The Queens of Crime

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of gender discrimination, graphic violence, and death.

English mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) is best known for her novels featuring gentleman detective Lord Peter Wimsey and his wife, amateur detective Harriet Vane. Wimsey first appeared in the novel Whose Body? (1923), while Harriet Vane first appeared as the suspect in Strong Poison (1930). Vane joins forces with Wimsey as a detective in Have His Carcase (1932), the novel Dorothy is writing throughout The Queens of Crime.

The Queens of Crime characterizes Dorothy as having a unique literary worldview that stems from her career as a mystery writer. As she listens to her husband’s reporter friends discussing May Daniels’s disappearance, she visualizes the process of writing May’s story: “[W]ords float over my head like clouds—‘bobbed hair’ and ‘full-time nurse’ and ‘stockings’—and I want to reach out and grab them, make them solid on the page” (41). Dorothy struggles to “resist the urge to jot all these tidbits down in my notebook” (41), suggesting that her career as a writer is central to her personality. When she begins investigating the case, she approaches it as a writer, “meticulously [mapping] out the method, the motive, and the murderer” (53) before considering the “details about the suspects and the victims” (53).