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Christian apologist and novelist

17 December 1957

Miss Dorothy L. Sayers died at her home at Witham, Essex, on Tuesday night at the age of 64.

Sudden death would have had no terrors for her. She combined an adventurous curiosity about life with a religious faith based on natural piety, common sense, and hard reading. She made a name in several diverse fields of creative work. But the diversity of her success was founded on an inner unity of character. When she came down from Somerville with a First in Modern Languages she tried her hand at advertising. The directness and the grasp of facts that are needed by a copywriter stood her in good stead as a newcomer to the crowded ranks of authors of detective fiction. During the 1920s and 1930s, she established herself as one of the few who could give a new look to that hard-ridden kind of novel.

Her recipe was deftly to mix a plot that kept readers guessing with inside information, told without tears, about some fascinating subject – campanology, the backrooms of an advertising agency, life behind the discreet windows of a West End club. Lord Peter Wimsey came alive as a good companion to the few detectives into whom an engaging individuality has been breathed.

This was not done by chance; she had made a close, critical study of the craft. Lecturing, once, on Aristotle’s Poetics she remarked that he was obviously hankering after a good detective novel because he had laid it down that the writer’s business was to lead the reader up the garden, to make the murderer’s villainy implicit in his character from the start, and to remember that the dénouement is the most difficult part of the story.

But it is some 20 years since Miss Sayers wrote a detective story, and, shortly before her death, she said: ‘There will be no more Peter Wimseys.’ The detective writer had been ousted by the Christian apologist. Miss Sayers approached her task of making religion real for the widest public with a zeal that sometimes shocked the conventionally orthodox (with whose protests she was well able to deal) and always held the ears of listeners and the eyes of the reading public. ‘The Man Born to be King’ became a bbc bestseller, attracting large audiences Christmas after Christmas.

Dante Translations

She carried what she regarded as the central purpose of her life on to the stage and into books. Dogma had no terrors for her. She did not believe in putting water into the pure spirit of her Church. Dante, with his colloquial idiom and unselfconscious piety, naturally attracted her. The translations she published of his Inferno and Purgatorio caught the directness of the original but failed, as Binyon did not, to catch the poetry. But her prose comments have done more than those of any other recent English author to quicken interest in Dante.

Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born in 1893, the daughter of the Rev. Henry Sayers and Helen Mary Leigh. She was in print before she was 21 with Op I, a book of verse, and followed it in 1919 by another, Catholic Tales. It was a medium in which she could be skilful, flexible, and effective, and readers of The Times Literary Supplement will, no doubt, remember her strong poem, ‘The English War’, which appeared in its issue of September 7, 1940. Lord Peter made his first appearance in 1923 in Whose Body? There followed Clouds of Witness (1926), Unnatural Death (1927), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) and The Documents in the Case (1930).

In 1930 Miss Sayers in addition to producing her Strong Poison, yet another detective book, made an interesting departure. Out of the fragments of its Anglo-Norman version she had constructed her Tristan in Brittany, in the form of a modern English story and produced it, partly in verse and partly in prose.

Have His Carcase (1932) introduced a companion for Lord Peter in the shape of Harriet Vane, a writer of detective stories. In Hangman’s Holiday (1933), a book of short stories, she created another amateur detective, Mr Montague Egg, who was a simpler reasoner than Lord Peter, but almost as acute. In The Nine Tailors, though of the same genre, her theme was built round a noble church in Fenland, and possessed a majesty which disclosed powers the authoress had scarcely exerted until then. Gaudy Night (1935) took Lord Peter and Harriet Vane into the serene and serious life of a women’s college at Oxford, and psychological problems deeper than those which belong to the detective convention arose.

Lord Peter on Stage

In 1936 her Busman’s Holiday, a play which presented Lord Peter married – Miss Sayers called it ‘a love story with detective interruptions’ – was staged at the Comedy Theatre. She had a collaborator in M. St Clair Byrne, and between them they provided Lord Peter’s public with an excellent entertainment. The Zeal of Thy House (1937), which was written for the Canterbury Festival and played there and in London, was set in the twelfth century and was a sincere and illuminating study of the purification of an artist, a kind of architectural Gerontius purged by heavenly fire of his last earthly infirmity. The Devil to Pay (1939) was also written for the Canterbury Festival. It set the legend of Dr Faustus, one of the great stories of the world, at the kind of angle most likely to commend it to the modern stage. Later it was played at His Majesty’s Theatre. By sheer alertness of invention and the power to fit her ideas into a dramatic narrative she accomplished an extremely difficult task with credit. Love All (1940) was an agreeable and amusing comedy.

In 1940 Miss Sayers published a calmly philosophic essay on the war, which she named ‘Begin Here’. Then, in 1941, she followed it with her ‘The Mind of the Maker’, in which she analysed the metaphor of God as Creator and tested it in the light of creative activity as she knew it. Unpopular Opinions, a miscellaneous collection of essays, came out in 1946, Creed or Chaos, another series of essays, pungent and well reasoned, in 1947, and The Lost Tools of Learning in the following year. She began her translations of Dante for the Penguin Series with the Inferno which came out in November, 1949; Purgatorio followed in May, 1955. She found the third volume Paradiso the hardest and in August, 1956, her translation had reached Canto VII. Her commentary was one of the most valuable parts of her books. After she had finished her second volume, she slipped in, as a kind of relaxation, a translation of Chanson de Roland, published this year.