The bells strike
The Bells Strike (English original title: The Nine Tailors ) is a 1934 novel by Dorothy L. Sayers . The novel is set in the 1930s in the vast moorland of East Anglia , mainly in the fictional village of Fenchurch St. Paul . The investigation of a mysterious death confronts amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey with a long ago burglary in the local manor house and is closely interwoven with the magnificent church of the village and the English tradition of changing bells.
title
The original title "The Nine Tailors" would literally be translated as "Die Neun Schneider", and an older German translation actually appeared under this title. The “tailors” are the strikes of a church bell called Tailor Paul , which, as a death knell, announce the death of a man.
action
Because of a car accident, Lord Peter Wimsey has to spend New Year's Eve in the small village of Fenchurch St. Paul and is hospitable there by the pastor couple. The pastor, enthusiastic about the changing bells, has planned a big nine-hour bell for New Year's Eve, which threatens to fail when the bellboy Will Thoday suddenly reports sick with severe flu. Lord Peter, also knowledgeable about the bell, spontaneously takes his place and the ringing takes place.
A few months later the pastor wrote to Lord Peter Wimsey: A man's corpse, brutally defaced, was found in a strange grave. The search for their identity leads Wimsey to a burglary years ago , during which a precious emerald necklace was stolen from a relative's manor house and was never found again. Only after extensive investigations does it emerge that the mysterious dead person is Jeff Deacon, the main perpetrator who was convicted at the time, who later escaped from prison and who was erroneously declared dead shortly afterwards. Shortly after the New Year, the corpse was moved from the bell chamber, where there are traces, to a fresh grave. Everything initially indicates that Deacon took the loot from its hiding place and was then robbed and murdered.
One of Deacon's accomplices, the jewel thief Nobby Cranton from London, who appeared in the village on New Year's morning, left behind an encrypted description of the hiding place prepared by Deacon, which made no sense to him. By chance, Lord Peter discovers that Deacon, who is also a bell ringer, has hidden the description in a text that is meaningless in itself, following the rules of alternating bell rings. When he tries to check his solution, he is surprised to find the loot still hiding in the church. Deacon did not acquire it before his death and was therefore not robbed.
As it turns out, on December 30, before he could get the loot from its hiding place, Deacon met Will Thoday, who had meanwhile married the wife of Deacon, who was believed to be dead. The fact that Deacon was still alive made Thoday's marriage null and void. Thoday planned to secretly take Deacon out of the country, until then detained him in the bell chamber and cared for him there until his flu prevented him. On January 2nd, Will took his brother Jim into his confidence, but he found only Deacon's body in the bell chamber, made it unrecognizable and hid it in the fresh grave. Jim and Will assert that they did not kill him, so Deacon's death remains a mystery, especially since he was neither starved nor died of thirst.
At the end of the story, the village and its surroundings were flooded, from which the population found shelter in the elevated church. Lord Peter Wimsey climbs up the tower while the alarm is ringing and, as he climbs through the bell chamber, experiences how the noise of the bells at close range not only triggers the greatest stress and incapacity, but also causes physical injuries. This makes it clear to him that Deacon was not murdered by anyone, but died from the noise of the nine-hour New Year's chimes, to which he was defenselessly exposed without anyone knowing about it - except Will Thoday, who, however, could no longer prevent it and now, plagued by remorse , jumps into the tide and dies if a lock in the overloaded canal system breaks.
Secondary topics
Alternating bells
The novel is linked not only in terms of content but also structurally to the English art of bell ringing. The alternating ringing not only plays a central role in the plot itself, but also the sequence of the narrative and the behavior of the characters follow the bells, which alternately move to the front and rear seats during a ringing. That it is deliberately designed in this way becomes clear in the chapter headings, which take up the technical language of alternating chimes and put characters in the place of bells. The reader is introduced to this art in the introduction and in individual sections of the novel.
Bells
The novel repeatedly addresses the peculiar respect and even superstition that many people feel towards large bells. The bell-keeper of the village does not allow visitors to come near a special bell of the chiming, the maintenance of which has already had a fatal accident in the past, and repeatedly expresses his conviction that bells do not tolerate any harm - which ultimately proves to be true, when the main villain Deacon was killed by the Bells when he was inevitably near her for several days.
Land drainage
The moor landscape in which the novel is set is characterized by a complex system of drainage canals. Even the initial car accident happened on the banks of the artificial thirty-foot canal . Lord Peter chats several times with a lock keeper who complains about the dilapidated condition of his lock gates , for the renovation of which no money is available, while in the district town a new canal is being built for a lot of money, which cuts a loop of the natural river and is supposed to improve the drainage significantly . The flooding at the end results from the fact that the weakened gates are no longer able to cope with the changed hydrological conditions and break.
Characters
- Lord Peter Wimsey , amateur detective
- Mervyn Bunter, Wimsey's servant
- Theodore Venables, Vicar of Fenchurch St Paul
- Agnes Venables, Theodore's wife
- Hilary Thorpe, 15-year-old daughter of the local landowners, orphaned at prime time
- Superintendent Blundell of the Lincolnshire Criminal Investigation Department
- Jeff Deacon, once the Thorpes' butler , was convicted of burglary 20 years earlier
- Nobby Cranton, London jewel thief and Jeff Deacon's accomplice
- Will Thoday, farmer and purifier
- Mary Thoday, Wills (and before that Jeff Deacon) wife
- Jim Thoday, Will's brother, a sailor
- Harry Gotobed, gravedigger and purifier
- Joe Hinkins, the Venables' gardener and purifier
- Ezra Wilderspin, blacksmith and purifier
- Alf Donnington, landlord of the “Red Cow” inn, also Lauter
- Hezekiah Lavender, chief lumber
- Jack Godfrey, sexton, bell warden and bell ringer
- Wally Pratt, youthful refiner
- Potty Peake, village idiot
- Suzanne Legros, French farmer, married in France to the deserted Jeff Deacon
Award
In 1996 the novel was awarded a "Rusty Dagger" by the British Crime Writers' Association, which awards the prestigious Dagger Awards . This one-time award was given for the best detective novel of the 1930s.
expenditure
- The nine tailors. Translated by Helene Homeyer. Wunderlich, Tübingen 1958.
- The bells strike. Translated by Otto Bayer. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1980, ISBN 9783499145476 .
radio play
- Bells on New Years Eve. Production: Bayerischer Rundfunk 1966 (4 episodes, 195 min), director: Otto Kurth
- The work was published in 2014 in the Pidax radio play classics series .
Remarks
- ↑ http://www.twbooks.co.uk/crimescene/awards/rustywinner.html
- ↑ See e.g. B. in the ARD audio game database