Hangman’s Holiday: A Collection of Short Mysteries

Hangman’s Holiday is a 1933 short story collection gathering twelve mysteries that Sayers had been publishing in periodicals across the late 1920s and early 1930s. The collection is divided between Lord Peter Wimsey stories, several featuring the wine salesman Montague Egg, and a handful of stand-alone non-series tales. Egg, an entirely different kind of detective from Wimsey, is a working-class commercial traveller who solves cases through patient observation and his catalogue of practical professional wisdom.

The Wimsey stories in the collection are mostly shorter and lighter than the cases in the novels: a country house mystery, a missing-jewel investigation, a brief encounter with a remote rural inn. The Montague Egg stories are unusually fresh because Egg himself is one of Sayers’s most likeable secondary creations. Several non-series stories at the end of the collection are darker and more genuinely macabre. A useful book for getting a wider sample of Sayers’s range.