SOURCE: Sayers, Dorothy. Introduction to The Second Omnibus of Crime, 1932, edited by Dorothy Sayers, pp. 1-16. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1932.

In the following essay, Sayers elucidates the defining characteristics of the detective story and the virtual disappearance of the detective short story genre.

Ten years ago, or rather more, a friend and myself, being stranded in London on a wet Sunday with nothing particular to do, went down to one of the great termini, to see if we could find a detective-story to read aloud. I remember that we started with no very high hopes. The book-stall was more likely, we thought, to be stocked with “ordinary novels.” We were lucky. We found Cleveland Moffet's Through the Wall, and we congratulated ourselves. Today we should be surprised if we could not choose between a score or so of detective-novels, all reasonably well written and issued by first-class firms...