Dorothy Sayers Biography

Dorothy Leigh Sayers introduced her monocle-wearing detective character, Lord Peter Wimsey, in the 1923 novel Who’s Body? Comfortably wealthy, Oxford-schooled, a lover of wine and fine cars, Wimsey was an amateur sleuth who solved mysteries in a world of vicars, cricketers, gentlemen’s clubs, and other features of 1920s England. Wimsey was a hit with readers, and Sayers wrote 14 Wimsey novels and short story collections in all, including Clouds of Witness (1926), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), Five Red Herrings (1931) and Busman’s Honeymoon (1937). The daughter of a minister, Sayers later wrote many plays, essays and radio broadcasts on Christian themes. One of her best-known works of that genre is The Mind of the Maker (1941), which discusses the religious side of the human creative impulse. Sayers also wrote a celebrated English translation of Dante‘s Divine Comedy, the third part of which was completed by her friend Barbara Reynolds after her death.