Wimsey solves crimes with elegance and enthusiasm, but true resolution eludes him. The power of her writing lies instead in the way she turns the classic promise of a mystery novel on its head. I set off on a year of obsession, first with Wimsey and his fictional cohort, then with the rest of Sayers’s oeuvre.īut Sayers’s work didn’t comfort me in the way I had initially expected, with clever, complete answers to daunting questions. And it, in turn, plucked me out of the sense that I was trapped on some perilous brink. A collection of Sayers’s stories, Lord Peter: The Complete Lord Peter Wimsey Stories, had sat on my shelf for years I picked it up. I have always turned to detective stories when I feel vulnerable there is nothing so relaxing as the promise that even the grisliest problem can, with the correct approach, be neatly solved. The unexpected, devastating end of a COVID-era romance had left me feeling everything, even boredom, with frightening intensity. Sayers-whose first novel, Whose Body?, was published a century ago this year-in January 2022. I first encountered Wimsey, the most famous creation of the mystery novelist Dorothy L. And Lord Peter Wimsey-scion of the aristocracy military hero buoyant connoisseur of wine, rare books, piano music, and women-is on the hunt for his next beguiling case. Humanity has gone through hell and emerged strung between merry, hectic giddiness and entrenched, unspeakable grief.
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