I developed an insatiable appetite for more of his adventures and hungrily read all thirteen of them, from the moment of his creation in Whose Body? (1923) to the final novel in the series, Busman's Honeymoon (1937), in which Sayers finally marries Peter off to Harriet Vane, a young detective novelist he met in an earlier novel ( Strong Poison, 1930) while trying to solve the mystery of who had killed her lover.
He was erudite and elegant, possessing a depth of refinement and a breadth of knowledge that left me longing for the graceful living of an earlier time. I found Wimsey entrancing and entered into his gentlemanly, Victorianesque approach to solving murders with fascination. So, I picked up that volume first-I think more out of a fond association with Alastair Cooke's eloquent commentary on the doings of the hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, than because I remembered any details of the plot. I had heard of Sayers years before in connection with the PBS television series The Nine Tailors. That very afternoon, I went to the university library and by some stroke of good fortune, found a shelf full of the work of Dorothy L. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, but since a theologian was what I hoped to be, I decided that perhaps I ought to read one. But one day in class, and in a tone that made it seem as though it were common knowledge, a theology professor mentioned that theologians tended to like really good mystery stories. Perhaps due to a youthful obsession with Nancy Drew, it wasn't until my first semester of graduate school that I considered the mystery novel to be anything other than a pleasant but forgotten pastime.
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