Literature / Clouds of Witness

Clouds of Witness is a 1926 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. It's the second in the Lord Peter Wimsey series.

Captain Denis Cathcart, fiancé of Peter's sister Mary, is shot dead outside the shooting lodge owned by Peter's brother. Mary discovers her other brother kneeling over the body at three in the morning, but refuses to explain what she was doing outside at that time. Peter and his friend Charles Parker arrive to investigate.

The book was adapted into a 1972 miniseries.

Contains examples of:

• Ambiguously Gay: "Sir Impey Biggs is the handsomest man in England, and no woman will ever care twopence for him."^note To be fair, he's kind of a dick. Professionally.
• Amoral Attorney: In response to a statement by Sir Impey Biggs caring far more for evidence he can use than the truth (chapter ten):
  "I've always said," growled Peter, "that the professional advocate was the most immoral fellow on the face of the earth, and now I know for certain."
• Asshole Victim: At the close of the novel, Mr Grimethorpe attempts to murder Gerald on vague suspicion, exchanges fire with the police, and gets hit by a taxi whose tire got punctured by a stray bullet and skidded, killing him instantly. The cab driver is aghast (but safe from harm and possible charges), but all the other characters are relieved that brute is gone, especially his wife, who is so happy to be rid of him and have a chance to be her own woman that Gerald's attempt to at least soothe her is completely ignored, ending any emotional remains of their affair.
• Ate His Gun: Discussed. Part of the prosecution's claim that the death wasn't suicide, is on the grounds that the bullet wound was to the chest. At the trial, medical personnel inform them that, while a shot to the head is by far the most common, not all suicides by gunfire are aimed at the person's head. This supports the defence's position of Plausible Deniability. Ultimately, the defence is correct; the trope is thus averted.
• Big Brother Instinct: Peter for Mary in chapter ten, he's more angry about the danger Goyles put Mary in and the man's utter lack of consideration for her than the same man's having shot at him, and gives him a good verbal whipping before Mary finishes the bloke off with a shorter, equally scathing speech, implied to be at least partially incited by the man's attitude towards Peter, reciprocating it.
• Big Secret: The Duke was committing adultery when his sister's fiancé committed suicide. The other woman was married to a vindictively jealous man, and the Duke refuses to put her in harm's way to clear himself.
• Breather Episode: This is one of the relatively light-hearted novels in the series. It follows the grisly Whose Body? and is followed in turn by the even darker Unnatural Death.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: Sir Impey points out in his closing speech that the mystery could have been cleared up within hours: all it would have taken was for someone to investigate the bag of outgoing letters at the Lodge rather than just taking them down to the post office as usual.
• The Dandy: Daniel Cathcart, to the point that Sir Impey Biggs' closing speech, describes the choice as a last minute change to the heart as opposed to the head due to vanity. (While vanity was no doubt a part, it is likely that he decided to shoot his heart to begin with in order to mirror what her actions did to him, by his own account.^note  In his suicide note, the penultimate phrase is translated as having broke his heart; the original French provided uses the phrase percer le cœur, literally "pierce the heart," which is what the bullet was intended to do.)
• Driven to Suicide: The apparent murder is actually the suicide of a man driven to the brink of ruin and then abandoned by the woman he loves. This goes undiscovered for most of the book, in part, because instead of leaving his suicide note somewhere nearby he mailed it to the woman — who didn't bother to read it.
• Expensive Glass of Crap: Murbles serves his guests one of a dozen bottles of 1847 port that a client left him in his will. The bequest was well-intentioned, and the port is mentioned to be of an excellent vintage, but the client had put off drinking it for so long that it had become undrinkable.
• Femme Fatale: Cathcart's mistress, Simone Vonderaa — described as a belle à se suicider^note beauty to kill oneself for by a shop clerk who had seen her.
• Freudian Excuse: Discussed — the Dowager Duchess of Denver is firmly opposed to modern psychology, and doesn't believe in "subconsciousness" or "repression." In the present case of the patient in question, she's entirely correct.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Mr Grimethorpe is described as routinely violent towards his wife and anything which approaches her in trousers. While she did eventually cheat, that occurred after years of him considering her "loose" and beating her for every single suspicion of his. Almost immediately after Gerald leaves the court a free man, Mr Grimethorpe shoots at him, the man's only evidence being that Mrs Grimethorpe ran away and Gerald was the wealthiest man he suspected and the only whose location he knew outside the North Riding of Yorkshire. While he did manage to aim at her fellow adulterer, his thought process is devoid of any actual facts about the matter—without any evidence that any cheating has occurred, let alone knowing who the other party is.
• Hanging Judge: The first magistrate deliberately steers the jury toward a guilty verdict on a capital charge, mostly to spite Parker. Fortunately, he has no sentencing power.
• Honor Before Reason: Gerald appears to be doing this for much of the book. Subverted, though, in that he feels (not without some reason) that the harm he will cause to someone else by speaking out may be as great as the harm he may suffer by keeping silent.
• Idiot Plot: invoked Invoked in The Summation — if Cathcart's death had been the only event taking place on the night in question, the solution would have been obvious. But, because Denver, Mary, and Goyles were sneaking around on their own business at the same time, everyone involved in the case came to completely the wrong conclusions and nearly got themselves killed trying to untangle the mess.
• Irony: The description of the Soviet Club in chapter seven is dripping with this. The best of it— Peter finds the atmosphere reminiscent of mission teas^note  which, being a thing of religion, the Soviets as a whole (as well as most Communists) take to be more "bourgeois" conspiracy than genuine and finds the servants, in comparison to those of less "democratic" institutions, to be staunch Capitalists.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Gerald Wimsey, Duke of Denver, is thoroughly conventional and rather stupid, but faced with a choice between risking his own neck or endangering the woman with whom he's been having an extramarital affair, he unhesitatingly plumps for the former. He's been accused of murder and she's his alibi, but she's married to a violently abusive man who will certainly kill her if he finds out she's been unfaithful, and frequently beats her regardless.
  • At the end of the novel, after Peter crossed the Atlantic by air under potentially fatal conditions to bring critical evidence to the trial in time, for the first time, after all of Gerald's comments against his brother's detective pass-time in both this novel and the proceeding one, he gives Peter an unmitigated though somewhat sheepish "thank you."
• Literary Allusion Title: "Clouds of witness" is from the Epistle to the Hebrews.
• Love at First Sight: Or, at least, meeting. We don't get Charles Parker's thoughts when he first sees Lady Mary Wimsey, but it becomes apparent very quickly that he's quite taken with her by the second. Further downplayed by his refusal to admit it, even after Peter points out (in chapter thirteen) that Parker has made his feelings quite obvious to Peter himself.
• Ominous Fog: At one point, Lord Peter and Bunter spend several hours wandering the moor in increasing distress after becoming lost in the fog, eventually getting stuck in a bog. With a bit of dramatic appropriateness, this occurs at a point when the investigation has hit a dead end and they can't see what line of inquiry to pursue next — and their rescue from both fog and bog leads directly to Lord Peter stumbling over a clue that breaks one part of the mystery wide open.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Peter gets shot in the shoulder, hits his head on the way down, and seems barely wounded at all — he tells the shooter that if he'd hit him "in the head, or the heart, or anywhere that matters," they'd really be in trouble. Downplayed somewhat by his having been in the hospital for it and then laid up in bed for a bit. Downplayed further by Peter being in bandages the next few days. Downplayed further still by Peter's general attitude and tendency to ignore his own wounds. It's implied that part of the reason Peter fainted after getting extricated from a bog is the bullet wound.
• Oop North: Rural Yorkshire, North Riding of Yorkshire to be exact, complete with dour, taciturn farmers and boggy moors.
• Perp Sweating: Sir Impey Biggs actually pulls this on Wimsey, complete with the lamp in the face, while pumping him for information to use in Gerald's defence. Wimsey, annoyed, turns the lamp off, unplugs it, and moves it to the other side of the room.
• Playing Sick: Mary, realising her evidence at the inquest was making matters worse for her brother, pretends to fall ill (to the extent of taking emetics to trigger vomiting fits) so she can't be called to give evidence at his trial.
• Quicksand Sucks: Peter's Pot, a dangerous bog just outside Grider's Hole, Grimethorpe's farm.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Peter delivers a richly deserved one to Mary's (soon-to-be-ex-)fiancé, Goyles when, after spending half the book tracking him down it turns out that Goyles hadn't shot Cathcart at all, only stumbled across his body in the dark and ran off in a panic. Following that, Mary returns his ring and provides a short and equally scathing one of her own immediately after.
• Shout-Out: Since Peter is constantly quoting literature and history, this goes without saying. Additionally, the novel and it's chapters all have epigraphs from various works.
  • Throughout the book, references are made to The Bible, Shakespeare, and Sherlock Holmes, as always. There are also several quotes from The Wallet of Kai-Lung.
  • Peter bumps into a wooden chest and decides to investigate it. The narrator playfully wonders if, "like the heroine of Northanger Abbey" he was expecting to find something gruesome, rather than just the spare bed linen it contained. ^note It also contains sand from the conservatory floor, later found as well on Lady Mary's dress. Also the collision caused a loud noise, which a witness heard during the night, and proved to be Lady Mary's fault as she hid the dress.
  • Edmund Clerihew's "Clive of India" is quoted word for word in reference to a good drink saved too long.
  • As soon as Peter realizes what had actually been going on with the deceased, he makes several mentions of the eighteenth-century French novel Manon Lescaut which is about a young man's devotion to his mistress resulting in his ruin.
  • Parker is found reading biblical epistles more than once in his free time, and he and Peter both reference them more than once.
  • Sir Impey Biggs quotes Racine during the trial, along with Shakespeare, the Epistle of Saint Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, and Manon Lescaut.
• Smoking Gun: The murder case goes to trial and appears to get close to convicting the innocent defendant before Peter shows up with a new piece of evidence proving the identity of the real killer, which he had had to travel to America and back to fetch. It's noted that he had briefed the defence lawyers about the evidence as soon as he'd deduced its existence, but they had to vamp until he got hold of it because the truth was strange enough that the jury would be unlikely to accept it without evidence.
• Surprise Witness: The defence are prepared to produce a Surprise Witness if it looks like the other evidence won't be sufficient to sway the jury. They'd rather not, because it's an alibi by a woman the defendant was having an affair with, which would be embarrassing all around, dangerous to the woman, whose husband is jealous and violent, and provide the prosecution with a motive, since if the dead man knew it would be reason to silence him. Fortunately, Peter manages to produce a Smoking Gun instead.
• Sympathetic Adulterer: Mrs Grimethorpe is trapped in an abusive marriage and accepts Gerald Wimsey's advances as an escape from her troubles. The Duke has less excuse for his behaviour — the Duchess is unpleasant and a shrew, but not nearly as evil or controlling as Mr Grimethorpe — but earns some sympathy for the lengths he goes to to shield his lover from the consequences of discovery — as well as his attempt to soothe her after she suddenly gets widowed, although she rejects him.
• Taking the Heat: Lady Mary attempts this. It turns out the suspect she's protecting didn't do it — he's just too paranoid to come forward and exonerate himself.
• '20s Bob Haircut: It's a minor plot point that Lady Mary and Simone Vonderaa have the same bobbed hairstyle.
• Unable to Support a Wife: Why Denver was able to dismiss Goyles as a suitor for his sister Mary — he was unable to support a wife to any extent, let alone to the standard appropriate to someone of Mary's station.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Mary Wimsey spends half the novel putting herself at great risk doing everything she can think of to try to protect Goyles, even up to confessing to the murder herself. When they meet after he's arrested, the first words out of his mouth are to accuse her of betraying him.
• Uptown Girl: Parker, a mere police inspector, falls for Lady Mary Wimsey. When he frets over this, Lord Peter gives his blessing by pointing out that Mary's previous boyfriends - a cardsharp and a communist - were so horrible that the family will probably be relieved if she dated an honest detective this time.
• Waking Non Sequitur: Parker falls asleep in front of the fireplace while waiting for Lord Peter. As Peter enters, Parker wakes up and says: "The glass-blower's cat is bompstaple." In the dream that Parker just had, this is the solution to the mystery. Awake, he can't even remember what "bompstaple" meant. ^note the real importance of the scene is Parker's pre-dream thought that a person might well sit before a fire in order to think about their troubles.
• Year X: A newspaper article is dated "Monday, November -, 19—". However, the trial scene straight-up says that the year in question is 1923.
• You Didn't Ask: During the climactic trial scene, the butler gives evidence of delivering a letter to the dead man the night of his death. When the prosecuting attorney demands to know why he never mentioned this before, the answer is, not only was he not asked but he was specifically told to confine his answers to the questions.
• Zany Scheme: Pretty nearly every character is trying to pull one of these on the others.

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