Although Dorothy L. Sayers (she always insisted on the use of her middle initial) later developed various writing careers, including religious stage and radio drama, essays, and translations of Dante, her reputation as a novelist rests exclusively on a dozen detective novels that established her as one of the finest practitioners of the genre. She was never quite comfortable with the stigma of writing what she termed "literature of escape," but her novels and stories--especially those that starred her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey--provided her with a large income and rescued her from work in an advertising agency so that she could eventually retire Wimsey (as Conan Doyle had retired Sherlock Holmes) and devote the last two decades of her life to the "literature of expression" of her strong religious concerns. Nonetheless, Sayers rescued detective fiction from a post-Conan Doyle slump, modernized it along her own lines, and imposed...