Contribution
Dorothy L. Sayers never considered her detective novels and short stories to be truly serious literature, and once Lord Peter Wimsey had provided a substantial income for her, she turned her attention to religious drama, theology, and a translation of Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802). Yet she wrote these popular works with the same thoroughness, commitment to quality, and attention to detail that infuse her more scholarly writings. Her mystery novels set a high standard for writers who followed her—and there have been many. Her plots are carefully constructed, and she was willing to spend months, even years, in researching background details. What gives her works their lasting appeal, however, is not the nature of the crimes or the cleverness of their solutions. Readers return to the novels for the pleasure of savoring Sayers’s wit, her literary allusions, the rich settings, the deftly developed characters, and, above all, her multitalented aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey. Blending the conventions of detective fiction with social satire and unobtrusively interweaving serious themes, she fulfilled her goal of making the detective story “once more a novel of manners instead of a pure crossword puzzle.”
Other literary forms
In addition to the twelve detective novels that brought her fame, Dorothy L. Sayers (SAY-uhrz) wrote short stories, poetry, essays, and plays, and distinguished herself as a translator and scholar of medieval French and Italian literature. Although she began her career as a poet, with the Basil Blackwell publishing house bringing out collections of her verse in 1916 and 1918, Sayers primarily wrote fiction from 1920 until the late 1930’s, after which she focused on radio and stage plays and a verse translation of Dante. She also edited a landmark anthology of detective fiction, Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (1928-1934; also known as The Omnibus of Crime).
Apart from her fiction, the essence of Sayers’s mind and art can be found in The Mind of the Maker (1941), a treatise on aesthetics that is one of the most illuminating inquiries into the creative process ever written; in her essays on Dante; and in two religious dramas, The Zeal of Thy House (pr., pb. 1937), a verse play written for the Canterbury Festival that dramatizes Sayers’s attitude toward work, and The Man Born to Be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, a monumental series of radio plays first broadcast amid controversy in 1941-1942. The latter work addressed what Sayers regarded as the most exciting of mysteries: the drama of Christ’s life and death, the drama in which God is both victim and hero. Of her many essays, the 1946 collection Unpopular Opinions and the 1947 Creed or Chaos?, and Other Essays in Popular Theology provide a good sampling of the acumen, wit, and originality with which Sayers attacked a variety of subjects, including religion, feminism, and learning.
In 1972, James Sandoe edited Lord Peter, a collection of all the Wimsey stories. Two other collections, both published during Sayers’s lifetime (Hangman’s Holiday, 1933, and In the Teeth of the Evidence, and Other Stories, 1939), include non-Wimsey stories. At her death, Sayers left unfinished her translation of Dante’s Cantica III: Paradise , which was completed by her friend and colleague Barbara Reynolds and published posthumously in 1962 as the final volume in the Penguin Classics edition of Dante that Sayers had begun in 1944. An unpublished fragment of an additional novel, to be called “Thrones, Dominations” and apparently abandoned by Sayers in the 1940’s, was also left unfinished, as was her...
(This entire section contains 431 words.)
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projected critical/biographical study of Wilkie Collins. This last fragment was published in 1977. From 1973 to 1977, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) produced excellent adaptations of five of the Wimsey novels for television, thus creating a new audience for Sayers’s work.
Achievements
One of the chief pleasures for readers of Dorothy L. Sayers is the companionship of one of fiction’s great creations, Lord Peter Wimsey, that extraordinarily English gentleman, cosmopolite, detective-scholar. Although the Wimsey novels were created primarily to make money, his characterization demonstrates that his creator was a serious, skillful writer. As the novels follow Wimsey elegantly through murder, mayhem, and madness, he grows from an enchanting caricature into a fully realized human being. The solver of mysteries thus becomes increasingly enigmatic himself. Wimsey’s growth parallels Sayers’s artistic development, which is appropriate, since she announced that her books were to be more like mainstream novels than the cardboard world of ordinary detective fiction.
Lord Peter is something of a descendant of P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster, and at times he emulates Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but in Wimsey, Sayers essentially created an original. Sayers’s novels integrate elements of earlier detective fiction—especially the grasp of psychological torment typified by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the fine delineation of manners exemplified in Wilkie Collins—with subjects one would expect from a medieval scholar: virtue, corruption, justice, punishment, suffering, redemption, time, and death. The hallmarks of her art—erudition, wit, precision, and moral passion—provoke admiration in some readers and dislike in others.
Sayers’s novels are filled with wordplay that irritates those who cannot decipher it and delights those who can. Her names are wonderful puns (Wimsey, Vane, Freke, de Vine, Snoot, Venables), her dialogue is embedded with literary allusions and double entendres in English, French, and Latin, and her plots are spun from biblical texts and English poetry. Reading a Sayers novel, then, is both a formidable challenge and an endless reward. Hers are among the few detective novels that not only bear rereading, but actually demand it, and Sayers enjoys a readership spanning several generations. To know Sayers’s novels is to know her time and place as well as this brilliant, eccentric, and ebullient artist could make them known. Because of her exquisite language, her skill at delineating character, and her fundamentally serious mind, Sayers’s detective fiction also largely transcends the limits of its time and genre. Certainly this is true of novels such as Strong Poison, The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, and Busman’s Honeymoon, books that did much toward making the detective novel part of serious English fiction.
Discussion Topics
To what tradition of detective stories should Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey novels be related?
What does Harriet Vane contribute to Lord Peter Wimsey’s career as an amateur detective?
Peter Wimsey’s manservant, Bunter, is a strong recurring character in Sayers’s detective works. How does he contribute to Wimsey’s success?
Sayers argues that, ideally, Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802) should be read “straight through” for the story and the verse but agrees that readers cannot go unaided. Why not?
What marks of distinction can one find in Sayers’s translation of Dante?
What medieval works other than The Divine Comedy did Sayers translate?
Bibliography
Brabazon, James. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981. The “authorized” biography based upon Sayers’s private papers, containing an introduction by her only son, Anthony Fleming. Brabazon shows that Sayers’s real desire was to be remembered as an author of poetry and religious dramas and as a translator of Dante.
Brown, Janice. The Seven Deadly Sins in the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1998. Links Sayers’s literary and religious works by analyzing her representation of the seven deadly sins in her mystery fiction.
Brunsdale, Mitzi. Dorothy L. Sayers: Solving the Mystery of Wickedness. New York: Berg, 1990.
Coomes, David. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Careless Rage for Life. New York: Lion, 1992. Coomes concentrates on reconciling the author of religious tracts with the detective novelist, thereby providing a portrayal of a more complex Sayers. He draws heavily on her papers at Wheaton College. Brief notes.
Dale, Alzina, ed. Dorothy L. Sayers: The Centenary Celebration. New York: Walker, 1993. Memoirs and essays situating Sayers in the history of detective fiction. Includes a brief biography and annotated bibliography.
Dale, Alzina Stone. Maker and Craftsman: The Story of Dorothy L. Sayers. Wheaton, Ill.: H. Shaw Publishers, 1992.
Downing, Crystal. Writing Performances: The Stages of Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. This study discusses Sayers’s popular detective fiction and later dramatic works in the context of the modernist disdain for such forms. It argues that despite the negative judgment of her contemporaries in the academy, Sayers actually holds an important position with relation both to literary modernism and to postmodern dramatic works.
Freeling, Nicolas. Criminal Convictions: Errant Essays on Perpetrators of Literary License. Boston: D. R. Godine, 1994.
Gaillard, Dawson. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: F. Ungar, 1981. In a brief 123 pages, Gaillard tries to establish a link between Sayers’s detective fiction and her other literary works. One chapter is devoted to her short stories, four to her mystery novels, and a sixth to a summary of Sayers’s literary virtues.
Hall, Trevor H. Dorothy L. Sayers: Nine Literary Studies. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980. Hall discusses the connection between Sayers’s creation, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation, Sherlock Holmes. Hall also speculates in some detail on the influence of Sayers’s husband, Atherton Fleming, on her writing.
Lewis, Terance L. Dorothy L. Sayers’s Peter Wimsey and British Interwar Society. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1994. Analyzes Sayers’s detective and her mysteries as they reflect and comment on British society in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
McGregor, Robert Kuhn, and Ethan Lewis. Conundrums for the Long Week-End: England, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Lord Peter Wimsey. Kent, Ohio: Kent State, 2000. A cultural study of interwar England through the lens of Sayers’s Wimsey books.
Pitt, Valerie. “Dorothy Sayers: The Masks of Lord Peter.” In Twentieth-Century Suspense: The Thriller Comes of Age, edited by Clive Bloom. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Analysis of Sayers’s use of masquerade and disguise in the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.
Reynolds, Barbara. Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993.
Reynolds, Moira Davison. Women Authors of Detective Series: Twenty-one American and British Authors, 1900-2000. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. Examines the life and work of major female mystery writers, including Sayers.
Youngberg, Ruth Tanis. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. An extensive guide to 942 English-language reviews, articles, books, introductions, and addresses published between 1917 and 1981. The annotations are designed to provide information, rather than criticism, to allow the reader to evaluate the particular item’s usefulness.
