SOURCE: Aird, Catherine. “It Was the Cat!” In Dorothy L. Sayers: The Centenary Celebration, edited by Alzina Stone Dale, pp. 79-86. New York: Walker and Company, 1993.

In the following essay, Aird assesses the achievement of Sayers's detective short stories.

It may seem a little inappropriate to use a quotation from Gilbert and Sullivan's light opera H.M.S. Pinafore when writing about the short stories of DLS, but members of the genus Felix species domesticus do figure more than somewhat in this particular aspect of her exceptionally wide-reaching oeuvre, reminding us of DLS's fondness for their independent ways.

For various reasons her short stories do not seem to have had the same attention that the rest of her many writings—the full-length detective stories, the theological plays, her work on Dante, and so forth—have attracted: indeed some commentators have been less than enthusiastic about them.

Can they...