Lord Peter Wimsey Investigates: Selected Short Stories

Description

Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. Lord Peter Wimsey, wealthy, charming and charismatic, is one of the most famous amateur detectives of the golden age of crime. This Macmillan Collector's Library edition of Lord Peter Wimsey Investigates is introduced and edited by crime writer David Stuart Davies. The fifteen short stories in this lively and witty collection, Dorothy L. Sayers's very best, celebrate the breadth of Peter Wimsey's career as London's most celebrated amateur sleuth. From the foppish man about town of 'In the Teeth of the Evidence', to the happily married man in 'The Haunted Policeman', to the father of three in 'Talboys', Wimsey kept that twinkle in his eye and the brilliance of mind that helped him spot a clue a mile off.

Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born in Oxford in 1893, the only child of the Rev. Henry Sayers. She won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, and in 1915 she finished her modern languages course with first-class honours. After university she worked in a publisher's office before joining an advertising firm, S. H. Benson, where she coined the famous slogan: 'Guinness is good for you'. In 1923 she published her first novel, Whose Body?, which introduced Lord Peter Wimsey, her hero for fourteen volumes of novels and short stories. She also wrote plays and essays, and she considered her best work to be her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. She died in 1957.

Be warned . . . once you make friends with Wimsey you'll want to get better acquainted -- Christopher Fowler Part of the Golden Age of mystery writers working between the wars, Sayers is often credited as the most intelligent of them all. Certainly her plots are ingenious and intricate, and she relishes technical detail and literary quotation * Guardian * After 60-odd years still compulsively readable * Independent * The books chronicling Wimsey's adventures remain models of their kind -- Barry Forshaw In time of dire and immediate trouble, one might well call upon a Sherlock Holmes for a quick solution to one's trials. But for the balm that reassures one about surviving the vicissitudes of life, one could do no better than to anchor onto a Lord Peter Wimsey -- Elizabeth George