She threw herself into work at Benson’s with renewed vigour. Colman’s of Norwich was a key client, and Sayers wrote The Recipe Book of the Mustard Club to promote Colman’s Mustard. Typically, she littered the text with quotations, and devised a frivolously elaborate history of the club, claiming it was founded by Aesculapius, god of medicine, and that Nebuchadnezzar was an early member. At first, the club was purely imaginary, featuring characters such as Lord Bacon of Cookham, and the club secretary Miss Di Gester, but the campaign was such a huge success that a real club was created. At its height, it boasted half a million members.
Sayers’ creative flair was ideally suited to marketing. She is credited with coining the phrase ‘it pays to advertise’, and collaborated on the most memorable advertisement of the time, part of a long campaign on behalf of Guinness stout. An artist called John Gilroy joined Benson’s in 1925, and he and Sayers became friends as well as colleagues. After a visit to the circus, Gilroy dreamed up the idea of using birds and animals to advertise Guinness. He sketched a pelican with a glass of Guinness on his beak, and Sayers suggested replacing that bird with a toucan. She wrote the lines:
If he can say as you can
Guinness is good for you,
How good to be a Toucan:
Just think what Toucan do.
To this day, there is a healthy market for Guinness toucan collectibles. Gilroy, a young man from Whitley Bay who had started out as a cartoonist, combined his advertising work with portrait painting, and Sayers was one of the first people to sit for him, sporting her silver wig. Gilroy was alive to her earthy physicality, and unexpected sex appeal, and rhapsodized about her: ‘terrific size – lovely fat fingers – lovely snub nose – lovely curly lips – a baby’s face in a way’.
Sayers was ready to spread her creative wings. She began to translate the Chanson de Roland into rhymed couplets, as well as a medieval poem, Tristan in Brittany. In addition, she dipped in and out of a projected book about Wilkie Collins. She never finished it, but her study of Collins’ methods influenced her own literary style. Her main focus remained on writing detective fiction. Spurred by the desire to support herself and her family, she became intensely productive. In 1928 alone she published three books, including a Wimsey novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. The novel was reviewed by Dashiell Hammett, shortly before the former Pinkerton’s gumshoe established himself as a writer of hard-boiled private eye novels. Hammett’s writing, tastes, politics, and life experiences were a world away from Sayers’, but he felt her novel only missed being ‘a pretty good detective story’ because of a lack of pace: ‘Its developments come just a little too late to knock the reader off his chair.’
She had written enough short stories to publish a collection, Lord Peter Views the Body, under the new imprint of Victor Gollancz. A left-wing firebrand, Gollancz had rejected his orthodox Jewish upbringing and become a highly successful businessman with an unrivalled flair for marketing. As managing director of Sayers’ publishers, he revolutionized the advertising of fiction, with two-column splashes in the broadsheets which made his books seem important and exciting.
When he left Ernest Benn to set up on his own, Gollancz built a list of talented detective novelists, promoting newcomers like Milward Kennedy and Gladys Mitchell. But Sayers was much more bankable, and he begged her to join him. She admired Gollancz’s intelligence and drive, and trusted his judgement – it was Gollancz who recommended her to a new literary agent, David Higham. Author and publisher had starkly contrasting political and religious views, but they enjoyed each other’s company, and their mutual respect and loyalty was lifelong.
Since her next novel was under contract to Benn, Gollancz started with the short stories, and came up with a simple but striking yellow and black dust jacket. Gollancz, who was as desperate as his authors for his titles to be noticed (oddly, this is not a trait which all writers associate with their publishers), honed this technique to perfection in the next few years. The bold, yellow jackets, with typography in varying sizes and typefaces, were as recognizable as advertising posters – and Gollancz duly hired Edward McKnight Kauffer, an American modernist whose posters for the London Underground were much admired, to produce eye-catching abstract artwork for works of detective fiction.
Gollancz claimed to have invented the term ‘omnibus volume’; long before the era of the fat airport thriller, he was convinced that readers liked bulky books, which yielded good profits. He had an idea for a huge anthology of mystery stories, and persuaded Sayers to edit it. With his encouragement, she researched the history of the detective story in the course of compiling a weighty gathering of genre fiction. She was probably influenced by Wright and Wrong – that is, by comparable projects undertaken in the United States by Willard Huntington Wright (better known as detective novelist S. S. Van Dine) and in Britain by E. M. Wrong. Her lengthy essay introducing the first series of Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror showed the breadth of her reading and her critical insight.
As Sayers’ reputation blossomed, the intense happiness of the early days of marriage faded. Pressure of work, and personal circumstances, took their toll. During the war, Mac had been gassed, two of his brothers had died and another was badly injured. His previous wife reckoned that this sequence of personal disasters transformed his personality, and not in a good way. Now Mac was afflicted by a series of health problems, and owed money to the taxman. When he had to give up his job and go freelance, his morale – and temper – suffered. Once again Sayers found herself let down by a man. Her reaction was to feast on comfort food and to drink more than was good for her.
Despairing of her ‘rapidly fattening frame’, she had her hair cut in an Eton crop, a severe, boyish style that had recently supplanted the ‘bob’. Her choice of clothes became even more outlandish, and on one occasion she turned up to a public function in a man’s rugby shirt. Her plain appearance and fondness for masculine dress led some people to assume she was a lesbian. But with detective novelists, as with detective novels, it is a mistake to judge a book by its cover.
After her father died in September 1928, Sayers and Mac bought a house in Witham, Essex. Today, her statue stands across the road from her home in Newland Street. Sayers’ mother died ten months after her father, and the double bereavement was a crushing blow. A contract with an American publisher enabled her to resign from Benson’s, but she took on responsibility for caring for an elderly aunt, as well as supporting John Anthony. Money remained tight. Mac Fleming’s health worsened, and as her increasing fame provoked his jealousy, he became depressive and difficult. He had promised to adopt John Anthony, but kept putting off any action. So the boy stayed with Ivy, and when Ivy suggested moving nearer to Witham, Sayers discouraged her. She had her hands full with Mac.
When Anthony Berkeley invited her to dine with fellow detective novelists, he offered her much more than simply the opportunity to socialize with people who played the same literary game. For Sayers, the Detection Club came to mean an opportunity to escape for a few hours, just as the stories the Club members wrote were enjoyed by people in search of escapism.
Sayers was becoming interested in real-life murders, absorbing herself in the fears and passions of victims, suspects and culprits alike. She and her colleagues in the Detection Club understood that these cases posed puzzles of their own – and itched to solve them. These puzzles differed from the contrived complexities of the typical detective story. They concerned guilt and innocence, the mysteries of human motivation, and the frighteningly unpredictable workings of justice.