The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: Dorothy L. Sayers

  • An Easter Post: Women in Prison, Agatha Christie’s Sad Cypress, and Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison

    I was halfway through Sad Cypress before I realized that the young doctor who had sought Hercule Poirot’s assistance was named Peter Lord. Lord Peter. A nice tribute to Dorothy L. Sayers in a book that follows the broad outlines of her earlier novel, Strong Poison. Sad Cypress was published a decade after Sayers’s book,…

  • New Year’s Eve: Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Nine Tailors and the Pealing of the Church Bells

    “From time to time complaints are made about the ringing of church bells. It seems strange that a generation which tolerates the uproar of the internal combustion engine and the wailing of the jazz band should be so sensitive to the one loud noise that is made to the glory of God.” In her Foreword…

  • 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…