Set between the two World Wars, the Wimsey novels are more than typical manor-house mysteries. Sayers used her knowledge of various topics—including advertising, women’s education, and veterans’ health—to give her books realistic details. In 1936, she brought Wimsey to the stage in Busman’s Honeymoon, a story which Sayers would publish as a novel the following year. The play was so successful that she gave up mystery writing to focus on the stage, producing a series of religious works culminating in The Man Born to Be King (1941), a radio drama about the life of Jesus.
Sayers continued writing theological essays and criticism during and after World War II. In 1949, she published the first volume of a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. She was halfway through the third volume when she died of a heart attack in 1957. Although she considered this translation to be her best work, it is for her elegantly constructed detective fiction that Sayers remains best remembered.
Sayers in the garden of her Oxford home, around 1897. She holds her two toy monkeys, Jocko and Jacko.
An 1899 studio portrait of Sayers, around six years old. (Photo courtesy of I. Palmer Clarke/Cambridge.)
The Sayers family circa 1905. Dorothy (about age twelve) posed with her family outside their home at the Bluntisham rectory. First row, left to right: Gertrude Sayers (aunt), Dorothy. Second row, left to right: Anna Breakey Sayers (grandmother), Mabel Leigh (aunt). Back row, left to right: Reverend Henry Sayers (father), Ivy Shrimpton (cousin), Helen Mary Leigh Sayers (mother).
Seventeen-year-old Sayers wearing a pageant costume in 1908.
Sayers with friends, posing as shipping magnate Sir Hugh Allen, in 1915.
A studio portrait of Sayers taken in 1926.
Sayers’s husband, “Mac” Fleming, at home in 1930 behind overflowing boxes of Sayers’s fan mail. A family friend sits to the right. (Photo courtesy of the Tropical Press Agency.)
Sayers’s husband, “Mac” Fleming, standing in doorway.
Sayers in 1950, at the unveiling of a plaque at the S. H. Benson advertising agency, where she once worked as a copywriter. The plaque was placed at the foot of a spiral staircase in the agency, a tribute to a character in Murder Must Advertise who plunges down a similar staircase.
All images used by permission of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1927 by Dorothy Leigh Sayers Fleming
copyright renewed © 1955 by Dorothy Leigh Sayers Fleming
cover design by Katrina Damkoehler
978-1-4532-5886-6
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Biographical Note
Contents
Part I
I. Overheard
II. Miching Mallecho
III. A Use for Spinsters
IV. A Bit Mental
V. Gossip
VI. Found Dead
VII. Ham and Brandy
VIII. Concerning Crime
IX. The Will
Part II
X. The Will Again
XI. Cross-Roads
XII. A Tale of Two Spinsters
XIII. Hallelujah
XIV. Sharp Quillets of the Law
XV. Temptation of St. Peter
XVI. A Cast-Iron Alibi
XVII. The Country Lawyer's Story
XVIII. The London Lawyer's Story
Part III
XIX. Gone Away
XX. Murder
XXI. By What Means?
XXII. A Case of Conscience
XXIII.--and Smote Him, Thus
Genealogical Table
A Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers
Copyright
Dorothy L. Sayers - [Lord Peter Wimsey 03] Page 27