Strong Poison

An extract from Os Guinness' book, Fool's Talk. (Chapter 3) Just thought Fans of LPW might be interested in references to him found in literature. smile emoticon

"For readers of Dorothy Sayers’s novels, Harriet Vane is an important character because in many ways she is the author’s double. Like Sayers, she is a mystery writer. Like Sayers, she gained a first class degree at Oxford University, and like Sayers, she has a formidable mind. (Sayers was one of the first woman graduates in Oxford history.) And like Sayers too, she had affairs. In Harriet’s case, she frequented artists’ circles in Bloomsbury, where she lived with her lover for a year—a less successful writer, Philip Boyes. He claimed not to believe in marriage, so she was persuaded to live with him without marrying.

Sayers’s own affairs were not publicly known during her lifetime, and there are key differences between her life and that of her fictional stand-in. But the public was aware of some of the similarities, and they engaged in a lively correspondence with Sayers about the advisability of that “horrid girl” having such a place in the life of Sayers and their real hero, the debonair and aristocratic Lord Peter Wimsey.

It would be several books and many adventures before Harriet accepted Peter’s proposal and became Lady Wimsey. But the novel in which they are brought together closely is Strong Poison, published in 1930, and the reason hinges on a key part of the logic of the Christian faith that meant so much to Dorothy Sayers. After Boyes and Harriet had lived together for a year, he asked her to marry him, now assured that she loved him. Her reaction, however, was indignation. Furious with him, she broke off the relationship altogether—outraged at his hypocrisy and at being offered a wedding ring as what she considered a “bad-conduct prize” for living with him.

Soon after the breakup, Boyes was found dead through arsenic poisoning, which was the very murder method Harriet had researched for the book she was writing. She at once became the prime suspect, with a strong and obvious motive, and all the circumstantial evidence against her. So she was arrested, tried for murder and looked to be staring at the hangman’s noose.

Harriet’s prospects were grim. The case against her looked watertight, and the prosecution pressed for a guilty verdict. She had the motivation to kill her former lover, and she had the opportunity. All the known facts of the case were against her, and there were no other suspects. She should obviously hang. When conclusive evidence appears to lock hands with justice, even a rush to judgment seemed appropriate. Harriet Vane had committed a horrible crime, and she would pay the supreme price.

But into that grave situation steps the fearless hero, Lord Peter Wimsey. He knows Harriet, so he believes in her innocence, and his logic has a steel to match the prosecutor’s case: The known facts may be against her, but because he knows her, he knows that the known facts cannot be all the facts. The challenge is to find the missing facts that change the picture entirely. The police had jumped to the wrong conclusion on watertight-seeming evidence that was actually incomplete. Harriet had been unjustly framed. She was innocent, and she did not deserve to die.

Lord Peter argues with his colleagues, “There must be evidence somewhere, you know. I know you have all worked like beavers, but I am going to work like a king beaver. And I have one big advantage over the rest of you . . . I do believe in Miss Vane’s innocence.”
-- Dorothy Sayers, Strong Poison (London: Times Mirror Books, 1970), p. 33.