

The striking similarities between Sayers and Vane always attracted suspicion that the author (1893-1957) had fallen in love with her own hero and had created a surrogate for herself. It was said that Wimsey was a debonair blend of P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster and Hollywood’s dance idol Fred Astaire.

The Wimsey/Vane courting, which begins at the opposite ends of a long table in a prison visitors’ room, should still have an appeal for contemporary audiences, especially women, who are the major consumer of murder mysteries today.

"The romance is really one where two wonderful brains meet, two sensitive people with wicked senses of humour," says the dark-haired Limoncelli, 42, during a recent chat at MTC. "Lord Peter doesn’t want to own his partner, he wants an equal. For a modern women, that’s a romance that I can buy into."

Sayers, a clergyman’s daughter who was one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford University, shares the most wanted list of crime queens of her era with Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and of course Agatha Christie. Limoncelli favours Sayers for her strict adherence to mystery writing’s fair-play rule, which demands the reader or audience member always know everything that the sleuth knows. That eliminates unsatisfying surprise endings where the detective reveals something no one else knows.

"That’s not fair," she says. "In Sayers you are inside the mind of the detective. When he’s pondering what a clue means, you’re doing the same thing. You have the same chance to put the mystery together that he does."

Limoncelli has dramatized four Sayers books for Lifeline, a 100-seat theatre specializing in adapting literature to the stage. Each one has done progressively better at the box office. The company performed Gaudy Night for the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, whose members included the author’s biographer and close friend Barbara Reynolds. At intermission the elderly Reynolds was asked for her opinion.

"She said, ‘All through Act I, I was wondering what Dorothy would say and I think I kept hearing her voice in my ear: Quite right, quite right,’" Limoncelli recalls. "That’s the best endorsement that I could ever have."

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca