40 pages • 1 hour read
Dorothy L. SayersThe Nine Tailors
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1934A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Consequences of Sacrilegious Crimes
Change ringing is an ecclesiastical practice. While the village church bells can sometimes be used to signal local emergencies, they are primarily meant to communicate events in the religious lives of parishioners, such as baptisms, weddings, and burials.
The secular and spiritual are intertwined in The Nine Tailors. As a result, religious customs play a significant role in the plot. While theft and murder fall into the domain of the secular world, the novel situates these events against a spiritual backdrop.
Deacon steals the emeralds and then has the audacity to hide them behind a wall panel in church during a Sunday service. In fact, he places the gems under the watchful gaze of angels. Wimsey describes these figures with admiration: “Incredibly aloof, flinging back the light in a dusky shimmer of bright hair and gilded outspread wings, soared the ranked angels, cherubim and seraphim, choir over choir, from corbel and hammer-beam floating face to face uplifted” (35).
Cranton also ransacks the church in his search for the gems. In the process, he accidentally strikes one of the bells, and the sound unnerves him. He says, “You’ll think I’m loopy, but I tell you that bell was alive. I shut my eyes and hung on to the ladder and wished I’d chosen a different kind of profession—and that’ll show you what a state I was in” (323). His guilty conscience flusters him. He drops the cipher letter in the belfry as he flees, where Hilary Thorpe later finds it.
When Jim Thoday discovers Deacon’s dead body, he conceals it until he can remove it from the belfry. However, the bells unnerve him just as they did when they spied Cranton doing wrong. Perhaps he feels a sense of the disparity between objects that are meant to sing the praises of God but instead are forced to witness criminal acts.
Will Thoday performs several acts that might be considered sacrilegious. He first confronts Deacon in the church and points a revolver at him in the house of God. He refers to his consent to Deacon’s blackmail as a deal with the devil. Their conversation about concealing multiple crimes takes place in the central aisle before the altar. Will compounds his insults to sacred objects and spaces by tying Deacon up with bell cords that previously used to ring the church bells. Then, he marches the thief upstairs and conceals him in the bell tower, not realizing he is signing his death warrant. As if these transgressions are not enough, his brother Jim then places the dead body of a thief and murderer in consecrated ground.
The bells are silent witnesses to all these sins against the community’s sacred spaces. A ringer named Hezekiah tells Wimsey, “Yew ain’t no call to be afeard o’ the bells if so be as yew follows righteousness” (308). Deacon, Cranton, and the Thoday brothers all have reason to fear, and all suffer punishment for their sacrilegious actions.
Human Law and Divine Justice
The book’s second theme builds upon the first. Just as the crimes in The Nine Tailors all occur in a church setting, justice is meted out according to divine law instead of the human variety. Several unforeseen circumstances position the characters in such a way that they get what’s coming to them. Deacon eludes the law by escaping prison and killing two men. He then compounds his earlier crimes by seducing a French farm woman, entering into a bigamous marriage, and abandoning her and their four children. Even though the Thoday brothers don’t kill him, the bells see to his proper punishment.
To a lesser degree, Cranton is also punished for his role in the robbery and rifling through the church for the emeralds. The bells frighten him enough that he flees and falls ill. He later says,
Well, wouldn’t anybody get rheumatic fever, if he’d fallen into one of those cursed dykes? I never saw such a country, never. Country life never did suit me—particularly in the blasted middle of winter, with a thaw going on. I was damn nearly found dead in a ditch, which is no end for a gentleman (248).
Cranton will very likely die soon from a weak heart, and his demise has been orchestrated by forces beyond the law of man.
Wimsey’s involvement in the story might also be interpreted as an act of divine intervention. His car slides off the road during a snowstorm, forcing him to seek shelter at the rectory. The rectory is an extension of the spiritual forces that govern the church itself. The rector’s enthusiasm for change ringing also connects him to the principle of righteousness that the bells represent.
Ironically, the bell concert that kills Deacon might not have occurred at all if Wimsey hadn’t shown up and possessed the necessary skills as a ringer. With Will suffering from fever, the entire concert might have been canceled. As it is, Wimsey and the rest play a part in killing Deacon.
Wimsey also wouldn’t have identified the murder weapon without one more push from beyond. When the floodwaters rise, the bells are used to signal an evacuation. Mary is distraught at the news that her husband has drowned, and Wimsey can’t bear to witness her grief, so he climbs the tower to escape her cries. There, he hears the cacophony that killed Deacon and might also kill him if he doesn’t get away in time.
When Wimsey shares his theory with the rector later, Venables says, “Perhaps God speaks through those mouths of inarticulate metal. He is a righteous judge, strong and patient, and is provoked every day” (397). A court of justice might have delivered a verdict sooner, but God’s bells do a more thorough job of punishing the guilty.
The Dangers of Dredging
The Nine Tailors also examines the subject of dredging in its literal and figurative sense. The story is set in a marshy part of England that is prone to annual flooding. As a result, the various drains, ditches, and sluice gates employed to control the water are immensely important to the local communities. If the water is not channeled properly, homes will flood, crops will die, and lives may be endangered.
The author examines the methods employed in East Anglia to keep the waters at bay. In doing so, she pokes fun at government bureaucracy and its tardiness in dealing with the problem. Her chief mouthpiece for expressing these opinions is an old sluice-keeper whose main problem is getting the government to give him a new sluice gate.
As he complains to Wimsey, “‘Mister,’ I says to him, ‘how about a new set o’ gates for my sluice?’ ‘That ain’t in our contract,’ he says. ‘No,’ I says, ‘and drowning half the parish ain’t in your contract neither, I suppose.’ But he couldn’t see it’” (345).
The government’s solution is to dig another cut to allow water to escape. Wimsey is quick to note the correlation between digging a new drainage ditch and digging up an unwelcome corpse, “Dig up one thing […] and you have to dig up another. I wish we’d never dug up Deacon. Once you let the tide in, it’s got to go somewhere” (346).
While the new cut will later have disastrous consequences for the region when it fails to prevent a flood, Wimsey’s attempts to dredge up the past to crack his murder case will also have negative consequences. He lets in the metaphoric tide of truth, and the waters have to go somewhere. Solving Deacon’s murder will cause pain to the innocent. Mary Thoday learns that she has accidentally committed bigamy and isn’t wed to her current husband in the church’s eyes. When her husband and brother-in-law are questioned about their involvement in Deacon’s death, Will Thoday belatedly realizes his inadvertent role in Deacon’s murder. His guilty conscience impels him to make a risky rescue attempt that will result in his death.
Wimsey is painfully aware of the repercussions of his quest for truth. He confides to Venables,
I rather wish I hadn’t come buttin’ into this. Some things may be better left alone, don’t you think? My sympathies are all in the wrong place and I don’t like it. I know all about not doing evil that good may come. It’s doin’ good that evil may come that is so embarrassin’ (306).
