Dorothy L. Sayers - Legacy

Legacy

Some of the character Harriet Vane's observations reveal Sayers poking fun at the mystery genre, even while adhering to various conventions.

Sayers' work was frequently parodied by her contemporaries. E. C. Bentley, the author of the early modern detective novel Trent's Last Case, wrote a parody entitled "Greedy Night" (1938).

Her characters, and Sayers herself, have been placed in some other works, including:

• Jill Paton Walsh has published three novels about Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane: Thrones, Dominations (1998), a completion of Sayers' manuscript left unfinished at her death; A Presumption of Death (2002), based on the "Wimsey Papers", letters ostensibly written by various Wimseys and published in The Spectator during World War II; and The Attenbury Emeralds (2010), based on Lord Peter's "first case", briefly referred to in a number of Sayers' novels.
• Wimsey appears (together with Hercule Poirot and Father Brown) in C. Northcote Parkinson's comic novel Jeeves (after Jeeves, the gentleman's gentleman of the P.G. Wodehouse canon).
• Wimsey makes a cameo appearance in Laurie R. King's A Letter of Mary, one of a series of books relating the further adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
• Sayers appears, with Agatha Christie, as a title character in Dorothy and Agatha, a murder mystery by Gaylord Larsen, in which a man is murdered in Sayers' dining room and she has to solve the crime.
• Wimsey is mentioned by Walter Pidgeon's character in the 1945 film Week-End at the Waldorf as one of three possible detectives waiting for him in the hall, outside the apartment of the character played by Ginger Rogers.