by DOROTHY L. SAYERS

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Dorothy Leigh Sayers was an English crime writer and poet. She was also a student of classical and modern languages. She is best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories set between the First and Second World Wars that feature English aristocrat and amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. As a crime writer during the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction”, Sayers was considered one of its four “Queens of Crime”, alongside Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. Sayers is also known for her plays, literary criticism, and essays. She considered her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy to be her best work. Sayers’s obituarist, writing in The New York Times in 1957, noted that many critics at the time regarded her mystery The Nine Tailors as her finest literary achievement. Sayers’s detective stories explored the trauma of World War I veterans in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, discussed the ethics of advertising in Murder Must Advertise, and advocated women’s education (then a controversial subject) and role in society in Gaudy Night. In Gaudy Night, Miss Barton writes a book attacking the Nazi doctrine of Kinder, Küche, Kirche, which restricted women’s roles to family activities, and in many ways the novel can be read as an attack on Nazi social doctrine. It has been described as “the first feminist mystery novel.” Sayers’s Christian and academic experiences are themes in her detective series.