The Documents in the Case Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 13)

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Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.

And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within Shedunnit that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime or green title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace, Penguin 89.

This book was first published in 1930 and then joined the Penguin series in March 1937. It is Sayers' only full-length novel not to feature her series detective Lord Peter Wimsey, and her only one to be written with a co-author, in this case, Dr Robert Eustace. It stands out, too, because of its format: this is an epistolary novel, presented as a series of 53 letters, statements and diary extracts, through which the reader must navigate to understand the story.

The action is centred on a suburban villa in Bayswater, west London. In the lower portion of the house, a married couple, the Harrisons, live with Mrs Harrison's paid companion, Miss Milsom. Early on, new tenants arrive for the upstairs flat, a pair of young men named Lathom and Munting. Lathom is a painter and Munting is a writer, currently at work on a literary biography. Munting is also engaged to a fellow writer, Elizabeth Drake, and many of his contributions in the dossier are letters addressed to her. We learn from the cover letter that appears first in the sequence that it is Paul Harrison, son of Mr Harrison of Bayswater, who has brought these documents together and is sending them to someone named Sir Gilbert Pugh — an authority figure of some kind, we infer. We are also told that the purpose of these documents is to help Pugh, and by extension the reader, "understand exactly what took place in my late father’s household". Right from the start, then, the authors are hinting to the reader that there is a mystery to be unravelled here, one that requires reading between the lines.

Another aspect of the book's presentation also communicates one of its major themes. There are no chapters, but the 53 documents are split into two sections, titled "Synthesis" and "Analysis". These headings echo stages in a scientific inquiry, signalling that science and experimentation are going to be important in this book. This was, broadly, the element that Robert Eustace brought to the collaboration on The Documents in the Case. He was a doctor and had co-authored quite a number of novels and short stories before, primarily scientific or medically-informed mysteries. He was almost twenty-five years older than Sayers, and had begun his fiction-writing career in the late 1890s in partnership with the Irish writer L. T. Meade.

Joining me to discuss The Documents in the Case is Victoria Stewart, a writer and researcher and the author of books including Crime Writing in Interwar Britain and Literature and Justice in Mid-Twentieth Century Literature. She's very knowledgable about the connections between real-life cases and golden age detective fiction, and I'm delighted to have her expertise for this very interesting and unusual novel.

Before we get into the book, though, I'll give my usual spoiler warning here. Until you hear me say that we are "entering the spoiler zone", you can safely listen without hearing major plot details. The timestamp for that point will also be in the episode description. After that, you can expect to hear major spoilers, up to and including the full solution to the mystery. And at the end of every episode, I ask my guest to award the book a rating, so stay tuned to the end to hear how many green penguins out of five Victoria gives this one and why.

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Caroline: So Victoria, maybe you can give us an idea of where Sayers is in her career at the point that this book comes along.

Victoria: Well, it's an interesting moment for her, really. Up until 1929, she's working full-time at Benson's Advertising Agency and during 1929, she actually decides to leave and become a writer full-time. So she gives in her notice in the summer and then she leaves at the end of the year. She's already started working on Documents in the Case at this point, and so from the start of 1930, she's actually a full-time freelance writer, so that's a going to be a big change for her. She's also had a really busy time in the preceding couple of years, and this is partly connected to another change that's going on.

Her first novels are published by a publisher called Ernest Benn, and during the 1920s, another publisher called Victor Gollancz began to establish himself as a really important figure in the publishing of genre fiction, including detective fiction and Sayers starts to develop a working relationship with him, which initially focuses around short fiction because conveniently for her, her contract with Ernest Benn doesn't cover short fiction.

So there's a book of Lord Peter Wimsey short stories that Gollancz publishes. I think that's 1927-28, and she also embarks on this really quite massive project for Gollancz to produce an anthology of short stories, not just detective stories, but also horror stories. And this is a real task that she's given.

She not only has to choose the stories, she also has to do all the admin, if you like, contacting the authors, arranging the rights, so haggling over money, all this kind of thing. So it's a real job of work that she undertakes while she's still in her full-time job and trying to keep her novel writing going.

But one advantage for her is that this is actually how she makes contact with Robert Eustace, who becomes her co-writer for Documents in the Case, because she approaches him to ask about the rights for one of the short stories that he co-wrote rather earlier on in the 20th century. So that's how she gets in touch with him.

He is from a slightly earlier generation of authors, I suppose, and he's working as a psychiatrist at a psychiatric hospital at the time. And it's from him that she gets the idea for how the murder is actually committed in this novel.

Caroline: Because he's had quite a few different co-writers, hasn't he? Over the course of his career, particularly L.T. Meade he worked with for a lot of things. And I think I'm right in saying that in each partnership he brings the science, right, that seems to be his role?

Victoria: I think that was the case, yes.

Caroline: And so it makes sense given that this is by far Sayers' most scientific mystery that it's the one that she co-writes with a scientist.

Victoria: Yes. Though interestingly, he apparently also was the one who suggested that there should be a romance element to the plot, that this should be partly how the plot unfolds.

Caroline: Mm, that's interesting. Yes. So that's one big ingredient of this book is the science. Another, I think is the format, the epistolary style, at least the first two thirds or so of the book is formed of these 53 documents in the case. Where does that come from? What is she harking back to for that?

Victoria: Well, Sayers, as we know, was a big fan of Wilkie Collins, who was a late Victorian author, sort of contemporary of Charles Dickens, and she particularly was interested in his novel, The Moonstone, from 1860, which is often seen as one of the founding texts of detective fiction and that also is written in this documentary format.

So I think we can see a bit of a homage to Wilkie Collins. And there are other little details as well that if you've read The Moonstone, which I would definitely recommend, it's a fantastic read. Other little details where she's maybe making references to that novel as well.

Caroline: I think in an episode several years ago, actually, a guest, Robin Stevens, suggested that she also sees a lot of The Moonstone in Clouds of Witness, an earlier Sayers book, in terms of its Yorkshire setting and the kind of more section and all that kind of thing. So Sayers, a big fan of Collins, we can say.

Victoria: It was definitely an enduring interest for her. And rather, later on, I think it was during the Second World War, she wrote the preface to the Everyman edition of The Moonstone. She also was working off and on, I don't think the timescale is quite fixed as to when she was doing it, but she attempted to write a biography of Collins, which there are some notes, I think, a few draft chapters in existence and that rather fell by the wayside because he had quite a complicated private life and around the time she was working on it, there was still descendants of his alive and so on. It was all a little bit delicate. But yeah, Collins is definitely major touchstone for Sayers.

Caroline: And then thinking about where she is with her own fiction, at this point, she's been writing Lord Peter Wimsey novels and stories all the time that she's also been working in advertising.

This is what she's known for. And then I suppose especially to a reader today, she just suddenly breaks off and goes in this new direction with The Documents in the Case. It's a standalone, non-series work. It's written in this epistolary style. It's nothing like what she's done before. Do we have any insight into why she felt like doing that?

Victoria: I'm not really sure. I don't know if it was partly the influence of having the co-author and maybe that freed her up a little bit. Interestingly, the next novel that she writes or I think she must have been working on them both at the same time, given how close together the publication dates are.

But the next one, which was her first novel published by Gollancz was Strong Poison, and that's the first novel in which Harriet Vane makes an appearance, who becomes a really important character for her. So this becomes a hinge text, if you like, in that way as well. Maybe she just felt that this was an opportunity because she had a co-author. It wasn't her sole responsibility that she could try out something quite different in terms of the format. And yes, setting aside that series character.

Caroline: It does feel, even reading it now, it feels experimental. It's strange because, you know, a lot of the detective fiction we read from the interwar years feels very of its type. Whereas this doesn't fit so neatly into any of the tropes we know, I think.

Victoria: I think you're absolutely right. Not only is it structured through documents, as we've mentioned, but just the order in which things happen. So for instance, the crime doesn't happen near the beginning, which is much more common for detective fiction of this period.

It doesn't happen until we are quite away, almost halfway, actually into the novel. So, yes, experimental I think is a good word for it. And also, I mean, detective fiction of this period obviously does always engage with sociocultural issues to a greater or lesser extent. This novel certainly has a lot of discussion of contemporary ideas about science.

Einstein gets a mention, for instance. Psychoanalysis, which is still a practice that was looked on with suspicion in many quarters at this time. That's discussed quite extensively. Lots of reference to contemporary novels that are probably now really completely forgotten. There's all kinds of stuff mixed in there, which we wouldn't necessarily always get to the same extent in detective fiction in this period.

Caroline: Another thing that I think is quite striking about this book is that it has what feels like a very specific setting. It's set in this sort of suburban milieu, which is partly just an accurate reflection of a type of life that people led at the time, echoing all those contemporary references, but it also feels like a reference to a particular crime and a particular very famous crime. Could you tell us a bit about that?

Victoria: Yes. I think she has to be making reference to the Bywaters and Thompson case, which was a real cause celeb of the early 1920s. There were certain points of the plot that really quite strongly echo that crime. This is a case that a number of authors tackled in fiction, perhaps most notably and slightly later, F. Tennyson Jesse in her novel, A Pin to See the Peepshow, which is a relatively faithful account, I would say of that crime or certainly more so than this novel, but I think it's a signal of how interested people still were during the 1920s. It was a real headline grabbing case, a very shocking case for a number of different reasons. And yes, I think this suburban setting is almost certainly a nod towards that case. Though much of the action actually takes place away from that setting, which itself is quite interesting.

Caroline: Yeah, it's odd, isn't it?

Victoria: Well, so one explanation that I read as a suggestion as to why the crime happens in this rather remote location is that it if it had happened in London and there'd been more people around, it would have been possible for an antidote to be administered.

So it has to happen in this remote place in order for it to be plausible that it's not discovered in time for the victim to be saved is one suggestion.

Caroline: That does make sense. That is consistent with the plot at least. Yes. So, of our two locations, we've got this suburban villa in Bayswater inhabited by this older man, Harrison, his younger wife, who like Edith Thompson seems to be very impressionable.

She lives very much for her art, and her reading, and she's inclined to self dramatize, shall we say. But she's also quite a vulnerable and emotional person who is repeatedly, it seems, hurt by the quite callous treatment from her husband. They're not exactly lodgers, are they? But they're just people in the flat above this artist and poet novelist, these two young men who come to live there.

They also have this live-in companion servant, Agatha Milsom, and we hear from all of these people variously in the documents discussing what's happening over this particular period, but what all the documents seem to be getting at and in the manner of epistolary novels, and one of the great pleasures of them is that as you begin reading the documents, you don't quite know what the author is driving at. You don't quite know what it is she wants you to look at.

We are now going to be entering the spoiler zone, so stop here if you haven't read the book yet and don't want to hear major plot details.

But we, I think we gradually realise, maybe, by the time you're about 25 pages in that it's the marriage that you're supposed to be looking at. Mr and Mrs Harrison. How would you characterize this marriage? What impression did it make on you?

Victoria: Well, it is evidently a rather troubled relationship. And I think in some respects this is one of the quite startling things about this novel, that its depiction of an unhappy marriage. It's quite unsparing in some respects, I think.

There's a line where the poet who is one of the people we hear quite a lot from, his letters to his fiance are included quite heavily in the first part of the novel. He makes this comment about the fact that although Mr Harrison seems like a very loving husband, the way that he talks about his wife is very different from the way he talks to her.

That gives us a glimpse of, I wouldn't go so far as to say an abusive relationship, but certainly maybe even something approaching what we would now call coercive control. For instance, he doesn't want her to go back to work. He wants her to stay at home. Miss Milsom, who is something between a paid companion and a servant, it's a little bit difficult to work out exactly what her status is in the household. She almost seems to take on the role of not guarding Mrs Harrison exactly, but making sure she doesn't step out of line in some way. So yeah, a rather troubled relationship, I think you would have to say.

The other aspect that just strikes me, that's a little bit of a reference, I think to Bywaters and Thompson, when we eventually hear from Mrs Harrison herself, the letters that she writes to Lathom. Edith Thompson's letters were read out in court and rather unsparing, and they were really dissected actually during the court proceedings and much was made of the fact that she may have been inventing a lot of what she was saying. So this was part of her defense that when she talked about wishing her husband harm, she wasn't being honest, that she was just really fabricating, daydreaming almost. And I think we can maybe see Sayers making use of that idea, but she actually turns it, gives it different kind of twist. An almost darker, quite cynical twist actually in some ways how that part of the novel eventually pans out.

Caroline: Yes. I don't think Sayers was at all sympathetic to Edith Thompson.

Victoria: No, not in the least.

Caroline: That's very much the sense that I get from this novel that she was even quite impatient with her in a kind of, 'well just pull yourself together girl' way.

Victoria: I mean, the contrast with F. Tennyson Jesse is really quite startling in that way. I think you're right. And the sense that Mrs Harrison completely manipulates Lathom by the end of it, that's quite startling, I think, quite shocking.

Caroline: Yes. Because one of the sort of smoking guns in the novel is this initial suggestion by Mrs Harrison that she's pregnant with Lathom's child. Lathom being the artist from upstairs she's been having the affair with. And then actually, no, she's not. And she seems to sort of dismiss this possibility so quickly that you are, I think, quite strongly led in the direction of, well, she made it up in the first place to manipulate him into acting.

Victoria: Absolutely. That's the moment that I think of as being rather cynical on Sayers' part for sure.

Caroline: And then it gets referenced later, doesn't it? When Mr Harrison's son by his first wife, Paul, who is, we understand, the architect of these documents. He's brought them together in an attempt to try and get the authorities to reconsider the coroner's verdict of accidental death on his father, and actually consider that it was murder by Lathom.

He makes reference to the, well, we are never going to be able to bring it home to her, but I hold her responsible for my father's death. She didn't actually poison him, but she orchestrated it so that somebody did.

Victoria: Absolutely. There's certainly this sense of her inciting Lathom and perhaps even not really caring what happens to Lathom afterwards, which again, very, very cynical reading of the whole situation.

Caroline: One thing that is really interesting to go back and look in such detail at specific novels of an author that you've known for a long time is to realise that they didn't necessarily share all your opinions about everything. And yeah, I think especially if you read this book in partnership with A Pin to See the Peepshow, which is a much more sympathetic, and I think today much more mainstream opinion of the case of Edith Thompson, which is that she was an unjustly accused bystander, essentially.

Victoria: Well, sure. And I mean, Thompson ended up being hanged.

Caroline: She was hanged for murder.

Victoria: Yeah. Despite not having physically taken any action. Her lover, Freddie Bywaters, approached Thompson and her husband when they were in the street and murdered the husband. And Edith Thompson was just, was there.

Caroline: She was just there. Yeah.

Victoria: But the evidence that she had somehow told Bywaters to do this was really rather thin. It's almost as though she was tried for the fact that she had this younger lover. And actually that's the other point of contact with the Harrisons, that there's an age gap between husband and wife, that the husband is rather older as well.

Caroline: So I suppose in a way, this is a thought experiment of, well, what if Edith Thompson was to blame? Because we are shown, the way Sayers writes it, that Mrs Harrison is kind of instrumental in the murder of her husband, even if she didn't actually get the vial out and pour it into his dinner, you know?

Victoria: Absolutely.

Caroline: Yeah. So we should move on to talk about the science, because that is a huge part of this novel. It's Robert Eustace's contribution, this plot that Sayers was very excited about, this novel method of murder. I don't know if she thought it was novel, but certainly unusual, original, that it would surprise people and it would excite people bringing in all of this contemporary science, the references to Einstein and so on, that you mentioned. How do you feel about this as a mystery reader? Do you agree? Do you think this is a good plot?

Victoria: I think the idea of the plot hinging on the difference between a naturally occurring poison and an artificial one, a synthetic one, I think that is an interesting idea. It has to be said. It wasn't a brand new idea and in fact, in that big anthology that I mentioned that Sayers was editing in the late 1920s she includes a short story by Ernest Bramah, one of the Max Carrados stories with his blind detective. A short story that also hinges on precisely this distinction between synthetic and shall we say real, naturally occurring, poison. And that's also centering on mushrooms as well. So not a brand spanking new idea, but I think the mechanism, the analytical machinery that's used, and that is described in quite a lot of detail in the novel. I think that is a new aspect and that's again something that Robert Eustace brought.

So there's a climactic scene in the novel where we witness the experiment to try and find out if this is real, naturally occurring poison or not. And I'm pretty sure there's a letter in which Eustace describes that to Sayers and describes it in a very, I mean, it's a very dramatic scene in the novel and it all hinges on whether you get light or darkness as the outcome. And that certainly is quite an interesting and engaging aspect. I have to say, there's some discussion of the science behind all of this. I wouldn't be able to repeat it to you, summarise it to you, Caroline? I just have to take it as read. I think there have been scientists more recently who've maybe taken issue with some of the ins and outs of how this worked. I certainly read one account from a relatively contemporary scientist who suggested that it might not have actually been possible to deduce what it was that had killed Harrison in the way that happens in the novel. But I think it's often the way that in order to make a scientific discovery or theory work within a plot, some liberties need need to be taken by the author.

Caroline: Even though to me the scientific descriptions in this book already feel quite complicated. I'm sure they are being hugely simplified for the lay reader.

Victoria: Yes. And there is certainly a letter of Sayers where she says, oh no, we put in all that work. And actually it wasn't right. And then yes, she satisfied herself that no, that it did stand up as an idea.

Caroline: I think another reason perhaps why this idea of the difference between something synthetic and something naturally occurring appealed to her potentially is because it allowed her to incorporate lots of discussion around the connection between the natural world and the artificial world that man is creating.

We know that by the end of this decade, she was going to be writing a lot about religion and faith and its place in the modern world. So perhaps she's already having these thoughts because there are long passages, there's a whole scene set in a parsonage where they're just talking about Darwin and God, and is it possible to be a religious man and is it possible not to be a religious man given what we know and all this kind of thing? Do you think that belongs in the novel? Is that worthwhile?

Victoria: Well, I don't know about belongs. I think it certainly reflects, as you say, Sayers' interest in how you can reconcile having religious faith with also with accommodating these scientific theories that are burgeoning at the time. And I suppose the discussions earlier on maybe cue us up for the fact that science, hard science is going to be really important at the climax.

Caroline: Because that's one of Mrs Harrison's topics that she likes to bring up that Mr Harrison is always shutting down is she wants to talk about Einstein and relativity. And I suppose also that signals a curiosity about theories of the world that he just doesn't have.

And he's supposed to be all small-minded and suburban. I think some of it goes a bit over my head. That's why I find it a bit harder reading than some of the rest of it. But, you know, she's just smarter than me.

Victoria: Well, it's, it's one of those things that probably for a reader in 1930, a lot of these names that are now a little bit obscure to us, like James Jeans, for instance, who was a pretty well known science author at the time.

You almost need some footnotes now, but at the time it, it would have been much more familiar to people who read the newspaper, listened to the radio and so on. So it's one of the ways in which can be quite hard for a contemporary reader, maybe to key into the things that were the more ephemeral, perhaps, ideas that were in the air and would have been talked about in a middle class household.

Caroline: Yes, you're right. Maybe it's like talking about Brian Cox today. Yeah. Or Stephen Hawking or something like that, you know? Yes. I hadn't thought of that. Very familiar figures. Even if we don't understand every single thing that they're working on. It certainly makes the novel stand out. I think you could probably say this of every Sayers novel, but there's always some aspect in her work that you think, well, no one else was trying to do that. No one else was trying to incorporate discussion about the meaning of life at a molecular level into a detective novel.

Victoria: No, this is true. And she certainly did like to do a bit of research for her novels. She seems to have really enjoyed that, whether that was looking into railway timetables in the Highlands or whatever it might be. And I think, yes, that is in evidence here.

Caroline: We should also talk about, we've talked about the suburban end of the setting, but then the place where the murder actually happens is this little shack, as he calls it, Mr Harrison's little holiday cottage in rural Devon. And we get this, I think, very evocative description of how you even get to this place. You have to take sort of three trains in a taxi and then walk across a muddy field to even get there. No electricity. I don't think it has running water. It truly is in the sticks, back to basics. And he loves it there because he has this passion for the natural world and this belief that people ought to know more about the natural world and know what they can eat and forage and so on. So that's what he does when he's there, is he's indulging this passion and then that's what's weaponized to kill him.

And you particularly highlighted to me the scene where Lathom and Munting come back and discover him dead there. Why did this make such an impression on you?

Victoria: Well, it's a really key scene in the novel. Lathom has been staying with Harrison at the Shack, and then he goes back to London and he asks Munting to go back there with him. And we realise later that the reason he's done that is that he knows, or rather hopes that Harrison will be deceased by the time they get there. So he's taking Munting with him as a witness really. There's a great description of Lathom's edginess on the journey. And when they finally get there, I mean, it's such a striking scene. It's quite startling, I think, how relatively explicit Sayers is in describing what it would be like if someone had been poisoned in the way that Harrison has been supposedly poisoned.

So what's hinted at are the really visceral effects that poisoning would have. There's no question that being poisoned is simply a case of eating something bad, falling unconscious, and then passing out and dying. This has been a really violent, messy, unpleasant death. To the extent that Harrison has had such strong convulsions that he's broken his bed, which is really shocking.

And then Lathom goes off to get the police and Munting his left on his own in the shack. And he almost feels sick himself because of how disgusting the place is from the signs of what Harrison has gone through. I'm not being very explicit myself, but you know, anyone who's ever suffered from food poisoning will sort of have a general idea and in the novel it is really quite shocking, I think, the way she describes it and a tremendously atmospheric, almost gothic piece of writing. And it certainly makes this place sound like anything but a holiday cottage. It sounds really, really grim. And yeah, a very powerful scene, I think.

Caroline: And because we don't get any account of him being happy there really, I think later on in his son's documentary part, we get some description of how he liked to live there, what time of day he'd go on his foraging trips, and what time he'd make his dinner. But that's all practical.

We don't get any firsthand description of Harrison enjoying his holidays there. So it is just a scene of horror. That's the only purpose the place serves, and it is really grim. Such a contrast to the almost in bad taste, suburban opulence of the villa filled with things from Liberty's and whatnot. This really spartan, spare desolate place where he's died. It feels really unusual for detective fiction of the time that dying is clearly so painful and awful.

Victoria: Yeah, absolutely. As you're speaking there, I'm just thinking as well that Mrs Harrison refuses to ever go to the shack, and it's interesting from that point of view that Harrison decides to invite Lathom to go there with him. So it's a very masculine little space, isn't it? Where it's just the men all together, but even before this awful thing happened characterized as being really, really spartan and quite grim.

Caroline: Something that stood out to me when I was rereading the book for this was that Munting as Lathom's erstwhile flatmate, not exactly friend. They're kind of acquaintances from school who happen to meet again and decide, oh, it would suit us both to rent a flat together at this time. He really struggles with what kind of loyalty he ought to be showing to this acquaintance.

Where should his loyalty lie? Is it to Harrison who's been killed in this way? Is it to Lathom who he shares a background with and a school and he's shared a home with? And he doesn't until quite late on feel absolutely sure that he knows he's guilty. So he goes on his own moral journey. But there's a point when he says something like he so carefully constructed the alibi with me. Lathom showed me at every point that he had made sure somebody knew where he was all the time. That's what clinches it for him. That's what makes him go, oh no, he is guilty. That to me almost feels like a meta fictional comment that Munting is a reader of detective fiction or something, and he knows that it's always the person with the perfect alibi. And here he has been made to be part of the perfect alibi and that disgusts him.

Victoria: Yes, yes. There's an interesting comment, I can't remember exactly where it comes in the novel, where he's regretting having decided to move in Lathom in the first place. And he says something like, oh, this is what comes of striking up acquaintances in restaurants, because that's where he meets Lathom again and, yes, you're right, they're at school together, aren't they? But there's a bit of an age gap between them.

Caroline: Five or six years, I think. Yes. They weren't even contemporaries.

Victoria: Yes. And I think that's quite important that, oh, the old school tie, we recognize each other. Oh, I trust him because he has this connection to me, even though I don't actually really remember him from back then, or not very well.

Caroline: Or know him now. What is his character now?

Victoria: Exactly. So oh, of course he's a jolly good fellow because we were at school together and maybe we have some friends in common and so on.

But yes, Munting is confronted with a real crisis of confidence in terms of his own judgment. And I think you're right that he realises that he's been sucked into this plot, really.

Caroline: Yes. And again, because it's told in this documentary style, there are just these gaps of knowledge that are not filled for us.

And one of them for me is at what point does Lathom turn? He starts this foolish affair with his downstairs neighbour's wife under said neighbour's nose. At what point does it turn into something darker? Because the impression we get of Lathom is that he's quite lighthearted, he's quite a foolish character, but he's not a serious or deep thinker.

He is an artist of some talent and quality, but once he's out of his fugue states of painting that he's a pretty superficial kind of guy, so we never really know. That's one of the mysteries of the book is at what point does he make the decision? We don't know.

Victoria: No, no. And it's an interesting question, isn't it? The scene where he decides to paint her portrait, that seems to be quite an important moment. There's that curious scene where he stalks the Harrisons when they go to Paris for, I think it's New Year they go for, don't they? I think what's he doing? Why is he doing that? But he's slightly opaque from that perspective.

Caroline: Yes. And then another character we haven't talked about, but we should, is Miss Milsom, the companion/housekeeper. Her servant status somewhat unclear, which is having spent quite a lot of time in the last few months thinking about servants, this is one of my quarrels with this book is I feel that she can't be both a lady of leisure who does so much embroidery and also cooking all the meals and keeping the house. There just isn't enough hours in the day, which is it? But anyway. She's someone who in the early section of the book, we hear from a lot. Her letters are very prominent.

Her letters to her sister describing the household, describing her own life there, giving her impressions of the Harrisons and of the new arrivals upstairs. And of course, they come from her unique perspective, and then they are contradicted and corroborated by other documents that we see. But Miss Milsom just disappears.

She has one important role in the plot, which is this, how would you describe it? She sort of interrupts an assignation, almost. Lathom is creeping around the house at night, obviously visiting Mrs Harrison, but he's wearing Munting's dressing gown and in the dark she identifies him as Munting.

She tells Harrison, Harrison throws Munting out of the house and it precipitates the next phase of the plot. But then we never really hear from Miss Milsom again, and then we later learn that she's been committed to an asylum and that's it. And so I feel like Sayers did her dirty. This character was shortchanged. She was so promising and her voice was so strong, and then she just goes away.

Victoria: I have a few issues with how she's characterized as well. I'd have to agree with you. It's interesting. So one of the differences between this novel and The Moonstone is that in The Moonstone, the idea is that the vast majority of the accounts that make up that novel have been written specially in order to try to explain the crime that's at the centre of it.

Whereas we are told early on in the little preface section, which is from Paul Harrison's perspective, we're warned that Ms. Milson's letters have simply been found and that they contain a lot of irrelevant material, I think is maybe a word that he uses, irrelevant, so he almost cues the reader up to have to be patient, to have to sift through for which bits of information are going to be important and which aren't. So that in itself is maybe a little bit of an alarm bell here as to how this material is being used. But yes, it's really quite shocking and almost a bit callous, I think, the way that she's shuffled off to an asylum and that encounter with who she thinks is Munting but is actually Lathom is key in that because she thinks that she is the target, that she's going to be attacked or assaulted or something. And that again, is almost, I wouldn't say it was exactly played for laughs, but there's certainly a sense that she can't really be taken seriously.

Of course no one who's going to be interested in her in any way. And that's all rather uncomfortable, I think. Having said that, I think the whole idea of creeping around in someone else's dressing gown and so on. I'm almost sure that has to be another little nod to The Moonstone because in The Moonstone a nightgown and who's been wearing the nightgown and how did the stain get on the nightgown?

All really important. And yeah, nightgown, dressing gown, I think there's a little nod there, but certainly Miss Milsom gets rather the raw end of the deal in all of this.

Caroline: She certainly does. Yes. And I think it's one of the biggest structural problems with the book, actually. The way that she is so present and then just disappears, offscreen, and is never heard from again.

Because there are other characters such as Munting's fiance, who we never, or I think only in one scene that encounter directly, but I don't feel the same about her. I feel she exists almost in a sitcom as one of those voices you hear off stage, but you never see the person. And I'm completely satisfied with that.

I don't need to know more of her. It's the unevenness of Miss Milsom's involvement that bothers me, I think. And I do end up sympathizing with her quite strongly actually. I almost feel the most sorry for her of everybody who's left by the end of the book.

Victoria: Yeah. You sort of feel that say is needed there to be another character, to observe that marriage actually within the household. And Miss Milsom is the solution she came up with for that problem, if you like. But that means that she gets treated in this rather callous fashion, I suppose, once she's no longer necessary.

Caroline: So something that I always like to consider interwar detective fiction in the light of, is this idea of fair play. Do we feel that The Documents in the Case plays fair by the reader?

Victoria: Well, that's a good question. I suppose one of the issues is the pace at which information is revealed. So we do learn relatively late on, that there is a way of detecting the difference between synthetic and naturally occurring poison, and it is a bit of a rabbit out of a hat in of solving the plot.

The whole device by which Lathom gets hold of the poison in the first place, which is oh, another rather passing acquaintance happens to take him along to his laboratory and so on. That maybe a slight weak link in the plot though I think the whole idea that it's not that difficult to just wander into the university buildings, that probably in the days before, you know, swiping your ID card, I suspect that probably is quite plausible. So a fair-ish play? What's your take on that?

Caroline: I agree. I think she does put in enough pointers that I think you can direct your suspicions in the right corner. But I think unless you know chemistry, you are not going to be able to work out from the first half what happens in the second half. So I don't know if you could give it a full clearance on that.

I think we've pointed out quite a lot of the pitfalls of this book and the places where it's perhaps a bit disappointing, but we should address the other side of it. What do you like about this book? What stands out to you?

Victoria: I think reading it again, before talking to you today, I really quite like Munting as character and the whole way that his romance is woven in. I think that's done actually quite well, and he rather abruptly leaves the household after this incident where he essentially takes the rap really for Lathom and you're rather hoping that he's going to be able to, or I certainly found myself hoping that he was going to be able to resolve this with his fiancee who is told that this has happened. Milsom writes to her and tells her, and thankfully because they're modern young people, it all works out okay. And again, that scene at the shack where he's taken along and confronted with something he could not have been expecting. I do quite like the way that he's characterized. I think that is done really quite successfully.

Caroline: I found myself rooting for him as well. And I think you end the novel feeling that he's the only character that has hope. You feel hopeful for him because he he is a little bit, I don't want to say cowardly, but he's a bit slow to do the right thing when comes to Lathom, but his fiancee then wife is not, she's quite clear with him that this is what you had to do and you've done it, and you have to just accept the way you feel about it is the consequence of that. So I feel like they're going to be okay.

Victoria: And that whole crisis of conscience thing, it's reminding me a bit, the way you're describing it, of how Lord Peter Wimsey is in, some of the novels where he knows that someone is going to be condemned to death because of what he's discovered. There's a little echo there maybe.

Caroline: I do think Sayers is unusually for a detective novelist quite interested in what happens after the cuffs go on, mentally. And she does actually put that in her book, and I do really value that. I think she gets a lot closer to not in her plots necessarily, but in the feelings. I think she gets a lot closer to what it's like to be around a murder than a lot of her contemporaries who are a bit more interested in the sort of chess game of it.

Victoria: Yes. Yeah, I'd certainly agree with that.

Caroline: So we should end our discussion the way I always end these discussions by deciding how many green penguins out of five would you like to award The Documents in the Case?

Victoria: Oh, well, I've been thinking long and hard about this. I think for me the issue with this novel is that there's a little bit too much going on and it's pulling in a few too many different directions. So The Moonstone type elements that we've mentioned, the scientific aspect of the plot, the Bywaters and Thompson elements, and I'm not sure they quite cohere into a satisfying whole.

Having said that, as we've also mentioned, there's lots of really interesting things in there, and I think especially on a second or third reading you see a little bit more what she's trying to do maybe in those early pages, which you do have to have a little bit of patience, I think, the first time you read this novel to stick with it, I suppose. I think I'm going to go for three penguins on this occasion, Caroline.

Caroline: That seems fair to me. I would certainly characterize this as like a connoisseur's novel, you know?

Victoria: I would say that if you haven't read any Sayers novels, I would not necessarily start with this one. But thinking about it in this moment that she's in, certainly if you're familiar with Strong Poison. This one is a really interesting one to read as the predecessor to Strong Poison and obviously there's the poisoning link as well and how they deal with that. Again, there's an interesting comparison to be done there.

Caroline: No, absolutely. I think it's maybe one to read once you've immersed yourself in the genre a little bit. I can't possibly imagine what it'd be like to read this as your first ever golden age detective novel. I think that would be extremely confusing. But thank you very much for joining me, Victoria, and for your assessment. And thank you everyone for listening.

Music

This episode of Shedunnit was written, produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton.

Many thanks to my guest, Victoria Stewart. You can find her links to her books Crime Writing in Interwar Britain and Literature and Justice in Mid-Twentieth Century Literature, as well as all the other titles we referenced, in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/thedocumentsinthecase. I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

The next episode of Green Penguin Book Club will be coming your way in March and will be covering The Sanfield Scandal by Richard Keverne, so if you're reading along with me, that's your next target. To help you find copies of this book, I've made a page on the Shedunnit website that links to all the various retailers, and that's linked in the episode description too. Buying a book via that page will also benefit the podcast through commission, so it's a great way to support the show while doing something that you were going to do anyway.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.