Dorothy Sayers, who was so slender-necked when young that she was nicknamed Swanny, grew increasingly stout with age. She loved rich food, and consumed plenty once she became successful. She passed this predilection on to Lord Peter Wimsey, the sleuth-hero of her detective novels.
I have been rereading these in preparation for talking to P D James and Jill Paton Walsh, both Sayers fans, at the Bath Festival this month. Lolling on a sofa reading frivolous thrillers before lunch is called research. Lord Peter does a fair bit of lolling, usually on the plumply cushioned Chesterfield in his black-and-yellow-walled Piccadilly flat. Humming an air by Bach, he solves the policeman-baffling problem of the corpse in the bath, then leaps to his feet and dashes out to hail a taxi to one of his clubs for lunch. He breakfasts on mixed grills, brought to him by his servant Bunter, and drinks only fine vintage wines.
In the early books, Lord Peter is a silly-arse-about-town, his clowning concealing the rapier intelligence and ferocious curiosity that mean he always gets his man. Sex plays little part in his adventures. Occasionally, however, he squires naive, impoverished female intellectuals (like the young Sayers, perhaps) to posh restaurants. A typical dinner includes huItres Musgrave (oysters fried in their shells with little strips of bacon), turtle soup, filet de sole, faisan roti aux pommes Byron, salad and souffle glace. When Bunter cooks for him at home, he makes do with an omelette and a savoury.
People rarely serve savouries any more. I ate one once. Like Sayers, I was an impoverished intellectual studying at Oxford. One night I was invited to a posh dinner, one of the female guests having fallen ill. I had no long frock, so the woman in question lent me hers, an Austenish creation with puffed sleeves. At the end of the long, boring, drunken dinner we were served a savoury called devils on horseback: prunes wrapped in bacon. Quite tasty. When next day I returned the dress, gushing nervous thanks, the dress-lender drawled: "Oh, my dear, don't crawl." It was May 1968. Time to become a socialist-feminist.
Lord Peter mocks all socialists, revolutionaries and Bolsheviks, but he encounters a feminist in the shape of thriller-writing Harriet Vane. Poor, ferociously independent Harriet, the true incarnation of the early, idealistic Sayers, does not care about food and rejects despised girly treats such as lobster and champagne. When she attends painters' parties in Chelsea she drinks cocoa, and when travelling to Oxford she picnics on sandwiches at the roadside. When Peter wines and dines her at fancy places she drops her silk napkin on the floor.
As the romance progresses, in the later novels, food recedes in importance. Harriet stays thin, unlike her burly creator.
