Strong Poison By Dorothy L Sayers Part I

Strong Poison, published in 1930, has always been one of my favourite Lord Peter Wimsey novels.   When I first read it, as a teenager I was very taken with the liberated heroine Harriet Vane... who later becomes Peter’s wife.

 Harriet is an indepenedent woman, who went to Oxford and supports herself by writing detective fiction...  At the time, in the 1920s and 30s, there were many women writing detective stories.  Although there were also a lot of male writers, some of the biggest sellers in the genre were women... such as Agatha Christie, Sayers, and Margery Allingham. 

I like Sayers’ novels much more than Christies, although there are times when I find her a bit snobbish-… and nowadays I’m less fond of Harriet.  However there is no denying that Harriet is an interesting figure.  She has had a university education which was unusual for the time.  Sayers herself also went to Oxford... but at a time when the main career for an educated woman was teaching she disliked that job very much though she did work at it for a few years.  She then took the unusual step of becoming an advertising copy writer.  It was a new form of business and Sayers was lucky to get a start in it.  Advertising was very “wordy”, at the time, in the form of slogans and written in newspapers and posters... and she had a quick witty way with words. However after a few years of advertising, Sayers, who was writing in her spare time, was able to give up the job and become a full time writer of journalism and detective novels.  Later she moved on to more serious religious and dramatic works.

Harriet Vane resembles Sayers in respect of her being a detective story writer... and also in her love life.  The novel opens dramatically with her being tried for the murder of her ex-lover, a novelist called Philip Boyes... who has died from arsenic poisoning. 

Wimsey attends the trial, but believes that although the evidence points to Harriet, she cannot possibly be guilty. He falls in love with her and is determined to save her.  There is a “hung” jury, and Harriet is lucky enough to get a new trial... and Peter and his organisation of women detectives work to prove her innocence before she is tried again.