The Nine Tailors

The Nine Tailors was published in 1934 and is widely considered one of the most atmospheric mystery novels of the Golden Age. The setting is the fictional village of Fenchurch St. Paul in the East Anglian Fens, a flat watery landscape Sayers knew from her childhood as a vicar’s daughter in the area. Lord Peter and Bunter are stranded in the village on New Year’s Eve by a car accident, and Peter ends up participating in a marathon nine-hour bell-ringing peal at the parish church to celebrate the New Year.

Months later he is called back. A faceless body has been discovered in a freshly opened grave in the churchyard, and the local authorities have no idea who the man is or how he died. The investigation takes Lord Peter into the rural waterways, the parish records, an old jewel theft from years before, and ultimately into a piece of evidence involving the bells themselves that has stayed with readers ever since. The Fens setting is rendered with the same loving precision Hardy gave to Wessex. The book is slower than some of the others and gains from it. A major Sayers achievement.