The Swaffham Crier Online

The Reading Group Reads

The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L Sayers

"The bells, the bells!"...unlike her contemporary Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers probably wrote howdunits rather than whodunits, but in this celebrated 1930's tale of Bell and Fen, the who and how are more than usually connected.

Stranded in deepest fen on New Years Eve after unsuccessfully negotiating one of those notorious fen-road Handbrake Turns, her upper-class hero-sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey stands in to help ring an overnight ninehour peal in the parish church of Fenchurch St Paul after a ringer is taken ill. (What? Bell-ringers will chortle at Lord Peter's dexterity, but people will believe it. A close acquaintance tried a similar trick at the New Year millennium ring in St Cyriacs - but with more predictable results!)

Next day, the squire's wife dies, and the mystery-proper begins when, on the death of her husband later in the year, her grave is re-opened to find.. . an extra body...ooo-er!

The great appeal of the book lies in the way that the bells and the peculiarly English practice of change-ringing (not for us the effete tunes of Continental Europe, but rather mathematical progressions) are so intrinsically woven into the plot, and the atmospheric effects achieved throughout:

"The air was so heavy with water, that not till they had passed Frog's Bridge did they hear the sweet, dull jangle of sound that told them that the ringers were practicing their Christmas peal; it drifted through the streaming rain with an aching and intolerable melancholy, like the noise of the bells of a drowned city pulsing up through the overwhelming sea."

The "nine tailors"of the title refers to nine strokes of the tenor bell rung on the death of a male parishioner (six for a female) followed by one stroke for every year of their life. You had to stand and count to guess who it was. This is still rung (and you might have heard it!) but nowadays, we're told, mostly just for the death of a bell-ringer. One of the great parts of the book is at the end, when the bells must ring out urgent alarm of encroaching flood. The alarm call was a bing-bong bing-bong bing-bong (as opposed to ner-ner ner-ner-ner..) with highest and lowest bells - was this ever rung here, we wonder?

Although frequently described as Sayers'greatest book, and sometimes as one of the greatest books of the 20th century, by and large the reading group did not think much of it, rather agreeing with 1940s American critic Edmund Wilson: I set out to read [it] in the hope of tasting some novel excitement, and I declare that it seems to me one of the dullest books I have ever encountered.. . But he was American after all, and didn't live in East Anglia. And everybody liked the bells, some expressing an interest in the current campaign for new bell-ringers - urgently required if Swaffham Prior is to recover after Tower Captain Margaret Stanier's death.

Our next book will be Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons, Yule House, 41 Lower End, 8pm, 5th March, and then The Island by Victoria Hislop, at 15 Mill Hill, April 2nd. New members always welcome - just turn up!

Caroline Matheson