There’s an article in October’s issue of Red Herrings titled “A Celebration of Lord Peter Wimsey”. I always find something to inspire or educate me in the CWA monthly bulletin. I already knew that Sayers had a first-class degree in Modern Languages from Somerville College, Oxford. I also knew that she worked in advertising as a copywriter. I didn’t know that in 1924, and unmarried, she had a son who she gave to her cousin to raise. I also discovered that she wore men’s suits and rode a motorcycle.
Claire and I both love the Lord Peter Wimsey books of Dorothy L Sayers. As the article quotes Barry Forshaw, “Sayers was a far better writer than her contemporary Agatha Christie … her academic background allowed her to freight in serious literary concepts along with the more populist concerns of the crime thriller.”
The chair of the CWA, Vaseem Khan, is quoted as saying that Sayers is now the least remembered of the four Queens of Crime from the Golden Age – the others being Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. What about Josephine Tey? Her novel The Daughter of Time was named the greatest crime novel of all time by the CWA in 1990. Josephine Tey was certainly writing great crime novels between 1929 and 1952. Ngaio Marsh’s work runs from 1934 to 1982, and Margery Allingham from 1929 to 1989. I suppose the thing is that neither Sayers, nor Tey, were as prolific as Christie, Marsh, or Allingham.
It is undeniable that Agatha Christie’s fictional sleuths, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, have popularity and longevity, particularly Poirot. So what can I learn from this? I’ve left it a bit late to write as many novels as any of them. I can only hope to make my characters interesting, and my plots enthralling. Certainly when I read the ODNB entry for Sir Anthony Standen, I thought he’d led a far more interesting life that any character of Sayers, Christie, or the others. I’ll just have to keep striving to do him justice in the Sir Anthony Standen Adventures.