““The Cave of Ali Baba could be summarily dismissed as a potboiler, save for one factor: its dating. In a letter written in 1933, Sayers advised Harold W. Bell, an American enthusiast and Sherlock Holmes scholar, that “as regards the dates—I’m afraid I usually mix these up on purpose, to prevent people like you from attributing the events narrative to any particular year!” This was not altogether true. The two earliest novels are difficult to date exactly, and several of the short stories are maddeningly vague, but Sayers grew more explicit and precise in later works. As a kind of working hobby, Sayers had taken an interest in the dating of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures, entering into a long correspondence with H. W. Bell. Sayers considered his Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: The Chronology of their Adventures the most complete attempt to unravel this really arcane subject. However, anyone familiar with Doyle’s cavalier approach to the subject of dating (or consistency in the names of his characters!) has to realize how impossible the task really is. Many have tried, and one set of guesses is really as good as another. To produce a comprehensive chronology of the Holmes adventures, the scholar simply must be arbitrary somewhere. The debates center on where best to be arbitrary. In her own work, Sayers came to be the antithesis of Doyle’s approach, despite protests to the contrary. The events ascribed to Unnatural Death are definitely set in the spring of 1927, and it is difficult to conceive that The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club took place at any time other than the later autumn of that same year. Several references in these works and others place Peter’s birthday in 1890, providing a continuous frame of reference. In sharp contrast to Doyle, Sayers took assiduous care over her dates, consciously constructing a biographical chronology of Wimsey’s adventures. That is what makes “The Cave of Ali Baba” so curious. The story begins with a faked announcement of Peter’s death. The newspaper obituary announced that he was killed at age thirty-seven while hunting in Tanganyika in December. The staged death therefore takes place in December 1927, just after the events surrounding the Bellona Club mystery. For the next two years, Wimsey poses as an ex-footman named Rogers to gather evidence against the syndicate, which he finally exposes. Presumably, these events take place throughout 1928 and 1929, a view supported by the fact that Sayers never set any other cases during this period. The difficulty is that this story—highlighting appallingly melodramatic events of 1929—appeared in print in 1928. Sayers was describing events that would take place in Wimsey’s imaginary future. This has to be the ultimate form of creative biography. Sayers perpetrated a similar trick in the novel Strong Poison. Peter, weighed down the most critical investigation of his career, spends Christmas with his family and friends at Duke’s Denver. Almost without exception, the bluebloods gathered together prove overbearingly insensitive to Peter’s aspirations and fear. Sayers introduces this ordeal by stating that “Wimsey was accustomed to say, when he was an old man and more talkative even than usual, that the recollection of that Christmas at Duke’s Denver had haunted him in nightmares, every night regularly, for the following twenty years.” The difficulty is that Strong Poison was not published twenty years after the imagined events. In fact, the novel was released just scant months after the Christmas of 1929, when this fictional nightmare occurred. Again, Sayers was looking into Peter’s future, giving him twenty years of life that none of his enthusiasts had yet lived. This peculiar playing with the dates on the part of Dorothy L. Sayers would be nothing more than a strange anomaly, had she done it only once or twice. Yet she consciously tinkered with the concept of time in a variety of subtle and inventive ways during the next few years. She cast Wimsey into the future, she pushed him into events of the more distant past, and she arranged events of later novels to fit within the time frames of those already published. And she did this with a purpose. By placing the Wimsey adventures in the proper time sequence that Sayers created for them, the reader can observe both the proper evolution of his character and the expression of his author’s deepest beliefs on the most important of all subjects: the nature of human love.”
— Robert Kuhn McGregor and Ethan Lewis, Conundrums for the Long Week-end: England, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Lord Peter Wimsey (via isfjmel-phleg)
