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100 Masters of Mystery and Detective Fiction Dorothy L. Sayers Born: Oxford, England; June 13, 1893 Died: Witham, Essex, England; December 17, 1957 Type of Plot: Master sleuth Principal Series: Lord Peter Wimsey, 1923-1937. Principal Series Characters Lord Peter Wimsey, a wealthy aristocrat, Oxford graduate, book collector, wine connoisseur, and lover of fast cars, cricket, and crime. Though he gives the appearance, particularly in the early novels, of being a foppish playboy, his flippancy masks intelligence, conscience, and sensitivity. Bunter, an imperturbable, supremely competent manservant. He served under Wimsey in World War I, then became his valet, bringing his master through a war-induced breakdown. His skills range from photographing corpses and cooking superb meals to extracting crucial evidence from cooks and housemaids over tea in the servants’ quarters. Chief-Inspector Charles Parker, a Scotland Yard detective, is Lord Peter’s friend and later his brother-in-law. He provides a calm, rational balance to Wimsey’s flamboyant personality. Harriet Vane, the detective novelist with whom Lord Peter falls in love as he saves her from the gallows in Strong Poison (1930). Independent, capable, and proud, she refuses to marry him until she is convinced that their marriage can be an equal partnership. Contribution Dorothy L. Sayers never considered her detective novels and short stories to be truly serious literature, and once Lord Peter Wimsey had provided a substantial income for her, she turned her attention to religious drama, theology, and a translation of Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy). Yet she wrote these popular works with the same thoroughness, commitment to quality, and attention to detail that infuse her more scholarly writings. Her mystery novels set a high standard for writers who followed her—and there have been many. Her plots are carefully constructed, and she was willing to spend months, even years, in researching background details. What gives her works their lasting appeal, however, is not the nature of the crimes or the cleverness of their solutions. Readers return to the novels for the pleasure of savoring Sayers’s wit, her literary allusions, the rich settings, the deftly developed characters, and, above all, her multitalented aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey. Blending the conventions of detective fiction with social satire and unobtrusively interweaving serious themes, she fulfilled her goal of making the detective story “once more a novel of manners instead of a pure crossword puzzle.” Biography Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born in Oxford, England, on June 13, 1893, the only child of the Reverend Henry Sayers, headmaster of the Christ Church Choir School, and his talented wife, Helen Leigh Sayers. When Dorothy was four, the family moved to the fen country immortalized in The Nine Tailors (1934), and there she was educated by her parents and governesses. By the time she entered the Godolphin School in Salisbury in 1909, she was fluent in French and German and an avid reader and writer. Her life as a pampered only child did not, however, prepare her well to fit in with her contemporaries, and she found real friends only when she entered Somerville College, Oxford, in 1912. There she participated enthusiastically in musical, dramatic, and social activities and won first-class honors in French. She was among the first group of women granted degrees in 1920. After leaving Oxford in 1915, she held a variety of jobs, finally settling at Benson’s Advertising Agency in London as a copywriter. Shortly after she joined Benson’s, she began work on her first detective novel, Whose Body? (1923). Following its publication, she took a leave of absence from her work, ostensibly to work on a second book but in reality to give birth to a son out of wedlock. One of her biographers, James Brabazon, has identified her child’s father as a working-class man to whom she may have turned in reaction to a painful affair with the writer John Cournos. She placed her son in the care of a cousin, returned to work, and two years later married Captain Oswald Arthur “Mac” Fleming, another man who shared almost none of her intellectual interests. Fleming, a divorced journalist, suffered throughout most of their married life from physical and psychological damage resulting from his service in World War I. She and Fleming informally adopted her son in 1934, but the boy continued to live with her cousin, and she never told him that he was her own child. In this decade of personal stress, Sayers’s career as a detective novelist was taking shape. By 1937 she had published more than a dozen books and was recognized as one of England’s best mystery writers. In the last twenty years of her life, she devoted her energies to becoming an articulate spokeswoman for the Church of England and a respected Dante scholar. She did not quite abandon her earlier pursuits, maintaining a strong interest in the Detection Club, which she had helped found in 1930. She died in 1957. Analysis In her introduction to The Omnibus of Crime (1928-1934), Dorothy L. Sayers writes that the detective story “does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest level of literary achievement. . . . It rarely touches the heights and depths of human passion.” It is, she adds, "part of the literature of escape, and not of expression. We read tales of domestic unhappiness because that is the kind of thing which happens to us; but when these things gall too close to the sore, we fly to mystery and adventure because they do not, as a rule, happen to us." Clearly, she cherished no ambition of finding literary immortality in the adventures of Lord Peter Wimsey. Nevertheless, she brought to the craft of writing detective fiction a scholar’s mind and a conviction that any work undertaken is worth doing well, qualities that have won acclaim for her as one of the best mystery writers of the twentieth century. Her biographers have suggested that the impetus for her writing of mystery stories was economic. Still financially dependent on her parents in her late twenties, she began work on Whose Body? in 1921 as one last effort to support herself as a writer. In a letter to her parents, she promised that if this effort were unsuccessful, she would give up her ambitions and take a teaching position—not a career she coveted. Her choice of this genre was a sensible one for her purposes. Mysteries were enormously popular in England and America in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and by 1937, when Lord Peter Wimsey made his last major appearance, her twelve detective novels and numerous short stories had guaranteed her a substantial income for the rest of her life. Having chosen her form, Sayers entered upon her task with diligence, studying the work of the best of her predecessors, particularly Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Wilkie Collins. She applied her academic training to the genre, its history, its structures, and its compacts with its readers. Her efforts were so successful that only a few years after the publication of her first novel she was asked to edit a major anthology of detective stories and to write an introduction that is both a short history of the genre and an analysis of its major characteristics. Sayers’s work is not, on the surface, especially innovative. Particularly in her early work, she used the popular conventions of the form—mysterious methods of murder, amoral villains, and the clever amateur detective in the tradition of C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and E. C. Bentley’s Philip Trent. From the beginning, however, she lifted the quality of the mystery novel. First, as critic and detective novelist Carolyn Heilbrun notes, “Miss Sayers wrote superbly well.” A reader can open her books to almost any page and find lines that reflect her pleasure in a well-turned phrase. She enjoyed experimenting with different types of styles, even imitating Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) by using letters to tell the story in The Documents in the Case (1930; with Robert Eustace). Sayers was a skillful creator of plots, adhering firmly to the “fair play” she describes in her introduction to The Omnibus of Crime: “The reader must be given every clue—but he must not be told, surely, all the detective’s deductions, lest he should see the solution too far ahead.” Her adherence to this principle is especially clear in her short stories, both those featuring Wimsey and those involving her second amateur detective hero, Montague Egg. Egg, a traveling salesman of wine and spirits, is a master interpreter of the hidden clue and another delightful character, though the stories about him tend to be more formulaic than the Wimsey tales. Sayer’s full-length novels are unusual in the variety of crimes and solutions they depict. She never fell into a single pattern of plot development, and in fact she argued that a successful mystery writer cannot do that, for each work arises out of a different idea, and each idea demands its own plot: “To get the central idea is one thing: to surround it with a suitable framework of interlocking parts is quite another. . . . idea and plot are two quite different things.” The challenge is to flesh out the idea in a suitable sequence of events and to develop characters in ways that make these events plausible. The character most crucial to the effectiveness of the mystery novel is, naturally, that of the detective. Sayers developed Lord Peter Wimsey gradually over the fifteen years in which she wrote about him. In his first appearances he is a rather stereotypical figure, comprising elements of Trent, Holmes, and P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, the quintessential “silly-ass-about-town.” In his first case, he greets the discovery of a body in a bathtub, clad only in a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses, with gleeful enthusiasm. Sayers herself might later have considered him too gleeful; as she wrote in her introduction to The Omnibus of Crime, “The sprightly amateur must not be sprightly all the time, lest at some point we should be reminded that this is, after all, a question of somebody’s being foully murdered, and that flippancy is indecent.” At the beginning of his career, Wimsey is distinguished chiefly by superficial attributes—wealth; an aristocratic upbringing; interest in rare books, wine, and music; skill in languages; arcane knowledge in a variety of fields; and the services of the unflappable Bunter. While the early Wimsey is, in Margaret Hannay’s words, something of a “cardboard detective,” nevertheless there are in him elements that allowed Sayers to “humanize him” in her later works. He is shown in Whose Body? and Unnatural Death (1927) to have moments of self-doubt as he contemplates his responsibility for actions that follow upon his intervention into the crimes. His moral sensitivity is also revealed in his sympathetic response to the irritating but understandable war victim George Fentiman in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), who so bitterly resents his dependence on his wife. The later Lord Peter retains the ability to “talk piffle” as a mask to cover his intelligence, but his detecting is now seen not as an amateur’s game but as work in service of truth. His stature is also increased by his work for the Foreign Office, which sends him out to exercise his conversational skills as a diplomat. As Sayers acknowledges in her essay “Gaudy Night,” in which she discusses the composition of the novel of the same name, Peter’s growth came largely in response to the creation of Harriet Vane in Strong Poison. Sayers invented Harriet, she confessed, with the idea of marrying him off before he consumed her whole existence. When she came to the end of the novel, however, her plan would not work. “When I looked at the situation I saw that it was in every respect false and degrading; and the puppets had somehow got just so much flesh and blood in them that I could not force them to accept it without shocking myself.” The only solution, she decided, was to make Peter “a complete human being, with a past and a future, with a consistent family and social history, with a complicated psychology and even the rudiments of a religious outlook.” In the novels written after 1930, Wimsey becomes wiser, more conscious of the complexities of human feelings, less certain of the boundaries of good and evil. As he becomes a more complex figure, the novels in which he appears begin to cross the border between the whodunit and the novel of manners. Another major factor in Sayers’s success as a mystery writer was her ability to create authentic, richly detailed settings for her work. “Readers,” she says in “Gaudy Night,” seem to like books which tell them how other people live—any people, advertisers, bell-ringers, women dons, butchers, bakers or candlestick-makers—so long as the detail is full and accurate and the object of the work is not overt propaganda. She alludes here to the three novels many readers consider her best—Murder Must Advertise (1933), The Nine Tailors, and Gaudy Night (1935). In each she drew on places and people she knew well to create worlds that her readers would find appealing. From her nine years as copywriter with Benson’s, Sayers created Pym’s Publicity in Murder Must Advertise. There is an aura of verisimilitude in every detail, from the office politics to the absurd advertisements for “Nutrax for Nerves” to the Pym’s-Brotherhood annual cricket match. Sayers even borrowed Benson’s spiral iron staircase as the scene of Victor Dean’s murder, and she drew on her own successful “Mustard Club” campaign for Wimsey’s brilliant cigarette-advertising scheme, “Whiffle your way around Britain.” Sayers set The Nine Tailors in a village in the fen country much like the parish in which her father served for most of her childhood and adolescence. The plot depends heavily on the practice of bell-ringing, which Sayers studied for two years before she completed her novel. Her account of the mechanics of draining the fen country and the attendant dangers of flooding shows equally careful research. Many of the greatest delights of the book, however, lie in the evocation of village life, epitomized in the final scene, in which the inhabitants of Fenchurch St. Paul have taken refuge from the floodwaters in the huge church: A curious kind of desert-island life was carried on in and about the church, which, in course of time, assumed a rhythm of its own. Each morning was ushered in by a short and cheerful flourish of bells, which rang the milkers out to the cowsheds in the graveyard. Hot water for washing was brought in wheeled waterbutts from the Rectory copper. Bedding was shaken and rolled under the pews for the day. . . . Daily school was carried on in the south aisle; games and drill were organized in the Rectory garden by Lord Peter Wimsey; farmers attended to their cattle; owners of poultry brought the eggs to a communal basket; Mrs. Venables presided over sewing-parties in the Rectory. The mystery plot is here grounded in a world of rich and poor, old and young, that seems to go on beyond the confines of the novel. For some readers the most interesting community of all those that Sayers depicted is Shrewsbury College, the setting for Gaudy Night—one of the first works of a still-popular type of detective fiction, the university mystery. Shrewsbury is closely modeled on Somerville, where the author spent three of the most personally rewarding years of her life. Although her picture of life in the Senior Common Room did not win universal approval from her Somerville acquaintances, she captured brilliantly the camaraderie and rivalries of the educational institution, the dedication of committed teachers to their students and their scholarly disciplines, and the undergraduates’ struggle to deal with academic and social pressures. Sayers’s settings come to life chiefly through their inhabitants, many of whom have little do with the solution to the mystery but much to do with the lasting appeal of the works. Every reader has favorite characters: old Hezekiah Lavender, who tolls the passing of human life on the venerable bell Tailor Paul; Tom Puffett, the loquacious chimney sweep in Busman’s Honeymoon (1937); Ginger Joe, the young fan of fictional detective Sexton Blake who provides Wimsey with an important clue in Murder Must Advertise; Miss Lydgate, the kindly scholar in Gaudy Night. These characters are often seen most vividly through their own words. Lord Peter’s delightful mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, is instantly recognizable for her stream-of-consciousness conversation, dotted with malapropisms that cover underlying good sense. Wimsey’s indefatigable spinster investigator, Miss Climpson, is best known through her self-revelatory letters, which are as full of italics as Queen Victoria’s diaries: My train got in quite late on Monday night, after a most dreary journey, with a lugubrious wait at Preston, though thanks to your kindness in insisting that I should travel First-class, I was not really at all tired! Nobody can realise what a great difference these extra comforts make, especially when one is getting on in years, and after the uncomfortable travelling which I had to endure in my days of poverty, I feel that I am living in almost sinful luxury! Of Wimsey himself, Carolyn Heilbrun wrote, “Lord Peter’s audience, if they engage in any fantasy at all about that sprig of the peerage, dream of having him to tea. They don’t want to be Lord Peter, only to know him, for the sake of hearing him talk.” It might even be said that good conversation finally brings Peter and Harriet Vane together, for it is talk that establishes their mutual respect, allowing them to reveal their shared commitment to intellectual honesty and their mutual conviction that husband and wife should be equal partners. Taken as a whole, the conversations of Sayers’s characters dazzle readers with the skill and erudition of their author, who reproduces the voices from many levels of English society while keeping up a steady stream of allusion to works as diverse as Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and the adventures of fictional character Sexton Blake. While Sayers’s brilliant handling of plot, character, setting, and dialogue would probably have made her novels classics in the genre without additional elements, these works are also enriched by serious themes that preoccupied her throughout her career: the place of women in society, the importance of work, and the nature of guilt and innocence. The works show a recurrent concern with the problems of the professional woman searching for dignity and independence in a man’s world. Sayers embodies these concerns in such characters as Ann Dorland in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Marjorie Phelps, Sylvia Marriott, and Eiluned Price in Strong Poison, Miss Meteyard in Murder Must Advertise, and especially Harriet Vane, the character who most resembles her author. Wimsey is attractive to all these women not so much for his undeniable sex appeal as for his taking them seriously as human beings. If Sayers can be said to have fallen in love with her detective, as many have suggested, it is surely this quality that she found most appealing. She argues passionately in her lecture Are Women Human? (1971) that women should be treated as individuals, not as members of an inferior species: “What,” men have asked distractedly from the beginning of time, “what on earth do women want?” I do not know that women, as women, want anything in particular, but as human beings they want, my good men, exactly what you want yourselves: interesting occupation, reasonable freedom for their pleasures, and a sufficient emotional outlet. What form the occupation, the pleasures and the emotion may take, depends entirely upon the individual. As this quotation suggests, Sayers’s concern with the place of woman in society is closely related to her belief that each person needs to find his or her own proper work and do it well. This idea, later to be the major theme of her religious drama The Zeal of Thy House (1937) and her theological volume The Mind of the Maker (1941), is central to the action of Gaudy Night and to the development of Peter and Harriet’s relationship. The plot of his novel arises out of a young scholar’s suppression of evidence that would invalidate the argument of his master’s thesis, an action whose discovery led to his professional disgrace and eventually to his suicide. His wife sets out to avenge his death on the woman scholar who discovered his fraud. While Sayers does not deny the moral ambiguities in the situation, she makes it clear that fraudulent scholarship is no minor matter. One must do one’s work with integrity, regardless of personal considerations. Acting on this conviction, Lord Peter urges Harriet to “abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change,” even if it means confronting painful episodes from her past. When she responds, “It would hurt like hell,” he replies, “What would that matter, if it made a good book?” She interprets his respect for her work as respect for her integrity as a human being and moves a step closer to accepting his proposal of marriage. The issue of guilt and innocence—more fundamentally, of good and evil—is handled more obliquely. As R. D. Stock and Barbara Stock note in their essay “The Agents of Evil and Justice in the Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers,” the nature of the criminals changes during the course of the author’s career. In most of the early novels the criminal is a cold, heartless villain, quite willing to sacrifice others for his or her own goals. In the later works, however, the author shows her readers a world in which guilt and innocence are less clear-cut. The victims, such as Campbell in The Five Red Herrings (1931) and Deacon in The Nine Tailors, are thoroughly unsympathetic figures. Their killers are seen not as monsters but as human beings caught in circumstances they are not strong enough to surmount. In The Nine Tailors the murderers are the bells, inanimate objects controlled by individuals who share in the guilt of all humanity. This novel reflects Sayers’s conviction, stated in The Mind of the Maker, that “human situations are subject to the law of human nature, whose evil is at all times rooted in its good, and whose good can only redeem, but not abolish, its evil.” By moving away from “the jig-saw kind of story” to deal with issues of moral and intellectual complexity, Sayers was enlarging the scope of her genre but also testing its limits. One of the great appeals of detective stories, she once wrote, is that they provide readers who live in a world full of insoluble problems with problems that unfailingly have solutions. Her last works still provide answers to the questions around which her plots revolve: Who killed the man whose body was found in Lady Thorpe’s grave? Who was disrupting Shrewsbury College? Who murdered Mr. Noakes? These solutions do not, however, answer all the questions raised: What are one’s obligations to other human beings, even if they are wrongdoers? When does one become a contributor to the development of another’s guilt? What are the moral consequences of solving crimes? It is not surprising that she felt the need to move on to literary forms that would allow her to deal more directly with these issues, though there are many readers who wish she had continued to let Lord Peter and Harriet explore them. By the time Dorothy Sayers ended Wimsey’s career with several short stories written in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, she had left an indelible mark on the twentieth century detective story. Her world of aristocrats and manservants, country vicars, and villages in which everyone had a place and stayed in it, was vanishing even as she wrote about it; Wimsey tells Harriet at one point, “Our kind of show is dead and done for.” Yet her works continue to appeal to large numbers of readers. Why? Some readers simply desire to escape the problems of the present—but the secret of Sayers’s popularity surely goes beyond that. Her reputation rests partly on her superb handling of language, her attention to details of plot and setting, her humor, and her memorable characters. Yet it is ultimately those elements that push at the boundaries of the detective stories that have kept her works alive when those of many of her popular contemporaries have vanished. She left her successors a challenge to view the mystery novel not simply as entertainment (though it must always be that) but also as a vehicle for both literary excellence and reflection on serious, far-reaching questions. Principal Mystery and Detective Fiction Series: Lord Peter Wimsey: Whose Body?, 1923; Clouds of Witness, 1926; Unnatural Death, 1927 (also as The Dawson Pedigree); The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 1928; Lord Peter Views the Body, 1928; Strong Poison, 1930; The Five Red Herrings, 1931 (also as Suspicious Characters); Have His Carcase, 1932; Murder Must Advertise, 1933; Hangman’s Holiday, 1933; The Nine Tailors, 1934; Gaudy Night, 1935; Busman’s Honeymoon, 1937; In the Teeth of the Evidence and Other Stories, 1939; Striding Folly, 1972. Other novels: The Documents in the Case, 1930 (with Robert Eustace); The Floating Admiral, 1931 (with others); Ask a Policeman, 1933 (with others); Six Against the Yard, 1936 (with others; also as Six Against Scotland Yard); Double Death: A Murder Story, 1939 (with others); The Scoop, and Behind the Scenes, 1983 (with others); Crime on the Coast, and No Flowers by Request, 1984 (with others). Other Major Works Plays: Busman’s Holiday, 1936 (with Muriel St. Clare Byrne); The Zeal of Thy House, 1937; He That Should Come, 1939; The Devil to Pay, Being the Famous Play of John Faustus, 1939; Love All, 1940; The Man Born to Be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, 1941-1942; The Just Vengeance, 1946; The Emperor Constantine, 1951 (revised as Christ’s Emperor, 1952). Poetry: Op. 1, 1916; Catholic Tales and Christian Songs, 1918; Lord, I Thank Thee—, 1943; The Story of Adam and Christ, 1955. Nonfiction: Papers Relating to the Family of Wimsey, 1936; An Account of Lord Mortimer Wimsey, the Hermit of the Wash, 1937; The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, 1938; Strong Meat, 1939; Begin Here: A War-Time Essay, 1940; Creed or Chaos?, 1940; The Mysterious English, 1941; The Mind of the Maker, 1941; Why Work?, 1942; The Other Six Deadly Sins, 1943; Unpopular Opinions, 1946; Making Sense of the Universe, 1946; Creed or Chaos? and Other Essays in Popular Theology, 1947; The Lost Tools of Learning, 1948; The Days of Christ’s Coming, 1953, revised 1960; Introductory Papers on Dante, 1954; The Story of Easter, 1955; The Story of Noah’s Ark, 1955; Further Papers on Dante, 1957; The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement, and Other Posthumous Essays on Literature, Religion, and Language, 1963; Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World, 1969; Are Women Human?, 1971; A Matter of Eternity, 1973; Wilkie Collins: A Critical and Biographical Study, 1977 (edited by E. R. Gregory); The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 1937-1943, 1998. Children’s Literature: Even the Parrot: Exemplary Conversations for Enlightened Children, 1944. Translations: Tristan in Brittany, 1929 (by Thomas the Troubadour); The Heart of Stone, Being the Four Canzoni of the “Pietra” Group, 1946 (by Dante); The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, 1949-1962 (cantica III with Barbara Reynolds); The Song of Roland, 1957. Edited Texts: Oxford Poetry 1917, 1918 (with Wilfred R. Childe and Thomas W. Earp); Oxford Poetry 1918, 1918 (with Earp and E. F. A. Geach); Oxford Poetry 1919, 1919 (with Earp and Siegfried Sassoon); Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror, 1928-1934 (also as The Omnibus of Crime); Tales of Detection, 1936. Bibliography Brabazon, James. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography. London: Gollancz, 1981. Brown, Janice. The Seven Deadly Sins in the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1998. Brunsdale, Mitzi. Dorothy L. Sayers: Solving the Mystery of Wickedness. New York: Berg, 1990. Coomes, David. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life. Oxford: Lion, 1992. Dale, Alzina Stone. Maker and Craftsman: The Story of Dorothy L. Sayers. Wheaton, Ill.: H. Shaw Publishers, 1992. Dale, Alzina Stone, ed. Dorothy L. Sayers: The Centenary Celebration. New York: Walker, 1993. Freeling, Nicolas. Criminal Convictions: Errant Essays on Perpetrators of Literary License. Boston: D. R. Godine, 1994. Hannay, Margaret P., ed. As Her Whimsey Took Her: Critical Essays on the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979. Hitchman, Janet. Such a Strange Lady: An Introduction to Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Hone, Ralph. Dorothy L. Sayers, a Literary Biography. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979. Kenney, Catherine McGehee. The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990. Lewis, Terrance L. Dorothy L. Sayers’ Wimsey and Interwar British Society. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1994. McGregor, Robert Kuhn, and Ethan Lewis. Conundrums for the Long Week-End: England, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Lord Peter Wimsey. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2000. Pitt, Valerie. “Dorothy Sayers: The Masks of Lord Peter.” In Twentieth-Century Suspense: The Thriller Comes of Age, edited by Clive Bloom. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Reynolds, Barbara. Dorothy L Sayers: Her Life and Her Soul. Rev. ed. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998. Elizabeth Johnston Lipscomb |
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