To celebrate the 128th Birthday of Dorothy L. Sayers, we've asked Dr. Eric Sandberg to give us a glimpse into the life and legacy of this prolific writer and critic, and her wider impact on one of the most fruitful periods in the history of crime fiction.

The next volume in the prestigious McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series is now available for preorder. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction by Eric Sandberg (no. 11 in the series) looks at the life and work of the creator of sleuths Lord Peter Wimsey and Montague Egg.

“[. . .] any writer who tries to make a detective story a work of art at all will do well if he writes it in such a way that Aristotle could have enjoyed and approved.”[1]

-- Dorothy L. Sayers --

Dorothy L. Sayers, born 128 years ago today, will be a familiar figure to any reader of mystery fiction. Alongside writers like Margery Allingham (1904–1966), Agatha Christie (1890–1976), Elizabeth Mackintosh (better known as Josephine Tey) (1896–1952), Ngaio Marsh (1895–1982), and Gladys Mitchell (1901–1983), Sayers was a key practitioner of interwar detective fiction, and at the same time its leading historian and theorist. Her Lord Peter Wimsey novels are touchstones of British Golden Age detective fiction. The eleven novels in the series are classic examples of the way crime fiction in general, and the clue-puzzle mystery in particular, can integrate complex characterisation, powerful relationships, and important social material, particularly in the novels that followed the introduction of the fictional detective novelist Harriet Vane, Wimsey’s love interest, investigative partner, and – eventually – wife. Q. D. Leavis may have deplored the “odd conviction” that Sayers belonged to a “different class” than other popular writers, and Edmund Wilson may have described her writing as lacking “any distinction at all,” but these condemnations have been reduced by the judgement of posterity to little more than literary-historical curiosities.[2] Love her or hate her – and Sayers is undeniably a polarizing figure – there can be no doubt that she is one of the central figures in the history of the genre.

In addition to the Wimsey novels (and to a lesser extent the short stories, which even the fondest reader cannot praise with anything approaching fervid enthusiasm) that lie at the heart of her continued popularity, Sayers wrote eleven short stories featuring the travelling wine salesman and amateur detective Montague Egg, and co-authored The Documents in the Case (1930), an experimental documentary/epistolary detective novel. She reviewed over 300 crime novels between 1933 and 1935, wrote several important essays on detective fiction, edited three influential Omnibus of Crime anthologies, and acted as a founding member and president of the Detection Club. All in all, few writers can have had as powerful an impact on their chosen form as Sayers.

There is, however, something unexpected, and for her readers highly fortuitous, about the fact that Sayers’ wrote detective fiction at all. She came from an extremely respectable background: her father, the Reverend Henry Sayers, was an educator and Anglican clergyman at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford and in the parish of Bluntisham-cum-Earith, Huntingdonshire, while her mother Helen was the daughter of a Leicestershire solicitor. Before leaving home for boarding school, Sayers had already studied Latin, French, and German. She entered Somerville College at the University of Oxford in 1912 on the Gilchrist Scholarship in Modern Languages. Of course, at this time women were not eligible for degrees, but Sayers’ was among the first female students to be (belatedly) awarded an MA when these rules were finally changed in 1920. Sayers’ early literary interests were quite conventional, as is indicated by the poems she published in 1916 (Op. I) and 1918 (Catholic Tales and Christian Songs).

After completing her studies, however, instead of returning to her family as might have been expected (or making a respectable marriage, perhaps to a clergyman), Sayers worked as a teacher in a girl’s school, a reader for a publisher, and as a secretary to a school in France. From 1920 she lived in London and two years later began working for the advertising agency S. H. Benson as a copy-writer – this experience became the basis for her 1933 novel Murder Must Advertise. While this allowed her to live independently and not rely on her family for money, she was by no means well-off, and her first venture into detective fiction, the 1923 novel Whose Body? was written as much to sell as to produce something (as she later claimed) “more like a novel” than a conventional detective story.[3] The need to make money became more acute when the Sayers’ gave birth to a son in 1924 (despite being unmarried at the time). Sayers was extraordinarily productive over the next decade, publishing an average of a novel a year, in addition to an impressive quantity of short stories, articles, and reviews. By 1931, she had made enough money, and established herself firmly enough as a popular writer, to quit her work in advertising. She continued to write crime fiction until late in the decade, despite what one of her several biographers has described as an increasing “weariness with forcing all of her talents into one mold.”[4] In 1935 she published what many consider her masterpiece, Gaudy Night, which concludes the great romantic tale of Wimsey and Harriet Vane.

To the great sadness of many readers, Sayers gradually abandoned detective fiction in favour of other literary projects. From 1937 onwards, she began to write for the stage – in fact her last Wimsey novel, Busman’s Honeymoon, was adapted from a co-written play – producing a number of dramatic works, largely on religious themes. Probably the best-known of these is the twelve-part radio play cycle The Man Born to be King which aired on the BBC radio in 1941 and 1942. By the end of the Second World War, she had become a rather well-known public figure, speaking and writing about the role of the Anglican Church and the religious individual in a time of strife and violence. During the war years, she also published The Mind of the Maker (1941), an attempt, perhaps not entirely successful, to synthesize Sayers’ religious and literary interests.

Between the end of the war and her death in 1957, Sayer’s writing career entered its third and final stage. When she discovered the Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s work in 1943, she instantly realised that he was “the most incomparable story-teller who ever set pen to paper”, [5] and by 1946 she began lecturing on his work. Her translation of the first Canticle of the Divine Comedy, Inferno, was published by Penguin in 1949, followed by Purgatorio in 1955. Her friend (and biographer) Barbara Reynolds completed Paradiso from her notes, and the translation (while subject to criticism over the years) was considered the standard edition until quite recently, and to this day remains in print.

The extraordinary diversity of Sayers’ career as a detective novelist, religious playwright, and literary translator can be interpreted in a number of ways. Some readers – a minority – see her as an academic, a scholar, and an intellectual who was forced for a time to prostitute her real talents in order to pay her bills. For others – general readers, and certainly most of the members of the International Crime Fiction Association – she was a wonderful writer of detection fiction who did more than anyone else of her generation – yes, even Christie – to develop the potential of the form. These readers can only lament the fact that she succumbed to the dreary siren’s call of religious and intellectual respectability. Catherine Kenney, however, has emphasised thematic continuities, including a fascination with the relationship between tradition and modernity, a deep concern with questions of justice and morality, and in an interest in the roles of men and women in a changing society, over the different parts of Sayers’ career.[6] But any way one chooses to approach Sayers’ body of work – or which part of it one chooses to approach, more than a century after her birth she remains a writer to celebrate.

References

​[1] Dorothy L. Sayers, “Aristotle on Detective Fiction,” English 1.1 (1936) 23-35. doi: 10.1093/english/1.1.23, 35.

[2] Q. D. Leavis, “The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers,” Scrutiny (December 1937) 334-340. 335.; Edmund Wilson, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd: A Second Report on Detective Fiction,” The New Yorker (June 20, 1945) 59-66. 60.

[3] Dorothy L. Sayers, “Gaudy Night,” in The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Howard Haycroft (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1946), 208.

[4] Ralph E. Hone, Dorothy L. Sayers: A Literary Biography (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1979), 63.

[5] Dorothy L. Sayers, “And Telling You a Story . . .,” in Further Papers on Dante: His Heirs and His Ancestors by Dorothy L. Sayers (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006), 2.

[6] Catherine Kenney, The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers (Kent: Kent State University Press,1990), 184.