Dorothy Leigh Sayers, b. 1893, Oxford, England; d. 1957, Witham, Essex, England. A clergyman's daughter, Dorothy L. Sayers was raised in an isolated parish in Huntingdonshire, where she was tutored by a French governess; in her teens, she was sent to boarding school in Salisbury, where (according to her later writings) she enjoyed her subjects but was socially miserable. She won a scholarship to Oxford and entered Somerville College there in 1912, where she studied modern languages and French literature and did extremely well, finishing with First Class Honours. She had a variety of jobs for a few years after that, including an editorial position at the publisher Blackwell's, in Oxford, where she plunged into the intellectual life of a scholar with enthusiasm, never truly to leave it. She published two volumes of poetry during that period.
In 1922 she found a position as an advertising copywriter at Benson's, a London advertising agency, where she enjoyed the cameraderie and creativity, later using the agency as a setting for the Wimsey novel Murder Must Advertise. Meanwhile, her father had changed his parish for an even poorer living at Wisbech, in the Fen country, and she spent her vacations there writing drafts of a novel featuring a nobleman/detective whose family seat was also in that district. The first Wimsey novel, Whose Body?, was published in 1923, and three others followed in as many years, as her readership grew.
By this time, Sayers's romantic life was turbulent and rather unhappy. By nature earthy and a bit of a vamp, she had had many beaux at university, and had had an intense crush on the young Captain whose assistant she had been at a boarding school in France in 1919. However, she did not fall deeply in love until she was 29, to a caddish journalist and novelist named John Cournos. She would have married him, but he claimed not to believe in marriage, pressuring her to live with him anyway; after a year of frustrated non-consummation (she refused to use birth control, wanting instead to marry and have children) she broke it off, only to learn afterward that Cournos's marriage "principles" had been merely a test of her devotion. The experience scarred her deeply, and in Strong Poison she made the story a central part of the plot, putting Harriet Vane in the same situation. On the rebound, she had an affair with a car salesman and motorcyclist, Bill White, and to her consternation became pregnant. Her son was delivered in secrecy-- even her parents never knew-- and was raised by a cousin; it soon became clear that Bill could not be a reliable husband. Two years later, in 1926, she married a divorced journalist and celebrated raconteur, Capt. Atherton Fleming, known as 'Mac'; he later adopted her child as his own. They were comrades at first and enjoyed each other's company, but as Sayers's success grew, Fleming's diminished; he became unhappy, and he began to drink and to treat her badly; she called him "queer and unreliable", and he stopped earning anything. Their unhappiness continued until his sudden death in 1950. Given Sayers's bad history with men, it is easy to read the character of Peter Wimsey as the perfect man (an intelligent partner as well as passionate lover) that she dreamed of, and of Harriet Vane as a picture of Sayers herself; there is real feeling in the depiction in Busman's Honeymoon of the final happiness of Peter and Harriet.
In the following decades, she continued to write widely, editing anthologies of mystery stories, translating medieval French poetry, lecturing for the BBC and others, reviewing books for the Times, and always continuing the Wimsey saga. She announced in the late 1940s (a decade after the climactic Busman's Honeymoon) that there would be no more Wimsey novels, but there were nevertheless several more stories and she actually started a sequel. When her success freed her from financial worries, she turned to the scholarly pursuits that had always interested her, writing religious dramas and Christian apologetics, expounding Christian dogma and making it meaningful in lectures, essays, radio talks, and books; and enthusiastically volunteering in church work herself, while still immersed in the intellectual life of wartime and postwar London as a medieval scholar. Religion and theology had always been of intense importance to her, and she remained a lifelong Anglican, although her relationship with the church and Christianity was somewhat equivocal---she turned down a Doctor of Divinity degree from the Archbishop of Canterbury, to some extent on the grounds that she didn't want to be connected in the public mind with the church authorities. Her last great work, a translation of Dante's "Divine Comedy", consumed her intensely for over a decade, and was not quite finished at her death.
Lord Peter Wimsey, debonair and wealthy bachelor and detective, was introduced in 1923 in Whose Body?. He is the second son of the Duke of Denver, and is hence possessed of a large fortune but is free from binding ties to title and estate. He is quickwitted, an honours graduate of Oxford, where he was a famous cricketer; he is also a connoisseur of food and wine and collector of rare manuscripts. With his competent and indefatigable valet, Bunter, he solves crimes as something of a hobby. Not all of these characteristics were present in the first book (where he is something of a caricature), and as Sayers wrote more novels, she allowed his personality to develop and his characterization to become richer and more human. By the end of the series, he has become a consistent human being, with past and future, family and social history, and a complicated psychology. His long courtship of (and eventual marriage to) Harriet Vane, whom he acquitted of murder in Strong Poison, makes Sayers's books as much novels of manners (in the grand English style) as they are detective stories, containing much real psychological insight; his delight in literary quotation and parody, and his quick wit, make his conversations a pleasure to read.
In 1948, after 12 novels, when Peter had been successfully married and his and Harriet's future happiness well-established, Sayers announced that there would be no more Wimsey novels, but in a few short stories we see the couple as happy parents of three children, and she began a sequel, of which five chapters and some notes survive. Fifty years later, the sequel was completed by Jill Paton Walsh and published in 1998 under the title Thrones, Dominations.
All Sayers's novels feature Wimsey, but 11 of her short stories star the dapper wine salesman Montague Egg, who is observant as a shrewd salesman should be, and sums up his deductions with banal quotations from the "Salesman's Handbook." He was introduced in the 1933 collection Hangman's Holiday. Sayers felt that these stories were not great literature, but they are engaging and entertaining on rereading. Sayers was also a member of the Detection Club, which produced a number of collaborative mysteries in which each chapter was contributed by a different author without knowing the plot intentions of the others. She participated in Behind the Screen (serialized 1930), Scoop (serialized 1931), The Floating Admiral (published by George Doran, 1931), Ask a Policeman (published in a limited edition by Macmillan, 1933), The Anatomy of Murder (published by John Lane, 1936; considers real-life crimes), Double Death (published by Gollancz, 1939), Six Against the Yard (published 1948; with critiques by a real-life CID detective), No Flowers By Request (serialized 1953). Among the other Club members were Agatha Christie, Freeman W. Crofts, Hugh Walpole, E. C. Bentley, and G. K. Chesterton (and, in modern times, P. D. James, Ngaio Marsh, Julian Symons, and Michael Innes).
Sayers today is known as much for her scholarship and translations as for her detective writing, just as she would have hoped; but the Wimsey novels are still remarkable for their artful combination of solid puzzles and strong, interesting personalities, so that the plot is driven as much by the characters themselves as by the detection. Sayers frequently lamented that "modern" writers of her time had decided that characterization got in the way of the plot, and she consciously aimed in her stories to bring the detective story back into the rich tradition of the 19th-century English novel. Her rich, literate writing shows how satisfying the the combination of mystery and manners can be.
Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her life and soul (St. Martin's Press, New York, 1995). The most comprehensive and recent.
Mary Brian Durkin, Dorothy L. Sayers (Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1980).
Catherine Kenney, The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers (The Kent State University Press, 1990).