REMEMBERED TODAY MAINLY AS the creator of the great aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy Leigh Sayers (1893–1957) was a renowned intellectual who produced numerous books on other, more rarified, subjects during a full, rich career. The only child of the headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral Choir Church, Oxford, she learned Latin by the age of seven and spoke fluent French as a child. A brilliant scholar at Somerville College, Oxford, she received her degree in 1915—one of the first English women to do so. Volumes of her poetry were published in 1916 and 1918, and she began a lifelong interest in religious literature at that time. Needing more remunerative employment than poetry or religious research could offer, she took a job as a copywriter at an advertising agency and, in 1920, conceived the foppish detective who was to make her fortune. In Wimsey’s first case, Whose Body? (1923), the amateur detective is about to attend a sale of rare books when his mother asks him to help a friend who has inconveniently discovered a corpse in his bathtub. Her second mystery, Clouds of Witness (1926), established her as a major figure in the Golden Age of detective fiction, those years between the world wars that featured the fair-play school of pure detection, exemplified by such authors as Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Christianna Brand, and S. S. Van Dine. After only fourteen novels and some short stories, she stopped writing mysteries; her last novel was Busman’s Honeymoon in 1937. Apart from a few short stories, her literary efforts from that point produced mainly religious articles and books, as well as a highly praised translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
“The Poisoned Dow ’08” (also published as “The Poisoned Port”) was originally published in the February 25, 1933, issue of the The Passing Show; it was first collected in Hangman’s Holiday (London, Gollancz, 1933).