Thursday, December 16, 2010

Year of the Book #36 Dorothy L Sayers

I was in love with “Lord Peter Wimsey” for the longest time. (I guess I still am, in a residual sort of way – it’s a weakness for the British Upstairs folk.) Even when I knew that he held a long-standing candle for oh-so-elegant “Harriet Vane”



Peter Death Bredon Wimsey. Younger son of the 15th Duke of Denver, scion of a family that traces it ancestry to the 12th century.

His “vaguely foolish” face and deliberately cultivated idle-fop-about-town with a Bertie-Wooster IQ level belies a 1st class degree  from Oxford, fluency in French & Latin, a penchant for rare medieval manuscripts, vintage cars and wine, a considerable flair at the piano (Bach being a favourite).

The word “sleuth” comes to the lips with difficulty to describe such a man, but that is also what he is – what Hercule Poirot was to Agatha Christie, Peter Wimsey was to Dorothy L Sayer’s enormously successful series of detective novels. It is said that if anyone could dare to compete with Christie’s success, it was Sayers

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/second-glancedorothy-sayers/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A2715365

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