Biography Essay

Her dozen detective novels and two dozen short stories in that genre established the reputation of Dorothy Leigh Sayers in the 1920s and 1930s as a major writer of mysteries; they also established Lord Peter Wimsey as an equally famous fictional detective. Since the success of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the fame of the serial detectives had threatened to eclipse that of their authors, yet it had become essential that a forceful personality be created for a writer in the genre to succeed in capturing an audience. Sayers conceived of Lord Peter as a fascinating if somewhat eccentric charmer, following the Conan Doyle tradition that the character of the detective took precedence over all other facets of the detective fiction. Like Conan Doyle she found herself eventually wanting to rid herself of Wimsey and what...