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[A]s one army surgeon responded when asked if he was a doctor, "No . . . I am a detective."
Bourke 89
Dorothy L. Sayers's (1893-1957) flippant aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey, equally able to score a cricket goal, judge a fine wine, and track down a murderer, is also a veteran of the First World War and a survivor of shell shock. While initially this seems a negligible element of his biography, the very first novel contains an early account of his breakdown, and as the Wimsey novels continue it becomes increasingly important both as a means to develop his character and as a way of meditating on the lasting effects of the war. As Gill Plain writes, the novels present a "careful and effective portrait of the survivor as hero" (46). Years after the end of the war, he is still in the business of execution, and his war experiences temper any claim of perfect justice with the harsh reality of death and the ambivalence of crime and human action; after all, Wimsey comes out of a war which made many a soldier a murderer.1 Through solving crime, Lord Peter summons the dream of perfect justice but cannot participate in it. No matter how many criminals he uncovers, he cannot uncover the mystery of his own shell shock, or unravel the enigma of his own personality. Thus, despite the stability of the detective genre - its assurances that every crime can be solved and every criminal revealed - Lord Peter Wimsey novels represent a much more ambiguous and unsettling world, where the greatest crimes are never brought to justice, and where triumph over even the most hardened criminal cannot be a cause of unmitigated celebration.2
Plain, who has pointed out that "war casts its shadow over the entire corpus of Wimsey novels" (46), was the first to argue for the centrality of shell shock to Wimsey's character and Sayers's narrative ambitions, noting that Wimsey's shell shock "corresponds to contemporary medical assumptions regarding the incidence of male hysteria" (50). I shall show, however, that Sayers's evocation of shell shock goes beyond this correspondence: it taps into a contemporary nexus of shell shock, detection, and criminality, not without challenging her contemporaries' fears of shell-shocked soldiers...