Dorothy L. Sayers and her murder mysteries

Whose Body?
Murder Must Advertise
Clouds of Witness
Have His Carcase
Strong Poison….. hmmm: these sound like murder mystery titles!

Today is the birthday of Dorothy L. Sayers, novelist, teacher, poet, scholar, playwright, translator, essayist, and copywriter. Sayers died in 1957, at age 64. During her lifetime she wrote a number of mystery novels, most featuring a dapper British nobleman named Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey, whose family motto is "As my Whimsy takes me."

Sayers was highly educated, especially for a woman of her time – she attended Oxford University and studied modern languages and medieval literature. At that time Oxford did not award degrees to its female students, but Sayers graduated with first-class honors in 1915 and did eventually receive her MA when Oxford changed their gender-biased policy. Drawing on her formal education and the Latin and religious education her rector father taught her, her murder mysteries were rarely "puzzle stories", unlike the books of her contemporary, the more-famous Agatha Christie.

Blackwell Publishing published two volumes of her poetry, the first a year after she graduated from college and the second in 1918.

A few years later she started working as a copywriter, creating ads from S.H. Benson's advertising agency. When I was in graduate school pursuing an MBA in Marketing, I often heard the adage, "It pays to Advertise!" – little did I know that Sayers, who I had just begun to read, was responsible for inventing that phrase! She also wrote many ads for Guinness Brewery.

Sayers wrote eleven Lord Peter Wimsey books, plus a handful of short stories featuring this younger son of a duke. The fictitious Wimsey had been an officer in the British army during World War I. Upon his return to civilian life his sergeant, Mervyn Bunter, becomes his valet and assistant crime-detective.

Although I very much enjoyed all of the Wimsey stories, the critics of her time did not universally love her work. The New Yorker Magazine, in 1945, published a critique by Edmund Wilson, who basically damned her by faint praise, by saying her works were only noteworthy because they were more literary than other murder-mysteries of that era. He declared them not well-written and labeled her novel The Nine Tailors "one of the dullest books" he ever encountered. But I found The Nine Tailors to be an absorbing account of detection and a fascinating account of English country life. The title of the book comes from the name of a specific permutation or pattern of bell-ringing, which the reader learns is one of the traditions of British pastoral church life.

As the novels were written, Wimsey aged in real time. In the novel Strong Poison he investigates a murder where the accused is a young woman named Harriet Vane, the victim's ex-lover. Lord Peter

proves that Harriet didn't "do the deed" and finds the real killer. Along the way he falls in love with Harriet for her courage and ideals. But Harriet, who, like her creator, is a murder-mystery writer, spurns his love…

A number of movies and plays were made based on the Lord Peter novels. Sayers also wrote some non-Wimsey novels featuring traveling salesman Montague Egg.

Sayers was accused of antisemitism, partially based on some characterizations in her novel Whose Body? But when she learned of these allegations, she was surprised, and said that the only characters in that book "that were treated in a favourable [sic] light were the Jews". Furthermore, in 1920, Ms. Sayers became the lover of the Russian-Jewish émigré and poet John Cournos, who claimed a philosophy of "free love". She apparently drew on that experience when she wrote the scene in Strong Poison where Harriet explains why she left her lover.

She had another lover, car salesman William White, who was married, and she secretly gave birth to their child in 1924. The child, Tony, was raised by Dorothy's aunt; he was not initially told of his real parentage. In 1926 Sayers married Captain Oswald Fleming. In 1935 they adopted Tony but Fleming, who had long experienced poor health, died in 1950. Sayers was an acquaintance of the so-called Inklings – a literary club that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien.

After Sayers' death in 1957, her estate licensed her intellectual property rights to writer Jill Paton Walsh, who wrote several books using the characters Dorothy had created, including Thrones, Dominations; and The Attenbury Emeralds.



Her fame spread to the non-literay universe too: a minor planet is named for her – "3627 Sayers", which was discovered by Czech astronomer Lubos Koutek in 1973.

Her Wimsey stories in chronological order can be found here: https://www.novelsuspects.com/series-list/the-lord-peter-wimsey-series-books-in-order/