Lord Peter Wimsey would appear in eleven novels during the lifetime of Dorothy L. Sayers; she left one unfinished, and three more would be written by Jill Paton Walsh, who finished Thrones, Dominations, that unfinished manuscript. (As a fan of the series, I believe Thrones, Dominations is absolutely worth reading, but it’s worth noting that I hadn’t even realized the third one existed, because I disliked the second so much.) Sayers also wrote a handful of short story collections and a series of “letters” from the family printed in The Spectator and intended to be the family’s reaction to the early days of World War II.

There would, in those books, be plenty of changes in how Peter appeared. It became considerably more explicit in later books that his upper class twittish behaviour was a pose, and in a later book it’s said that it means he’s either “frightfully bored or detecting something.” Peter’s PTSD would become an important aspect of his motivations, along with the woman who rejected him during his darkest days in World War I. Faithful Manservant Bunter would be revealed to be someone he knew during the war who had helped save his life; Bunter saved his life again by hauling him out of his depression.

The cast of characters would widen; while we met the Dowager Duchess and Chief Inspector Parker in Whose Body?, the rest of the family would appear in Clouds of Witness, except Peter’s niece and nephew. Nephew Jerry, or “Pickled Gherkins,” as Peter called him sometimes, would be in a short story or two and become a major character in Gaudy Night; niece Winifred would be such a nonentity throughout the series that I had to double check her name, because I’m not sure she’s ever actually a character. And, of course, Lady Mary wouldn’t marry until later. In time, we would also meet Harriet Vane, the love of Peter’s life.

Peter lives in a fully realized world. He has friends, associates, family, and a past. He is given his own fictional bibliography. We would eventually learn that the source of the Wimsey money was not the estate, but Peter was independently wealthy as a landlord and investor. His sister Mary would flirt with communism, though of course a wealthy aristocrat married in time to a police officer was not exactly going to survive in a Stalinist regime. Still, there are clubs and businesses and so forth that exist solely in the Wimsey world alongside existing businesses and brands and so forth from ours.

It is true that, often, the solutions were based on clever tricks. The murder weapon in the play, Busman’s Honeymoon, is a bit of a Rube Goldberg machine. Other books rely on complicated details of genealogy or railway timetables for their solutions. It’s true that the books stand out in sharp contrast to some of the grittier books coming out of the US detective tradition at the time. Lord Wimsey may be strong and clever and a crack shot, but how would he and Sam Spade get along? It’s also true that the upper class criminals are more likely to be allowed to “do the right thing” rather than be hanged for their crimes. Suicide is seen as atonement for murder. Sayers was, in the end, bound by her class and time, after all. Still, the books are some of my favourites.

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