A Biography of Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) was a playwright, scholar, and acclaimed

author of mysteries, best known for her books starring the gentleman sleuth

Lord Peter Wimsey. The Los Angeles Times hailed Sayers as “one of the

greatest mystery story writers of [the twentieth] century.”

Born in Oxford, England, she was the only child of Reverend Henry

Sayers, headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral School and then rector of

Bluntisham village. Sayers grew up in the Bluntisham rectory, then won a

scholarship to Oxford University, where she studied modern languages and

worked at the publishing house Blackwell’s, which in 1916 published Op.

1, Sayers’ first book of poetry.

In 1922 Sayers took a job as a copywriter for London advertising firm

S. H. Benson, forerunner to the famous Ogilvy & Mather. There she created

several popular slogans and campaigns, including the iconic, animal-theme

Guinness advertisements that are still used today.

While working as a copywriter, Sayers began work on Whose Body?

(1923), a mystery novel featuring dapper detective Lord Peter Wimsey.

Over the next two decades, Sayers published ten more Wimsey novels and

several short stories, crafting a character whose complexity was unusual for

the mystery novels of the time. Handsome, brave, and charming, Wimsey

has a few defining flaws, including his tendency to prattle, fear of

responsibility, and perpetual nervousness caused by shell shock inflicted

during World War I. Sayers once described him as a cross between Fred

Astaire and Bertie Wooster. Her writing was praised by fellow mystery

writers Ruth Rendell and P. D. James; James said that Sayers “brought to

the detective novel originality, intelligence, energy and wit.”

Set between the two World Wars, the Wimsey novels are more than

typical manor-house mysteries. Sayers used her knowledge of various

topics—including advertising, women’s education, and veterans’ health—to

give her books realistic details. In 1936, she brought Wimsey to the stage in

Busman’s Honeymoon, a story which Sayers would publish as a novel the

following year. The play was so successful that she gave up mystery writing

to focus on the stage, producing a series of religious works culminating in

The Man Born to Be King (1941), a radio drama about the life of Jesus.

Sayers continued writing theological essays and criticism during and

after World War II. In 1949, she published the first volume of a translation

of Dante’s Divine Comedy. She was halfway through the third volume when

she died of a heart attack in 1957. Although she considered this translation

to be her best work, it is for her elegantly constructed detective fiction that

Sayers remains best remembered.

Sayers in the garden of her Oxford home, around 1897. She holds her two toy

monkeys, Jocko and Jacko.

An 1899 studio portrait of Sayers, around six years old. (Photo courtesy of I. Palmer

Clarke/Cambridge.)

The Sayers family circa 1905. Dorothy (about age twelve) posed with her family outside their home at the Bluntisham rectory. First row, left to right: Gertrude

Sayers (aunt), Dorothy. Second row, left to right: Anna Breakey Sayers

(grandmother), Mabel Leigh (aunt). Back row, left to right: Reverend Henry Sayers

(father), Ivy Shrimpton (cousin), Helen Mary Leigh Sayers (mother).

Seventeen-year-old Sayers wearing a pageant costume in 1908.

Sayers with friends, posing as shipping magnate Sir Hugh Allen, in 1915.

A studio portrait of Sayers taken in 1926.

Sayers’s husband, “Mac” Fleming, at home in 1930 behind overflowing boxes of

Sayers’s fan mail. A family friend sits to the right. (Photo courtesy of the Tropical

Press Agency.)

Sayers’s husband, “Mac” Fleming, standing in doorway.

Sayers in 1950, at the unveiling of a plaque at the S. H. Benson advertising agency,

where she once worked as a copywriter. The plaque was placed at the foot of a spiral

staircase in the agency, a tribute to a character in Murder Must Advertise who plunges

down a similar staircase.

All images used by permission of the Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton

College, Wheaton, Illinois.