“Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it 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? Indeed, some of her principles were codified in the ceremonial oaths she demanded of prospective members of the Detection Club: No writer should lie: “Any fool can tell a lie, and any fool can believe it but the right method is to tell the truth in such a way that the intelligent reader is seduced into telling the lie for himself.” She was obsessed with Fair Play-all the clues should be laid in front of the reader, all the deductions should be ones the readers could make, if only they were able. Why? We’ll get to that.īut first the novels! Entertaining, erudite, lucid, filled with ingenious puzzles and even more ingenious solutions, written with grace, elegance, flair, wit, and an acute attention to character and psychological development, these novels combined the best qualities of the detective story with a novelist’s attention to the mores and manners of the day. With minor exceptions, unpublished in her lifetime, she never again produced a work of detective fiction in any form.

In the field of detective fiction, she was an overwhelming force, and seemingly everywhere.Īnd then she stopped. Chesterton, among many others, she was the driving force behind three collaborative novels and additional collaborative serials broadcast on the BBC. As a member and the long-term president of the Detection Club, a writers’ association that included Christie and G.K. As a reviewer, she covered more than 350 detective novels for the Sunday Times, and her essays appeared widely in other publications. Her influence on detective fiction went far wider than that, however.Īs an editor, she produced a magisterial three-volume Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (1928, 1931, 1934) and its sequel Tales of Detection (1936), accompanied by cogent analyses of the contents.

She earned that title largely on the strength of eleven extraordinary novels published between 19, featuring the iconic character of Lord Peter Wimsey and, in four of them, the inestimable Harriet Vane, as well as dozens of short stories and one stand-alone novel. Sayers (don’t forget the middle initial, please, she was most adamant about that). In the Golden Age of British detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s, four women were universally considered the four Queens-Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L.

Dorothy sayers nine tailors