The actual murder mystery in Dorothy L Sayers’ 1933 novel Murder Must Advertise is frankly absurd. When I assigned it to my students in Twentieth Century British History, I gave away the name of the killer before we started rather than waste precious class time in confusion. What makes it a great teaching tool—and a great read—is that it’s a snapshot of the development of interwar mass culture and the challenge to class distinctions that it heralded.
Sayers was in the advertising business when she began her career as a novelist; she knew whereof she wrote. Nearly half the novel takes place within the walls of a fictional advertising agency, Pym’s Publicity, where a copywriter, Victor Dean, has recently died under mysterious circumstances. The level of detail is remarkable, the descriptions of the people who work there are layered and perceptive, Geertz-style “thick description” via contemporaneous fiction.1 Sayers even includes a personal stand-in, Miss Meteyard, the only female copywriter, who we find out knew the identity of the killer all along but preferred to watch events play out rather than intervene.
While Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot had different economic circumstances—Marple was an elderly spinster who counted every penny, Poirot was wealthy and able to indulge in luxuries whenever he chose—they were both firmly in the middle class, if on opposite ends of it. Sherlock Holmes refused a knighthood in The Adventure of the Three Garridebs. In contrast, Sayers’ detective-hero Lord Peter Wimsey is a born and bred aristocrat, Oxford-educated and effortlessly wealthy. However, for Murder Must Advertise, he goes undercover as a working stiff at Pym’s Publicity, writing copy for newspaper ads.2
Advertising is the true villain in Murder Must Advertise, tempting the working classes to seek “a luxury beyond their reach.” Victor Dean, an advertising copywriter at Pym’s whose murder before the events of the book begin is the plot’s inciting incident, was “[s]inning above his station” by trying to romance an aristocratic lady. His desire to afford the life of the aristocracy led him to a blackmail attempt on a co-worker which provoked his murder. Similarly, the first clues to the murderer’s identity come from their pretensions to a loftier station in life (spoilers in the footnote for those who can’t resist!).3
But Wimsey and his brother-in-law, Chief Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard, are immune to the siren song of advertising. The mostly-innocent staff of the advertising agency are similarly unaffected, especially the clever wits in the copywriting department, where the book spends most of its time. Indeed, the copywriters’ favorite pastime is to mock and derogate the products their clients sell—allowing them to demonstrate both their intelligence and their moral rectitude.
Behind Victor Dean’s murder was a dastardly gang of drug-smugglers whose criminal enterprise depends (ridiculously – the details of their conspiracy are comically foolish) upon newspaper advertisements for a patent medicine. These antagonists use consumption to mask, rather than mark, their social position. It’s an intriguing question whether Sayers was consciously responding to Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, but she is less concerned with consumption-as-class-marking than consumption-as-class-concealing.
However, in Sayers’ telling, advertising is also capable of reinforcing class norms when done right. In the midst of all his detectiving, Lord Peter Wimsey also becomes an advertising genius while creating a campaign for Whifflets Cigarettes. It’s a forerunner of airline points, letting consumers collect coupons from every pack they purchase. These coupons, however, don’t allow them to purchase luxuries, but rather modest, class-appropriate treats like a seaside holiday at a decent hotel or a nice serving set for the dining room. Smoke your way to a peaceful working-class life.
The Great War is barely mentioned in Murder Must Advertise, and the rise of fascism even less, despite the book appearing in 1933. Even the Great Depression is absent; if anything, the economy of Murder Must Advertise is going strong.4 Despite that, the novel is permeated by a sense of sadness and loss. All of Sayers’ Wimsey novels have that. In other books in the series, we learn that Lord Peter Wimsey—as garrulous, debonair, and delightful a person we’ll ever meet—experienced some kind of breakdown in combat during the Great War. He is haunted by visions of the murderers he’s sent to the gallows.
As such, Sayers’ trepidation about advertising and social class is best read as an acknowledgement that the world has been knocked off its balance. Sayers knows advertising isn’t going away but she isn’t sanguine about where it’s headed. The final lines of the novel are a long string of advertising slogans, where commercialism is mixed with . . . other messages:
Tell England. Tell the world. Eat more Oats. Take Care of your Complexion. No More War. Shine your Shoes with Shino. Ask your Grocer. Children Love Laxamalt. Prepare to meet thy God. Bung’s Beer is Better. Try Dogsbody’s Sausages. Whoosh the Dust Away. Give them Crunchlets. Snagsbury’s Soups are Best for the Troops. Morning Star, best Paper by Far. Vote for Punkin and Protect your Profits…
Advertise, or go under.
What Murder Must Advertise offers, therefore, is a way to understand the unease of the interwar world, not through the lens of politics or war, but through a cozy mystery about commercial culture. It highlights the ever-growing tensions between the comfortable norms of yesteryear and the excitement, opportunity, and danger in a world moving ever-faster, poised at any moment to slip out of control. It may, therefore, feel somewhat relevant to the modern reader.
- Clifford Geerz (1926-2006), a pioneer of cultural anthropology, popularized a technique of cultural observation called “thick description” in his 1973 book, The Interpretation of Culture, referring to a mode observation of other cultures that seeks to understand a subject’s own understandings of their actions and beliefs, requiring more than just a surface description of behavior, but contextualizing that behavior within a culture.
- For a smart discussion of Wimsey’s multiple avatars in Murder Must Advertise, see Laura E. Nym Mayhall, “Aristocracy Must Advertise: Repurposing the Nobility in Interwar British Fiction,“ Journal of British Studies, vol. 60 (October 2021).
- It’s Mr. Tallboy, in case you’re wondering. Notably, he is not one of the copywriters at Pym’s Publicity; he’s more of a client account manager.
- The UK’s experience of the Great Depression was different than the United States’, largely because the British economy had a stagnant instead of roaring 1920s. Unemployment was still quite high in 1933, there were strikes and public demonstrations, and the UK was as impacted by the crisis in the financial markets as much as anyone else. British government intervention in the economy was less dramatic than the New Deal, but, again, some of that was because the British were ahead of the US in social provision (for example, they’d introduced old age pensions before the First World War).
