A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025. Mysteries. S Is For Dorothy L. Sayers and Mary Stewart

 

My first encounter with Dorothy L Sayers was her translation of The Song Of Roland, which I read for English at university. I didn’t even know she wrote mystery stories at the time! She also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy, though she only got as far as the first two volumes of three before dying suddenly in her sixties.

Later, I discovered her amateur sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, for whom she is best known. 

She was a founding member of the Detection Club, which I believe is still around. Another member was Agatha Christie. I mentioned the club’s “fair play” rules, also known as Knox’s Ten Commandments, which, among other things, said that readers should be able to work out whodunnit. Here is a Wikipedia article with the details.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Detective_Fiction

I have read her first novel, Whose Body?  which introduced Lord Peter Wimsey, and some of her short stories. She also wrote religious plays. 

Lord Peter Wimsey is an aristocrat, son of the Duke of Denver. He has a valet called Bunter, who was his batman during the Great War. Bunter assists him. He also knows what Peter went through while fighting in that war. Early in the first novel, he has a bout of PTSD when hearing a loud noise from the street that reminds him of the explosions during the fighting, and Bunter comforts him. I don’t recall any of the books I’ve read at the time that did this. We never really get into Poirot’s head, although Miss Marple does share her thoughts with the reader about how things have changed. Hastings, Poirot’s sidekick, mostly shares his annoyance when Poirot corrects him. We know Hastings has been in the war, as The Mysterious Affair At Styles has him recovering from his wounds at the beginning, but it never turns up again, as far as I recall. 

The killer in Whose Body? was an interesting twist, but not something you couldn’t work out, and made sense when you thought about it.

There was a TV series starring Ian Carmichael, adapting five of the novels, made in 1972. He also played the role in a series of radio plays. I haven’t seen or listened to any of them, but it might be possible to find them online. 

Just briefly here, another S writer was Mary Stewart, who is best known for her Merlin novels, but who also wrote quite a few romantic mysteries, some of them adapted for film, such as The Moon-Spinners, which was adapted for a Disney film. I have read some of her mysteries, though I admit I prefer her Merlin books, which I think are classics. My sister is the Stewart mystery fan in my family. But the mysteries are very enjoyable too. 

These books, from both authors, are classics, so you shouldn’t have any trouble finding them. 

Tomorrow we’ll talk a bit about Josephine Tey.