Books to the Ceiling

In a short piece entitled “Summer Reading” in this past Sunday’s New York Times, Verlyn Klinkenborg reminisces fondly about a summer which he was supposed to spend reading weighty tomes as part of his work toward a graduate degree in literature. In between bouts of lucubration, he planned to tend a small garden as relief from his mental labors. In the event, he did not do much of either.  Klinkenborg offers this simple explanation for the failure of his carefully thought out scheme: “It was ruined by Dorothy Sayers.”

Here’s how she did it:

“It isn’t the suspense. These are mild adventures. It isn’t the wit or the powers of observation of the whimsical hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, or his less whimsical foils–Bunter, his man, and Harriet Vane, his eventual woman. All of these pieces play a part. But there was enough world in those books to keep me from bothering about the world around me. I was never once tempted to take a note or pull a weed or do anything but turn the pages and move my chair out of the sun.

In my view, not all of the novels in this series qualify as “mild adventures.” At its climax, The Nine Tailors comes close to being apocalyptic. But I certainly share Klinkenborg’s love of the proverbial page turner, and I’m glad he discovered such a compelling vision in the work of one of my favorite writers.

[ Dorothy L. Sayers ]