Sayers worked from 1921 to 1929 at an advertising agency in London, coining slogans and writing ad copy for clients such as Coleman’s Mustard and Guinness Beer. So when she wrote
Murder Must Advertise in 1933, she had an insider’s perspective on the way commerce plays on the greed of the consumer, as a drug pusher plays on the cravings of the addict. The book provides a vehicle for her rage against the exploitation. Lord Peter Wimsey gets a job at Pym’s Publicity disguised as “Death Bredon,” a lowly copyeditor, who was found at the bottom of an iron staircase. At night, in the costume of a harlequin, he haunts the jazz-age parties of wealthy drug addicts, “symbolically opposing two card-board worlds.” ~Carole Vanderhoof, introduction to selection in
The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers: Selections from Her Novels, Plays, Letters, and Essays (Walden, NY: Plough Publishing House, 2018), p. 83. Available for purchase at Eighth Day Books.
“Now, [said Peter,] Mr. Pym is a man of rigid morality—except, of course, as regards his profession, whose essence is to tell plausible lies for money—”
“How about truth in advertising?”
“Of course, there is
some truth in advertising. There’s yeast in bread, but you can’t make bread with yeast alone. Truth in advertising,” announced Lord Peter sententiously, “is like leaven, which a woman hid in three measures of meal. It provides a suitable quantity of gas, with which to blow out a mass of crude misrepresentation into a form that the public can swallow….”
All over London the lights flickered in and out, calling on the public to save its body and purse: SOPO SAVES SCRUBBING – NUTRAX FOR NERVES – CRUNCHLETS ARE CRISPER – EAT PIPER PARRITCH – DRINK POMPAYNE – ONE WHOOSH AND IT’S CLEAN – OH, BOY! IT’S TOMBOY TOFFEE – NOURISH NERVES WITH NUTRAX – FARLEY’S FOOTWEAR TAKES YOU FURTHER – IT ISN’T DEAR, IT’S DARLING – DARLING’S FOR HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES – MAKE ALL SAVE WITH SANFECT – WHIFFLETS FASCINATE. The presses, thundering and growling, ground out the same appeals by the million: ASK YOUR GROCER – ASK YOU DOCTOR – ASK THE MAN WHO’S TRIED IT – MOTHERS! GIVE IT TO YOUR CHILDREN – HOUSEWIVES! SAVE MONEY – HUSBANDS! INSURE YOUR LIVES – WOMEN! DO YOU REALIZE? – DON’T SAY SOAP, SAY SOPO! Whatever you’re doing, stop it and do something else! Whatever you’re buying, pause and buy something different! Be hectored into health and prosperity! Never let up! Never go to sleep! Never be satisfied. If once you are satisfied, all our wheels will run down. Keep going—and if you can’t Try Nutrax for Nerves! …
To Lord Peter Wimsey, the few weeks of his life spent in unravelling the Problem of the Iron Staircase possessed an odd dreamlike quality, noticeable at the same time and still more insistent in retrospect. The very work that engaged him—or rather, the shadowy simulacrum of himself that signed itself on every morning in the name of Death Bredon—wafted him into a sphere of dim platonic archetypes, bearing a scarcely recognizable relationship to anything in the living world. Here those strange entities, the Thrifty Housewife, the Man of Discrimination, the Keen Buyer and the Good Judge, forever young, forever handsome, forever virtuous, economical and inquisitive, moved to and fro upon their complicated orbits, comparing prices and values, making tests of purity, asking indiscreet questions about each other’s ailments, household expenses, bed-springs, shaving cream, diet, laundry work and boots, perpetually spending to save and saving to spend, cutting out coupons and collecting cartons, surprising husbands with margarine and wives with patent washers and vacuum cleaners, occupied from morning to night in washing, cooking, dusting, filing, saving their children from germs, their complexions from wind and weather, their teeth from decay and their stomachs from indigestion, and yet adding so many hours to the day by labour-saving appliances that they had always leisure for visiting the talkies, sprawling on the beach to picnic upon Potted Meats and Tinned Fruit, and (when adorned by So-and-so’s Silks, Blank’s Gloves, Dash’s Footwear, Whatnot’s Weatherproof Complexion Cream and Thingummy’s Beautifying Shampoos), even attending Ranelagh, Cowes, the Grand Stand at Ascot, Monte Carlo and the Queen’s Drawing-Rooms. Where, Bredon asked himself, did the money come from that was to be spent so variously and so lavishly? If this hell’s dance of spending and saving were to stop for a moment, what would happen? If all the advertising in the world were to shut down tomorrow, would people still go on buying more soap, eating more apples, giving their children more vitamins, roughage, milk, olive oil, scooters and laxatives, learning more languages by gramophone, hearing more virtuosos by radio, re-decorating their houses, refreshing themselves with more non-alcoholic thirst quenchers, cooking more new, appetizing dishes, affording themselves that little extra touch which means so much? Or would the whole desperate whirlgig slow down, and the exhausted public relapse upon plain grub and elbow-grease? He did not know. Like all rich men, he had never paid any attention to advertisements. He had never realized the enormous commercial importance of the comparatively poor. Not on the wealthy, who buy only what they want when they want it, was the vast superstructure of industry founded and built up, but on those who, aching for a luxury beyond their reach and for a leisure forever denied them, could be bullied or wheedled into spending their few hardly won shillings on whatever might give them, if only for a moment, a leisured and luxurious illusion. Phantasmagoria—a city of dreadful day, of crude shapes and colours piled Babel-like in a heaven of harsh cobalt and rocking over a void of bankruptcy—a Cloud Cuckooland, peopled by pitiful ghosts, from the Thrifty Housewife providing a Grand Family Meal for Fourpence with the aid of Dairyfields Butter Beans in Margarine, to the Typist capturing the affections of Prince Charming by a liberal use of Muggins’s Magnolia Face Cream.
Among these phantasms, Death Bredon, driving his pen across reams of office foolscap, was a phantasm too, emerging from this nightmare toil to a still more fantastical existence amid people whose aspirations, rivalries and modes of thought were alien, and earnest beyond anything in his waking experience. Nor, when the Greenwich-driven clocks had jerked on to half-past five, had he any world of reality to which to return; for then the illusionary Mr. Bredon dislimned and became the still more illusionary Harlequin of a dope-addict’s dream; an advertising figure more crude and fanciful than any that postured in the columns of the
Morning Star; a thing bodiless and absurd, a mouthpiece of stale clichés shouting in dull ears without a brain. From this abominable impersonation he could not now free himself, since at the sound of his name or the sight of his unmasked face, all the doors in that other dream-city—the city of dreadful night—would be closed to him….
“Do you really believe [said Detective Charles Parker to Wimsey] that the head of this particular dope-gang is on Pym’s staff? It sounds quite incredible.”
“That’s an excellent reason for believing it. I don’t mean in a
credo quia impossible sense, but merely because the staff of a respectable advertising agency would be such an excellent hiding-place for a big crook. The particular crookedness of advertising is so very far removed from the crookedness of dope-trafficking.”
“Why? As far as I can make out, all advertisers are dope-merchants.”
“So they are. Yes, now I come to think of it, there is a subtle symmetry about the thing which is extremely artistic, All the same, Charles, I must admit that I find it difficult to go the whole way with Milligan. I have carefully reviewed the staff of Pym’s, and I have so far failed to find any one who looks in the least like a Napolean of crime…. I dare say I could spot [the murderer] without much difficulty—but that’s not what you want, is it? You’d rather have the Napolean of the dope-traffic, wouldn’t you? If he exists, that is.”
“Certainly I should,” said Parker, emphatically.
“That’s what I thought. What, if you come to think of it, is a trifle like an odd murder or assault, compared with a method of dope-running that baffles Scotland Yard? Nothing at all.”
“It isn’t, really,” replied Parker, seriously. “Dope-runners are murderers, fifty times over. They slay hundreds of people, soul and body, besides indirectly causing all sorts of crimes among the victims. Compared with that, slugging one inconsiderable pip-squeak over the head is almost meritorious.”
“Really, Charles! for a man of your religious upbringing, your outlook is positively enlightened.”
“Not so irreligious, either. ‘Fear not him that killeth, but him that hath power to cast into hell’ [Lk. 12:5]. How about it?”
“How indeed? Hang the one and give the other a few weeks in jail—or, if of good social position, bind him over or put him on remand for six months under promise of good behaviour.”
Parker made a wry mouth.
“I know, old man, I know. But where would be the good of hanging the wretched victims or the smaller fry? There would always be others. We want the top people. Take even this man, Milligan, who’s a pest of the first water—with no excuse for it, because he isn’t an addict himself—but suppose we punish him here and now. They’d only start again, with a new distributor and a new house for him to run his show in, and what would anybody gain by that?”
“Exactly,” said Wimsey. “And how much better off will you be, even if you catch the man above Milligan? The same thing will apply.”
Parker made a hopeless gesture.
“I don’t know, Peter. It’s no good worrying about it. My job is to catch the heads of the gangs if I can, and, after than, as many as possible of the little people. I can’t overthrow cities and burn the population.”
“’Tis the Last Judgment’s fire must cure this place,” said Wimsey, “calcine its clods and set its prisoners free” [from Robert Browning, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”].
*Dorothy Sayers,
Murder Must Advertise (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933), ch. 5, pp. 9, 15.
