Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy Leigh Sayers (June 13, 1893–December 17, 1957) was an English academic, linguist, writer and lay theologian. Well-respected in academic and religious circles during her lifetime, she is best remembered today for her fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey, though she herself thought that her non-fiction was her best work. Her writing contained social commentary and explored themes of feminism (particularly women’s education and sexuality), business ethics, racism and other social issues before any of these were the well-defined fields of study that they are today.

Sayers approached even her writing of fiction with thoroughness and precision. Though her evident erudition and commitment to accuracy is often praised, some have called it tedious and distracting. For example, Sayers went to extraordinary lengths to learn the elements of campanology for The Nine Tailors; some found her attention to detail compelling; others deemed it boring. "The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will" contains a complex literary crossword puzzle, the details of which are not integral to the story.

Sayers was a great friend of other Christian writers of the day, including C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. Like most writers, Sayers’s works often reflect the attitudes and the social mores of her generation, her class, and the prevailing thought of the day. This has led to charges of racism and antisemitism in her work, allegations that have been vigorously argued on both sides by her critics and her defenders.

Favorable appraisals

Most fans of Sayers' mysteries have their personal favorites among the books. The Nine Taylors, however, published in 1934, at the height of her reputation, has frequently been cited as either her best novel or as her most famous one. The noted mystery critic and historian, Howard Haycraft, for instance, writing in 1941, says about Sayers and The Nine Taylors:

...Dorothy Sayers (1893—), who has been called by some critics the greatest of living writers in the form. Whether of not the reader agrees with this verdict, he can not, unless he is both obtuse and ungrateful, dispute her preëminence as one of the most brilliant and prescient artists the genre has yet produced.... The Nine Taylors—in the writer's estimation her finest achievement and one of the truly great detective stories of all time.

No less a critic than John Dickson Carr, himself one of the greatest mystery writers of the Golden Age, had prepared, in 1946, a gigantic anthropology of The Ten Best Detective Novels. One of the books chosen was The Nine Taylors.

In Blood in Their Ink: The March of the Modern Mystery Novel the British mystery writer Sutherland Scott asks that if one had to select:

Dorothy Sayers' outstanding characteristics, they might be stated as (a) her ingenuity in thinking up unusual murder methods; and (b) her ability to insert a first-class mystery into a background which is not in itself dramatic.

He goes on to classify Sayers, favorably, among other writers, all of them British, of the airy-fairy mystery:

This group applies British institutions and the British mode of life, sometimes in an exaggerated form, to the detective novel. The result depends substantially on the author concerned... Like our native brand of humour, stories in this category are not always so well received abroad.

As the 1930s passed, Sayers' began to devote less space in her books to formulaic detective fiction and more to the trappings of the mainstream novel. Not everyone was happy with this evolution:

Writing in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1939, John Strachey represented the extreme view when he said, "[Miss Sayers] has now almost ceased to be a first-rate detective writer and has become an exceedingly snobbish popular novelist."

Strachey's words, however, were mild compared to those of the far more august literary critic and man of letters Edmund Wilson. Writing in The New Yorker in 1944 he excoriated crime fiction in general in an essay called "Why Do People Read Detective Stories?" Three months later, responding to a barrage of criticism from other literary lights such as Jacques Barzun, Joseph Wood Krutch, Raymond Chandler, Somerset Maugham, and Bernard De Voto, Wilson had read another selection of mystery novels and updated his views in "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?". In it he takes particular aim at Sayers, The Nine Taylors, and Lord Peter:

The writer that my correspondents were most nearly unanimous in putting at the top was Miss Dorothy L. Sayers...and the book of hers that...I could not fail to enjoy was...The Nine Taylors. Well, I set out to read The Nine Taylors 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 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: "Oh, here's Hinkins with the aspidistras. People may say what they like about aspidistras, but they do go on all the year round and make a background," etc.

Lord Peter

Wilson then takes his ax to Lord Peter:

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, being Miss Dorothy Sayer's version of the inevitable Sherlock Holmes detective, I had to skip a good deal of him too...and the awful whimsical patter of Lord Peter.

Another assessment of The Nine Taylors and Sayer's literary skills

Writing about the dénouement of The Nine Taylors, Wilson admits that it is:

Not a bad idea for a murder, and Conan Doyle would have known how to dramatize it in an entertaining tale of thirty pages, but Miss Sayers has not hesitated to pad it out to a book of three hundred and thirty pages.

As for Sayers' writing:

I had often heard people say that Dorothy Sayers wrote well, and I felt that my correspondents had been playing her as their literary ace. 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. In any serious department of fiction, her writing would not appear to have any distinction at all.