From The Paris Review:
Dorothy Sayers’s Strong Poison opens with a description of a man’s last meal before death. The deceased, Philip Boyes, was a writer with “advanced” ideas, dining at the home of his wealthy great-nephew, Norman Urquhart, a lawyer. A judge tells a jury what he ate: the meal starts with a glass of 1847 oloroso “by way of cocktail,” followed by a cup of cold bouillon—“very strong, good soup, set to a clear jelly”—then turbot with sauce, poulet en casserole, and finally a sweet omelet stuffed with jam and prepared tableside. The point of the description is to show that Boyes couldn’t have been poisoned, since every dish was shared, with the exception of a bottle of Burgundy (Corton), which he drank alone. The judge’s oration is another strike against the accused, a bohemian mystery novelist named Harriet Vane, who saw Boyes on the night he died, and had both motive and opportunity to poison him. Looking on from the audience, the famous amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey writhes in misery; he believes Harriet Vane is innocent, and he has fallen suddenly and completely in love with her.
The moment is one of great significance for fans of Sayers’s work. The eleven Wimsey books, published between 1923 and 1937, hinge on the romance between Wimsey and Vane, which percolates through several novels following Strong Poison, and culminates in Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon. For me, though, it’s the menu that’s more intriguing: cold Jell-O soup, followed by sauce-smothered fish, soggy-skinned chicken, and eggs with jam? Even if you account for changing tastes, this meal is a pungent reminder that Dorothy Sayers was having a joke. Urquhart is smugly respectable, and the stuffy and unappetizing menu illustrates his stodgy Victorian-era tastes. Moreover, it reminds us that Wimsey began as a satire—a bumbling Bertie Wooster who detects things—dreamed up a time when Sayers desperately needed the money. The books were potboilers, and the upper-class milieus, four-course dinners, mannered menservants, literary quotations, and aged wines were played for winks and kicks. When Sayers’s financial situation stabilized, she moved on to work she considered more important: writing a series of religious plays, penning original theology, and translating Dante.
And yet, the books have endured, despite their many flaws, and I’ve read and reread the entire run every few years since first discovering them in high school, including the wonderful one about the church bells and the boring one about the artists’ colony in Scotland. The biographer James Brabazon suggests that their true appeal was the pleasure of spending time in Sayers’s company. She was the daughter of a rector, born in Oxford, and a member of its first female graduating class. Her erudition informs her plots, and Peter’s silly, quotation-laden verbal style has delighted readers for generations. When Harriet, declining Peter’s proposal of marriage, tells him that “if anybody ever marries you, it will be for the pleasure of hearing you talk piffle,” the reader understands. Sayers’s books are also credited with being the first feminist detective stories, and she also worked in advertising as a woman in the twenties, wore gender-bending three-piece suits, and expressed a frank sexuality. Brabazon writes that her work has been so successful because it “communicat[es] her energy, her amusement, her intelligence, her love of writing, her enthusiasm, her sense of fun.” I refined that theory when I read—at long last—the work Sayers did take seriously: her theology and her translation of Dante. How I’d never done this before is the true mystery.
Link to the rest at The Paris Review
The point of the bland meal was that no poison was tasted. (Usually poisoned meals were full of curries and kedgerees, and other strong tastes.)
That makes perfect sense. Every poisoner must start with how to choose a poison that can’t be detected by the consumer of said poison. Followed, of course, by how to evade detection by the coroner once the consumer is dead.