Striding Folly

Striding Folly is a 1972 posthumous short story collection gathering the last three Lord Peter Wimsey stories Dorothy L. Sayers wrote, all in the late 1930s and early 1940s, none of them published in book form during her lifetime. The collection was assembled by Sayers’s literary heirs from manuscripts in her papers. The three stories are short and have a more melancholy tone than most of the canon.

The title story, Striding Folly, involves Lord Peter helping to investigate a strange architectural anomaly that turns out to be connected to a murder. The Haunted Policeman is a brief story about Peter on the night of his elder son’s birth, helping a young constable who claims to have witnessed an impossible vanishing house. Talboys is set years later, with Peter and Harriet now established as a married couple with children, dealing with a small-scale rural mystery involving the theft of peaches. The collection is short, slight, but valuable for completists who want every recorded Lord Peter case.