Don’t fear reading an unfinished overarching story

DOES THE STORY HAVE TO BE FINISHED BEFORE YOU START READING?

The story you’re considering reading may not end with the current book. Is that reason not to start it?

Not if the JOURNEY is as good as the DESTINATION.

Dorothy L. Sayers is my mentor here. In Strong Poison, her jaded detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, falls hard for the woman in the dock at the Old Bailey, Harriet Vane, accused of poisoning her lover.

It took THREE more novels, with TWO irrelevant ones mixed in, before Peter and Harriet finally find peace in each other.

Each of those novels added to and changed the direction of the developing story between Peter and Harriet, taking the time to turn it into a friendship (originally, he led to her being exonerated in Strong Poison).

Sayers showed

that there was too much of a change needed to make her protagonists a couple, given where they started:

an age difference (he’s middle-aged, she’s in her 30s – they will have children before Sayers stops writing about them)a social class difference (she’s the daughter of a country doctor, he’s the younger brother of a duke)a status difference (he solves mysteries and crimes as a hobby, she’s a self-supporting writer)a financial difference (he travels, works with the Foreign Office; she writes potboilers for eating money)

and a commonality: they’ve both gone to Oxford and read something significant (scholarship), but of course he has a huge experience database, and she doesn’t.

The RELATIONSHIP, to be believable,

needs time to develop and mature (and Sayers walks us through it very believably) before their initial status (he saves her from the gallows, she responds to his offer of marriage by saying she will live with him if he wants, but not marry him) can get to the place where he develops a true respect and affection for the object of his very odd obsession.

Peter’s intentions are good, his timing terrible.

Harriet can’t handle the pressure but never takes the step of making her wish to turn him down stick permanently. And eventually realizes what has been going on, and that she’s changed as well.

The lightness of Sayers’ touch with her material, and how it goes, was far more interesting to me than the detective/mystery stories that drew me to this English series in the beginning (I read more of these than I can shake a stick at over YEARS – it was, with SF, my preferred reading material for a long time), but it took me a while to see why: Sayers sets up a relationship that is WORTH the BUILDUP.

No unbelievable leaps.

No falling for the rescuer.

No quick overcoming of obstacles.

No unsubstantiated major personality changes.

No gods in the machine or strokes of Fate.

Sayers both took her time,

and gave her odd couple plenty of it, to get down to the bedrock of the question: are these two suited for each other and a long-term relationship – even though practically every other character, commenting on events as they happen, doesn’t see it.

I wish she’d chosen to do more with it after the marriage. There are only two short stories, and they are both lovely, only the later one, Talboys, showing what the author had wrought from her materials in their little family, with only the notation that Harriet still writes, and a very minor bit of detecting from Peter. Then she went on, having left her favored couple together and contented, to write theology!

Sayers taught me a lot about choosing your material and letting it mature. I am forever grateful.

I’m doing my own version.

It’s called Pride’s Children. And will be about as long as GWTW when I’m finished. But it’s taking me time to do it right. And it’s coming out in pieces.

Several of my reviewers have caught on. I think they like it.

The point I’m trying to make is that I didn’t know, when I started reading the mysteries, that it would lead anywhere, but found, after it did, that I like Dorothy L. Sayers way of making it happen. I see her writerly fingerprints all over it.

With respect.

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