The Nine Tailors is a 1934 mystery novel by the British writer Dorothy L. Sayers, her ninth featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. The story is set in the Lincolnshire Fens, and revolves around a group of bell-ringers at the local parish church. The book has been described as Sayers' finest literary achievement, although not all critics were convinced by the mode of death, nor by the amount of technical campanology detail included.
Plot
Twenty years before the events of the novel, the family of Sir Henry Thorpe, squire of the Fenland village of Fenchurch St Paul, had suffered the theft of a valuable emerald necklace, still unrecovered. The family's then butler, Geoffrey Deacon, and his accomplice, Nobby Cranton, had been convicted and imprisoned. In 1918 Deacon had escaped from prison but apparently died shortly afterwards, the body lying in a quarry where it was found two years later, still in prison clothes. Deacon's widow Mary subsequently married one of the village bell-ringers, William Thoday.
The novel opens with Lord Peter Wimsey running his car into a ditch near Fenchurch on a snowy New Year's Eve. Stranded for a few days while repairs are carried out, Wimsey helps ring an all-night peal on the church bells after William Thoday is struck down with influenza. Lady Thorpe, Sir Henry's wife, dies the next day.
When Sir Henry dies the following Easter, a man's mutilated body is found in his wife's grave, believed to be that of a labourer calling himself 'Stephen Driver'. Oddly, the dead man was wearing French-made underclothes. The rector writes to Wimsey asking him to return to investigate.
At the Post Office, Bunter, Wimsey's manservant, finds an uncollected letter posted in France. The writer is the French wife of a British soldier, Arthur Cobbleigh, who had deserted in 1918. Cobbleigh evidently knew where the emeralds were hidden and plotted to recover them with 'Driver' – who is revealed to be not the mutilated man, but Cranton.
A document found in the bell chamber is a cipher, written on the same paper as the letter from France. Wimsey's knowledge of change ringing enables him to decipher it, leading him to the emeralds, still in their hiding place in the church. He shows the document to Mary Thoday, and she and William promptly abscond to London. Wimsey speculates they have gone to be remarried, Mary having recognised the handwriting as that of Deacon, her first husband, and realising that her marriage to William was void as Deacon had still been alive at the time.
Wimsey identifies the mutilated man as Deacon himself. After his escape, Deacon had killed Cobbleigh and swapped clothes and identities with him, leaving him in the quarry. After marrying bigamously in France, Deacon had waited several years to return for the emeralds that he had hidden before his arrest. He had asked Cranton for help, sending him the cipher as a token of good faith. Cranton had broken into the church, discovered Deacon's body in the bell chamber and fled, horrorstruck.
William Thoday and his brother Jim, a merchant seaman, are interviewed. William confesses that on 30 December he had encountered Deacon, whom he had long believed to be dead, prowling around the church. Desperate to protect his wife from the scandal of a bigamous marriage, he had tied Deacon up and locked him in the bell chamber, planning to bribe him to leave the country the next day. Unfortunately, his bout of influenza prevented him from returning, and Jim discovered Deacon's dead body still tied up two days later. Still loyal to his brother, Jim had waited until the night after Lady Thorpe's funeral, when he made the body unrecognisable, hid it in her grave, then returned to his ship. When the body was rediscovered at Easter, each of the brothers thought that the other had killed Deacon.
When Wimsey returns to Fenchurch the following Christmas, floods are threatening the countryside, and Wimsey climbs the tower as the bells are sounding the alarm. The appalling noise in the bell chamber convinces him that Deacon, tied there for hours during the all-night New Year peal, could not have survived: Deacon had been killed by the bells themselves. Wimsey explains, "We needn't look for a murderer now. Because the murderers of Geoffrey Deacon are hanging already, and a good deal higher than Haman". William Thoday is drowned in the flood trying to save another man. Wimsey speculates that "I think perhaps he guessed at last how Geoffrey Deacon died and felt himself responsible".
