Gaudy Night (1935) is a mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, the tenth in her popular series about aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, and the third featuring crime writer Harriet Vane.

The dons of Harriet Vane's alma mater, the all-female Shrewsbury College (a thinly veiled take on Sayers' own Somerville College^[1]), have invited her back to attend the much anticipated annual 'Gaudy' celebrations. However, the mood turns sour when a lunatic begins a series of malicious pranks including poison-pen messages, obscene graffiti, the destruction of a set of proofs and crafting vile effigies. Desperate to avoid a possible murder in college, Harriet asks her old friend Wimsey to investigate.

Explanation of the novel's title[link]

"Gaudy" derives from the Latin gaudium and Old French gaudie, meaning "merry-making" or "enjoyment". A college gaudy is a meeting for former members. The phrase "gaudy night" is taken from Shakespeare's Antony & Cleopatra:

Let's have one other gaudy night: call to me / All my sad captains; fill our bowls once more / Let's mock the midnight bell.

—Antony and Cleopatra, Act III scene 11 line 182

Plot summary[link]

Harriet Vane returns reluctantly to Oxford to attend the Gaudy dinner. Expecting hostility because of her notoriety, she is surprised to be welcomed warmly by the dons, and rediscovers her old love of the academic life.

Some time later the Warden of Shrewsbury writes to ask for help. There has been an outbreak of anonymous letters, vandalism and threats, apparently from someone within the college, and a scandal is feared. Harriet, herself a victim of poison-pen letters ever since her trial, reluctantly agrees to help, and spends much of the next few months resident at the college, ostensibly to do research on Sheridan Le Fanu and assist a don with her book.

As she wrestles with the case, trying to narrow down the list of suspects and avert a major scandal, Harriet is forced to examine her ambivalent feelings about love and marriage, along with her attraction to academia as an intellectual (and emotional) refuge. Her personal dilemma becomes entangled with darkly hinted suspicions and prejudices raised by the crimes at the college, which appear to have been committed by a sexually frustrated female don. Harriet is forced to re-examine her relationship with Wimsey in the light of what she has discovered about herself. Wimsey eventually arrives in Oxford to help her, and she gains a new perspective on him from those who know him, including his nephew, a current undergraduate at the university.

The attacks build to a crisis, and the college community of students, dons and servants is almost torn apart by suspicion and fear. There is an attempt to drive a vulnerable student to suicide, and a physical assault on Harriet that almost kills her. The perpetrator is finally unmasked by Wimsey as one of the college servants, revealed to be the widow of a disgraced academic at a northern university. Her husband's academic fraud had been exposed by one of his fellow dons there, destroying his career and driving him to suicide. The don has since moved to Shrewsbury College, and the campaign has been the widow's revenge against intellectual women who move outside their "proper" domestic sphere.

At the end of the book, Harriet Vane finally accepts Wimsey's proposal of marriage. (Their marriage and honeymoon—interrupted by another murder mystery—are depicted in Busman's Honeymoon.)

[edit] Characters in Gaudy Night

• Lord Peter Wimsey – protagonist, an aristocratic amateur detective
• Harriet Vane – protagonist, a mystery writer
• Letitia Martin – Dean of Shrewsbury College
• Helen de Vine – A new Research Fellow at Shrewsbury College
• Miss Lydgate – Harriet's former tutor^[2]
• Dr Baring – Warden of Shrewsbury College
• Miss Hillyard – A history don at Shrewsbury College
• Phoebe Tucker – Harriet's old college friend
• Lord Saint-George – Lord Peter's nephew, an undergraduate at The House
• Reggie Pomfret – An undergraduate at Queen's College
• Miss Burrows – The college librarian
• Annie Wilson – A scout at Shrewsbury College
• Padgett – The Head Porter at Shrewsbury College
• Mervyn Bunter – Lord Peter's valet

Literary significance and criticism[link]

Although no murder occurs in Gaudy Night, it is not without a great deal of suspense and psychological thrills. The narrative is interwoven with a love story and an examination of women's struggles to enlarge their roles and achieve some independence within the social climate of 1930s England, and the novel has been described as "the first feminist mystery novel."^[3]

"Gaudy Night is a remarkable achievement. Harriet Vane and Saint-George, the undergraduate nephew of Lord Peter, help give variety, and the college setting justifies good intellectual debate. The motive is magnificently orated on by the culprit in a scene that is a striking set-piece. And though the Shrewsbury dons are sometimes hard to distinguish one from another, the College architecture is very good. Note a reference to C. P. Snow's The Search, and sound views on counterpoint versus harmony."^[4]

Gaudy Night deals with a number of philosophical themes, such as the right relation between love and independence or between principles and personal loyalties. Susan Haack has an essay on Gaudy Night as a philosophical novel.^[5]

Women's Education[link]

The issue of women's right to academic education is central to the book's plot. The lecturers of Shrewsbury College are veterans of the prolonged struggle for academic degrees to women, which Oxford granted only reluctantly (Sayers herself took part in this struggle). The lecturers are surprised and a bit dismayed at the attitude of their students, who take for granted this right for which such a hard struggle had to be waged.

And in fact, the struggle is not yet completely won. Some of the male lecturers in Oxford are still not happy with women getting degrees; the number of women in the University is restricted by statute to no more than 25% (a restriction which would only be removed in the 1970s); women are segregated in special women's colleges such as Shrewsbury, while the prestigious historic colleges remain exclusively male; women's colleges are starved for funds and run on a shoestring.

Publication of such going-ons as happen in the book (poison-pen letters, vandalism, the near-suicide of a student and near-murder of a lecturer) would discredit and severely damage Shrewsbury College in particular and the cause of women's education in general. Therefore, all this must be kept secret - which rules out any approach to the police or other outside agency.

For most of the book, it is assumed that the perpetrator is mentally deranged and that this is a sufficient motive. But as it turned out, in fact all these acts were carried out by deliberate design, with the conscious intention of causing just such a discrediting of women's education. Ironically the perpetrator turns out to be a strong, assertive women, capable of taking bold initiatives and setting the agenda for everybody else - and making use of all this to aggressively promote a violently anti-feminist agenda.

International Background[link]

A subplot in the book is Peter Wimsey's role as an informal envoy of the British Foreign Ministry, called upon to help defuse international crises where more conventional diplomats have failed. For much of the book he is in Italy, dealing with a major crisis which for a time seemed to threaten the outbreak of a new European war (as he tells Bunter). Though not explicitly named, this was clearly the Abyssinia Crisis, and the reference was obvious to readers at the time. The book reflects the mindset at the time of writing, when the outbreak of the Second World War had not yet come to seem inevitable.

In the frame of the book's plot, Wimsey's diplomatic obligations serve as a plot device to keep him away from Britain, and leave Harriet on her own for most of the book, to try to resolve the mystery at Oxford without his help.

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations[link]

It was adapted for television in 1987 as part of a series starring Edward Petherbridge as Lord Peter and Harriet Walter as Harriet Vane.

In 2005, an adaptation of the novel was released on CD by the BBC Radio Collection to finally complete the run of Wimsey adaptations begun with Whose Body? in 1973; the role of Harriet was played by Joanna David, and Wimsey by Ian Carmichael.

In 2006, a theatrical adaptation was created by Frances Limoncelli and directed by Dorothy Milne at Lifeline Theatre in Chicago.^[6]

The plot of Gaudy Night was adapted to become the two-part Out of the Past episode (#155 & #156) of the American television mystery series Diagnosis: Murder starring Dick van Dyke as Dr. Mark Sloan. The episode first aired on 11 May 2000, with John Schneider as the villain.

Famous quotes[link]

• "How fleeting are all human passions compared to the massive continuity of ducks."
• "She went to bed thinking more about another person than about herself. This goes to prove that even minor poetry may have its practical uses."
• "It may, perhaps, be embarrassing for a solitary man to walk across a wide quadrangle under a fire of glances from a collection of collegiate females; but it is child's play compared, for example, with the long trek from the pavilion at Lord's to the far end of the pitch, with five wickets down and ninety needed to save the follow-on. Thousands of people then alive might have recognized that easy and unhurried stride and confident carriage of the head."
• "However loudly we may assert our own unworthiness, few of us are really offended by hearing the assertion contradicted by a disinterested party."
• "Placetne, Magistra? Placet."

See also[link]

• University of Oxford#Women's education

References[link]

External links[link]

• Annotations and explanations by Bill Peschel
• Review of Gaudy Night by Jo Walton

This article's lead section may not adequately summarize its contents. Please consider expanding the lead to provide an accessible overview of the article's key points. (April 2012)

Dorothy Leigh Sayers (usually pronounced /ˈseɪ.ərz/, although Sayers herself preferred [ˈsɛːz] and encouraged the use of her middle initial to facilitate this pronunciation;^[1] Oxford, 13 June 1893 – Witham, 17 December 1957) was a renowned English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator and Christian humanist. She was also a student of classical and modern languages. She is best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories set between World War I and World War II that feature English aristocrat and amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. However, Sayers herself considered her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy to be her best work. She is also known for her plays and essays.

Biography[link]

Childhood, youth and education[link]

Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, where Sayers' father was headmaster of the Choir School

Sayers, an only child, was born on 13 June 1893 at the Head Master's House, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, where her father, the Rev. Henry Sayers, M.A., was chaplain of Christ Church and headmaster of the Choir School. (When she was six he started teaching her Latin.)^[2] She grew up in the tiny village of Bluntisham-cum-Earith in Huntingdonshire, after her father was given the living there as rector. The Regency rectory is an elegant building, while the church graveyard features the surnames of several characters from her mystery The Nine Tailors. The proximity of the River Great Ouse and the Fens invites comparison with the book's vivid description of a massive flood around the village.^[3]

From 1909 she was educated at the Godolphin School,^[4] a boarding school in Salisbury. Her father later moved to the less luxurious living of Christchurch, also in Cambridgeshire.

In 1912, she won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford,^[5] and studied modern languages and medieval literature. She finished with first-class honours in 1915.^[6] Although women could not be awarded degrees at that time, Sayers was among the first to receive a degree when the position changed a few years later, and in 1920 she graduated as a MA. Her experience of Oxford academic life eventually inspired her penultimate Peter Wimsey novel Gaudy Night.

Her father was from a line of Sayerses from Littlehampton, West Sussex, and her mother (Helen Mary Leigh – whence Sayers' second name) was born at "The Chestnuts", Millbrook, Hampshire to Frederick Leigh, a solicitor, whose family roots were in the Isle of Wight. Dorothy's aunt Amy, her mother's sister, married Henry Richard Shrimpton.

Career[link]

Poetry, teaching, and advertisements[link]

Dorothy Sayers' first book, of poetry, was published in 1916 as OP. I^[7] by Blackwell Publishing in Oxford. Later Sayers worked for Blackwell's and then as a teacher in several locations including Normandy, France, just before World War I began.

Sayers' longest employment was from 1922–1931 as a copywriter at S. H. Benson's advertising agency in London. This was located on the Victoria Embankment overlooking the Thames; Benson's subsequently became Ogilvy & Mather. Sayers was quite successful as an advertiser. Her collaboration with artist John Gilroy resulted in "The Mustard Club" for Colman's Mustard and the Guinness "Zoo" advertisements, variations of which still appear today. One famous example was the Toucan, his bill arching under a glass of Guinness, with Sayers's jingle: <poem> If he can say as you can Guinness is good for you How grand to be a Toucan Just think what Toucan do </poem>

Sayers is also credited with coining the slogan "It pays to advertise!"^[8] She used the advertising industry as the setting of Murder Must Advertise.

Detective fiction[link]

Sayers began working out the plot of her first novel some time in 1920–21. The seeds of the plot for Whose Body? can be seen in a letter Sayers wrote on 22 January 1921:

My detective story begins brightly, with a fat lady found dead in her bath with nothing on but her pince-nez. Now why did she wear pince-nez in her bath? If you can guess, you will be in a position to lay hands upon the murderer, but he's a very cool and cunning fellow... (p. 101, Reynolds)

Lord Peter Wimsey burst upon the world of detective fiction with an explosive "Oh, damn!" and continued to engage readers in ten novels and two sets of short stories; the final novel ended with a very different "Oh, damn!". Sayers once commented that Lord Peter was a mixture of Fred Astaire and Bertie Wooster, which is most evident in the first five novels. However, it is evident through Lord Peter's development as a rounded character that he existed in Sayers's mind as a living, breathing, fully human being. Sayers introduced detective novelist Harriet Vane in Strong Poison. Sayers remarked more than once that she had developed the "husky voiced, dark-eyed" Harriet to put an end to Lord Peter via matrimony. But in the course of writing Gaudy Night, Sayers imbued Lord Peter and Harriet with so much life that she was never able, as she put it, to "see Lord Peter exit the stage".

Sayers did not content herself with writing pure detective stories; she explored the difficulties of World War I veterans in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, discussed the ethics of advertising in Murder Must Advertise, and advocated women's education (then a controversial subject) and role in society in Gaudy Night. In Gaudy Night, Miss Barton writes a book attacking the Nazi doctrine of Kinder, Kirche, Küche, which restricted women's roles to family activities, and in many ways the whole of Gaudy Night can be read as an attack on Nazi social doctrine. The book has been described as "the first feminist mystery novel."^[9]

Sayers's Christian and academic interests are also apparent in her detective series. In The Nine Tailors, one of her most well-known detective novels, the plot unfolds largely in and around an old church dating back to the Middle Ages. Change ringing of bells also forms an important part of the novel. In Have His Carcase, the Playfair cipher and the principles of cryptanalysis are explained. Her short story Absolutely Elsewhere refers to the fact that (in the language of modern physics) the only perfect alibi for a crime is to be outside its light cone, while The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will contains a literary crossword puzzle.

Sayers also wrote a number of short stories about Montague Egg, a wine salesman who solves mysteries.

Translations[link]

Dante shown holding a copy of the Divine Comedy, next to the entrance to Hell, the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory and the city of Florence, with the spheres of Heaven above

Sayers herself considered her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy to be her best work. The boldly titled Hell appeared in 1949, as one of the recently introduced series of Penguin Classics. Purgatory followed in 1955. Unfinished at her death, the third volume (Paradise) was completed by Barbara Reynolds in 1962.

On a line-by-line basis, Sayers's translation can seem idiosyncratic. For example, the famous line usually rendered "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" turns, in the Sayers translation, into "Lay down all hope, you who go in by me." As the Italian reads "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate", both the traditional and Sayers' translation add to the source text in an effort to preserve the original length: "here" is added in the first case, and "by me" in the second. It can be argued that Sayers' translation is actually more accurate, in that the original intimates to "abandon all hope". Also, the addition of "by me" draws from the previous lines of the canto: "Per me si va ne la città dolente;/ per me si va ne l'etterno dolore;/ per me si va tra la perduta gente." (Longfellow: "Through me the way is to the city dolent;/ through me the way is to the eternal dole;/ through me the way is to the people lost.")

The idiosyncratic character of Sayers's translation results from her decision to preserve the original Italian terza rima rhyme scheme, so that her "go in by me" rhymes with "made to be" two lines earlier, and "unsearchably" two lines before that. Umberto Eco in his book Mouse or Rat? suggests that, of the various English translations, Sayers "does the best in at least partially preserving the hendecasyllables and the rhyme."^[10]

Sayers's translation of the Divine Comedy is also notable for extensive notes at the end of each canto, explaining the theological meaning of what she calls "a great Christian allegory."^[11] Her translation has remained popular: in spite of publishing new translations by Mark Musa and Robin Kirkpatrick, as of 2009 Penguin Books was still publishing the Sayers edition.^[12]

In the introduction to her translation of The Song of Roland, Sayers expressed an outspoken feeling of attraction and love for:

"(...) That new-washed world of clear sun and glittering colour which we call the Middle Age (as though it were middle-aged) but which has perhaps a better right than the blown rose of the Renaissance to be called the Age of Re-birth".

She praised "Roland" for being a purely Christian myth, in contrast to such epics as Beowulf in which she found a strong pagan content.

Other Christian and academic work[link]

Sayers's most notable religious book is probably The Mind of the Maker (1941) which explores at length the analogy between a human Creator (especially a writer of novels and plays) and the doctrine of The Trinity in creation. She suggests that any human creation of significance involves the Idea, the Energy (roughly: the process of writing and that actual 'incarnation' as a material object) and the Power (roughly: the process of reading/hearing and the effect it has on the audience) and that this "trinity" has useful analogies with the theological Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

In addition to the ingenious thinking in working out this analogy, the book contains striking examples drawn from her own experiences as a writer and elegant criticisms of writers when the balance between Idea, Energy and Power is not, in her view, adequate.^[13] She defends strongly the view that literary creatures have a nature of their own, vehemently replying to a well-wisher who wanted Lord Peter to "end up a convinced Christian". "From what I know of him, nothing is more unlikely... Peter is not the Ideal Man".^[14]

Creed or Chaos? is a restatement of basic historical Christian Doctrine, based on the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed, similar to but somewhat more densely written than C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity; both sought clearly and concisely to explain the central doctrines of Christianity to those who had encountered them in distorted or watered-down forms, on the grounds that if you are going to criticize something you had best know what it is first.

Her very influential essay The Lost Tools of Learning^[15] has been used by many schools in the US as a basis for the classical education movement, reviving the medieval trivium subjects (grammar, logic and rhetoric) as tools to enable the analysis and mastery of every other subject. Sayers also wrote three volumes of commentaries about Dante, religious essays, and several plays, of which The Man Born to be King may be the best known.

Her religious works did so well at presenting the orthodox Anglican position that, in 1943, the Archbishop of Canterbury offered her a Lambeth doctorate in divinity, which she declined. In 1950, however, she accepted an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Durham.

Although she never describes herself as such, her economic and political ideas, rooted as they are in the classical Christian doctrines of Creation and Incarnation, are very close to the Chesterton-Belloc theory of Distributism.^[16]

Criticism of Sayers[link]

Criticism of background material in her novels[link]

The literary and academic themes in Sayers's novels have appealed to a great many readers, but by no means to all. Poet W. H. Auden and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein were critics of her novels, for example.^[17][18] A savage attack on Sayers's writing ability came from the prominent American critic and man of letters Edmund Wilson, in a well-known 1945 article in The New Yorker called Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?^[19] He briefly writes about her famous novel The Nine Tailors, saying "I set out to read [it] in the hope of tasting some novel excitement, and I declare that it seems to me one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field. The first part is all about bell-ringing as it is practised in English churches and contains a lot of information of the kind that you might expect to find in an encyclopedia article on campanology. I skipped a good deal of this, and found myself skipping, also, a large section of the conversations between conventional English village characters..." Wilson continues "I had often heard people say that Dorothy Sayers wrote well... but, really, she does not write very well: it is simply that she is more consciously literary than most of the other detective-story writers and that she thus attracts attention in a field which is mostly on a sub-literary level."

The academic critic Q.D. Leavis, in a review of Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon published in the critical journal Scrutiny, criticises Sayers in more specific terms. The basis of Leavis' criticism is that Sayers' fiction is "popular and romantic while pretending to realism."^[20] Leavis argues that Sayers presents academic life as "sound and sincere because it is scholarly", a place of "invulnerable standards of taste charging the charmed atmosphere".^[21] But, Leavis says, this is unrealistic: "If such a world ever existed, and I should be surprised to hear as much, it does no longer, and to give substance to a lie or to perpetrate a dead myth is to do no one any service really."^[22] Leavis suggests that "people in the academic world who earn their livings by scholarly specialities are not as a general thing wiser, better, finer, decenter or in any way more estimable than those of the same social class outside", but that Sayers is popular among educated readers because "the accepted pretence is that things are as Miss Sayers relates". Leavis comments that "only best-seller novelists could have such illusions about human nature".^[22]

Critic Sean Latham has defended Sayers, arguing that Wilson "chooses arrogant condescension over serious critical consideration" and suggests that both he and Leavis, rather than seriously assessing Sayers' writing, simply objected to a detective-story writer having pretensions beyond what they saw as her role of popular-culture "hack".^[23] Latham claims that, in their eyes, "Sayers's primary crime lay in her attempt to transform the detective novel into something other than an ephemeral bit of popular culture".^[24] All writers of hugely popular detective fiction have been roundly criticized at various times and for various reasons; what makes Sayers' case perhaps unusual are the sources of many of the criticisms: literary and academic figures. But in fact there is nothing remarkable in this: Sayers' fiction touches on a number of controversial topics relating to academia and the literary community, so vociferous criticism of her work must be expected.

Criticism of major characters[link]

Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers' heroic detective, has been criticized for being too perfect; over time the various talents he displays grow too numerous for some readers to swallow. Edmund Wilson also expressed his distaste for Lord Peter in his criticism of The Nine Tailors: "There was also a dreadful stock English nobleman of the casual and debonair kind, with the embarrassing name of Lord Peter Wimsey, and, although he was the focal character in the novel... I had to skip a good deal of him, too."^[19] On the other hand, this characterization of Wilson's omits some of the complexities of Lord Peter's character, and these same complexities are what have endeared him to readers fond of protagonists who transcend the standards of the genre.

Wimsey is rich, well-educated, charming, and brave, as well as an accomplished musician, an exceptional athlete, and a notable lover. He does, however, have serious flaws: the habit of over-engaging in what other characters regard as silly prattling, a nervous disorder (shell-shock) and a fear of responsibility. The latter two both originate from his service in World War I. The fear of responsibility turns out to be a serious obstacle to his maturation into full adulthood (a fact not lost on the character himself).

The character Harriet Vane, featured in four novels, has been criticized for being a mere stand-in for the author. Many of the themes and settings of Sayers's novels, particularly those involving Harriet Vane, seem to reflect Sayers's own concerns and experiences.^[25] Vane, like Sayers, was educated at Oxford (unusual for a woman at the time) and is a mystery writer. Vane initially meets Wimsey when she is tried for poisoning her lover (Strong Poison); he insists on participating in the defence preparations for her re-trial, where he falls for her but she rejects him. In Have His Carcase she collaborates with Wimsey to solve a murder but still rejects his proposals of marriage. She eventually accepts (Gaudy Night) and marries him (Busman's Honeymoon).

Alleged racism and anti-Semitism in Sayers's writing[link]

Biographers of Sayers have disagreed as to whether Sayers was anti-Semitic. In Sayers: A Biography,^[26] James Brabazon argues that Sayers was anti-Semitic. This is rebutted by Carolyn G. Heilbrun in Dorothy L. Sayers: Biography Between the Lines.^[27] McGregor and Lewis argue in Conundrums for the Long Week-End that Sayers was not anti-Semitic but used popular British stereotypes of class and ethnicity. In 1936, a translator wanted "to soften the thrusts against the Jews" in Whose Body?; Sayers, surprised, replied that the only characters "treated in a favourable light were the Jews!"^[28]

Personal life[link]

Blue plaque for Dorothy L. Sayers on 23 & 24 Gt. James Street, WC1

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

In 1924 at the age of 29, Sayers secretly gave birth to an illegitimate son, John Anthony, who was cared for as a child by her aunt and cousin, Amy and Ivy Amy Shrimpton, and passed off as her nephew to friends.^[29] Two years later, after publishing her first two detective novels, Sayers married Captain Oswald Atherton "Mac" Fleming, a Scottish journalist whose professional name was "Atherton Fleming." The wedding took place on 8 April 1926 at Holborn Register Office, London. Fleming was divorced with two children. Sayers and Fleming lived in the flat at 24 Great James Street in St Pancras, London that Sayers maintained for the rest of her life. Both worked, Fleming as an author and journalist and Sayers as an advertising copywriter and author. Over time, Fleming's health worsened, largely due to his World War I service, and as a result he became unable to work.

Sayers was a good friend of C. S. Lewis and several of the other Inklings. On some occasions, Sayers joined Lewis at meetings of the Socratic Club. Lewis said he read The Man Born to be King every Easter, but he claimed to be unable to appreciate detective stories. J. R. R. Tolkien read some of the Wimsey novels but scorned the later ones, such as Gaudy Night.^[30]

Fleming died on 9 June 1950, at Sunnyside Cottage, Witham, Essex. Sayers died suddenly of a stroke on 17 December 1957 at the same place. Fleming was buried in Ipswich, while Dorothy's remains were cremated and her ashes buried beneath the tower of St Anne's Church, Soho, London, where she had been a churchwarden for many years. Upon her death it was revealed that her nephew, John Anthony, was her son; he was the sole beneficiary under his mother's will. He died on 26 November 1984 at age 60, in St. Francis's Hospital, Miami Beach, Florida.

Legacy[link]

Sayers' work was frequently parodied by her contemporaries. McGregor and Lewis suggest that some of the character Harriet Vane's observations reveal Sayers poking fun at the mystery genre, even while adhering to various conventions. E. C. Bentley, the author of the early modern detective novel Trent's Last Case, wrote a parody entitled "Greedy Night" (1938).

Her characters, and Sayers herself, have been placed in some other works, including:

• Jill Paton Walsh has published three novels about Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane: Thrones, Dominations (1998), based on Sayers' manuscript, left unfinished at her death; A Presumption of Death (2002), based on the "Wimsey Papers", letters ostensibly written by various Wimseys and published in The Spectator during World War II; and The Attenbury Emeralds (2010), based on Lord Peter's "first case", briefly referred to in a number of Sayers' novels.
• Wimsey appears (together with Hercule Poirot and Father Brown) in C. Northcote Parkinson's comic novel Jeeves (after Jeeves, the gentleman's gentleman of the P.G. Wodehouse canon).
• Wimsey makes a cameo appearance in Laurie R. King's A Letter of Mary, one of a series of books relating the further adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
• Sayers appears, with Agatha Christie, as a title character in Dorothy and Agatha [ISBN 0-451-40314-2], a murder mystery by Gaylord Larsen, in which a man is murdered in Sayers' dining room and she has to solve the crime.
• Wimsey is mentioned by Walter Pidgeon's character in the 1945 film Week-End at the Waldorf as one of three possible detectives waiting for him in the hall, outside the apartment of the character played by Ginger Rogers.

Bibliography[link]

See also Plays of Dorothy L. Sayers

See also List of fictional books#Works invented by Dorothy L. Sayers

Poetry collections[link]

• Op. I (1916)^[7]
• Catholic Tales and Christian Songs (1918)^[31]

Lord Peter Wimsey novels and short story collections[link]

• Whose Body? (1923)
• Clouds of Witness (1926)
• Unnatural Death (1927). From the papers held by the Marion E. Wade Center, it is clear that Sayers' original title was The Singular Case of the Three Spinsters.
• The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928)
• Lord Peter Views the Body (1928; 12 short stories)
• Strong Poison (1930)
• Five Red Herrings (1931)
• Have His Carcase (1932)
• Hangman's Holiday (1933; 12 short stories, 4 including Lord Peter)
• Murder Must Advertise (1933)
• The Nine Tailors (1934)
• Gaudy Night (1935)
• Busman's Honeymoon (1937; the play on which it was based, co-written with Muriel St. Clair Byrne, was published in Love All, Together with Busman's Honeymoon, ed. Alzina Stone Dale, 1984)
• In the Teeth of the Evidence (1939; 17 short stories, 2 including Lord Peter; editions published after 1972 usually adds "Talboys", the last story she wrote with Lord Peter)
• Striding Folly (1972; 3 short stories)
• Lord Peter—the Complete Lord Peter Wimsey Stories (1972; the first edition contains 20 Lord Peter short stories; the second edition includes all 21 Lord Peter short stories by adding "Talboys")
• Sayers on Holmes, Essays and Fiction on Sherlock Holmes, introd. Alzina Stone Dale (2001; booklet of 54 pages reprinting various Holmesian essays by Sayers, and including a previously unpublished BBC radio script, broadcast in 1954, in which an 8-year-old Lord Peter brings Holmes a problem of a missing cat).
• Thrones, Dominations (1998; begun by Sayers in 1936, completed by Jill Paton Walsh and published in 1998.)
• The Wimsey Papers a series of fictional letters by members of the Wimsey Family, published in The Spectator in the early months of World War II, which are actually essays expressing Sayers' views on various subjects.
• Dorothy L. Sayers: the Complete Stories (2002; all 21 Lord Peter short stories, the 11 Montague Egg stories, and 12 others)
• Sayers also wrote the scenario for the film The Silent Passenger (1935), a Lord Peter story which was never published in book form, and whose script was altered greatly by the film company from her original.^[32]

Other books of crime fiction[link]

• The Documents in the Case (1930) written with Robert Eustace
• The Floating Admiral (1931, written with members of The Detection Club, a chapter each)
• Ask a Policeman (1933, written with members of The Detection Club)
• Six against the Yard (1936, written with members of The Detection Club)
• Double Death: a Murder Story (1939, written with members of The Detection Club)
• The Scoop and Behind the Screen (1983, Originally published in The Listener (1931) and (1930), both written by members of The Detection Club)
• Crime on the Coast and No Flowers by Request (1984, written by members of The Detection Club, Sayers takes part in the second, originally published in Daily Sketch (1953)
• The Travelling Rug (2005, a previously unpublished short detective story, probably written in the early to middle 1930s, planned as the first in a series to be called The Situations of Judkins. It features a house-maid, Jane Eurydice Judkins. This book contains a printed version of the story, as well as a photographic reproduction of the manuscript in Wheaton College Library.)

Dante translations and commentaries[link]

• The Divine Comedy, Part 1: Hell (1949) ISBN 0-14-044006-2
• The Divine Comedy, Part 2: Purgatory (1955) ISBN 0-14-044046-1
• The Divine Comedy, Part 3: Paradise (1962) (completed by Barbara Reynolds) ISBN 0-14-044105-0
• Introductory Papers on Dante: Volume 1: The Poet Alive in His Writings (1954)
• Further Papers on Dante Volume 2: His Heirs and His Ancestors (1957)
• The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement Volume 3: On Dante and Other Writers (1963)

Plays[link]

• The Man Born to be King, a cycle of 12 plays on the life of Jesus (1941)

Collections of essays and non-fiction[link]

• The Greatest Drama Ever Staged Hodder and Stoughton (1938)
• Strong Meat Hodder and Stoughton (1939)
• Begin Here (A Wartime Essay) Victor Gollancz (1940)
• Even The Parrot (Exemplary Conversations for Enlightened Children) Methuen (1944)
• The Mind of the Maker (1941) ISBN 0-8371-3372-6
• The Lost Tools of Learning (1947)
• Unpopular Opinions (1947)
• The Greatest Drama Ever Staged (reprinted from Unpopular Opinions in a series of pocket-sized booklets) St Hugh's Press
• Creed or Chaos?: Why Christians Must Choose Either Dogma or Disaster (Or, Why It Really Does Matter What You Believe) (1947) ISBN 0-918477-31-X
• Are Women Human? (1971) (two essays reprinted from Unpopular Opinions) ISBN 0-8028-2996-1
• The Whimsical Christian (1978) ISBN 0-02-096430-7
• Sayers on Holmes (2001) ISBN 1-887726-08-X
• Les Origines du Roman Policier: A Wartime Wireless Talk to the French: The Original French Text with an English Translation (ed. and trans. Suzanne Bray, Hurstpierpoint: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 2003) ISBN 0-9545636-0-3

Collected letters[link]

Five volumes of Sayers' letters have been published, edited by Barbara Reynolds.

• The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1899–1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist ISBN 0-312-14001-0
• The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1937–1943, From Novelist to Playwright ISBN 0-312-18127-2
• The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1944–1950, A Noble Daring ISBN 0-9518005-1-5
• The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1951–1957, In the Midst of Life ISBN 0-9518000-6-X
• The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: Child and Woman of Her Time ISBN 0-9518000-7-8

Notes[link]

References and scholarship[link]

• Op. I by Dorothy Sayers (poetry): digital.library.upenn.edu
• The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy L. Sayers: Audio of this Essay: ISBN 978-1-60051-025-0
• Brabazon, James, Dorothy L. Sayers: a Biography (1980; New York: Avon, 1982) ISBN 978-0-380-58990-6
• Brown, Janice, The Seven Deadly Sins in the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers (Kent, OH, & London: Kent State University Press, 1998) ISBN 0-87338-605-1
• Connelly, Kelly C. "From Detective Fiction to Detective Literature: Psychology in the Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers and Margaret Millar." CLUES: A Journal of Detection 25.3 (Spring 2007): 35–47
• Coomes, David, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life (1992; London: Chariot Victor Publishing, 1997) ISBN 978-0-7459-2241-6
• Dale, Alzine Stone, Maker and Craftsman: The Story of Dorothy L. Sayers (1993; backinprint.com, 2003) ISBN 978-0-595-26603-6
• Dean, Christopher, ed., Encounters with Lord Peter (Hurstpierpoint: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1991) ISBN 0-9518000-0-0
• – Studies in Sayers: Essays presented to Dr Barbara Reynolds on her 80th Birthday (Hurstpierpoint: Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1991) ISBN 0-9518000-1-9
• Downing, Crystal, Writing Performances: The Stages of Dorothy Sayers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) ISBN 1-4039-6452-1
• Gorman, Anita G., and Leslie R. Mateer. "The Medium Is the Message: Busman's Honeymoon as Play, Novel, and Film." CLUES: A Journal of Detection 23.4 (Summer 2005): 54–62
• Kenney, Catherine, The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers (1990; Kent, OH, & London: Kent State University Press, 1992) ISBN 0-87338-458-X
• Leavis, Q.D. (1937). "The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers". Scrutiny VI. 
• Lennard, John, 'Of Purgatory and Yorkshire: Dorothy L. Sayers and Reginald Hill's Divine Comedy', in Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007), pp. 33–55. ISBN 978-1-84760-038-7
• Loades, Ann. "Dorothy L. Sayers: War and Redemption." In Hein, David, and Edward Henderson, eds. C. S. Lewis and Friends: Faith and the Power of Imagination, pp. 53–70. London: SPCK, 2011.
• McGregor, Robert Kuhn & Lewis, Ethan Conundrums for the Long Week-End : England, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Lord Peter Wimsey (Kent, OH, & London: Kent State University Press, 2000) ISBN 0-87338-665-5
• Reynolds, Barbara, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993; rev. eds 1998, 2002) ISBN 0-340-72845-0
• Sørsdal, Randi, From Mystery to Manners: A Study of Five Detective Novels by Dorothy L. Sayers, Masters thesis, University of Bergen, bora.uib.no
• Webster, Peter, 'Archbishop Temple’s offer of a Lambeth degree to Dorothy L. Sayers'. In: From the Reformation to the Permissive Society. Church of England Record Society (18). Boydell and Brewer, Woodbridge, 2010, pp. 565–582. ISBN 978-1-84383-558-5. Full text in SAS-Space
• Young, Laurel. "Dorothy L. Sayers and the New Woman Detective Novel."CLUES: A Journal of Detection 23.4 (Summer 2005): 39–53

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Dorothy L. Sayers

• Dorothy L. Sayers at the Internet Movie Database
• The Dorothy L. Sayers Society
• Dorothy L Sayers in Galloway—the scene of her novel Five Red Herrings (1931)
• Archival material relating to Dorothy L. Sayers listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• "Dorothy L. Sayers: A Christian Humanist for Today" by Mary Brian Durkin
• "Second Glance: Dorothy Sayers and the Last Golden Age" by Joanna Scutts
• Works by Dorothy L. Sayers on Open Library at the Internet Archive

Lord Peter Death^[1] Bredon Wimsey is a fictional character in a series of detective novels and short stories by Dorothy L. Sayers, in which he solves mysteries; usually, but not always, murders. A bon vivant who solves mysteries for his own amusement, Wimsey is an archetype for the British gentleman detective.

Born in 1890 and aging in real time, Wimsey is described as being at best average height, with straw-coloured hair, a beaked nose, and a vaguely foolish face. Reputedly his looks were patterned after those of academic Roy Ridley. He also possessed considerable intelligence and athletic ability, evidenced by his playing cricket for Oxford University while earning a First. He created a spectacularly successful publicity campaign for Whifflet cigarettes while working for Pym's Publicity Ltd and at aged 40 was able to turn three cartwheels in the office corridor, stopping just short of the boss's open office door (Murder Must Advertise).

Among Lord Peter's hobbies, apart from criminology, is collecting incunabula. He is an expert on matters of food (especially wine) and male fashion, and on classical music. He excels at the piano, including Bach's works for keyboard instruments. One of Lord Peter's cars is a 12-cylinder ("double-six") 1927 Daimler four-seater, which (like all his cars) he calls "Mrs. Merdle" after a character in Little Dorrit (by Charles Dickens) who "hated fuss".

"Mrs. Merdle"; a Daimler double-six V12 50hp Corsica drophead coupé body designed by Reid Railton (1931)

a Daimler double-six V12 50hp four-door saloon made for Anna Neagle and given her by her husband

Biography[link]

Background[link]

Lord Peter Wimsey's (fictional) ancestry begins with the 12th-century knight Gerald de Wimsey, who went with King Richard The Lion Heart on the Third Crusade and took part in the Siege of Acre.^[2] This makes the Wimseys an unusually ancient family, since "Very few English noble families go that far in the first creation; rebellions and monarchic head choppings had seen to that" (as reviewer Janet Hitchman noted in the introduction to Striding Folly). The family coat of arms is described as sable, 3 mice courant, argent; crest, a domestic cat couched as to spring, proper. The family motto, displayed under its coat of arms, is "As My Whimsy Takes Me."^[3]

Early life[link]

Lord Peter's was born the second of the three children of Mortimer Wimsey, 15th Duke of Denver, and Honoria Lucasta Delagardie, who lives on throughout the novels as the Dowager Duchess of Denver. The Dowager Duchess is witty and intelligent, and strongly supports her younger son, whom she plainly prefers over his less intelligent, more conventional older brother, Gerald, the 16th Duke. Gerald's snobbish wife, Helen, who detests Wimsey, and their devil-may-care heir, Viscount St. George (Wimsey's nephew, who likes him), also make appearances in the novels, as does Lady Mary, the younger sister of the Duke and Lord Peter.

As a boy, the young Peter Wimsey was, to the great distress of his father, strongly attached to an old, smelly poacher living at the edge of the family estate.

According to the novels, Lord Peter was educated at Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a first-class degree in history. He was also an outstanding cricketer, whose performance would still be well remembered decades later, leading to the near unmasking of his incognito in Murder Must Advertise. Though not taking up an academic career, he was left with an enduring and deep love for Oxford.

At this time, Lord Peter was considerably influenced by his maternal uncle Paul Delagardie, who took upon himself to instruct his nephew in the facts of life as Paul himself understood them - i.e. to conduct various love affairs, often in the more permissive atmosphere of France, treat his various lovers respectfully but avoid any deep emotional entanglements.

To his uncle's disappointment, Peter eventually fell deeply in love we with a young woman named Barbara and became engaged to her. When the First World War broke out, he hastened to join the British Army, releasing Barbara from her engagement in case he was killed or mutilated. The girl later married another, less principled, officer.

Wimsey served on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, reaching the rank of Major in the Rifle Brigade. At one stage, he was appointed an Intelligence Officer. This included, on one occasion, infiltrating the staff-room of a German officer.^[4] Though not explicitly stated, his being able to do that implies that Wimsey spoke a fluent and unaccented German. As noted in "Have His Carcase", he communicated at that time with British Intelligence using the Playfair cipher and became proficient in its use.

For reasons never clarified in any of the books, after the end of his mission as a spy behind enemy lines Wimsey was in the later part of the war removed from Intelligence and resumed the job of a regular line officer. He was a conscientious and effective commanding officer, popular with the men under his command—an affection still retained by Wimsey's former soldiers many years after the war, as evident from a short passage in "Clouds of Witness" and an extensive flashback in "Gaudy Night".

Especially, at this time in the army he met Sergeant Mervyn Bunter, who had previously been in service. After sharing what the Dowager Duchess referred to as "a jam," the two arranged that if they were both to survive the war, Bunter would become Wimsey's valet. Throughout the books, Bunter always takes care to address Wimsey as "My Lord". Nevertheless, he is a friend as well as a servant, and Wimsey again and again expresses amazement at Bunter's high efficiency and competence in virtually every sphere of life.

In 1918, Wimsey was severely wounded by artillery fire near Caudry in France. He suffered a breakdown due to shell shock (which we now call post-traumatic stress disorder) and was eventually sent home. After the war he was ill for many months, recovering at the family's ancestral home in Duke's Denver, a fictional setting—as is the dukedom from which it derives—lying about some fifteen miles beyond the original Denver on the A10 near Downham Market. It is noted on several occasions that Wimsey was for a time unable to give servants any orders whatsoever, since his wartime experience made him associate the giving of an order with causing the death of the person to whom the order was given. Bunter arrived and, with the approval of the Dowager Duchess, took up his post as valet. Bunter moved Wimsey to a London flat at 110A Piccadilly, W1, while Wimsey recovered. Even much later, however, Wimsey would have relapses—especially when his actions caused a murderer to be hanged. As noted in "Whose Body?", on such occasions Bunter would take care of Wimsey and tenderly put him to bed, and they would revert to being "Major Wimsey" and "Sergeant Bunter".

Detective work[link]

Lord Peter begins his hobby of investigation by recovering The Attenbury Emeralds in 1921. He also becomes good friends with Scotland Yard detective Charles Parker, a sergeant in 1921 who eventually rises to the rank of Commander. Bunter, being a man of many talents himself, not least photography, often proves instrumental in Peter's investigations. However, Wimsey is not entirely well. At the end of the investigation in Whose Body? (1923) he hallucinates that he is back in the trenches. He soon recovers his senses and goes on a long holiday.

The next year, he returns (in Clouds of Witness (1926) to the fictional Riddlesdale in North Yorkshire to assist his older brother Gerald, who has been accused of murdering Captain Denis Cathcart, their sister's fiancé. As Gerald is the Duke of Denver, he is tried by the entire House of Lords, as required by the law at that time, to much scandal and the distress of his wife Helen. Their sister, Lady Mary, also falls under suspicion. Lord Peter clears the Duke and Lady Mary, to whom Parker is attracted.

It is not exactly known when Wimsey recruited Miss Climpson to run an undercover employment agency for women, in order to be able to garner information from the world of spinsters and widows which neither master nor man would be able to access, but it is prior to Unnatural Death (1927), in which Miss Climpson assists Wimsey's investigation of the suspicious death of an elderly cancer patient.

As recounted in the short story "The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba", in December 1927 Wimsey faked his own death, supposedly while hunting big game in Tanganyika, in order to penetrate and break up a particularly dangerous and well-organised criminal gang. Only Wimsey's mother and sister, the loyal Bunter and Inspector Parker knew he was still alive. Emerging victorious after more than a year masquerading as "the disgruntled sacked servant Rogers", Wimsey remarked that "We shall have an awful time with the lawyers, proving that I am me." In fact, he returned smoothly to his old life, and the interlude is never referred to in later books.

During the 1920's, Wimsey was involved in affairs with various women, which were the subject of much gossip, in Britain and throghout Europe. This part of his life remains, however, very hazy; in fact, it is hardly ever mentioned in the books taking place in this period itself, most of the scanty information on the subject being given in flashbacks from later times, after he met Harriet Vane and relations with other women became a closed chapter. In Busman's Holiday Wimsey facetiously refers to a gentleman's duty "to remember whom he had taken to bed" so as not to embarress his bedmate by calling her with the wrong name.

There are several references to a relationship with a famous Viennese opera singer, and Bunter - who evidently was involved with this, as with other parts of his master's life - recalls Wimsey being very angry with a French mistress who mistreated her own servant. The only one of Wimsey's earlier women to appear onstage is the artist Marjorie Phelps, who plays an important role in "The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club". She has known Wimsey for years and is attracted to him, though it is not explicitly stated they were lovers. Wimsey likes her, respects her, and enjoys her company - but that isn't enough. In "Strong Poison", she is the first person other than Wimsey himself to realize that he has fallen in love with Harriet.

It is in Strong Poison Lord Peter encounters Harriet Vane, a cerebral, Oxford-educated mystery writer, while she is on trial for murder of her former lover. He falls in love with her at first sight. Wimsey saves her from the gallows, but based on the principle that gratitude is not a good foundation for marriage, she politely but firmly declines his frequent proposals. Lord Peter encourages his friend and foil, Chief Inspector Charles Parker, to propose to his sister, Lady Mary Wimsey, despite the great difference in their rank and wealth. They marry and have a son, named Charles Peter ("Peterkin"), and a daughter, Mary Lucasta.

While on a fishing holiday in Scotland, Wimsey instigates and takes part in the investigation of the murder of an artist, related in the Five Red Herrings. Despite the rejection of his marriage proposal, he continues to court Miss Vane. In Have His Carcase, he finds Harriet is not in London, but learns from a reporter that she had discovered a corpse while on a walking holiday of England's coast. Wimsey is at her hotel the next morning. He not only investigates the death and offers proposals of marriage, but also to act as Harriet's patron and protector with press and police. Despite a prickly relationship, they do work together to identify the murderer.

Back in London, Wimsey goes undercover as "Death Bredon" at an advertising firm, working as a copywriter (Murder Must Advertise). Bredon is framed for murder, leading Charles Parker to "arrest" Bredon for murder in front of numerous witnesses. To distinguish Death Bredon from Lord Peter Wimsey, Parker smuggles Wimsey out of the police station and urges him to get into the papers. Accordingly Wimsey accompanies "a Royal personage" to a public event, leading the press to carry pictures of both "Bredon" and Wimsey.

By 1935 Lord Peter is in continental Europe, acting as an unofficial attaché for the British Foreign Office. Harriet Vane contacts him about a problem she has been asked to investigate in her college at Oxford (Gaudy Night). At the end of their investigation, Vane finally accepts Peter's proposal of marriage.

The couple marry, on 8 October 1935, at St. Cross Church, Holywell, Oxford, as depicted in the opening collection of letters and diary entries in Busman's Honeymoon. The Wimseys honeymoon at Talboys, a house in east Hertfordshire near where a young Harriet had lived as a child, that Peter has bought for her as a wedding present. There, they find the body of the previous owner, and spend their honeymoon solving the case, thus having the eponymous "Busman's Honeymoon".

Over the next five years, according to Sayer's short stories, the Wimseys have three sons: Bredon Delagardie Peter Wimsey (born in October 1936 in the story "The Haunted Policeman"); Roger Wimsey (born 1938), and Paul Wimsey (born 1940). However, according to the wartime publications of The Wimsey Papers, published in The Spectactor, the second son was called Paul. It may be presumed that Paul is named after Lord Peter's maternal uncle Paul Delagardie. "Roger" is an ancestral Wimsey name. Sayers told friends orally that Harriet and Peter were to eventually have five children in all.^{[citation needed]}

In the final Wimsey story, the 1942 short story "Talboys", Peter and Harriet are enjoying rural domestic bliss with their three sons when Bredon, their first-born, is accused of the theft of prize peaches from the neighbour's tree. Peter and the accused set off to investigate and, of course, prove Bredon's innocence.

Fictional bibliography[link]

Wimsey is described as having authored numerous books, among them the following fictitious works:

• Notes on the Collecting of Incunabula
• The Murderer's Vade-Mecum

The stories[link]

Dorothy Sayers wrote 11 Wimsey novels and a number of short stories featuring Wimsey and his family . Other recurring characters include Inspector Parker, solicitor Murbles, barrister Sir Impey Biggs, newshound Salcombe Hardy, and city whiz the Honourable Freddy Arbuthnot, who finds himself entangled in the case in the first of the Wimsey books, 1923's Whose Body?.

Sayers wrote no more Wimsey murder mysteries, and only one story involving him, after the outbreak of the Second World War. In one of the Wimsey Papers, a series of fictionalised commentaries in the form of mock letters between members of the Wimsey family published in the Spectator, there is a reference to Harriet's difficulty in continuing to write murder mysteries at a time when European dictators were openly committing mass murders with impunity; this seems to have reflected Sayers' own wartime feeling. The Wimsey Papers included a reference to Wimsey and Bunter setting out during the war on a secret mission of espionage in Europe.

The only occasion when Sayers returned to Wimsey was the 1942 short story "Talboys". The war at that time devastating Europe received only a single oblique reference. Though Sayers lived until 1957, she never again took up the Wimsey books after this final effort. In effect, rather than killing off her detective, as Conan Doyle unsuccessfully tried with his, Sayers pensioned Wimsey off to a happy, satisfying old age. Thus, Peter Wimsey remained forever fixed on the background of inter-war England, and the books are nowadays often read for their evocation of that period as much as for the intrinsic detective mysteries.

Origins[link]

In How I Came to Invent the Character of Lord Peter Wimsey,^[5] Sayers wrote:

Lord Peter's large income... I deliberately gave him... After all it cost me nothing and at the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody.

Janet Hitchman, in the preface to "Striding Folly", remarks that "Wimsey may have been the sad ghost of a wartime lover(...). Oxford, as everywhere in the country, was filled with bereaved women, but it may have been more noticeable in university towns where a whole year's intake could be wiped out in France in less than an hour." There is, however, no verifiable evidence of any such World War I lover of Sayers on whom the character of Wimsey might be based.

Another theory is that Wimsey was based, at least in part, on Eric Whelpton, who was a close friend of Sayers at Oxford.

The novels are set in Britain contemporaneously with when they were written, from the early 1920s to the late 1930s. The story "Talboys" and Jill Paton Walsh's recent continuations Thrones, Dominations and A Presumption of Death continue this into the early 1940s, while Paton Walsh's third continuation The Attenbury Emeralds is set in the postwar era.

Social satire[link]

Many episodes in the Wimsey books express a mild satire of the British class system, in particular in depicting the relationship between Wimsey and Bunter, the two of them clearly being the best and closest of friends, yet Bunter invariably punctilious in using "my lord" even when they are alone, and "his lordship" in company. In a brief passage written from Bunter's point of view in "Busman's Honeymoon" Bunter is seen, even in the privacy of his own mind, to be thinking of his employer as "His Lordship". Wimsey and Bunter even mock the Jeeves and Wooster relationship.

However, in "Whose Body?" it is seen that when Wimsey is caught by a severe recurrence of his WWI shell-shock and nightmares, being taken care of by Bunter, the two of them revert to being "Major Wimsey" and "Sergeant Bunter". In that role, Bunter - sitting at the bedside of the sleeping Wimsey - is seen to mutter affectionately "Bloody little fool!" ^[6]

In "The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps That Run," the staunchly democratic Doctor Hartman invites Bunter to sit down to eat together with himself and Wimsey, at the doctor's modest apartment. Wimsey does not object, but Bunter strongly does: "If I may state my own preference, sir, it would be to wait upon you and his lordship in the usual manner". Whereupon Wimsey remarks: "Bunter likes me to know my place"^[7]

At the conclusion of Strong Poison, Inspector Parker asks "What would one naturally do if one found one's water-bottle empty?" (a point of crucial importance in solving the book's mystery). Wimsey promptly answers "Ring the bell." Whereupon Miss Murchison, the indefatigable investigator employed by Wimsey for much of this book, comments "Or, if one wasn't accustomed to be waited on, one might use the water from the bedroom jug."

Dramatic adaptations[link]

The novel Busman's Honeymoon was originally a stage play by Sayers and her friend Muriel St. Clare Byrne.

Several Lord Peter Wimsey novels were made into television productions by the BBC, in two separate series. Lord Peter Wimsey was played by Ian Carmichael in a series of independent serials that ran from 1972 to 1975 and adapted five novels (Clouds of Witness, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, The Five Red Herrings, Murder must advertise and The Nine Tailors) and by Edward Petherbridge in 1987, in which the three major Wimsey/Vane novels (Strong Poison, Have his Carcase and Gaudy Night) were dramatised. Harriet Vane was played by Harriet Walter. The BBC was unable to secure the rights to turn Busman's Honeymoon into a proposed fourth adaptation of the planned 13-episode series. Unable to adapt Honeymoon, the series was trimmed to ten episodes and was transmitted under the title A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery. Both the 1970s productions and the 1987 series are now available on videotape and DVD.

Edward Petherbridge also played Wimsey in the UK production of the Busman's Honeymoon play staged at the Lyric Hammersmith and on tour in 1988, with the role of Harriet being taken by his real life spouse, Emily Richard.

Ian Carmichael starred as Wimsey in radio adaptations of the novels made by the BBC, all of which have been available on cassette and CD from the BBC Radio Collection. In the original series, which ran on Radio 4 from 1973–83, no adaptation was made of the seminal Gaudy Night, perhaps because the leading character in this novel is Harriet and not Peter; this was corrected in 2005 when a version specially recorded for the BBC Radio Collection was released starring Carmichael and Joanna David. The CD also includes a panel discussion on the novel, the major participants in which are P. D. James and Jill Paton Walsh. Gaudy Night was released as an unabridged audiobook read by Ian Carmichael in 1993.

In 1935, British movie,The Silent Passenger, was released, in which Lord Peter (played by Peter Haddon) solved a mystery on the boat train crossing the English Channel. Sayers disliked the film and James Brabazon describes it as an "oddity, in which Dorothy's contribution was altered out of all recognition."

A 1940 film of Busman's Honeymoon or The Haunted Honeymoon (US title), starring Robert Montgomery and Constance Cummings as Lord and Lady Peter was released but the characters and events bore little resemblance to Sayers' writing. Sayers refused even to see this movie.

Bibliography[link]

Novels[link]

With year of first publication

• Whose Body? (1923)
• Clouds of Witness (1926)
• Unnatural Death (1927)
• The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928)
• Strong Poison (1931)
• Five Red Herrings (1931)
• Have His Carcase (1932)
• Murder Must Advertise (1933)
• The Nine Tailors (1934)
• Gaudy Night (1935)
• Busman's Honeymoon (1937)
• Thrones, Dominations (1998; unfinished manuscript completed by Jill Paton Walsh)
• A Presumption of Death (2002; by Jill Paton Walsh)
• The Attenbury Emeralds (2010; by Jill Paton Walsh)

Short story collections[link]

• Lord Peter Views the Body (1928)
• Hangman's Holiday (1933; also contains non-Wimsey stories)
• In the Teeth of the Evidence (1939; also contains non-Wimsey stories)
• Striding Folly (1972)
• Lord Peter (1972; see the article for complete list of stories.)

In addition there are

• The Wimsey Papers, published between Nov. 1939 and Jan. 1940 in The Spectator Magazine—a series of mock letters by members of the Wimsey family, being in effect fictionalised commentaries on life in England at the inception of the war.

Unpublished work[link]

Various

Books about Lord Peter by other authors[link]

• The Wimsey Family (1977) by C. W. Scott-Giles ISBN 0-06-013998-6
• Lord Peter Wimsey Cookbook (1981) by Elizabeth Bond Ryan and William J. Eakins ISBN 0-89919-032-4
• Thrones, Dominations (1998) completed by Jill Paton Walsh
• The Lord Peter Wimsey Companion (2002) by Stephan P. Clarke ISBN 0-89296-850-8 published by The Dorothy L. Sayers Society.
• Conundrums for the Long Week-End : England, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Lord Peter Wimsey (2000) by Robert Kuhn McGregor, Ethan Lewis ISBN 0-87338-665-5
• A Presumption of Death, (2002) (novel by Jill Paton Walsh, based loosely on The Wimsey Papers)
• The Attenbury Emeralds (September 2010) by Jill Paton Walsh

As a footnote, Lord Peter Wimsey has also been included by the science fiction writer Philip José Farmer as a member of the Wold Newton family; and Laurie R. King's detective character Mary Russell meets up with Lord Peter at a party in the novel A Letter of Mary.

See also[link]

Novels portal

• Eric Whelpton

References[link]

External links[link]

• Lord Peter Wimsey chronology
• Lord Peter Wimsey portrait at Balliol, Oxford
• Extensive review of the Wimsey books in "Second Glance: Dorothy Sayers and the Last Golden Age" by Joanna Scutts