SOURCE: Ohanian, Seta. “Dinner with Dorothy L. Sayers Or ‘As My Whimsey Feeds Me’.” Journal of Popular Culture 13, no. 3 (spring 1980): 434-46.

In the following essay, Ohanian provides an overview of Sayers's Lord Wimsey stories, asserting that “each tale is a complete experience of the detective process, straightforward, as the medium dictates, and without too many of the ramifications and developments of which Sayers is fond.”

The laws which govern the writing of detective fiction constitute a rigid canon which cannot be transgressed without endangering the purity of the genre. These commandments, which several writers have not hesitated to define and enumerate for public consumption, are of classical derivation, and it is with an eye toward Aristotle that Jacques Barzun says of detective fiction that “it is an art of symmetry, it seeks the appearance of logical necessity, like classical tragedy, and like tragedy it cherishes the unity of...