possesses a literary style; it is, according to quite a few people, a work of literature. YetStrong Poison explicitly mentions major literary figures both real and fictional. Peter Wimsey makes a reference to Sherlock Holmes, a famous detective of British literature created by Arthur Conan Doyle. Wimsey is also a part of another literary reference. He is, much to his chagrin, roped into a conversation about free love and D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence is a famous English author whose ideas and biography have been linked to liberal philosophies on sex.

Style is how an author writes a story or novel. It includes word choice, literary devices, pacing, and sentence structure.

Sayers is often contrasted to her mystery writing peer, Agatha Christie, for adding more stylistic embellishments to her prose. We can see that in the opening sentence of Strong Poison:

There were crimson roses on the bench; they looked like splashes of blood.

We note that Sayers opens with a simile, which contributes to building a poetic and—because of the evocations of blood—mysterious style.

Much of this mystery, however, is written in a relatively fast-paced style and relies on dialogue, which lends a sense of immediacy to a scene. When we hear dialogue, we feel as if we are actually part of the scene that is taking place. The fast-paced style is reflected, too, in opening of the book at a climatic part of the story: Harriet Vane's murder trial. We don't have to wait for a drama to unfold: we are thrust into what is called imedia res or the middle of the action, a literary device that pulls the reader into a plot very quickly.

However, Sayers also uses long, convoluted, Victorian-style sentences that can suggest rather than tell and are wordy by modern standards. This can be particularly confusing for a modern reader, and words such as "peripatetic" and "procuration" may be difficult for modern audiences looking for a light mystery to pass the time at the beach. An example is this long passage (even after significant cutting!) of omniscient narration, in which we learn about a business that Peter helps fund:

The establishment was ostensibly a typing bureau, and indeed there were three efficient female typists who did very excellent work for authors and men of science from time to time. ... All the employees were women—mostly elderly, but a few still young and attractive—and if the private register in the steel safe had been consulted, it would have been seen that all these women were of the class unkindly known as "superfluous." There were spinsters with small fixed incomes, or no income at all; widows without family; women deserted by peripatetic husbands and living on a restricted alimony, who, previous to their engagement by Miss Climpson, had had no resources but bridge and boarding-house gossip. There were retired and disappointed school-teachers; out-of-work actresses; courageous people who had failed with hat-shops and tea-parlours; and even a few Bright Young Things, for whom the cocktail-party and the night-club had grown boring. ... It may have been coincidence that these gentlemen so very often had the misfortune to appear shortly afterwards before the magistrate on charges of fraud, blackmail or attempted procuration, but it is a fact that Miss Climpson's office boasted a private telephone-line to Scotland Yard, and that few of her ladies were quite so unprotected as they appeared. ... His lordship was somewhat reticent about this venture of his, but occasionally, when closeted with Chief-Inspector Parker or other intimate friends, referred to it as "My Cattery."

We can see in the above a narrative tendency to use extra words, such as "indeed" and "very excellent" that locate the work in a particular time period. We can note, too, that Sayer's weaves the plight of women into her story, but also uses this scene to characterize Peter's sexism through his words, exhibited in him privately calling this woman run business a "My Cattery." In this way, Sayers shows rather than tells us what a character is like.