Recalled as I slowly re-read my collection of Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries—with a digression about the best bookstore ever.
My "old friend" Alistair Cooke, who once upon a time hosted one of my favorite television programs of all time,
America, introduced me to the dapper Lord Peter Wimsey long ago, as
Murder Must Advertise was my initial exposure to Lord Peter when it was broadcast on
Masterpiece Theatre. Needless to say, I was captivated by the jazz-age Lord Peter, who solved mysteries with the help of his devoted valet, Mervyn Bunter, who, earlier in Lord Peter's life, had saved him after he was buried in a trench during a First World War battle. Not only was he British—calling on my long-simmering Anglophila stemming from
Lassie Come-Home, Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes, and watching Richard Greene's
Robin Hood series as a child—he was ably assisted by a collection of regulars who included Chief Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard, Inspector Sugg, the unforgettable Miss Climpson, and the stories featured such memorable supporting characters as Mr. Ingleby and Miss Meteyard at Pym's Publicity, the Reverend Venables of Fenchurch St. Paul, and the delightful Dowager Duchess of Denver, Lord Peter's mother, whose tart and funny observations were always welcome. (One of my favorite Dowager Duchess moments is from a letter she is writing where she refers to a family in reduced circumstances; "how," she wonders, "does one reduce a circumstance?") A few years later I managed to record both
Murder and my other favorite,
The Nine Tailors, on video from broadcast, but both copies were deteriorating and had interference since they were telecast from Boston. Later I bought all five of the broadcast stories (the others being
Clouds of Witness, Five Red Herrings, and
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club) on DVD.
I was in college at the time Lord Peter entered my life, on a limited budget, and forewent schoolbooks to buy all the Wimsey novels, re-released by Avon to coincide with the series being featured on
Masterpiece Theatre (
Nine Tailors, which for some reason was owned by Harcourt, was luckily also re-released in a paperback edition). The paperbacks were (gasp!) the then enormous sum of $1.25 in the mid-1970s, so I ended up buying them two at the time, and had no sooner finished those two when I went to buy more.
However, this was no chore: while the bookstore situation in Rhode Island was a bit thin in those days (Read-All didn't carry a big line of mysteries and I hadn’t yet discovered the two Brown University-oriented bookstores on Thayer Street; the Waldenbooks at Warwick Mall didn’t carry all of the Wimseys, just what had been shown on TV), so the quest for Lord Peter meant I had to go to downtown Providence to perhaps one of the best bookstores I’ve ever shopped in—such a hardship!
It certainly didn’t look like much. It was located in a little storefront tucked in between boring clothing stores on Weybosset Street, cat-corner from the Outlet Company department store. The plain white banner sign over the front said simply “Paperback Books.” On either side of the door were show windows which displayed a collection of books much sunned and faded. Inside the floor was of worn linoleum, sometimes worn down to the backing, the shelves of finished but aged and worn wood. A wire rack right near the cashier featured the bestsellers of the day, but better treats were located further inside. The interior itself wasn’t very large, although the store described an L-shape and opened out to the right as you walked toward the rear. Leaving just enough room in the aisles for the average person, every other square inch of the floor was covered with back-to-back book shelves (the ones lining the perimeter of the room were nearly up to the ceiling); the cashier sat up in a large booth overlooking the store, not only to keep a weather eye out for shoplifters, but so that more books could be crammed around her.
If it wasn’t at the paperback bookstore it wasn’t
anywhere. How they managed to cram such a large selection of books into such a pocket-sized store I never figured out. They carried classics for the college crowd, lurid true-crime novels for those who liked that sort, classic science fiction, romance novels, nonfiction, and an entire corner of mystery books at the back of the store. (I could still walk in that store now and find everything perfectly. The Wimsey books were on the bottom shelf in the right rear corner of the store.)
They must have had the world’s best distributor, too, because books showed up there almost a month before any other bookseller. Their media book shelves were especially appealing. You could tell when one of the television networks was going to have a movie or special based on a novel because that novel, with its photo cover, would appear sometimes even two to three months before the movie was released. Novelizations based on movies were also sold there, and I can still tick off the volumes I bought:
Cromwell, Strange Report (the mystery series with Anthony Quayle),
Red Sky at Morning, The Gathering, The Homecoming, Spencer’s Mountain, The Waltons...
I suspect the habitual cashier, a stout, quiet young woman, was also a closet science fiction fan, since I saw my first fanzine at the paperback bookstore, “Night of the Twin Moons,” a
Star Trek Sarek-and-Amanda zine. I picked it up with some wonder at the hand-drawn and lettered cover, the pica-typed interior with more original illustrations, the stapled spine. I'd read about fanzines in a book called
Star Trek Lives! but that was the first time I had ever seen one. The other note of interest was...the ceiling. Like all good stores trying to cater to the “in” crowd in the 1970s, the paperback bookstore sold posters. However, with the bookshelves along the walls reaching all the way to the ceiling, there was no room to display them. But the ceiling however–big posters of the Partridge Family, the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, Bobby Sherman, and other rock luminaries of the day regarded you from above as you shopped. There were even counterculture black light posters and the ubiquitous rainbow unicorns.
So like Noah, two by two I collected Lord Peter–the store even sold the big trade paperback
Lord Peter, which contained all of Sayers’ short stories about Wimsey, and was even more difficult to find. It cost...gasp!...$3.95! My mother thought I had gone mad, spending that much for a book!
(The paperback bookstore continued to be a mainstay until it was “remodeled” in the early 1980s: they added new snazzy metal shelves and carpeting, and stripped the ceiling–and took away 90% of the books. The “ambiance” and mostly empty shelves just didn’t fly. It closed not a year later.)
In the late 1980s PBS showed a second series of Wimsey mysteries, these featuring Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane and Edward Petherbridge as Lord Peter. I enjoyed Walter as Vane, but I never did warm up to Petherbridge, even if he was closer to Sayers’ description of Lord Peter, with the sleek blond hair and nondescript face. He always appeared unbearably stiff to me and terribly Byronic; I can't imagine Petherbridge's Wimsey dressing in a Harlequin costume and diving off a fountain or hanging about in Marjorie Phelps' art studio or going to the Soviet Club—although honestly I can’t imagine Carmichael’s Wimsey proposing to Harriet, either! Many Petherbridge fans say that he was younger than Carmichael and therefore better fit the role of the late 20s-early 30s Lord Peter was in the majority of the books. In fact, Petherbridge was fifty-one when he made the three Harriet Vane stories, the same age as Carmichael was when he did the first of his Lord Peter Wimsey stories. In the end, it may simply be a case of “the one you saw first,” like
fans of different regenerations of the Doctor, and my money is always on Carmichael.
It will be interesting to see in the future if the BBC or ITV will try to make a new Lord Peter Wimsey series with an actor closer to the age the character was in the books.
(Speaking of film versions of Lord Peter, I have in my video collection a great curiosity, an American version of
Busman’s Honeymoon, which was re-titled
The Haunted Honeymoon and stars Robert Montgomery and Constance Cummings. Montgomery is the most unlikely Lord Peter you’ll ever see, although there’s a nice solid British supporting cast, including Sir Seymour Hicks as Bunter.)
