The Worlds of Dorothy Sayers by Stephen Wade

The Worlds of Dorothy Sayers: The Life and Works of a Crime Writer and Poet

By Stephen Wade

Pen and Sword History 2025

Dorothy Sayers, famously the author of the Lord Peter Wimsey murder mystery novels and less famously an enthusiastic translator and annotator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, is the subject of Stephen Wade’s new biography, The Worlds of Dorothy Sayers: The Life and Works of a Crime Writer and Poet. Sayers was born in 1893, achieved success as a writer through hard work by her early 30s, and lived until 1957, writing nonfiction, criticism, poetry, a steady flow of letters, translations, and of course the aforementioned Wimsey novels, which have been beloved of murder mystery fans for almost a century. It was a long, fascinating, and complicated life, and yet Wade covers it in a bit over 200 pages.

Leaving room for himself, it should be noted. Wade mentions up front that he wanted to write a book in which he himself is a presence (“albeit rather shadowy”). “Writing as an enthusiast for popular biography, I wanted to include anecdotes, experiences, and instances from my own writing life.”

This is admittedly odd (are there no blogs? No Substacks? And the podcasts, are they still in operation?), but it turns out to be a minor worry, since Wade scarcely leaves himself room for Sayers herself, much less himself. Sayers (he insists on referring to her as “DLS,” as though she were the latest gadget from Panasonic) led a tangled and fascinating life, but somehow Wade manages to find space for frankly baffling digressions on, well, how reading works:

The phenomenal success of Wimsey – one that puts him alongside Holmes, Poirot, and Marple, is that he is fashioned individually in the mind of each reader; the reader in the best fiction is not only invited to share in the story as it advances, but also to make their own story as a spin-off, as a personal fabrication, which will ultimately either see the fictional creation as something as ‘real’ as the people walking around in the reader’s version of reality, or as a confirmation of a set of values lumped together with the unavoidable human failure that goes along with their genius: the detective trade is a mystery in both senses of the word – a profession (as in the ‘mystery plays’ done by trades people) and at the same time a bundle of skills and arts which make for enigmatic success in a tough, complicated moral world.

This kind of blather, basically nonsense, happens just often enough in the book to make Sayers and her world feel always just a bit out of reach. Wade compensates a bit by occasionally rousing to a feisty tone, as one he takes one of his rare swipes at earlier biographies, noting that “Reading the various biographies of DLS, one would be forgiven for thinking that, at the beginning of her career as a novelist, everything ran smoothly and she had no real struggle.” But even this is somewhat thin, particularly since a) no major earlier biography presents a picture of blithe uninterrupted success for the author’s early years, and b) not every author’s early years are deserts of grueling frustration, and Sayers had a fairly smooth path to her success.

That success is sketched in economically and fairly satisfyingly in these pages. As usual, the Sayers who emerges is an industrious worker almost on a level with Anthony Trollope. “Barbara Reynolds pointed out that DLS was often at work on two books at the same time,” Wade writes, “and that she would use different rooms and desks for each specific book.” (This is one of innumerable quotes from and allusions to Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul by Barbara Reynolds, a book Wade rightly calls “magisterial” and never significantly exceeds)

Although Wade is almost startlingly nugatory on most of Sayers’ creative life, the readings of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels are good and energetic, although Wade gets more wobbly when he strays to the broader genre in general. This is where most of the books simple errors crop up too, as when Wade writes, “As Raymond Chandler famously said, putting words into the mouth of his detective, Philip Marlowe, ‘Down these means streets a man must go’” (The line occurs in Chandler’s essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” of course; Marlowe never says it).

The end result is a small and politely functional trot through the life and times of a popular author. Dorothy Sayers was far more nuanced and interesting than any reader will see in The Worlds of Dorothy Sayers. The second-hand market will always be there for those who want to hunt down the Barbara Reynolds book, but in any case readers will come to the same conclusion: even after all this time, the DLS-451xE is still a winner.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News