dorothy sayers? anyone?

So it's only been recommended to me for like ten years, so this is a little early to get on that, but...

If I were to leap into the Sayers back catalog, where should I start? In order or is one of the other books better for a good landing?

(Yes I am literally doing this because Gaudy Night has only been mentioned like a million times and I am so curious.)

Comments

Gaudy Night

[jesse_the_k]

and later, if you still care, Busman's Honeymoon.

Have His Carcase I barely read when I adored Sayers.

I just bounced off (an excellent audio reading by Ian Carmichael) of the initial one, Strong Poison. Fifteen and 25-year-old mes found the terrors of UK upper class more interesting, and didn't get hung up on the anti-queer sentiment and anti-Semitism.

I loved this Toast essay on and in the style of Gaudy Night:
http://the-toast.net/2015/04/28/on-harriet-vane-and-peter-wimsey-an-essay-with-personal-interruptions/

[leupagus]

Excellent question! My question would be: do you prefer mystery with romance or mystery without romance? Because about half of the Wimsey novels that Sayers wrote are just him (well, him and his butler and his friends), and the other half feature a woman, Harriet Vane, whom he falls in love with who solves crimes with him. If you prefer the mystery with romance, you don't really need to read any of the books pre-Harriet in order to get the gist of the series; however if you would rather just have straight mystery, then you can stop at a certain point and not read further.

So the straight mystery reading list rec would be:

Whose Body?
Clouds of Witness
Unnatural Death
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
The Five Red Herrings
Murder Must Advertise
The Nine Tailors

And the mystery plus romance reading reclist would be:

Strong Poison
Have His Carcase
Gaudy Night
Busman's Honeymoon

If you have no preference, I do think that starting at the beginning (Whose Body?) is a good place, since it's a pretty strong novel on its own (I certainly like it) and sets up some of the recurring issues throughout the series (Wimsey's shell-shock, for example). I do think the mystery plus romance novels are the best-written, with the exception of "Murder Must Advertise" which is a truly fantastic read and does some really fun things with alternating POVs.

[lazulus]

I second this comment! Murder Must Advertise remains my favourite Sayers and I will happily reread it despite knowing the ending. Of the Wimsey/Vane novels, Gaudy Night is my favourite, but I also have a huge fondness for Busman's Honeymoon.

[lazulus]

Also, I would heartily recommend the BBC dramatisations that are now available in a three volume set on Audible. Ian Carmichael is the quintessential Wimsey and they are well edited and wonderfully performed. Sadly the only audiobooks that are currently available are dreadful and I wish that they would re-record them with a narrator who doesn't make me want to put a hit out on them!

[greywash]

I second all of this!

FWIW, I think that my personal favorites are Murder Must Advertise and Strong Poison, but whenever I reread them, I reread the whole series, in order, from the beginning.

[kore]

I like this reading order too -- I think I just read straight through them all. Except for Five Red Herrings, which I found impenetrable. Nine Tailors is a real slog for 4/5 of the way, and then the final 20? or so pages are gorgeous and completely justify everything that came before.

[rissabby]

I agree about Nine Tailors. Nobby's story still stands out in my mind, but it took a long time to get there.

[fenris_wolf0]

I agree with leupagus and domarzione and ususally I recommend publication order. It's always safest and all of these books are very readable.

If you don't have an inkling of Peter Wimsey's old modus operandi, even taking into account the fact that these mysteries started as fairly conventional and not representative of the later ones which are a lot more relatable, it takes away from the best ones which are indeed the last few books.

In particular, do not start with Gaudy Night or even Strong Poison, even though they are both excellent. They are even more enjoyable if you see how the main character behaved before he met someone he could truly be himself with. The contrast is three quarter of the pleasure of seeing their romance develop imo.

Depending on how much time you have, go for the whole series or as much of it as you can: they become more and more interesting in publication order so I'd second greywash's recommendation 100%.

[ithiliana]

Brilliant post and recs!

I tend to like reading them in chronological order on a regular basis, although at other times, I pick up favorites (especially the plus romance/Harriet Vane ones for comfort reading). It is fun to see Peter evolve over the course of the series although I don't see it as so much a planned metanarrative but Sayers becoming better at craft and also more interested in the character as a flawed human being instead of the rather mannered trope-y type I read him in the earlier books.

[pir8fancier]

Agree with this assessment wholeheartedly. Of the plotty novels, agree that Murder Must Advertise is the most clever.

[codyne]

It's been many years, but it seems to me I read the Peter Wimsey books more or less in order, and it worked out well because the novels did build on each other, although the stories are not so interwoven that it would really hurt to read them out of order. There aren't any bad or weak ones, I don't think, so there is no downside to starting at the beginning, though I think I would recommend reading at least a few of the earlier ones before getting to Gaudy Night, if only because having the background makes it all the more intense. Maybe at least do all the ones with Harriet Vane in order, if you don't want to start at the beginning. (All this with the caveat that it's probably been 30 years since I read them, and my memory is pretty dodgy.)

[pensnest]

I have particular love for Murder Must Advertise, because it gives such a clear picture of what Sayers' own life in an ad agency must have been like. It's a bit like an AU, and I do love a really well-done AU. (The guff about the drug trade is meh.) And there is a cricket match, which reads like fanfic... DLS stanning Lord Peter *so hard*. Hee.

[dine]

leupagus's list is excellent, and following her suggestions make a great deal of sense. my personal absolute favourite novel is Murder Must Advertise but reading at least Whose Body? first would be a good idea

[nestra]

Yeah, I agree in general with other comments that the best books are Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, and Busman's Honeymoon. To get at least a basic grasp before you head into the Peter/Harriet, you could start with Clouds of Witness, then head to Strong Poison. But the only one that I think can really be a slog is The Five Red Herrings, and the early books are generally quick reads.

I waver a bit on Have His Carcase, but it gets you into Harriet's head.

[raincitygirl]

I would start with Murder Must Advertise, which is an awesome standalone Sayers book.

Then the Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night trilogy. It's a trilogy, not a quadrilogy, and anyone who says otherwise is lying to you. Busman's Honeymoon is great for the first few chapters, but then it kind of falls apart.

All that having been said, if Strong Poison and/or Have His Carcase are hard going and you feel like giving up, skip ahead to Gaudy Night. It's not only the best book in the trilogy, it's the best book Sayers wrote, PERIOD.

Then I would try The Nine Tailors, which is another standalone.

[bratfarrar]

I'd go with "Whose Body?" because it's a) one of the shorter ones, and b) is a good intro to the character of Peter Wimsey--a lot of the things that will show up in later books are at least touched on here. After that, my three favorites are probably "Murder Must Advertise", "Gaudy Night", and "Busman's Honeymoon" (it does *not* fall apart after the first few chapters, it's just functioning in a slightly different mode than the preceding books, and the bits where Harriet and Peter's valet Bunter come to an understanding have inspired a fair bit of fic for a reason). But the books as a whole tend to reward chronological reading, I think.

Alternately, the short story collections are also a lot of fun, and since they're mostly unconnected you can read them in nearly any order and still get a decent feel for the recurring characters.

[bratfarrar]

I should add that "Have His Carcass" is easier going if you just skip through the chapter where they're code-breaking, but it really requires having read "Strong Poison" first so you can understand the character interactions between Peter and Harriet. "Gaudy Night", even though it's set after, manages somehow to be more self-contained.

[bratfarrar]

All that to say--I'm thrilled you're going to be reading the Wimsey books and dearly hope you enjoy them as much as I have, because it would be lovely to have someone to talk to about them.

[domarzione]

Don't read Gaudy Night first. Order might not matter for the rest, but it does for this one. You need to meet Harriet first elsewhere.

I started with Whose Body? and then Clouds of Witness and then Murder Must Advertise because that's the order they came in in the Avenel-published collection I inherited.

But seriously, don't read Gaudy Night first.

[seperis]

I started with Whose Body? So far so good.

[liz144]

The first Sayers I ever read was Gaudy Night, and it's still one of my top 3 novels. However, it isn't necessarily the best representation of the series as a whole. If you're ready to commit to reading the entire span of her mysteries, then starting at the beginning is a great option. Otherwise, Murder Must Advertise, as many people have said above, is one of the best standalone novels, in my opinion.

[kore]

Don't read Red Herrings! It's amazingly awful. All of her other books are great.

[bratfarrar]

I wouldn't say it's awful--it's just purely a puzzle mystery, and so it lacks a lot of the character stuff that gives her other mysteries depth. For that genre, it's nicely done, but yes, it does feel rather flat in comparison to her other works.

[kore]

Yeah, I just absolutely could not make it past chapter one with the phonetically spelled dialogue. I felt bad, but it was like a brick wall. I was just looking at at it again, tho, and maybe some of it doesn't look that bad....?

[bratfarrar]

It's really not, once you get into the swing of it. The main thing, I think, is that--it's not quite a spoof, but close. This, for example:

(Here Lord Peter Wimsey told the Sergeant what he was to look for and why, but as the intelligent reader will readily supply these details for himself, they are omitted from this page.)

--is very much in the vein of the Ellery Queen mysteries of the time, where the whole thing is almost a contest between author and reader. And everyone writing at the time butchered the Scottish dialect, often to the point of unreadability; I've slogged through far worse from contemporary mystery novels.

Which doesn't help if you're not already somewhat acclimated, I know.

[jadesfire]

It's one where I think the BBC adaptation might be a better way to experience it. Because it's effectively an abridgement, it's able to strip out a lot of the extraneous material, and you don't have to struggle through the written accents. I also found it easier to remember which suspect was which, as they all sounded different!

[ithiliana]

Is that the one with all the train tables (shudder)? I think I hardly ever re-read that one.

[kore]

YES

It's like that Monty Python skit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTVDOx35FNg

[rissabby]

I read these during the 1970's because I loved the BBC TV shows. (<3 Ian Carmichael.) But, I tried re-reading Murder Must Advertise a few years ago and I found it unentertaining. A lot of office scenes and weird wild rich people. Lord Peter was way too perfect. Smart, athletic, clever, blah, blah.

If you're skipping some of the books, I'd like to vote for keeping Clouds of Witness for one of the pre-Harriet Vane stories. It's centered around Lord Peter's family, and there's some great stuff with Charles Parker, one of the main reoccurring supporting characters.

The drawback of Whose Body? is that Peter could be any-smart-amature-detective. He doesn't develop his own charming style until later. And, there are gimmicks that don't ever show up again.

If you're not reading them all, then I think

Clouds of Witness
Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

are enough early Wimsey. Then all the Harriet Vane stories, possibly skipping Have His Carcase, but you will probably want to read it later if you love Peter/Harriet.

Enjoy yourself. I wish I was reading them again for the first time.

[polarisnorth]

I just read them straight through in publication order - but that's pretty much how my brain demands I read series unless there's a very specific reason not to.

[ithiliana]

Sayers also has feminist essays (no longer in print), and after giving up on mysteries started doing medieval scholarship (she was among the first cohorts of women admitted into Oxford). As I recall, from a long-ago essay, she had a motorcycle which she used to visit home from Oxford. The paper was a comparison of Woolf and Sayers (who were roughly contemporaries in time though lived and wrote in completely different circles).

If you're looking for more recs, I must mention Sarah Caudwell! A much shorter series, with the fascinating problem of it being impossible to determine if the narrator/protagonist, Hilary Tamar, is a man or a woman. The main group of secondary characters are all lawyers in London (Hilary being a law professor).

[fenris_wolf0]

Yes, excellent rec: I love that series (Sarah Cauldwell's). I remember giggling throughout the first book -Thus Was Adonis Murdered, I think?- though to be fair, these have next to nothing in common with Dorothy Sayers' style...

Still a great rec: everyone's life would be improved by reading these books (only four of them, unfortunately). And personally, I think my favorite is the first one - the first couple of pages are unequalled anywhere, imo. You'll know which paragraph I mean. :)

[ithiliana]

I'm trying to remember what neuron firing off made me think, wow, if she likes Sayers, she might also like Caudwell, because yes, many differences.....maybe just because they both live in the (British women mystery writers whose books I LURVE!)? I think I may be due for a re-read of Caudwell--I can use some of the sparkling joy fizzing through my veins I get from reading her work.

(Adorable icon, and I LOLed when I hoved the cursor to see the description!).

[fenris_wolf0]

You have excellent taste. But I think something that shouldn't be overlooked is the generational gap between them. Sarah Cauldwell is a modern UK writer, comparable to Lindsey Davis, especially in her sense of humor.

Whereas Dorothy Sayers is of the same generation of writers as Margery Allingham, and just following in Agatha Christie's footsteps.

Thus, Cauldwell characters are very relatable and easy to understand, easily challenging gender roles in a very modern fashion, while Lord Peter Wimsey is... more of a two dimensional caricature, at least in her earlier books. The comparison bratfarrar made to Ellery Queen's style of mysteries is very apt (irrelevant side note: I'm also a big Ellery Queen fan!)

Even in the later books, where he becomes an ideal, very modern man, he is not necessarily easy to relate to and seems a bit like a Gary Stu, since Harriet Vane is a clear author stand-in. And I say that as a big Dorothy Sayers fan... Her personal life is definitely relevant to the evolution of Peter Wimsey's character.

[ithiliana]

Very true (the differences). But I love them both.

I love Harriet more than Peter (and yes, darn tooting she is, and YAY for it), and actually find her more "relatable" in some ways than Caudwell's characters.

Her personal life is definitely relevant to the evolution of Peter Wimsey's character.Letters!

[janne_d]

I certainly didn't read them in order - the first one I read was Strong Poison, followed by Busman's Honeymoon, then whatever ones I found to buy. I was hooked right away but I wouldn't recommend starting with those two since it skips from Peter meeting Harriet straight to them being married!

Like a few others, I think Clouds of Witness is a good introduction to Peter Wimsey, but my favourites are absolutely the ones that focus on the developing relationship between Peter and Harriet. And I love Busman's Honeymoon a great deal, it definitely is a quadrilogy for me!

Of the others, I think the most enjoyable are Murder Must Advertise, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club and, if you like Miss Climpson in Strong Poison, Unnatural Death. Ooh, and Lord Peter Views the Body is a short story collection that is fun, and may also be a good place to get an idea of Sayers' style.

Personally I think only people who have a strong interest in campanology will really enjoy Nine Tailors - I made it to the end but it was a slog - and Five Red Herrings makes my brain hurt and doesn't have a great pay-off!

When you run out of actual Sayers books, I did rather like Thrones, Dominations that was expanded from Sayers' unfinished book by Jill Paton Walsh and is set just after the Wimseys return from the honeymoon. (The next one that was written entirely by JPW was not great, don't bother). And there is some good fanfic on AO3 (of course).

[ithiliana]

I love love love Miss Climpson (and the whole agency). Am now wondering if there is fanfic about her......there must be.

I bounced off Thrones very hard for some reason which I cannot remember now.

[janne_d]

Miss Climpson is fabulous! My favourite secondary character is the Dowager Duchess though - her rambles are amazing and it’s so clear she’s the source of a lot of Peter.

Thrones is an interesting one - I know others who have said they can see the joins where JPW took over, but I didn’t find it jarring. It felt very much like part of the series to me and I really liked reading how Harriet and Peter settle back into their lives now that they are married.

[duskpeterson]

Everybody is giving such good advice concerning the novel order that I'll just mention two other things:

1) In addition to the deservedly-recommended Ian Charmichael TV/radio series, there was a 1987 adaptation of the first three Lord Peter / Harriet Vane stories. As Wikipedia puts it: "Both sets of adaptations were critically successful, with both Carmichael and Petherbridge's respective performances being widely praised, however both portrayals are quite different from one another: Carmichael's Peter is eccentric, jolly and foppish with occasional glimpses of the inner wistful, romantic soul, whereas Petherbridge's portrayal was more calm, solemn and had a stiff upper lip, subtly downplaying many of the character's eccentricities." I would only add that I thought Petheridge did a better job of bringing out Peter's fragility. But both series are excellently acted.

2) Sayers wrote a lot of nonfiction and drama. My recommendations:

* Echoing Ithiliana's recommendation of "Are Women Human?" and "The Human-Not-Quite Human," essays about women. They originally appeared in her collection "Unpopular Essays" (which also has a number of political essays), but Eerdmans brought ought a slender little paperback in 1971 that contains only those two essays.

* "Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers." Volume One covers the Lord Peter period and includes an event that clearly shaped her portrayal of Harriet Vane.

* "The Man Born to be King" (a radio play about Jesus that was the "Jesus Christ Superstar" of its time, shocking listeners by having the characters use modern slang) and "The Emperor Constantine" (ditto, but about Constantine).

* "Busman's Honeymoon: A Detective Comedy in Three Acts," the play version, which she wrote *before* the novel. I recommend reading the novel first (the stage directions of the play give away the solution to the mystery), but the play helps to show why certain events occurred the way they did in the novel. In a word: stage props.

* "The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement" (essays on literature). One of the essays in it, "The Lost Tools of Learning," almost single-handedly launched the Conservative Christian classical education movement. I'm sure Sayers is rolling in grave over this, for she was Anglican to the bone.

* Her notes to the Penguin edition of Dante's "Divine Comedy" (which treat Dante as a writer with serious things to say about Christian ethics, rather than as a fantasy writer who was just winging it, the way most commentators do), plus "Introductory Papers on Dante" and "Further Papers on Dante."

* If you're interested in Christianity and literature, "The Mind of the Maker" (which is about the theology of the creative process) and "The Whimsical Christian" (which collects many of her Christian essays).

That's just the tip of the iceberg; you can find more of her works described here and here. People remember Sayers for the Lord Peter stories, but she wrote a heck of lot more than that.

[ithiliana]

LETTERS? There are published LETTERS?

OMG! Must. Get.

And other stuff....splutters....copies list...dashes off to Search!

THANK YOU!

[duskpeterson]

Yeah, there was stuff in the Wikipedia bibliography I didn't know about, and I fervently bought Sayers books in the 1990s. (Picture me prowling through used bookshops in Oxford, pushing aside a gazillion editions of the Bible to find more of Sayers's books.) I have more searching to do myself!

[ithiliana]

I knew she wrote a lot about Dante and religion and such from somewhere (the topic never interested me that much so I never followed up), but I love her feminist essays, and can hardly wait to get to the letters (some volumes of which are horribly expensive via amazon). I got one in Kindle format, and have another used (reasonable price) on order, plus "The Wimsey Papers" and the literature collection. *rubs hands gleefully*

Might be fascinating doing something comparing Tolkien and Sayers (whom he did not seem to approve of, snerks).

[duskpeterson]

Fair warning: My recollection (it's been a while) is that Volume 2 of the letters plunges into Sayers's Christian-writing period; plus, a number of the essays in the literature book are about Christian literature. It's really difficult not to trip over Christianity in Sayers's work, even in the Lord Peter stories, though she has a lovely passage in "The Mind of the Maker" where she rages at readers who want her to make Lord Peter Christian.

(I always found that passage amusing because she obviously had no idea how culturally Christian she'd made him.)

"Might be fascinating doing something comparing Tolkien and Sayers"

Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams . . . England was positively littered with Christian writers of fiction at that time, and all of them except Tolkien were also Christian apologists. I've no idea what was drifting around in the air.

(Grubs about in Sayers to see what other stuff turns up.) Well, "Unpopular Opinions" has four essays on Sherlock Holmes and one called "Aristotle on Detective Fiction."

Wikipedia seems to have missed that Sayers edited a series of anthologies that starts with The Omnibus of Crime.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1650818.The_Omnibus_of_Crime

Apparently there's an intro by her? And maybe more in the subsequent volumes?

Her intro to the Penguin edition of The Song of Roland is interesting.

I can't help but quote Sayers being the total fangirl. This is Sayers on her first encounter with "The Divine Comedy":

"I can remember nothing like it since I first read 'The Three Musketeers' at the age of thirteen. Neither the world, nor the theologians, nor even Charles Williams had told me the one great, obvious, glaring fact about Dante Alighieri of Florence - that he was simply the most incomparable story-teller who ever set pen to paper. However foolish it may sound, the plain fact is that I bolted my meals, neglected my sleep, work, and correspondence, drove my friends crazy, and paid only a distracted attention to the doodle-bugs which happened to be infesting the neighbourhood at the time, until I had panted my way through the Three Realms of the Dead from top to bottom and from bottom to top; and that, having finished, I found the rest of the world's literature so lacking in pep and incident that I pushed it all peevishly aside and started out from the Dark Wood all over again."