List of works by Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy Leigh Sayers was an English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator and Christian humanist; she was also a student of classical and modern languages. She is perhaps best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories, set between the First and Second World Wars, which feature Lord Peter Wimsey, an English aristocrat and amateur sleuth. Sayers herself considered her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy to be her best work.
Sayers was educated at home and then at the University of Oxford. This was unusual for a woman at the time, as women were not admitted as full members of the university until 1920—five years after Sayers had completed her first-class degree in medieval French. In 1916, a year after her graduation, Sayers published her first book, a collection of poems entitled Op. I, which she followed two years later with a second, a slim volume titled Catholic Tales and Christian Songs. The same year she was invited to edit and contribute to the annual editions of Oxford Poetry, which she did for the next three years. In 1923 she published Whose Body?, a murder mystery novel featuring the fictional Lord Peter Wimsey, and went on to write eleven novels and twenty-one short stories about the character. The Wimsey stories were popular, and successful enough for Sayers to leave the advertising agency where she was working.
Towards the end of the 1930s, and without explanation, Sayers stopped writing crime stories and turned instead to religious plays and essays, and to translations. Some of her plays were broadcast on the BBC, others performed at the Canterbury Festival and some in commercial theatres. During the Second World War through these plays and other works like The Wimsey Papers and Begin Here: A War-Time Essay, Sayers "offered her countrymen a stirring argument for fighting", according to her biographer, Catherine Kenney. As early as 1929 Sayers had produced an adaptation—from medieval French—of the poem Tristan by Thomas of Britain, and in 1946 she began to produce translations of Dante, firstly the four Pietra canzoni then, from 1948, the canticas of the Divine Comedy. Her critical analyses of Dante were popular and influential among scholars and the general public, although there has been some criticism that she overstressed the comedic side of his writing to make him more popular. Sayers died in December 1957 after suffering a sudden stroke.
Poems
| Title | Year of first publication | First edition publisher | Notes |
| Op. I | |||
| Catholic Tales and Christian Songs | |||
| Oxford Poetry, 1917 | Contributor and editor with Wilfred Rowland Childe and T. W. Earp | ||
| Oxford Poetry, 1918 | Contributor and editor with T. W. Earp and E. F. A. Geach | ||
| Oxford Poetry, 1919 | Contributor and editor with T. W. Earp and Siegfried Sassoon | ||
| The Quorum | Contributor | ||
| Lord, I Thank Thee | |||
Novels
| Title | Year of first publication | First edition publisher | Notes |
| Whose Body? | Boni & Liveright, New York | ||
| Clouds of Witness | Unwin | ||
| Unnatural Death | Benn | Published in the US as The Dawson Pedigree | |
| Benn | |||
| Strong Poison | Gollancz | ||
| Benn | With Robert Eustace | ||
| Gollancz | Published in the US as Suspicious Characters | ||
| Hodder and Stoughton | With members of The Detection Club. A chapter each was completed by: Canon Victor Whitechurch, George and Margaret Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson, Clemence Dane and Anthony Berkeley. G. K. Chesterton contributed the prologue. | ||
| Have His Carcase | Gollancz | ||
| Murder Must Advertise | Gollancz | ||
| Ask a Policeman | Barker | With members of The Detection Club: Anthony Berkeley, Milward Kennedy, Gladys Mitchell, John Rhode, Sayers and Helen Simpson. | |
| Gollancz | |||
| Gaudy Night | Gollancz | ||
| Six against the Yard | Selwyn and Blount | With members of The Detection Club: Margery Allingham, Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts, Father Ronald Knox, Sayers and Russell Thorndike. | |
| Busman's Honeymoon: A Love Story With Detective Interruptions | Harcourt Brace | Adapted from the play Busman's Honeymoon | |
| Double Death: a Murder Story | Gollancz | With members of The Detection Club |
Short story collections
Sayers contributed to numerous short story anthologies, but also published a number of collections of her own works.| Title | Year of first publication | First edition publisher | Notes |
| Lord Peter Views the Body | Gollancz | All stories feature Lord Peter Wimsey Includes: The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers, The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question, The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will, The Fantastic Horror of the Cat in the Bag, The Unprincipled Affair of the Practical Joker, The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention, The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps That Ran, The Bibulous Business of a Matter of Taste, The Learned Adventure of the Dragon's Head, The Piscatorial Farce of the Stolen Stomach, The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face and The Adventure of the Cave of Ali Baba | |
| Hangman's Holiday | Gollancz | Includes:
| |
| In the Teeth of the Evidence and Other Mysteries | Gollancz | Includes: | |
| Gollancz | |||
| Talboys | Harper | Includes: - All featuring Lord Peter Wimsey: Striding Folly, The Haunted Policeman, and Talboys | |
| Lord Peter: A Collection of All the Lord Peter Wimsey Stories | Harper | Includes: The Abominable History of the Man with Copper Fingers, The Entertaining Episode of the Article in Question, The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will, The Fantastic Horror of the Cat in the Bag, The Unprincipled Affair of the Practical Joker, The Undignified Melodrama of the Bone of Contention, The Vindictive Story of the Footsteps That Ran, The Bibulous Business of a Matter of Taste, The Learned Adventure of the Dragon's Head, The Piscatorial Farce of the Stolen Stomach, The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face, The Adventure of the Cave of Ali Baba, The Image in the Mirror, The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey, The Queen's Square, The Necklace of Pearls, In the Teeth of the Evidence, Absolutely Elsewhere, Striding Folly and The Haunted Policeman.
| |
| Striding Folly | New English Library | Includes: All featuring Lord Peter Wimsey: Striding Folly, The Haunted Policeman and Talboys | |
| Gollancz | Two collaborative detective serials written by members of the Detection Club which were broadcast weekly by their authors on the BBC National Programme in 1930 and 1931 with the scripts then being published in The Listener a week after broadcast. | ||
| Crime on the Coast and No Flowers by Request | Gollancz | Two collaborative detective serials written by members of the Detection Club; originally published in Daily Sketch | |
| The Complete Stories | Perennial | Includes all short stories from Lord Peter Views the Body, Hangman's Holiday, In the Teeth of the Evidence and Other Mysteries, Talboys and Lord Peter: A Collection of All the Lord Peter Wimsey Stories |
Editor
| Title | Year of first publication | First edition publisher | Notes |
| Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror | Gollancz | ||
| Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror: Second Series | Gollancz | ||
| Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror: Third Series | Gollancz | ||
| Tales of Detection | J.M. Dent | As part of the Everyman's Library series |
Translation
| Title | Year of first publication | First edition publisher | Notes |
| Tristan in Brittany, Being Fragments of the Romance of Tristan, Written in the Twelfth Century by Thomas the Anglo-Norman | Benn | Translation of the Old French poem Tristan by Thomas of Britain | |
| Translation of four pietra Canzone by Dante Alighieri | |||
| Translation of cantica 1 of Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri | |||
| Translation of cantica 2 of Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri | |||
| Translation of The Song of Roland | |||
| Translation of cantica 3 of Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, with Barbara Reynolds completing the last third |
Scripts and plays
| Title | Location of first performance London, unless otherwise stated | Date of first performance | Notes |
| See note | Screenplay; with Basil Mason; adapted from Sayers's unpublished short story of the same title | ||
| Busman's Honeymoon: A Detective Comedy in Three Acts | Comedy Theatre | 16 December 1936 | With Muriel St. Clare Byrne |
| Canterbury Festival | 12 June 1937 | Four scenes | |
| He That Should Come: A Nativity Play in One Act | See note | 25 December 1938 | Radio play, first broadcast on the BBC |
| Canterbury Festival | 10 June 1939 | Four Scenes | |
| Love All | Torch Theatre | 10 April 1940 | |
| See note | 27 December 1941 | Radio play; first broadcast on the BBC. Adapted from the story of the same title by Alexander Pushkin | |
| See note | Twelve-episode radio series; first broadcast on the BBC between December 1941 and October 1942 | ||
| 15 June 1946 | |||
| Where Do We Go from Here? | See note | With members of the Detection Club. Radio play, first broadcast for the Mystery Playhouse series on the BBC | |
| Playhouse Theatre, Colchester | 3 July 1951 |
Miscellany
Sayers wrote numerous essays, poems and stories which appeared in several publications, including Time and Tide, The Times Literary Supplement, Atlantic Monthly, Punch, The Spectator and the Westminster Gazette; in the last of these she was the author of a poem under the pseudonym H.P. Rallentando. She also wrote several book reviews for The Sunday Times.| Title | Year | Publisher | Notes |
| Papers Relating to the Family of Wimsey | Privately printed | As Matthew Wimsey; co-written with others | |
| Privately printed | |||
| Published in serial form in The Spectator | |||
| Harper | Compiled by C.W. Scott-Giles | ||
| Taking Detective Stories Seriously: The Collected Crime Reviews of Dorothy L. Sayers | Tippermuir Books | Compiled by Martin Edwards |
Letters
| Title | Year | Publisher | Notes |
| Hodder & Stoughton | |||
| A supplement to the letters |