Read: Women are writing the best crime novels I found in her exploration of that quandary a powerful balm: assurance not that all of the challenges I face will be tidily resolved but rather that existence remains rewarding even if they will not be. This is exactly what soothed me about Sayers’s work: She was preoccupied with the question of how, once you realize you will likely never understand those around you, you might still live a meaningful life. The deeper mysteries of the people involved-why they’ve made certain disastrous choices, whether they feel remorse, how their sense of right and wrong got skewed-remain obscure and often, at the end of each investigation, appear even more tangled than before. Wimsey solves crimes with elegance and enthusiasm, but true resolution eludes him. The power of her writing lies instead in the way she turns the classic promise of a mystery novel on its head. I set off on a year of obsession, first with Wimsey and his fictional cohort, then with the rest of Sayers’s oeuvre.īut Sayers’s work didn’t comfort me in the way I had initially expected, with clever, complete answers to daunting questions. And it, in turn, plucked me out of the sense that I was trapped on some perilous brink.
A collection of Sayers’s stories, Lord Peter: The Complete Lord Peter Wimsey Stories, had sat on my shelf for years I picked it up. I have always turned to detective stories when I feel vulnerable there is nothing so relaxing as the promise that even the grisliest problem can, with the correct approach, be neatly solved. The unexpected, devastating end of a COVID-era romance had left me feeling everything, even boredom, with frightening intensity. Sayers-whose first novel, Whose Body?, was published a century ago this year-in January 2022. I first encountered Wimsey, the most famous creation of the mystery novelist Dorothy L. And Lord Peter Wimsey-scion of the aristocracy military hero buoyant connoisseur of wine, rare books, piano music, and women-is on the hunt for his next beguiling case. Humanity has gone through hell and emerged strung between merry, hectic giddiness and entrenched, unspeakable grief.
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