Dorothy L. Sayers Reviews Mystery Writers

As y’all know, I have a pash for Dorothy L. Sayers. She is one of my favorite mystery writers. While I haven’t been keeping up with the Wimsey Annotations as I should (I have been trying as of late, but that is another post), people still seem to find it useful.

But she was not just a mystery writer. She translated Dante, did battle on behalf of Christianity by writing plays and engaging with the public in her letters, and generally kept busy.

What I didn’t realize was that for a few years she reviewed mystery novels. Each week for two years (1933-1935), readers of “The Sunday Times” heard her opinion of two or three new novels. She resumed reviewing twice more, in 1937 and 1949.

Thanks to volunteers with the Dorothy L. Sayers Society, Martin Edwards compiled these reviews and they were published as “Taking Detective Stories Seriously.” If you have any interest in mystery fiction from this time, from big names such as Ellery Queen, G.K. Chesterton, and Rex Stout, to the rare and now-obscure writers, or if you’re interested in good critical writing, this is the book for you.

Reading these short reviews feels like chatting with an erudite, intelligent friend of firm opinions. Her job as a reviewer, she wrote was “to discover [the author’s] aim and then … to pronounce whether the aim has been well or ill achieved.” Although she admits that she is writing only of her reactions to a book, her standards for good mystery fiction were high: clear, concise writing; an interesting plot; and a distribution of clues that are fair to the reader. This is the classical Golden Age mystery we’re talking about.

If a book meets her standards, she is unfailingly cheerful about it. When a story falls short of her standards, however, she lets you know, even if the author was a friend of hers. Ronald Knox may sup with her at the Detection Club, but that did not protect him when she reviewed his “The Body in the Silo” and wrote: “I hope Father Knox has satisfied himself that his murder-method is physically possible, for some of the details are rather staggering.”

One could spend the rest of the day quoting her judgments. Of A. Fielding’s “The Paper Chase”: “This sentence defeats me altogether. If I tried with both hands for a fortnight I could make nothing of it. And I say it is a shame that any writer should so mishandle the richest, most flexible, most highly civilized language in Christendom.”

Sayers is particularly hard on those who abuse the English language, although she gives Americans leeway with their vigorous use of slanguage to tell their stories. In her later reviews, she included “The Week’s Worst English” with entries such as this one followed by an acerbic comment:

“I stood on the platform with him, watching his sunburnt, handsome face, keen grey eyes and firm jaw, upright as a dart, a man who stood out above his fellows.” – No wonder Mr. Masterman’s squire took to drink, with a jaw like that to put it in.

I suppose this reveals me to be a pendant and something of a fuddy-duddy, and to that I plead guilty. I have read a lot of tripe in my time, and a lot of it I have enjoyed. I am sensitive to words and how they are used, to the point that when I fall short I shudder at my impertinence at lecturing others on the proper use of words. But as Christianity teaches you, you can still aspire to holiness even when you fall short yourself. Fortunately, Mrs. Sayers is still around in book form to back me up.