Almost Gothic: The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers
The Nine Tailors has been described as the best of Dorothy Sayers’s novels. It certainly has many of the features of classic literary fiction, including a small rural community as a setting; a cast of characters from every level of society; and elaborate symbolism focused on a set of church bells, each with a meaningful name. Indeed the entire novel seems to have a symbolic level of meaning over and above the literal plot of the mystery. Of course mystery novels nearly all begin in medias res, with the discovery of a death, after which the detective reconstructs the previous events; but this novel’s backstory reaches back roughly two decades, to the Great War, and includes much more than the death.
The title The Nine Tailors alludes to the old saying “Nine tailors make a man.” This is sometimes taken as a slur on tailors as cowards or weaklings, saying that one real man is worth nine of them; but Sayers has in mind a custom of ringing nine strokes of a church bell for a man’s death, six for a woman’s, or three for a child’s. There are several deaths in the course of the novel.
