1. Sayers wrote her last Wimsey story, “Talboys,” in 1942. This work remained unpublished in her lifetime. See Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter: A Collection of All the Lord Peter Wimsey Stories, comp. James Sandoe (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 431–53.
2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Jazz Age (New York: New Directions, 1996), 13.
3. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918–1939 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1963).
4. Among the better examinations of Sayers’s mystery writings are James Bernard Burleson, “A Study of the Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, 1965); Mary Brian Durkin, Dorothy L. Sayers (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), 27–100; and Dawson Gaillard, Dorothy L. Sayers (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981).
5. For an angry critique of Sayers’s fiction in the context of the postwar era, see Martin Green, “The Detection of a Snob: Martin Green on Lord Peter Wimsey,” The Listener 69 (Mar. 14, 1963): 461, 464. A broader perspective on the same issue, one that discusses Sayers’s work in passing, is Colin Watson, Snobbery with Violence: Crime Stories and Their Audience (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1971).
6. The transition from the traditional to the modern is examined in fascinating and challenging detail in Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1989). The historical framework on which this book rests is supplied largely by Eksteins and by Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End. In the pages to follow, we sketch the general political history of Britain and Europe during the era, essentially to remind readers of what was going on in the larger world. We make no claim to original or exhaustive research in these areas. Reference notes should be regarded as little more than suggestions for further reading.
7. One discussion of Sayers’s use of real news stories in her works is Sharyn McCrumb, “Where the Bodies are Buried: The Real Murder Cases in the Crime Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers,” in Dorothy L. Sayers: The Centennial Celebration, ed. Alzina Stone Dale (New York: Walker and Company, 1993), 87–98.
8. For a readily accessible celebration of Sayers’s endurance, see Carolyn Heilbrun, “Reappraisals: Sayers, Lord Peter and God,” reprinted in Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter: A Collection of All the Lord Peter Wimsey Stories, comp. James Sandoe (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 431–46.
9. Terrance L. Lewis addresses the problem of treating Lord Peter as a real person in his study, Dorothy L. Sayers’ Wimsey and Interwar British Society (Lewiston, Me.: Edwin Mellon Press, 1994), v. Lewis’s book pioneers the study of Wimsey in historic context. His discussions of Sayers’s perspective on the English class system and the effects of “the Slump” are especially enlightening. (See pp. 15–56.)
10. A term for the imaginary which Sayers employs on several occasions. A good example may be found in the “Author’s Note” in Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (1936; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), vi. For the sake of consistency, all references to Sayers’s fiction will be made to the HarperPerennial edition, unless otherwise noted.
11. For Terrance L. Lewis on the war, see Sayers’ Wimsey, 1–14.
12. Terrance L. Lewis treats “The Changing Status of Women” in Sayers’ Wimsey, 57–74.
13. See Eksteins, Rites of Spring, for an elaboration of this argument.
14. Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison (1930; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 88.
15. Terrance L. Lewis considers “Politics and the Changing World” in Sayers’ Wimsey, 89–96.
16. Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End, 291.
1. In compiling the biographical details of Dorothy L. Sayers for this work, we have made lavish use of seven different biographies, each with its strengths and weaknesses. These are, in order of publication: Janet Hitchman, Such a Strange Lady: A Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers (New York: Harper and Row, 1975); Alzina Stone Dale, Maker and Craftsman: The Story of Dorothy L. Sayers (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1978); Ralph E. Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Literary Biography (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979); James Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography (New York: Charles P. Scribner’s Sons, 1981); Catherine Kenney, The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990); David Coomes, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life (Batavia, Ill.: Lion Publishing, 1992); Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). It is generally surprising how little space is devoted to the development of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels in any of these. Frankly, we regard Barbara Reynolds’s book as far and away the best of the seven, and we will cite her work generally for biographical information. For details of Sayers’s early life, consult Reynolds, 1–44.
2. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 45–62. For a personal reminiscence of Sayers from a distant but most perceptive acquaintance, see Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933), 106, 482, 508, 510.
3. Ibid., 59–62.
4. An excellent treatment of prewar Europe is Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1865–1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1987). See also Oron J. Hale, The Great Illusion, 1900–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). An excellent short summary of the subject is provided by Joachim Remak, The Origins of World War I, 1871–1914, 2d ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994).
5. The best work regarding Britain and the approach of the war is Zara S. Steiner, Britain and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979).
6. Joachim Remak, Sarajevo: The Story of a Political Murder (New York: Criterion Books, 1959).
7. Historians generally agree that the most comprehensive and balanced treatment of the Great War is B. Liddell Hart, History of the First World War (London: Pan Books, 1970). A less intimidating overview is provided in James L. Stokesbury, A Short History of World War I (New York: William Morrow, 1981). Stokesbury’s discussion of the impact of new weapons technology may be found on pp. 14–18.
8. Two studies by Martin van Creveld examine von Schlieffen’s plan exhaustively: Supplying War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and Command in Wartime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). See also Stokesbury, World War I, 32–61.
9. Stokesbury, World War I, 36–60.
10. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 72–76. See also Dorothy L. Sayers to Muriel Jaeger, Feb. 6, 1916, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1899 to 1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist, ed. Barbara Reynolds (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 121–22. Two excellent works examine the impact of trench warfare on the common British soldier: Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (London: Penguin Books, 1979); and John Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
11. Stokesbury, World War I, 194–307.
12. The best treatment of the peacemaking is Arno Mayer, The Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (New York: Random House, 1973).
13. A truly perceptive and captivating study of the grieving necessitated by the war is Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
14. Graves, The Long Week-End, 1–39. For an excellent summary of the recent scholarship on sex and gender relationships during and after the war, see Gail Braybon, “Women and the War,” in The First World War in British History, ed. Stephen Constantine, Maurice W. Kirby and Mary B. Rose (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), 141–67.
15. Graves, The Long Week-End, 1–39; Winter, Death’s Men, 235–65; Braybon, “Women and the War.”
16. Winter, Sites of Memory, 1–53.
17. Ibid., 78–116; Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness (1926; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 189.
18. Winter, Sites of Memory, 102–5.
19. Though somewhat dated, the best summary of Britain’s postwar troubles is A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 120–62.
20. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 63–84.
21. Ibid., 85–106.
22. Ibid., 94–95.
23. A thumbnail sketch of the origins and career of Sexton Blake appears in William L. DeAndrea, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (New York: Prentice Hall, 1994), 29. DeAndrea’s work is an excellent source of obscure information on the history and development of detective fiction.
24. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Untitled,” unpublished MS, MS 138 (thirteen pages) presumably written in 1920. Sayers Collection of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois (hereafter cited as Sayers Collection, Wade Center). We wish to thank the David Higham Associates on behalf of the Estate of Anthony Fleming for permission to photocopy this manuscript. Barbara Reynolds does an excellent job of describing and analyzing this ragged piece of early Sayers fiction, and she includes this first description of Peter Wimsey, quoted in our subsequent paragraph, in Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 171–73.
25. Sayers, “Untitled.”
26. Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Mousehole: A Detective Fantasia in Three Flats,” unfinished MS, MS 138, Sayers Collection (thirteen pages). See also Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 174.
27. Dorothy L. Sayers, “How I Came to Invent the Character of Lord Peter,” Harcourt Brace News 1 (July 15, 1936): 1–2.
28. Sayers to her mother, Jan. 22, 1921, Letters, 174.
29. Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body? (1923; reprint, New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 13, 61.
30. There are, of course, entire libraries of material devoted to Sherlock Holmes. Most, unfortunately, treat him as if he were a real historical figure, seriously compromising the interpretation. A happy exception to this is Rosemary Jann, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995). There is no substitute for the genuine article however: Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York: Doubleday, 1930).
31. Gordon Phillips, “The Social Impact,” in First World War in British History, ed. Constantine, Kirby, and Rose, 106–40. Lord Peter explains that Duke’s Denver operates at a loss in Dorothy L. Sayers, Have His Carcase (1932; reprint, New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 154–55. He expresses his fears regarding the future of Duke’s Denver in Sayers, Gaudy Night, 289.
32. Sayers, Whose Body? 165, 177, 186–87. For a perspective on Lord Peter as a “dissenter from the values of Duke’s Denver,” see Erik Routley, The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story: A Personal Monograph (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972), 139–41.
33. Sayers, Whose Body? 176–77, 186. An excellent discussion of the influence of sport on British society is John Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). Perhaps the truest personification of this ethic during the 1920s was the American golfer Bobby Jones. See Peter Dobereiner, “My, But You’re a Wonder, Sir,” Bobby Jones: The Greatest of Them All, ed. Martin Davis (Greenwich, Conn.: The American Golfer, 1996), 38–47. Harriet Vane’s thoughts on the subject may be found in Sayers, Gaudy Night, 142.
34. Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell, 7–70.
35. Ibid., 161–205; Winter, Death’s Men, 223–34. Siegfried Sassoon embodied the new attitude in his later war poetry:
Base Details
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You’d see me with my puffy petulant face,
Guzzling and gulping in the best hotel,
Reading the Roll of Honour. “Poor young chap,”
I’d say—“I used to know his father well;
Yes, we’ve lost heavily in that last scrap.”
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I’d toddle home and die—in bed.
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. Jon Silkin (London: Penguin, 1981), 131.
36. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 139–238; Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That (New York: Doubleday, 1929), 82–244.
37. Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell, 123–59; Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 170–91.
38. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Gaudy Night,” in Titles to Fame, ed. Denys K. Roberts (London: Nelson, 1937). The essay was republished in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1992), 208–21. Subsequent citations will refer to the latter source.
39. Sayers to David Higham, Nov. 27, 1936, Letters, 405–6.
40. James Brabazon maintains that Dorothy L. Sayers was consciously anti-Semitic, in Sayers: A Biography, 216–19, a charge refuted by Carolyn G. Heilbrun in “Dorothy L. Sayers: Biography Between the Lines,” in Dale, Sayers Centenary, 1–14. Nancy-Lou Patterson agrees that Sayers’s treatment of ethnic stereotypes was ill considered. See “Images of Judaism and Anti-Semitism in the Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers,” Sayers Review 2, no. 2 (June 1978): 17–24. A most perceptive critique of British anti-Semitism is George Orwell, “Antisemitism in Britain,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, 4 vols., ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 3: 332–41.
41. Dorothy L. Sayers, ed., “Introduction” to Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (London: Victor Gollancz, 1928). Republished in Haycraft, Art of the Mystery Story, as “The Omnibus of Crime,” 71–109. Subsequent citations will reference the latter publication.
42. Two excellent books consider the impact of the war on modern literature: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); and Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990).
43. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound [1935], ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 4.
44. For examples, see Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925) and To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927); William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Random House, 1929) and As I Lay Dying (New York: Random House, 1930); James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1922). For a discussion of the development of modern narrative form, see James Mellard, The Exploded Form: The Modernist Novel in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980); or Randall Stevenson, Modernist Fiction: An Introduction (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1992).
45. Sayers’s most unusual experiment came with the publication, with Robert Eustace, of The Documents in the Case, an epistolary mystery novel published in 1930 (reprint; New York: HarperPerennial Library, 1987).
46. Sayers to her mother, Nov. 8, 1921, Letters, 180.
47. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 225.
1. Mary B. Rose, “Britain and the International Economy,” in Constantine, Kirby, and Rose, First World War in British History, 231–51; A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 134–35, 189, 203–4.
2. Taylor, English History, 227–60.
3. Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End, 139–59; Taylor, English History, 242–50.
4. Taylor, English History, 242–50. For a historical overview of the general strike, see Patrick Renshaw, Nine Days That Shook Britain: The 1926 General Strike (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1976).
5. Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death (1927; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 62.
6. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 107–16.
7. Ibid.; Sayers to John Cournos, Aug. 13, 1925, Letters, 237.
8. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 117–70.
9. Sayers to John Cournos, Oct. 27, Dec. 4, 1924, Letters, 218, 221.
10. The extant letters from Sayers to Cournos are printed in Sayers, Letters, 215–33, 236–41.
11. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 141–70.
12. Sayers to her mother, June 13, 1924, Letters, 215.
13. Sayers to her parents, Mar. 3, 1922, Letters, 189.
14. Sayers to John Cournos, Jan. 25, 1925, Letters, 224.
15. Sayers to John Cournos, Feb. 22, 1925, Letters, 230.
16. Sayers to John Cournos, Mar. 28, 1925, Letters, 231; Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 202–3.
17. Sayers, Clouds of Witness, 27–28.
18. Sayers, Unnatural Death, 112.
19. Ibid., 217.
20. Ibid.; Sayers to John Cournos, Oct. 18, 1925, Letters, 239–41.
21. Sayers, Unnatural Death, 21.
22. For further discussion of Sayers’s portrayal of women as villains, see Virginia B. Morris, “Arsenic and Blue Lace: Sayers’ Criminal Women,” Modern Fiction Studies 29 (autumn 1983):485–95.
23. Sayers, Unnatural Death, 216. For a discussion of Sayers’s use of humor, see Catherine Kenney, “The Comedy of Dorothy L. Sayers,” in Dale, Sayers Centenary, 139–50.
24. Sayers, Unnatural Death, 229–30.
25. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age, 3d ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984).
26. Deborah Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser, A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Genevieve Fraisse and Michelle Perrot, eds., A History of Women; Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War, vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap of Harvard, 1993).
27. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education: or A Fair Chance for the Girls (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1873) provides one of the clearest statements connecting education to physical harm of female reproductive organs.
28. See for instance Nancy Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850,” Signs 4 (1978): 219–36; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).
29. See Cott, “Passionlessness.”
30. Deborah Kuhn McGregor, From Midwives to Medicine: the Birth of American Gynecology (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 153–55; John Cournos, The Devil is an English Gentleman (New York: Liveright, 1932); Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 114–16.
31. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Carl Degler, “What Ought to Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 79 (1974): 1467–90.
32. Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990), 9–45.
33. Jann, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 3–6, 103–26.
34. Adams, The Great Adventure, 47–112; Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 76–135. For a vivid rendering of what it was for a young woman to grow up amidst the assumptions of the old culture, the reader can do no better than Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Victor Gollancz, 1933).
35. Sayers, Unnatural Death, 148.
36. Ibid., 155.
37. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 14–16.
38. Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison, 100–102, 112–14.
39. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 199–211.
40. Sayers, Unnatural Death, 37.
41. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 200–201. Reynolds quotes a letter from Sayers to Maurice Reckitt, Nov. 19, 1941.
42. Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End; Sayers, Clouds of Witness, 212.
43. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 225–27.
44. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 275–99; Hynes, A War Imagined, 425–26.
45. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 35–36; Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers, 10.
46. Sayers, Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 298.
1. Taylor, English History, 321–49; Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End, 235–53; Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
2. Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End, 211–12.
3. Ibid., 212; “Clarence Hatry,” The Banker 13 (May 1985): 78–79; Thomas Jaffe (ed.), “Clarence Who?” Forbes 146 (July 9, 1990): 120.
4. Taylor, English History, 321–49.
5. Sayers, Strong Poison, 124, 131.
6. Ibid., 136.
7. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 225–26.
8. Sayers to Victor Gollancz, Nov. 25, 1927, Letters, 266–67.
9. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 225–26.
10. Sayers to Victor Gollancz, Nov. 28, 1927, Letters, 267–68.
11. Sayers to her parents, Aug. 15, 1928, Letters, 282.
12. Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers” and “The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question,” in Lord Peter Views the Body, (1928; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 5–40.
13. Sayers, “The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps That Ran,” in Lord Peter Views the Body, 174.
14. Sayers, “The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention” and “The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head,” in Lord Peter Views the Body, 93–160, 197–222.
15. For a discussion of the Wimsey short stories, see Durkin, Sayers, 84–100.
16. Sayers to Harold Bell, Mar. 12, 1933, Letters, 330.
17. Sayers to Harold Bell, Feb. 4, Mar. 12, 1933, Letters, 325–34.
18. An anonymous reviewer noted in 1935 that Sayers took meticulous care to maintain an internal consistency in the Wimsey chronology. See “The Exploits of Lord Peter Wimsey,” Times (London), July 12, 1935, 9.
19. Sayers, “The Cave of Ali Baba,” in Lord Peter Views the Body, 283–317.
20. Sayers, Strong Poison, 126.
21. Three authors have considered aspects of this subject. See Jonathon Hodge, “Chronology,” Sayers Review 1, no. 4 (July 1977): 10; Geoffrey A. Lee, “The Wimsey Saga,” Proceedings of the Seminar, 1977 (Witham, Essex: Dorothy L. Sayers Historical and Literary Society, Archives), 2–12; Alzina Stone Dale, “Fossils in Cloud-Cuckoo Land,” Sayers Review 3, no. 2 (Dec. 1978): 1–13.
22. Sayers, “Gaudy Night,” in Titles to Fame, ed. Dennis K. Roberts (London: Nelson, 1937). Reprinted in Haycraft, Art of the Mystery Story, 210.
23. Sayers to Eustace Barton, May 7, 1928, Letters, 274.
24. Sayers and Eustace, Documents in the Case; Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 213–24; Trevor H. Hall, Dorothy L. Sayers: Ten Literary Studies (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980), 62–103. Sayers’s extensive correspondence with Barton is contained in Letters, 272–89, 298–99, 302–5, 308, 310–11, 323. Dawson Gaillard maintains that The Documents in the Case is Sayers’s best crime novel. See Gaillard, Sayers, 45–54. H. R. F. Keating also defends Documents in “Dorothy L.’s Mickey Finn,” in Dale, Sayers Centenary, 129–38.
25. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 206–9.
26. Sayers to Ivy Shrimpton, Oct. 18, 1928, Letters, 287.
27. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 208–10.
28. Sayers to Ivy Shrimpton, Dec. 10, 1928, Letters, 289–90.
29. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 210–11.
30. Sayers to her mother, Apr. 8, July 12, 1926, Letters, 245–47, 249–50; Hall, Ten Literary Studies, 40–51.
31. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 234–35.
32. Ibid., 231–33.
33. Ibid., 210–11, 225–35; Sayers to Ivy Shrimpton, Nov. 11, 1933, Letters, 239.
34. Dorothy L. Sayers, Tristan in Brittany (London: Ernest Benn, 1929).
35. Sayers to Donald Tovey, Jan. 18, 1934, Letters, 340.
36. Sayers, Strong Poison, 45–46.
37. Ibid., 69.
38. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors: Changes Rung on an Old Theme in Two Short Touches and Two Long Peals (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1934), 10.
39. For a brief discussion of Sayers’s development of Wimsey as a character, see Julian Symons, The Detective Story in Britain (Harlow, Essex: Longman, Greens and Company, 1969), 26–28.
40. Sayers, “Gaudy Night,” 210.
41. Kevin I. Jones, Conan Doyle and the Spirits: The Spiritualist Career of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Wellingsborough, England: Aquarium Press, 1989).
42. Ibid., 109–31; Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 58–77.
43. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 112–14.
44. Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963). Virginia Woolf was among a small coterie of Britons who did believe that the nature of art and humanity had really changed: Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in Collected Essays, vol. 1 (1923; reprint, New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1966).
45. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 55–135; Malcolm Smith, “The War and British Culture,” in Constantine, Kirby, and Rose, First World War in British History, 168–83.
46. Wilfred Owen, “Insensibility,” in Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, 189. John Silkin’s introduction provides a thoughtful analysis on the place of the war poets in British literary history.
47. Hynes, A War Imagined, 269–463.
48. Smith, “The War and British Culture,” 168–83.
49. Sayers, Strong Poison, 88.
50. Sayers, “Gaudy Night,” 211.
51. For a discussion of Harriet Vane’s influence on the direction of the Wimsey stories, see Margaret P. Hanay, “Harriet’s Influence on the Characterization of Lord Peter Wimsey,” in As Her Whimsey Took Her, ed. Margaret P. Hanay (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1979), 36–50.
52. Dorothy L. Sayers, The Five Red Herrings (previously published as Suspicious Characters, 1931; reprint, New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 176.
53. For a discussion of the novel, see Lionel Basney, “The Nine Tailors and the Complexity of Innocence,” in Hanay, As Her Whimsey Took Her, 23–35.
54. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Notebook: The Nine Tailors,” Original Notebook (MS 151), Sayers Collection, Wade Center.
55. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 237–46; Sayers to Victor Gollancz, Sept. 14, 1932, Letters, 322–23.
56. Several of Sayers’s biographers cite the influence of her religious outlook on the Wimsey stories, though most tend to overdo it, reading backward from her later career as a Christian apologist. This seems especially true of David Coomes, Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life; Dale, Maker and Craftsman; and to a lesser extent, Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers; and Kenney, Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers. See also Stephen Hahn, “Theodocy in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise,” Renascence 41 (spring 1989): 169–76.
57. Sayers, Strong Poison, 167.
58. For a discussion of Lord Peter’s religious development, see Lionel Basney, “God and Peter Wimsey,” Christianity Today 17 (Sept. 14, 1973): 27–28.
1. Among those singing the praises of Sayers’s detective stories are “Little ‘Tecs’ Have Little Crooks,” New Statesman and Nation 3 (May 7, 1932): 594; and H. R. F. Keating, Murder Must Appetize (London: Lemon Tree Press, 1975). For a discussion of Sayers as the Queen of Crime, see “D. L. S.: An Unsteady Throne?” in Dale, Sayers Centenary, 23–30.
2. Sayers, introduction to “The Omnibus of Crime,” in Haycraft, The Art of the Mystery Story, 71.
3. Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime,” 71–83. Quotations, 72.
4. Ibid., 83.
5. Ibid., 89–93; quotation, 89; Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 196–97. See also E. R. Gregory, “Wilkie Collins and Dorothy L. Sayers,” in Hanay, As Her Whimsey Took Her, 51–64.
6. Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime,” 92–97. Sayers later wrote a series of essays on Sherlock Holmes minutiae in which she addressed the mystery of Doctor Watson’s given name. See Dorothy L. Sayers, “Studies in Sherlock Holmes,” in Unpopular Opinions (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946).
7. Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime,” 95–97.
8. Ibid., 97–109. For an intriguing critique of Sayers’s critique, see Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” in Haycraft, Art of the Mystery Story, 222–37. Two later discussions of Sayers on the mystery story are Catherine Aird, “It Was the Cat!,” in Dale, Sayers Centenary, 79–86; and Aaron Elkins, “The Art of Framing Lies: Dorothy L. Sayers on Mystery Fiction,” in Dale, Sayers Centenary, 99–107.
9. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 173. Sayers enjoyed playing with character names as well. In the short story “The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention,” two brothers named Haviland and Martin fight over their father’s unusual will. In the novel Have His Carcase, the murderer takes an assumed name while camping out in disguise—the name: Haviland Martin.
10. Sayers, Whose Body? 244. For a discussion of Sayers’s debt to Bentley, see Barbara Reynolds, “The Origin of Lord Peter Wimsey,” Sayers Review 2, no. 1 (May 1978): 1–16, 21.
11. Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime,” 104.
12. Dorothy L. Sayers, introduction to E. C. Bentley, Trent’s Last Case (1930; reprint, New York: Carroll and Graf, 1991), x–xiii; quotation xii.
13. Sayers, Unnatural Death, 250; Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime,” 108; DeAndrea, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, 126–27.
14. Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime,” 103.
15. Ibid., 102.
16. Sayers, Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, 304; Willard Huntington Wright, “The Great Detective Stories” in Haycraft, Art of the Mystery Story, 58; DeAndrea, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, 367.
17. Sayers to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, Oct. 30, 1930, Letters, 310.
18. Sayers to Victor Gollancz, Jan. 22, 1931, Letters, 312.
19. Sayers, Five Red Herrings, 142; DeAndrea, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, 62; Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime,” 102–3.
20. Two essays considering this issue are R. B. Reaves, “Crime and Punishment in the Detective Fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers,” in As Her Whimsey Took Her, 1–13; and R. D. Stock and Barbara Stock, “The Agents of Evil and Justice in the Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers,” in Hanay, As Her Whimsey Took Her, 14–22.
21. Sayers, Five Red Herrings, 194–95; Sayers to Victor Gollancz, Sept. 20, 1930, Letters, 309–10; Freeman Wills Crofts, Sir John McGill’s Last Journey (Catchogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer Books, 1930).
22. Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime,” 108; DeAndrea, Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, 79.
23. Sayers, Five Red Herrings, 272; Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime,” 79.
24. Sayers, “The Omnibus of Crime,” 89.
25. For a comparison of Sayers’s use of railways to that of Freeman Wills Crofts, see P. L. Scowcroft, “Railways and the Detective Fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers,” Proceedings of the Seminar, 1980 (Witham, Essex: Dorothy L. Sayers Historical and Literary Society, Archives, 1980).
26. Sayers to Victor Gollancz, Jan. 22, 1931, Letters, 311–12.
27. Have His Carcase, 14, 61.
28. Ibid., 187.
29. Ibid., 290.
30. Ibid., 112.
31. Sayers to Victor Gollancz, Sept.14, 1932, Letters, 322–23.
32. Sayers to Harold Bell, Mar. 12, 1933, Letters, 330.
33. Sayers, “Gaudy Night,” 209–10. For a discussion of Sayers’s plotting, focusing on Murder Must Advertise, see Stephen Hahn, “‘Where Do Plots Come From?’ Dorothy L. Sayers on Literary Invention,” Columbia Library Columns 37 (Feb. 1988): 3–12.
34. Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 118.
35. For a brief description of Sayers’s most successful campaign, see “Do You Remember the Mustard Club?,” pamphlet (Witham, Essex: Dorothy L. Sayers Historical and Literary Society, 1976).
36. Terrance L. Lewis, A Climate for Appeasement (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 109–25.
37. Sayers, Strong Poison, 229.
1. Sayers, Have His Carcase, 278–79.
2. Taylor, English History, 262–97, 321–50; Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End, 235–53.
3. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: Norton, 1990); Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1932, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
4. Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
5. David Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (New York: Norton, 1997); Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
6. Henry A. Turner, German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Detlev J. K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life (London: Batsford, 1987).
7. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, 300–331; Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: Aaron Asher Books, 1992).
8. Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End, 312–45; Taylor, English History, 396–97.
9. Taylor, English History, 284–86, 374, 418–19.
10. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, 19, 277.
11. Sayers to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, June 24, 1935, Letters, 350.
12. Sayers to Victor Gollancz, Sept. 26, 1935, Letters, 357.
13. Ibid., author’s note, vii; Pauline Adams, Somerville for Women: An Oxford College, 1879–1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); S. L. Clark, “Harriet Vane Goes to Oxford: Gaudy Night and the Academic Woman,” Sayers Review 2, no. 3 (Aug. 1978): 22–43.
14. Sayers to Victor Gollancz, Sept. 26, 1935, Letters, 357; Dorothy L. Sayers, “Are Women Human?” in Unpopular Opinions (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946). Two discussions of Sayers and feminism are Laura Krugman Ray, “The Mysteries of Gaudy Night: Feminism, Faith, and the Depths of Character,” Mystery and Detection Annual (Beverly Hills: D. Adams, 1973), 272–85; and Kathleen L. Maio, Unnatural Women: A Feminist Study of Dorothy L. Sayers, Women and Literature Ovular, Goddard/Cambridge Graduate Center (Oct. 1975).
15. For a discussion of Annie Wilson, see S. L. Clark, “The Female Felon in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night,” Publication of the Arkansas Philological Association 3 (1977): 59–67.
16. Sayers to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, Sept. 8, 1935, Letters, 354.
17. Sayers to Muriel St. Clare Byrne, July 16, 1935, Letters, 350.
18. Sayers to Ivy Shrimpton, Aug. 21, 1934, Letters, 341–42.
19. Sayers, “Gaudy Night,” 211–12.
20. A persuasive discussion of this aspect of the story is Carolyn G. Hart, “Gaudy Night: Quintessential Sayers,” Sayers Centenary, 45–50.
21. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 265–67.
22. In 1935, Gollancz acquired the rights to the first four Wimsey novels from the original British publishers, reissuing each with the “Biographical Note” appended.
23. Sayers, “Biographical Note,” in Whose Body? vii–xv.
24. Wilfred Scott-Giles, The Wimsey Family (London: Victor Gollancz, 1977).
25. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 265–67; Sayers to C. W. Scott-Giles, Feb. 26, 28, Mar. 25, Apr. 10, 15, Aug. 5, 1936, Letters, 368–74, 381–85, 397–98.
26. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 263–75.
27. Dorothy L. Sayers and Muriel St. Clare Byrne, Busman’s Honeymoon: A Detective Comedy, published with Dorothy L. Sayers, Love All: A Comedy of Manners (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1984).
28. Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 261–72.
29. For a brief discussion of marriage and the detective story, see P. D. James, “Ought Adam to Marry Cordelia?” Murder Ink, ed. Dilys Winn (New York: Workman Press, 1977), 68–69.
30. Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon: A Love Story With Detective Interruptions (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 92, 115.
31. For a discussion of the marriage, see B. J. Rahn, “The Marriage of True Minds, in Dale, Sayers Centenary, 51–65.
32. Sayers and St. Clare Byrne, Busman’s Honeymoon (play), 120.
33. Sayers and St. Clare Byrne, Busman’s Honeymoon (play), 120.
34. Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon (novel), 349.
1. In a general review of mysteries published by Time in 1938, the author noted that “the erudite Dorothy Sayers is now one of the most popular of mystery writers; her successful Murder Must Advertise sold only 9,000 copies, her audience growing slowly with each book until her most recent. Busman’s Honeymoon reached a high of 20,000.” “Murder Market,” Time 31 (Feb. 28, 1938): 67.
2. Alzina Stone Dale argues this position in Maker and Craftsman, 99–100; as does Brabazon, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography, 158; Hitchman, Such a Strange Lady, 112–13; and Durkin, Dorothy L. Sayers, 81.
3. Barbara Reynolds seems to lean toward new-found religious inspiration in Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 240; Catherine Kenney makes a stronger argument in The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers, 215–16. Details on the composition of Zeal of Thy House may be found in Reynolds, 273ff.
4. Ralph E. Hone emphasizes this explanation, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Literary Biography, 82; David Coomes favors this as well, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life, 119.
5. Sayers to B. S. Sturgis, Apr. 9, 1937, Letters, 20–21; Sayers to Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher, Oct. 24, 1949, quoted in Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 339.
6. See Alzina Stone Dale, “Wimsey: Lost and Found,” The Armchair Detective (Spring 1990): 142–51, esp. 145–46.
7. Janet Hitchman, Such a Strange Lady, 112; and Ralph E. Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers, 82, mention this possibility, though neither explores it.
8. Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End, 346–65; Taylor, English History, 398–405.
9. Joachim Remak, The Origins of the Second World War (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976).
10. Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938).
11. Graves and Hodge, The Long Week-End, 312–26; quotation, 315.
12. Taylor, English History, 389–437.
13. Sayers to Helen Simpson, July 2, 1936, Letters, 395.
14. Ibid., 396; Reynolds, Sayers: Her Life and Soul, 339–40.
15. The original manuscript of “Thrones, Dominations” is among the holdings in the Sayers Collection, Wade Center. Alzina Stone Dale provides a synopsis of the manuscript in “Wimsey: Lost and Found,” 147–51; reprinted in Sayers Centenary, 67–78. The manuscript has now been completed and published: Dorothy L. Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh, Thrones, Dominations (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
16. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Thrones, Dominations,” Unpublished MS, MS 219, Sayers Collection, Wade Center, 92. The selection is misquoted in Dale, “Wimsey: Lost and Found,” 150. Jill Paton Walsh renders this conversation correctly in Sayers and Walsh, Thrones, Dominations, 74.
17. Sayers, “Thrones, Dominations,” MS 219, Sayers Collection, Wade Center. Jill Paton Walsh omitted the discussion of Peter’s sexuality from her completed version of the novel. Apart from this omission, Walsh followed Sayers’s storyline quite faithfully, reorganizing the pages in a sensible fashion but retaining Sayers’s words almost verbatim. Roughly the first one-third of the completed version of Thrones, Dominations is Sayers; the remainder is the creation of Walsh.
18. Sayers, “Thrones, Dominations,” 171; Sayers and Walsh, Thrones, Dominations, 31.
19. Sayers to L. C. Kempson, Dec. 20, 1936, Letters, 409–10.
20. Sayers to Nancy Pearn, Nov. 5, 1938, Letters, 94.
21. Sayers to Sir Donald Tovey, Apr. 18, 1936, Letters, 388–89.
22. Dorothy L. Sayers, In the Teeth of the Evidence (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993). All of the Wimsey short stories are gathered in Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter: A Collection of All the Lord Peter Wimsey Stories, ed. James Sandoe (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
23. Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Master Key,” Unfinished MS, MS 133, Sayers Collection, Wade Center; Janet Thom, “Lord Peter Passes His Prime,” New Republic 102 (Feb. 19, 1940): 253.
24. Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Wimsey Papers: Number 14, Harriet Vane to the Duchess of Denver,” MS 242, Sayers Collection, Wade Center.
25. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Wimsey Papers,” The Spectator (Nov. 1939 to Jan. 1940). Eleven “papers” appeared in all.
26. Sayers, “Wimsey Papers: Number 7, Extracts from the Private Diary of Lord Peter Wimsey,” MS 242, Sayers Collection, Wade Center.
27. Sayers, “Talboys,” Lord Peter: Collection, 431–53.
28. For an analysis of the moral themes in Sayers’s detective fiction, see Janice Brown, The Seven Deadly Sins in the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1998), 53–214.
29. Sayers, “Are Women Human?” 106–13.
This epigraph is taken from Wordsworth’s “Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,” The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Andrew J. George (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1932), 4.
1. Cf. “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” l. 28. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 1891.
2. With which compare: “Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know, / Knowledge might pitie winne, and pittie grace obtaine” (Sir Philip Sidney, “Astrophel and Stella,” 1.3–4). The sonnet closes on the dictum, “looke in thy heart and write.” His “conceited . . . conclusion” notwithstanding, Wimsey doubtless followed Sidney’s advice.
3. Cf. Alexander Pope’s definition of wit, from ”An Essay on Criticism,” in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), ll. 297–98.
4. Complete Poems of W. H. Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), 126.