In the Teeth of the Evidence

In the Teeth of the Evidence is a 1939 short story collection gathering Sayers’s later short fiction, the last batch she would publish in the Lord Peter Wimsey universe. The collection is divided across two main sets of detective stories. Two are Lord Peter cases. Five feature Montague Egg, the wine salesman from Hangman’s Holiday. The remaining eleven are stand-alone tales not part of any series.

The Wimsey stories are slighter than the novels, since Sayers had largely moved on from the character by this point in her career. The Egg stories continue the wry social observation that made the earlier collection enjoyable. The stand-alone non-series stories include several of Sayers’s strongest short pieces, often darker than her novel work: a husband-and-wife murder plot, a strange ambiguous case about a missing actress, a piece of speculative crime fiction. The collection signals the end of Sayers’s career as a writer of detective fiction. She turned to theological and Dante translation work after this.