Dorothy L. Sayers

🔍 Ever wondered what happens when you combine medieval French scholarship, advertising expertise, and detective fiction? Meet Dorothy L. Sayers, whose Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries revolutionized the genre.

✍️ Join me as I explore the interesting career of one of the founding authors of the Detection Club who wrote mysteries where love bloomed between intellectual equals then went on to write something completely different! 

Where to start with Dorothy L. Sayers books: 

If you like to start at the beginning of a series, the first Lord Peter Wimsey book is Whose Body?

I recommend The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, which I have a podcast about: 

S4EP: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers
 https://www.sararosett.com/mbps3ep9/

For more classic whodunits, check out my books in print, audio, or ebook: 

High Society Lady Detective series 

1920s Lady Traveler in Egypt series
 
 

Sources: 

https://www.sayers.org.uk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_L._Sayers

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dorothy-L-Sayers

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:57

Welcome to Mystery Books Podcast. I'm Mystery Author Sarah Rosette. This is season six, episode six, and it's all about Dorothy L. Sayers. We're closing out this season of Mystery Books Podcast with Dorothy L. Sayers, one of the Queens of Crime. I've already done a podcast about one of Dorothy L. Sayers' books. I will link to it. That was The Unpleasantness at the Bologna Club. And in that episode, I talk a lot about her writing, her writing style, about Lord Peter Whimsey, about the tone of the books. So I will link to that if you're interested in that aspect of Dorothy Sayers. But for this episode, we're going to go with a higher level view and look at her overall career and sort of what she did overall throughout her life. So a little background on Dorothy Sayers. She was born in Oxford in 1893. She was excellent at languages, and she graduated with first class honors in medieval French from Oxford. Another interesting thing about her is that before her writing career took off, she worked as an advertising copywriter, and she put those experiences to good use later on in her book Murder Must Advertise. So if you want an inside look at the world of advertising in the 1930-ish time period in London, have a look at that book. Some other interesting things about her, she was one of the founding members of the Detection Club. Now, this was a very prestigious group of authors came together and it included Agatha Christie, G.K. Chesterson, and they co-founded the Detection Club, and they wanted to elevate the genre of crime writing and promote fair play in their stories. So a lot of people looked down on crime novels at this time, saying, you know, that they weren't great literature or they weren't valuable. And I think this was one thing they did to promote crime fiction. Now, Dorothy Sayers wrote a really funny oath that the new members had to take. I'm going to read you a little bit of it because it is so entertaining. The oath was, quote, Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of divine revelation, feminine intuition, mumbo jumbo, jiggery pokery, coincidence, or the act of God. So that was the main part of the oath. But they also had to promise never to conceal a vital clue from the reader and to honor the king's English, which I think those are those are great um add-ons. And then if you took the oath and you didn't keep your promises, curses were going to be called down upon you, and they were may other writers anticipate your plots, may your publishers do you down in your contracts, may strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints, and may your sales continually diminish. And that is frightening stuff indeed for writers. Another interesting thing about Sayers is that uh after she wrote mysteries early on in her career, and then later in her career, she shifted to more religious themes. She wrote a cycle of radio plays called The Man Born to Be King, and it was about the life of Jesus Christ. And then she also translated uh Dante's Divine Comedy. She considered that to be her most significant work. So let's talk about some of her other things that she published. She did detective novels. Her most famous character is, of course, Lord Peter Whimsey. He's an aristocratic sleuth, and there's 11 novels and many short stories with him as the main character. She also did many plays, some of those religious, and some of them were performed in cathedrals and broadcast on the BBC. And she was a very good literary critic. She wrote essays and literary criticism. Now, there's a couple of themes that come up again and again in her books. One of them is intellectual curiosity and problem solving. And you see that in the Lord Peter Whimsey books. He's very much like Albert Campion. He seems to be foolish, seems to be a fop, but underneath it all, he's actually very smart and intelligent. And he's using logic and deduction to figure out what has happened, the truth behind the surface, the truth of the mystery, what is really going on. Another one of the themes that come up again and again in her books is social commentary. And I you can see this in the, especially in the review of the unpleasantness at the Bologna Club. It's very much a commentary on war, the effects of PTSD, and the effects of that on society and family. And I read it, uh, there was some stuff going on in the world, and I was like, wow, this feels very contemporary, because some of those issues we're still dealing with them. And then a third theme would be the contrast and interplay between faith and reason. She was a devout Christian and she explored this contrast between having faith and also having intelligence, which makes so much sense because intelligence and deep thinking were very important to her. And so it would make sense that she would explore this in her writing. So I'll just mention a couple of her books that are very well known. Whose Body was her first Lord Peter Whimsey book. It introduces Lord Peter Whimsey and has kind of the light mystery tone. There's lots of great dialogue, especially between Whimsy and Bunter, his gentleman's gentleman. Then there's Drong Poison, and that is the introduction of Harriet Vane, who is Whimsy's equal and his love interest. And over the course of the series, they become closer. And then there's uh Gaudy Knight, is probably, I would say that's probably her most famous book. It's set at an Oxford College and explores challenges women faced in academia in that time time period. So if you're interested in Dorothy Sayers and you don't know where to start, I actually wouldn't recommend starting with Who's Body because that's that is the first in the series. So if you're one of those people who must start with the first book, by all means do it. But I found Who's Body a little hardgoing. So I would say probably one of the other books later in the series, maybe The Unpleasantness at the Bologna Club or Murder Miss Advertise. Those are still pretty early in the series, and you can get a feel for all the characters, and then um go on from there or go back and read Who's Body later. So that is a quick overview of Dorothy Sayers. So I will wrap this season up here and I will get back to writing books because I know that many of you are waiting for those books. So I don't want to spend too long on the podcast. But I do hope you've enjoyed this podcast and it's given you some new possibilities for your to be red pile. And if you've enjoyed it, I hope you'll tell a fellow mystery reader about it. If you can't get enough of 1920s Who Done It, check out my High Society Lady Detective series. It's available in ebook, audio, or print, and you can find that at Sarah Rosettebooks.com. Happy sleuthing, and I'll see you next time.