We see Bunter sleuthing on his own account in Have his Carcase when following a suspect who is determined to evade him. Bunter, despite a lack of really good disguises, is an excellent observer of small details, and gets his man!
1. Did this novel "work" for you as a mystery -- were you intrigued by the problem of who killed General Fentiman; was the solution satisfying; did you figure it out before Lord Peter did?
It worked for me as a moving. The solution and rationale for the murder seemed a bit contrived. I'm not sure there were many breadcrumbs. For someone reason, I figured it out but did not know the motive.
2. Apart from the mystery aspect, what did you think of this novel in terms of how it represented its place and time, specifically the legacy of the First World War in the decade immediately following the end of the conflict?
I think it did a very good job reflecting the legacy of the legacy of the Great War and the current attitudes towards PTSD and remembrance.
3. If, like some of us did this month (or have before) you also watched the 1970s TV adaptation, what did you think about that and how well it represented the book?
I avoid watching tv series or movies based on books. The almost always disappoint me.
Re Bunter's relationship with Wimsey: I think Sayers may have been thinking of a Jeeves-and-Watson character but Bunter is very definitely his own person. More intelligent than either of them, I suspect, but he can't manipulate Wimsey the way Jeeves does with Wooster. Wimsey would never stand for it (and he would certainly notice the kind of tactics Jeeves uses). However he does respect Bunter - for example he buys him expensive bits of photographic equipment to express gratitude for Bunter's work, rather than throwing five pound notes at him as Bertie Wooster does when Jeeves gets him out of a hole.
I think they are friends - as much as two men of very different classes could be back then, within the constraints of the master/servant relationship. I don't believe in Jill Paton Walsh's cosy ménage à quatre, with Bunter marrying a freelance photographer and setting up house at the bottom of the garden so he can go on being Wimsey's butler/valet/assistant detective. If he wanted to get married he would buy a country pub, or become a professional photographer himself.
What do people think generally of Jill Paton Walsh's work? I think she's done a good job with the characters Sayers created, developing them in a believable way and thinking creatively about how they would react to new situations (e. g. World War 2). I'd rather have her books than have to abandon the Wimseys at the end of Busman's Honeymoon, or the Striding Folly stories.
I think they run aground on the fundamental difference between someone who actually lived through those times writing about them and someone who has only read about them in history books or via elderly relatives doing it. The way JPW develops Bunter's character in particular is so alien to the character Sayers created that she might as well be talking about someone completely different.
And as for what she did with the Duke of Denver and St George...
I think they run aground on the fundamental difference between someone who actually lived through those times writing about them and someone who has only read about them in history books or via elderly relatives doing it. <snip>
That was exactly my feeling. Good research versus actual lived experience.
What she did with the characters was secondary, in my mind, to what I felt was a kind of flatness which I felt resulted from her not having actually inhabited the world about which she was writing.
I preferred to leave the characters where Dorothy L Sayers left them rather than follow the JPW trail.
I think they run aground on the fundamental difference between someone who actually lived through those times writing about them and someone who has only read about them in history books or via elderly relatives doing it. The way JPW develops Bunter's character in particular is so alien to the character Sayers created that she might as well be talking about someone completely different.
And as for what she did with the Duke of Denver and St George...
This is a fair comment. I'm not at all a fan of the way JPW develops Bunter either. Thrones, Dominations begun with notes, snippets, and a partial manuscript left by DLS, but I can't imagine DLS writing the domestic denouement between Hope and Harriet the way JPW did.
I gather that DLS left notes and writings suggesting that Viscount St George was killed in the Battle of Britain. It certainly wouldn't be out of line. So Peter was likely going to outlive Gerald and inherit, regardless of any silliness about fires and heart attacks.
It’s so lovely to have read the book with a lot of Sayer’s enthusiasts.
I quite liked the first JPW mainly because at least it was based on Sayers. By the end I felt we had a different set of characters with the same names. I too didn’t like what happened to Jerry, mainly because he was so real in Gaudy Night.
What do people think Wimsey’s attitude to religion is? I feel he is fairly devout if not necessarily a regular church goer. If I remember aright JPW made him rather cynical about such things.
It’s so lovely to have read the book with a lot of Sayer’s enthusiasts.
I quite liked the first JPW mainly because at least it was based on Sayers. By the end I felt we had a different set of characters with the same names. I too didn’t like what happened to Jerry, mainly because he was so real in Gaudy Night.
What do people think Wimsey’s attitude to religion is? I feel he is fairly devout if not necessarily a regular church goer. If I remember aright JPW made him rather cynical about such things.
I think the revelation in The Nine Tailors that Wimsey was a ringer, and a good one to be ringing peals of Kent (I forget the exact variation, but it's not a simple method from what I've heard) is interesting in this respect as well.
The classic route to becoming a ringer in days of yore was that the choirmaster would poke you towards the tower captain when your voice broke. So you'd be learning to ring at an age when your parents still had the power to push you into church whatever your views were (ringers, for the uninitiated, were and are notoriously ungodly) and, whether ot not you were devout, you became part of the church structure.
If your assessment is right, Sarasa, as an irregular churchgoer he would have fitted right in as a ringer. He could even have learned at Oxford, where at least four colleges at the time had their own peal of bells, without ever attending a service. I can imagine Sayers filing that away mentally, to be brought out for a later work. That is fairly much how I view Wimsey as well, BTW. He knows all the responses, but rarely passes the door.
Ironically St Cross church, venue of Wimsey's nuptials, is now a historic document store for Balliol, Peter's college, and its bells have been sealed away above the ceiling, silenced for the foreseeable future.
Sorry, that's a bit of a digression back to Nine Tailors, I need to provide my answers to the questions, and I'd like to hold forth a bit on Bunter as well before we close the month out.
I thought it was rather too neat, the way that Bunter got married, but still living in the same household as Peter, in the JPW books. Real life tends to be messier, and DLS did have the advantage of living through the times she was writing about, so she could see different options.
I think Bunter would retire, regretfully, but safe in the knowledge that Harriet could take over from him as far as Peter was concerned. And I think Peter would not want to break off relations with Bunter, so would invite him back whenever he needed a skilled photographer for a case.
That's how I'd do it if I was writing fan fiction.
I think Wimsey is a typical member of his class, in that he is a member of the C of E, knows all the responses and goes to church occasionally to be polite to his hosts and when the situation demands it but doesn't go regularly or feel the need to perform private devotions (compare with Miss Climpson). However, when struggling with an ethical conundrum he is willing to consult the vicar, so he does seem to recognise some kind of spiritual authority. And he is certainly grateful for Miss Climpson's 'fearfully tough conscience' in Strong Poison.
Oh, and what Sandemaniac said about bellringers. They may not all be agnostic/atheist, but being a regular churchgoer is certainly not a requirement.
Re Jerry: I could absolutely see him as a fighter pilot dying heroically in the Battle of Britain. It's the lived experience vs. historical research issue again though: if Sayers had written about it there would have been a lot more about the emotional impact of losing a beloved nephew. JPW doesn't quite dismiss him in one line, but that's what it felt like.
If I was writing fan fiction Bunter would become the landlord of the Green Dragon or whatever the name of the pub in the village where Tallboys is situated by marrying the widow of the previous landlord. It would become the place where the Wimsey's would put extra guests when the house was full and Bunter would be on hand when needed.
As for Wimsey's faith I don't think he is an agnostic as JPW seemed to suggest but certainly not a regular church goer. I think he might be a bit like Sherlock Holmes who in one story doesn't turn the murderer in as he has a terminal illness. Holmes' reasoning is that he will soon have to answer to a higher court. Maybe Wimsey felt a bit like that about Penberthy et al. @Sandemaniac all the stuff about bell ringing is fascinating and it fits the Wimsey back story well. One of my pet hates is authors who give their characters a backstory that the author knows very little about. For instance making a character a Catholic so they won't get divorced or they suffer from a shedload of guilt. It seems like very lazy writing to me.
At least three topics that are very interesting to me have come up on this thread while I was too busy to look in on it yesterday -- Bunter, the JPW novels, and Lord Peter's view of religion -- all of which I want to comment on, even if none of them (except Bunter) are particularly relevant to Bellona Club. I'll do them in separate posts though so as not to post a Giant Block of Text here.
Re Bunter: Bunter's relationship with Lord Peter is one of my favourite in fiction -- I think it's not uncommon to note that it's more like Sam and Frodo in Lord of the Rings than like any other pairing in fiction -- certainly closer to that than to either Holmes/Watson or Jeeves/Wooster. Such a close and intimate friendship, but with that class barrier firmly in place. I agree that JPW's solution to how their relationship might have worked out long term is probably not realistic; I like @Sarasa's fanfic version better and henceforth that is how I will imagine Bunter's retirement. No longer Lord Peter's servant, but still close at hand.
Bunter is an active participant in many of Peter's investigations; I don't think his skills (other than photography) are shown off to best advantage in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. He's very good at interviewing other people's servants, able to get them to let their guard down and tell him things they'd never tell Lord Peter -- off the top of my head I can think of Whose Body, Clouds of Witness, and Strong Poison as good examples of this.
My favourite Bunter role is the one @Azz mentioned -- when he's trailing the suspect in Have His Carcase. He's absolutely brilliant there as the man he's trailing changes disguises, goes in and out of unexpected entrances and exits, and Bunter stays on the trail.
Of course apart from Bunter the Assistant Detective, and Bunter the Faithful Friend of Lord Peter, his best role is as Bunter the Perfect Manservant, best displayed when he puts everything to rights after the disastrous arrival at Talboys in Busman's Honeymoon. I don't have the book handy now but there's a single paragraph that describes Bunter going around the village making connections with everyone needed to provide the necessities of life for the Wimseys. It made me reflect that when I was a teenager I wanted to marry Lord Peter because he was brilliant, sexy, and rich ... but later in life I mostly wanted to marry him because I need a Bunter in my life to arrange everything. That idea of having servants who seamlessly take care of all the daily worries is so seductive.
I have to say that I find Bunter slightly frustrating in that I don't recall (and I bet someone will know exactly what I've forgotten here!) that we ever find out where he got his almost inexhaustible skill set from. I'm entirely unsurprised that he was Wimsey's sergeant, given that the sergeant is the link between the officer and the other ranks that actually gets the officer's orders done - was he also his batman?
Again something I cannot recall is whether Bunter has family - he would have made a splendid uncle.
Bunter writes to his mother in Busman's Honeymoon, doesn't he? Which kind of suggests to me that he doesn't have other family, and that his mother is on her own, too.
I don't remember that we find out where Bunter got his skills from. He seems like the kind of person who is just good at making sure things happen and befriending the right people.
I would have to look it up to be sure, but I think the Dowager gives us some more of Bunter's backstory when discussing Peter's PTSD with Harriet in Busman's Honeymoon.
I wouldn't have thought Bunter could have been Wimsey's sergeant *and* his batman. Not simultaneously, anyway - both roles are quite time-consuming. But there's no saying that they were together for the whole war... maybe Bunter was his batman when Wimsey was a junior officer in the trenches and got promoted to sergeant while Wimsey was doing whatever he did for Military Intelligence. We will never know. Presumably Bunter acquired most of his skills when he was 'in service' before the war. As a working-class lad he would have started work at an age when Wimsey was still learning his Latin declensions and perfecting his batting technique.
Bunter served with Lord Peter in the trenches because he was among the party that took him out when he was buried by a shell explosion.
The dowager duchess mentions Bunter as having been a footman in another establishment before he came to Peter*. This is in her conversation with Harriet when Peter takes Harriet to Dukes Denver for the first time.
(* I expect he was also very well brought up by his redoubtable mother.)
A quote from Sayers that seems to shed some light on why Penberthy et al all get the chance to suicide instead of going to trial: "If sympathy [for the murderer] cannot be avoided, the author is at pains, either to let the criminal escape, or to arrange for his suicide, and so transfer the whole awkward business to a higher tribunal, whose decisions are not openly promulgated." From The Mind of the Maker, "Problem Picture."
Bunter served with Lord Peter in the trenches because he was among the party that took him out when he was buried by a shell explosion.
The dowager duchess mentions Bunter as having been a footman in another establishment before he came to Peter*. This is in her conversation with Harriet when Peter takes Harriet to Dukes Denver for the first time.
(* I expect he was also very well brought up by his redoubtable mother.)
Yes, but batmen usually would have been just regular soldiers, wouldn't they? They would still have been expected to fight. Sergeants have responsibility for organising the troops and ensuring that the junior officers give the right orders, which would be difficult to combine with keeping said junior officer's kit in order and making his morning tea. I wasn't saying he hadn't served in the trenches, just expressing doubt that he could have been Wimsey's batman at the same time as being a sergeant. I am of course willing to be corrected by anyone who has more detailed knowledge of how the army was organised back then.
I think the revelation in The Nine Tailors that Wimsey was a ringer, and a good one to be ringing peals of Kent (I forget the exact variation, but it's not a simple method from what I've heard) is interesting in this respect as well.
I think Wimsey is a typical member of his class, in that he is a member of the C of E, knows all the responses and goes to church occasionally to be polite to his hosts and when the situation demands it but doesn't go regularly or feel the need to perform private devotions (compare with Miss Climpson). However, when struggling with an ethical conundrum he is willing to consult the vicar, so he does seem to recognise some kind of spiritual authority. And he is certainly grateful for Miss Climpson's 'fearfully tough conscience' in Strong Poison.
There's a point at which, in conversation with Harriet in one of the later books, Peter says "I wouldn't call myself a Christian or anything ..." and seems almost embarrassed to make that statement. I think he's very comfortable with the externals of the Church of England -- certainly he's in his element doing the reading in church in Busman's Honeymoon, and his bell-ringing skill, while not speaking in any way to his personal faith, certainly speaks to his familiarity with church settings and rituals. He's always very comfortable with clergymen, and (unlike doctors!) they are almost always portrayed positively in the books. I don't think I can think of one member of the clergy who turns out badly in these novels, though I might be forgetting one.
One of the (several) things I didn't like about the JPW continuations of the stories was the fact that she made Peter more cynical about religion and I think even has him describe himself as an atheist at one point (I could be mis-remembering that, but I know I found it jarring). I always felt Sayers was moving him in the opposite direction, in keeping with her own religious beliefs. In the scene in the churchyard in Busman's Honeymoon, I've always read that as Peter not just grappling with the reality of finally being married to the woman he's loved and pursued so long, but of what this means for his life in the larger sense, including spiritually. This is the passage:
He was as much troubled and confused now as though somebody had credited him with the possession of a soul. In strict logic, of course, he would have had to admit that he had as much right to a soul as anybody else, but the mocking analogy of the camel and the needle's eye was enough to make that claim stick in his throat as a silly piece of presumption. Of such was not the Kingdom of Heaven. He had the kingdoms of the earth, and they should be enough for him .... But he was filled with a curious misgiving, as though he had meddled in matters too high for him; as though he were being forced, body and bones, through some enormous wringer that was squeezing out of him something undifferentiated till now, and even now excessively nebulous and inapprehensible. Vagula, blandula, he thought--pleasantly erratic and surely of no consequence -- it couldn't possibly turn into something that had to be reckoned with.
This paragraph continues with Peter, still holding Harriet in his arms and on his lap, surrendering to feelings of laughter, delight, exultatation, and "mysterious rapture."
(I had never bothered to chase down the source and meaning of vagula, blandula until this moment, but have now learned it is from "Animula vagula blandula: the first line of a poem which appears in the Historia Augusta as the work of the dying emperor Hadrian." English translations of the line include "Poor little, wandering, charming soul" and "Oh, loving Soul, my own so tenderly.")
Along with contemplation of his marital happiness, Lord Peter is also, perhaps for the first time, contemplating his own soul and experiencing feelings of rapture and delight. My conclusion from this scene is that at the end of Busman's Honeymoon, where Sayers intended to leave her hero, we should imagine Lord Peter not just happy at last on the human level, but capable of experiencing spiritual joy and union with God as well. If she had gone on to write about him in later life as Jill Paton Walsh did, it seems very unlikely to me that, given what we know of him thus far and the tenor of his thoughts in this particular scene, she would have had him describe himself as an atheist.
The scene I’m thinking of in JPW and maybe Trudy is as well is when Lord Peter says something about going to church or maybe religion in general in the sort of flippant tone he’d use when discussing someone’s bad taste in wine pairings.
@Trudy : Yes! That's the other thing about JPW. I think you've put your finger on an important aspect of Wimsey's character. I wonder if Sayers meant this - spiritual healing, I suppose - as the culmination of the slow process of his healing of the psychological damage he suffered in the First World War. As a lay theologian I seriously doubt she meant him to be an atheist, at least not permanently. As an honest writer portraying the effects of WWI on those who fought in it, she was bound to show the effects on religious observance and faith. And one of my favourite characters in the series is Miss Climpson, who manages to be an interesting person with intelligence and character despite being a plain elderly woman who is a devout Christian. A lesser writer would have made her a figure of fun. Certainly an atheist or agnostic would have done.
Thank you for choosing this book this month. I read it for the first time in years, and had forgotten the plot. I think I had seen Ian Carmichael's portrayal on television before reading many of the books, so that always coloured my mental picyure.
@Trudy : Yes! That's the other thing about JPW. I think you've put your finger on an important aspect of Wimsey's character. I wonder if Sayers meant this - spiritual healing, I suppose - as the culmination of the slow process of his healing of the psychological damage he suffered in the First World War. As a lay theologian I seriously doubt she meant him to be an atheist, at least not permanently. As an honest writer portraying the effects of WWI on those who fought in it, she was bound to show the effects on religious observance and faith. And one of my favourite characters in the series is Miss Climpson, who manages to be an interesting person with intelligence and character despite being a plain elderly woman who is a devout Christian. A lesser writer would have made her a figure of fun. Certainly an atheist or agnostic would have done.
In asimilar vein is the character of the ex safe-cracker Bill Rumm in Strong Poison. Lord Peter is quite accepting of (without necessarily assenting to) Bill Rumm’s faith and its expression.
Yes, the fact that Lord Peter, while not being overtly religious himself, has great respect for other people's religious convictions, is another thing suggesting to me that he is not cynical or entirely an atheist. Also, the Bill Rumm scene is great for his enthusiastic willingness to join in the evangelical (probably Salvation Army, I'm thinking, though it's never overtly stated) hymn-singing -- another example of him being quite familiar and comfortable with religious practice, and not just in the Church of England.
Inspector Charles Parker also studied evangelical theology in his spare time in this book, which was not thought odd or superstitious by Wimsey. Having not read many of the other books, I am unsure what Parker's religious beliefs are.
Re the encounter with Bill Rumm, I thought when I first read it that Wimsey was being asked to sing the hymn 'Jerusalem' - years later, my daughter learned this piece for a singing exam, which seems more likely. http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/h/o/l/y/c/holycity.htm
Comments
in Busman's Honeymoon!
1. Did this novel "work" for you as a mystery -- were you intrigued by the problem of who killed General Fentiman; was the solution satisfying; did you figure it out before Lord Peter did?
It worked for me as a moving. The solution and rationale for the murder seemed a bit contrived. I'm not sure there were many breadcrumbs. For someone reason, I figured it out but did not know the motive.
2. Apart from the mystery aspect, what did you think of this novel in terms of how it represented its place and time, specifically the legacy of the First World War in the decade immediately following the end of the conflict?
I think it did a very good job reflecting the legacy of the legacy of the Great War and the current attitudes towards PTSD and remembrance.
3. If, like some of us did this month (or have before) you also watched the 1970s TV adaptation, what did you think about that and how well it represented the book?
I avoid watching tv series or movies based on books. The almost always disappoint me.
I think they are friends - as much as two men of very different classes could be back then, within the constraints of the master/servant relationship. I don't believe in Jill Paton Walsh's cosy ménage à quatre, with Bunter marrying a freelance photographer and setting up house at the bottom of the garden so he can go on being Wimsey's butler/valet/assistant detective. If he wanted to get married he would buy a country pub, or become a professional photographer himself.
And as for what she did with the Duke of Denver and St George...
That was exactly my feeling. Good research versus actual lived experience.
What she did with the characters was secondary, in my mind, to what I felt was a kind of flatness which I felt resulted from her not having actually inhabited the world about which she was writing.
I preferred to leave the characters where Dorothy L Sayers left them rather than follow the JPW trail.
This is a fair comment. I'm not at all a fan of the way JPW develops Bunter either. Thrones, Dominations begun with notes, snippets, and a partial manuscript left by DLS, but I can't imagine DLS writing the domestic denouement between Hope and Harriet the way JPW did.
I gather that DLS left notes and writings suggesting that Viscount St George was killed in the Battle of Britain. It certainly wouldn't be out of line. So Peter was likely going to outlive Gerald and inherit, regardless of any silliness about fires and heart attacks.
I quite liked the first JPW mainly because at least it was based on Sayers. By the end I felt we had a different set of characters with the same names. I too didn’t like what happened to Jerry, mainly because he was so real in Gaudy Night.
What do people think Wimsey’s attitude to religion is? I feel he is fairly devout if not necessarily a regular church goer. If I remember aright JPW made him rather cynical about such things.
I think the revelation in The Nine Tailors that Wimsey was a ringer, and a good one to be ringing peals of Kent (I forget the exact variation, but it's not a simple method from what I've heard) is interesting in this respect as well.
The classic route to becoming a ringer in days of yore was that the choirmaster would poke you towards the tower captain when your voice broke. So you'd be learning to ring at an age when your parents still had the power to push you into church whatever your views were (ringers, for the uninitiated, were and are notoriously ungodly) and, whether ot not you were devout, you became part of the church structure.
If your assessment is right, Sarasa, as an irregular churchgoer he would have fitted right in as a ringer. He could even have learned at Oxford, where at least four colleges at the time had their own peal of bells, without ever attending a service. I can imagine Sayers filing that away mentally, to be brought out for a later work. That is fairly much how I view Wimsey as well, BTW. He knows all the responses, but rarely passes the door.
Ironically St Cross church, venue of Wimsey's nuptials, is now a historic document store for Balliol, Peter's college, and its bells have been sealed away above the ceiling, silenced for the foreseeable future.
Sorry, that's a bit of a digression back to Nine Tailors, I need to provide my answers to the questions, and I'd like to hold forth a bit on Bunter as well before we close the month out.
I thought it was rather too neat, the way that Bunter got married, but still living in the same household as Peter, in the JPW books. Real life tends to be messier, and DLS did have the advantage of living through the times she was writing about, so she could see different options.
I think Bunter would retire, regretfully, but safe in the knowledge that Harriet could take over from him as far as Peter was concerned. And I think Peter would not want to break off relations with Bunter, so would invite him back whenever he needed a skilled photographer for a case.
That's how I'd do it if I was writing fan fiction.
Oh, and what Sandemaniac said about bellringers. They may not all be agnostic/atheist, but being a regular churchgoer is certainly not a requirement.
Re Jerry: I could absolutely see him as a fighter pilot dying heroically in the Battle of Britain. It's the lived experience vs. historical research issue again though: if Sayers had written about it there would have been a lot more about the emotional impact of losing a beloved nephew. JPW doesn't quite dismiss him in one line, but that's what it felt like.
As for Wimsey's faith I don't think he is an agnostic as JPW seemed to suggest but certainly not a regular church goer. I think he might be a bit like Sherlock Holmes who in one story doesn't turn the murderer in as he has a terminal illness. Holmes' reasoning is that he will soon have to answer to a higher court. Maybe Wimsey felt a bit like that about Penberthy et al.
@Sandemaniac all the stuff about bell ringing is fascinating and it fits the Wimsey back story well. One of my pet hates is authors who give their characters a backstory that the author knows very little about. For instance making a character a Catholic so they won't get divorced or they suffer from a shedload of guilt. It seems like very lazy writing to me.
Re Bunter: Bunter's relationship with Lord Peter is one of my favourite in fiction -- I think it's not uncommon to note that it's more like Sam and Frodo in Lord of the Rings than like any other pairing in fiction -- certainly closer to that than to either Holmes/Watson or Jeeves/Wooster. Such a close and intimate friendship, but with that class barrier firmly in place. I agree that JPW's solution to how their relationship might have worked out long term is probably not realistic; I like @Sarasa's fanfic version better and henceforth that is how I will imagine Bunter's retirement. No longer Lord Peter's servant, but still close at hand.
Bunter is an active participant in many of Peter's investigations; I don't think his skills (other than photography) are shown off to best advantage in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. He's very good at interviewing other people's servants, able to get them to let their guard down and tell him things they'd never tell Lord Peter -- off the top of my head I can think of Whose Body, Clouds of Witness, and Strong Poison as good examples of this.
My favourite Bunter role is the one @Azz mentioned -- when he's trailing the suspect in Have His Carcase. He's absolutely brilliant there as the man he's trailing changes disguises, goes in and out of unexpected entrances and exits, and Bunter stays on the trail.
Of course apart from Bunter the Assistant Detective, and Bunter the Faithful Friend of Lord Peter, his best role is as Bunter the Perfect Manservant, best displayed when he puts everything to rights after the disastrous arrival at Talboys in Busman's Honeymoon. I don't have the book handy now but there's a single paragraph that describes Bunter going around the village making connections with everyone needed to provide the necessities of life for the Wimseys. It made me reflect that when I was a teenager I wanted to marry Lord Peter because he was brilliant, sexy, and rich ... but later in life I mostly wanted to marry him because I need a Bunter in my life to arrange everything. That idea of having servants who seamlessly take care of all the daily worries is so seductive.
I have to say that I find Bunter slightly frustrating in that I don't recall (and I bet someone will know exactly what I've forgotten here!) that we ever find out where he got his almost inexhaustible skill set from. I'm entirely unsurprised that he was Wimsey's sergeant, given that the sergeant is the link between the officer and the other ranks that actually gets the officer's orders done - was he also his batman?
Again something I cannot recall is whether Bunter has family - he would have made a splendid uncle.
I don't remember that we find out where Bunter got his skills from. He seems like the kind of person who is just good at making sure things happen and befriending the right people.
I wouldn't have thought Bunter could have been Wimsey's sergeant *and* his batman. Not simultaneously, anyway - both roles are quite time-consuming. But there's no saying that they were together for the whole war... maybe Bunter was his batman when Wimsey was a junior officer in the trenches and got promoted to sergeant while Wimsey was doing whatever he did for Military Intelligence. We will never know. Presumably Bunter acquired most of his skills when he was 'in service' before the war. As a working-class lad he would have started work at an age when Wimsey was still learning his Latin declensions and perfecting his batting technique.
The dowager duchess mentions Bunter as having been a footman in another establishment before he came to Peter*. This is in her conversation with Harriet when Peter takes Harriet to Dukes Denver for the first time.
(* I expect he was also very well brought up by his redoubtable mother.)
Yes, but batmen usually would have been just regular soldiers, wouldn't they? They would still have been expected to fight. Sergeants have responsibility for organising the troops and ensuring that the junior officers give the right orders, which would be difficult to combine with keeping said junior officer's kit in order and making his morning tea. I wasn't saying he hadn't served in the trenches, just expressing doubt that he could have been Wimsey's batman at the same time as being a sergeant. I am of course willing to be corrected by anyone who has more detailed knowledge of how the army was organised back then.
NCOs had other responsibilities inconsistent with, effectively, acting as an officer’s valet.
Kent Treble Bob Major.
There's a point at which, in conversation with Harriet in one of the later books, Peter says "I wouldn't call myself a Christian or anything ..." and seems almost embarrassed to make that statement. I think he's very comfortable with the externals of the Church of England -- certainly he's in his element doing the reading in church in Busman's Honeymoon, and his bell-ringing skill, while not speaking in any way to his personal faith, certainly speaks to his familiarity with church settings and rituals. He's always very comfortable with clergymen, and (unlike doctors!) they are almost always portrayed positively in the books. I don't think I can think of one member of the clergy who turns out badly in these novels, though I might be forgetting one.
One of the (several) things I didn't like about the JPW continuations of the stories was the fact that she made Peter more cynical about religion and I think even has him describe himself as an atheist at one point (I could be mis-remembering that, but I know I found it jarring). I always felt Sayers was moving him in the opposite direction, in keeping with her own religious beliefs. In the scene in the churchyard in Busman's Honeymoon, I've always read that as Peter not just grappling with the reality of finally being married to the woman he's loved and pursued so long, but of what this means for his life in the larger sense, including spiritually. This is the passage:
This paragraph continues with Peter, still holding Harriet in his arms and on his lap, surrendering to feelings of laughter, delight, exultatation, and "mysterious rapture."
(I had never bothered to chase down the source and meaning of vagula, blandula until this moment, but have now learned it is from "Animula vagula blandula: the first line of a poem which appears in the Historia Augusta as the work of the dying emperor Hadrian." English translations of the line include "Poor little, wandering, charming soul" and "Oh, loving Soul, my own so tenderly.")
Along with contemplation of his marital happiness, Lord Peter is also, perhaps for the first time, contemplating his own soul and experiencing feelings of rapture and delight. My conclusion from this scene is that at the end of Busman's Honeymoon, where Sayers intended to leave her hero, we should imagine Lord Peter not just happy at last on the human level, but capable of experiencing spiritual joy and union with God as well. If she had gone on to write about him in later life as Jill Paton Walsh did, it seems very unlikely to me that, given what we know of him thus far and the tenor of his thoughts in this particular scene, she would have had him describe himself as an atheist.
http://www.hymntime.com/tch/htm/h/o/l/y/c/holycity.htm