Lord Peter Wimsey Investigates

Be warned … once you make friends with Wimsey you’ll want to get better acquainted – Christopher FowlerPart of the Golden Age of mystery writers working between the wars, Sayers is often credited as the most intelligent of them all. Certainly her plots are ingenious and intricate, and she relishes technical detail and literary quotation * Guardian *After 60-odd years still compulsively readable * Independent *The books chronicling Wimsey’s adventures remain models of their kind – Barry ForshawIn time of dire and immediate trouble, one might well call upon a Sherlock Holmes for a quick solution to one’s trials. But for the balm that reassures one about surviving the vicissitudes of life, one could do no better than to anchor onto a Lord Peter Wimsey – Elizabeth George

Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born in Oxford in 1893, the only child of the Rev. Henry Sayers. She won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, and in 1915 she finished her modern languages course with first-class honours. After university she worked in a publisher’s office before joining an advertising firm, S. H. Benson, where she coined the famous slogan: ‘Guinness is good for you’.

In 1923 she published her first novel, Whose Body?, which introduced Lord Peter Wimsey, her hero for fourteen volumes of novels and short stories. She also wrote plays and essays, and she considered her best work to be her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. She died in 1957.