Some evenings, when I am reading in bed, my husband turns off his light and asks me to read to him. Of course, he rarely asks this when I am on page 1 or even the first chapter, so I have to tell him what has already happened. And then, of course, he falls asleep before I’ve explained the plot up to the page where I am currently reading. So I go back to reading silently; and then, the next night, he again asks me to explain the plot up to where I am reading.

This book has so many plot twists and characters using fake names and pretending to be other people, and secret codes, and double-marriages, and – well, when I finished telling him the plot yesterday, he threw his hands in the air and said he didn’t know why I bother reading books like this. He didn’t understand a) it’s less confusing when you learn the information gradually as the plot progresses; b) this is what makes these books fun!

So here we go: It’s New Years Eve 1926? 1927? and Lord Peter Whimsey, who has been reluctantly spending Christmas with his brother’s family at the Whimsey estate, is fleeing to spend New Year’s at a friend’s home along the shore. His route takes him through The Fens, an area of English wetlands that were drained into canals (much like the Florida everglades) and converted into farmlands during the middle ages, but is still prone to flooding, especially when the hundreds-years-old dykes and sluices break down.

It is late in the afternoon and snowing heavily and Whimsey’s car misses a turn and goes into a ditch. Whimsey and his man, Bunter, hearing bells in the distance, reason that a village must be nearby and walk down the road toward the bells. Eventually they come to a lane and a signpost that directs them to turn, which they do. The first building they come to is a pub and, since no other buildings are visible down the road, they stop to ask if they could use the phone or stay the night.¹ Unfortunately, the only nearby phone is in the village post office and the publican’s wife is busy nursing him back from the flu.² Luckily the local Rector is there and offers to put them up at his house, mobilize a nearby farmer with a pair of draft horses to pull the car out of the ditch and the local blacksmith to whang the axel back into shape which should allow Whimsey to drive his car to a larger town where it could be repaired.

On the way to the rectory, Whimsey mentions that he and Bunter found the pub by following the church bells – and it turns out that the Rector’s church is blessed with nine large bells and campanology is quite a hobby of his. In England, Sayers tells us at much length and with way too much detail for the casual reader, the best bells do not ring songs but ring patterns, which have names. Here’s a sample from the book, each number representing one of the bells, each bell having a different pitch:

213546
231456
324156
342156
435216

You get the idea.

Anyway, the Rector’s intent was to organize his local bell ringers to ring the bells that night from midnight to 9 am the next day, thereby setting a world record for the most of that pattern rung in a night. Upon returning home, however, the Rector learns that, not only have his three alternate bell ringers come down with the flu, one of his main ringers is also down with the flu. But, of course, Sir Peter Whimsey turns out to have rung this particular pattern of the bells for his own local church before leaving to fight in the war. He offers a hand and the men successfully complete the challenge and take the record. (All this is important to the plot, not just atmosphere.)

The next morning, when the bell ringers return to the rectory for breakfast, the Rector is called away to administer last rights to Lady Thorpe, the wife of the local Duke, who is dying of the flu. The Rector’s wife, fussing over the breakfast table, chatters to herself what a shame it is that the Thorpes have had such bad luck, and she blames the theft of the Wilbraham Emeralds. Peter Whimsey, scenting a mystery, asks for the story.

Here it is (and all of this is important to the plot, too): The Thorpe family has ruled the village for hundreds of years but, unfortunately, the present Duke’s grandfather invested heavily and unwisely in the previous century and the family suffered a huge financial loss. They still had enough to care for their property but they weren’t able to live up to the standards of previous generations. When the present Duke and his (now dying) wife married in 1914, his father splurged on a large wedding, with guests arriving early in the week and staying for a few days after the happy couple leaves on their honeymoon. One of those guests is the elderly and eccentric Lady Wilbraham, a distant relative who brings the very expensive Wilbraham Emerald necklace, and does not belief in safes.

In the early hours of the morning after of the wedding, long after the bride and groom have departed, Lady Wilbraham awakens the whole house with her screams: a man! a man was in her room and departed through the window! Chaos ensues, half-dressed men and servants dash about calling for firearms, ladies faint, one of the guests spies a figure disappearing into the darkness, shoots, it stumbles, and then limps on, clambering over the wall, and disappearing accompanied by the sound of a motorcycle. The men troop back to the house and begin wondering: how did the butler get dressed and out the door so quickly? And then Lady Wilbraham screams again: the emeralds! The man has stolen the emeralds! And she saw the butler in her room! The butler admits that, as he was butling about, he heard a noise in the lady’s room and, peeking in, saw a man climbing out the window, and he immediately ran into the room, and followed the man out the window but was unable to catch him.

The cops nab the other guy, a known London jewel thief, who confesses to being there to steal the jewels – but, he says, he was never inside the house; he had bribed the butler, who was supposed to drop the jewels out the bedroom window to him. Instead, the butler double-crossed him and dropped the jewel box, but it was empty! The butler denies this and the police don’t know whom to believe until Lady W’s lady’s maid confesses that she discovered that Lady W’s secret hiding place for the emeralds was under her chamber pot. That was so funny to the maid, that she shared the joke with her new friend Mary who is… the butler’s wife! The police race back on Sunday, sirens blaring, and arrest the butler coming out of the church. He and the jewel thief are sent to jail for 10 years but the butler escapes jail after two years and, owing to a manpower shortage caused by WWI, the constabulary are unable to apprehend him. His bones are discovered two years later at the bottom of a nearby gravel quarry, where they assume he fell during the escape, being unfamiliar with the neighborhood outside the prison walls, and died, taking with him the secret of the stolen emeralds. His wife, Mary, then a widow, married a local farmer who lives near the church, and settled down as a farmer’s wife, giving her loving husband two adorable daughters.

Meanwhile, when the bride and groom return from their honeymoon – abbreviated, owing to the start of WWI – they find the old Duke has collapsed due to the stress of the robbery and the trial and all of Lady W’s complaints because she also didn’t believe in insuring her jewels. The old Duke’s dying wish is that his son will repay Lady W the value of her emeralds, since it was their butler who had committed the robbery, when she was a guest in their home, and the son agrees. The son then, being the good person he is, leaves the estate in his pregnant wife’s care, and goes off to fight in the war, returning home with a chronic injury that leaves him prone to debilitating illness and confined to a wheelchair and unable to afford cutting-edge medical care owing to the payments to Lady W. In fact, it is a surprise to everyone that his wife, who was acting as his caregiver, died first and not the Duke himself, and surely the shock and grief will finish him off, and isn’t it sad about his daughter who is left penniless.

Whimsey is enchanted with this tale but there not being much to detect and, his car having been rescued and banged back into shape, he departs, pausing outside of town to ask directions or something from a shabby man with a beard. The Rector, being a friendly guy, writes to Whimsey, sharing local gossip with him, including the fact that, after burying his wife on January 4, the Duke succumbed to his illnesses in March. But, when they opened his wife’s grave to bury him with her, they discovered a dead body on top of her coffin! It’s a shabby man with a beard whose face has been beaten in and whose hands have been chopped off and are missing. No one is able to identify the man; they think perhaps it was a man calling himself Stephen Driver, who had tramped into town, taken a manual labor job with the blacksmith, then disappeared in the night. But the police cannot figure out who Stephen Driver is.

Now Peter Whimsey is on the case! What killed the dead man? And who put him in the grave? Who was Stephen Driver? Was he the man that Whimsey met on the road on New Year’s Day? Who did a local man, nicknamed ‘Batty’ see Mary’s new husband fight with in the church on New Year’s Eve? And why did Mary’s husband take 200 pounds out of the church that day? Why did a man called Paul Tailor – the name of one of the Rector’s bells – receive a general delivery³ letter from a woman in France? Who was the man that the French woman had rescued from a battle, nursed back to health, and married? And where did her husband go? What is the strange piece of paper that Hilary Thorpe finds in a dusty corner of the bell tower in the spring? Who wrote the message in a code, what is the code, and what does it have to do with the bells? What does Arthur Cobbleditch, a soldier who went missing near the prison that the butler escaped from have to do with any of this? Why did Mary and her husband refuse to take communion and suddenly rush up to London? And where are those darned emeralds?

All these questions eventually get answered in a way that is not as confusing as my husband makes sound. The thing that makes it all confusing is, firstly, having to explain the whole bells things, which becomes important in more ways than one. The bells are named and the names of the bells play a part in all these fake identities. The bell ringers and the Rector insist that the bells have personalities, one in particular being vengeful against those that commit crimes in the church or treat the bells with disrespect. And then there are the patterns that the bells get rung in, which is interesting to a certain extent but I have to say that if I was given or found a free book about campanology, I would not be reading it any time soon unless I was having trouble sleeping and then I would still have to weigh the risk of my brain exploding.

The other theme that runs through this book, making it more confusing, is the way that the fens have been drained, the engineering preventing the land from flooding and the people from being drowned. I didn’t mention it above because it does complicate things, but it is essential to the atmosphere of the setting as well as the plot, causing Peter Whimsey to return to the area, and later, to discover the answers to several of the questions I listed above. In fact, during the last several chapters, the engineering fails and the entire area is flooded eight feet deep, forcing the community to take refuge in the church (which is on higher ground), cows in the churchyard, valuables up the tower, furniture in the base of the tower, men on one side of the church, women on the other, and a canteen set up in the lady chapel.

And throughout, the bells ring out to celebrate the new year, to mourn the death of Lady Thorpe, of Lord Thorpe, of the unknown stranger found in his grave, to call the community to mass, and to warn them of the imminent flood.

Wrapping up the year, on another New Year’s Eve.

1. Most country pubs in those days had a couple of rooms for travelers. ↩︎
2. The Flu is a main character in this book, resembling as it does, The Great Influenza of WWI, with characters described as looking fine in the morning, looking ill in the afternoon, and dropping dead the next day. ↩︎
3. In those days, if you were traveling without known address, you could tell people to send letters “general delivery” to a particular post office near where you intended to eventually end up, and then you could ask that post office later for your mail and they would hand it over. Amazing! ↩︎