Lord Peter Wimsey - The Stories

The Stories

Dorothy Sayers wrote 11 Wimsey novels and a number of short stories featuring Wimsey and his family . Other recurring characters include Inspector Charles Parker, the family solicitor Mr. Murbles, barrister Sir Impey Biggs, newshound Salcombe Hardy, and financial whiz the Honourable Freddy Arbuthnot, who finds himself entangled in the case in the first of the Wimsey books, 1923's Whose Body?.

Sayers wrote no more Wimsey murder mysteries, and only one story involving him, after the outbreak of the Second World War. In one of the Wimsey Papers, a series of fictionalised commentaries in the form of mock letters between members of the Wimsey family published in the Spectator, there is a reference to Harriet's difficulty in continuing to write murder mysteries at a time when European dictators were openly committing mass murders with impunity; this seems to have reflected Sayers' own wartime feeling. The Wimsey Papers included a reference to Wimsey and Bunter setting out during the war on a secret mission of espionage in Europe.

The only occasion when Sayers returned to Wimsey was the 1942 short story "Talboys". The war at that time devastating Europe received only a single oblique reference. Though Sayers lived until 1957, she never again took up the Wimsey books after this final effort. In effect, rather than killing off her detective, as Conan Doyle unsuccessfully tried with his, Sayers pensioned Wimsey off to a happy, satisfying old age. Thus, Peter Wimsey remained forever fixed on the background of inter-war England, and the books are nowadays often read for their evocation of that period as much as for the intrinsic detective mysteries.

But from Jill Paton Walsh's recent continuations A Presumption of Death and The Attenbury Emeralds we learn that Wimsey and Bunter returned successfully from their secret mission in 1940; that Lord St. George was killed while serving as an RAF pilot in the Battle of Britain; and that consequently when Wimsey's brother died in 1951 on the occasion of the burning of the family seat at Duke's Denver, Bredon Hall, Wimsey eventually became himself the Duke of Denver.