Tag: Dorothy L. Sayers
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Ariadne Oliver and Harriet Vane on the Work of Writing
I’ve come around to appreciating Agatha Christie’s fictional crime novelist, Ariadne Oliver. She’s written broadly, as a caricature of Christie herself–a substantial woman in midlife, trailing apple cores. Like Dorothy L. Sayers’s Harriet Vane, a writer of detective novels, Ariadne is a well-regarded author of mysteries who can’t resist dabbling in a few herself. Also…
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Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King and Easter
Dorothy L. Sayers was a prolific writer of Golden Age mystery fiction, co-authoring several works with Detection Club members, as well as producing her own long-running Lord Peter Wimsey (and Harriet Vane!) series. But her writing achievements as a whole were much broader. Sayers had a classical education, and a lot of Latin shows up…
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Spring Book Haul
I don’t typically accumulate a substantial number of mysteries when I’m already in the midst of reading several new books. And I need to finish up Eliza Reid’s Death on the Island (with thanks to NetGalley for the preview) and Janice Hallett’s art school-email mystery, which manages to make an LMS messaging tool interesting. But…
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Independent Women in Golden Age Mysteries: From Evil Under the Sun to Gaudy Night
Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun (1941) has a wonderful series of final revelations. Poirot untangles the various threads that have complicated his investigation of Arlena Stuart’s mystery, for a rapt audience of suspects and bystanders. While the crime was rather convoluted in its execution, the motives were straightforward. Then there are the last several…
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Golden Age Women Writers: Josephine Tey and Dorothy L. Sayers
Josephine Tey is best known for The Daughter of Time, which remains highly regarded. A temporarily invalided Scotland Yard detective sets his wits to solving the poignant murders of the little princes in the tower, way back in . . . 1483. A very cold case. In The New Yorker, Sara Polsky’s “The Detective Novel…
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 