Merry Christmas, Lord Peter Wimsey!
The scones are buttered, and the bells are ringing
At the opening of Dorothy L. Sayers’s magnificent novel The Nine Tailors (1934), the esteemed rare books collector and overly-frequent accidental sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, finds himself in a minor car accident on an icy road in late December, on the outskirts of a picturesque small country town with a magnificent church. No, this isn’t Christmas Eve—it is, rather New Year’s Eve.
The snow is falling, breathtakingly beautiful, though destructive for roads. The church bells are getting ready to ring, inviting all the faithful to come and celebrate together. Really, the story could just as easily have taken place on Christmas Eve. It feels like Christmas Eve, one about to turn into a dreamy white Christmas.
As it happens, it is the town’s kind Rector who offers Lord Peter and his butler a wonderful tea (delightful fresh-baked scones with butter!) and beds for the night. Except, the Lord doesn’t get to do much actual sleeping that night. Instead, at the invitation of the Rector, Lord Peter becomes the ninth bell ringer for the all-night-long change ringing marathon at the church to usher in the New Year. (He substitutes for another bell ringer, who was in bed with the flu—a detail that will turn out to be important for the murder mystery that will eventually materialize as well.)
What is change ringing, you may ask? In existence since the 1600s, it has been a feature of English churches. Here is an explanation of this mathematical yet musical art in action.
And here is another explanation with some more ringing, this one at the University of Chicago.
Spending all night at church, Lord Peter and the other bell ringers get to ring in the new year, quite literally.
There is a reason that God’s people always wanted to celebrate significant moments with music—the Psalms of the Old Testament, the hymns of the early church, and the hymns and even bells and other musical instruments with which we continue to worship now.
We do not hear how Lord Peter celebrated Christmas that year, just a few days before taking that eventful drive to the countryside and getting an unplanned New Year celebration in small town East Anglia. It is simply not relevant to the story at hand. But that just gives us imaginative license to think what we will. And I choose to think that it was a lovely Christmas. After attending a majestic Christmas Eve service at his home church in London, Lord Peter enjoyed a dinner gathering with friends. Good food was shared, gifts exchanged, and the spirit of joy filled the air with laughter.
Indeed, I imagine laughter as the most significant music of Christmas. Why? because it is the ultimate sound of joy overcoming darkness. Sarah’s promised child once upon a time was the son of laughter—Isaac. And because of Jesus, we now get to laugh even in the face of the sorrows of this life.
Merry Christmas, dear friends.
Such a lovely piece! I've heard of & read a little of Peter Wimsey - I need to get back to it! He's such a riot of a character.
The fact that this is set on New Year's & not Christmas is fascinating, since there's definitely less New Year's murders than Christmas ones (in fiction). Does anyone else know any New Year's mysteries they’d recommend?
I just taught The Nine Tailors to a class of junior/senior English majors. I’ve long loved Sayers’ Peter Wimsey mysteries and find the overarching theme of divine providence in this book to be fascinating. But my 20 students were less than impressed. Church bells (and village life and agricultural settings) were so foreign to their Southern California city-&-suburb megachurch existence that they just couldn’t “get into” the book. I was so sad about that.