Who's Dorothy?

Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born in Oxford on 13 June 1893, the daughter of the Rev. Henry Sayers, the director of the Christchurch Cathedral Choir School, and Helen Mary (Leigh) Sayers. She grew up in the small village of Bluntisham, Cambridgeshire, after her father was given the living there as clergyman.
From the early age Sayers was very gifted in languages, learning Latin by the age of seven and French from her governess.
She was educated at the Godolphin School, a boarding school at Salisbury but she had to leave it because of an illness.
In 1912 she won a scholarship to the Oxford women's college Somerville, studying modern languages and medieval literature. She finished with first-class honours in 1916. In 1920 Sayers earned her M.A., among one of the first group of women to be granted degrees from Oxford University.
Disliking the routine and seclusion of academic life she joined Blackwell's, the Oxford publishers, worked with her Oxford friend Eric Whelpton at L'École des Roches in Normandy, and from 1922 until 1931 served as copywriter at the London advertising firm of Bensons.
During these years Sayers went through a period she did not advertise much later. She had an illegitimate son, who was brought up by her cousin, Ivy Shrimpton. The father was Bill White, a motorcyclist and car salesman. Sayers rejected contraceptives, which caused a problem with her lover, the Russian born-novelist John Cournos, whom she met in 1921. Sayers wanted to marry him, but Cournos told her that he did not believe in marriage, afterwards she broke off with him.
Letters from this unhappy affair with him are now housed at Harvad University. Although her cousin Ivy Shrimpton took care of the child, Sayers followed closely his upbringing and supplied funds for this purpose. Sayers kept the child secret even from her parents who were in their seventies.
Sayers's friends learned of John Anthony's existence only after her death in 1957 as the only beneficiary under his mother's will. However, Sayers communicated regularly with her son by mail. Shortly before he died in 1984 John Anthony said that his mother "did the very best she could."
In 1926 Sayers married the journalist, Captain Oswald Atherton "Mac" Fleming, who was divorced and had two children. The marriage began happily with a strong partnership at home. Both were working a great deal, Mac as an author and journalist and Dorothy as an advertising copywriter and author. Over time, Mac's health worsened largely due to his World War I service and as a result he became unable to work.
Mac Fleming died June 9, 1950, at Sunnyside Cottage, Witham, Essex. Dorothy died suddenly of a stroke on 17 December 1957 at the same place.

Oxford City

Oxford, Dorothy Leigh Sayers’ birthplace, is a small village of England of 151.000 inhabitants very famous around the world. There, the rivers Cherwell and Thames run through Oxford and meet near the city centre. River Thames is well-known because is the home of the annual rowing race called The University Boat Race in which participates the Oxford University Boat Club and the Cambridge University Boat Club in late March or early April, on the Championship Course from Putney to Mortlake in the west of London
Dorothy lived for years in 1 Brewer Street, where there is a plaque commemorating her living there. Near there is the Christ Church where here father, Henry Sayers, was the Headmaster.
Sayers studied in the University of Oxford and she spent her happiest teen days there. This University is the oldest one in the English-speaking world and it is also regarded as one of the world's leading academic institutions inviting academics to go there from all over the world. That place inspired her to write “Gaudy Night”, one of the best stories of Lord Peter Wimsey developed in the city of Oxford. But she was not the only one who wrote books based on Oxford; other authors have chosen this city as the scene of their works like Jude the Obscure (1895) by Thomas Hardy, A Question of Upbringing (1951 ) by Anthony Powell and lately Oxford Murders (2008) by Alex de la Iglesia and Jorge Guerricaechevarría.
Another place to visit in Oxford is the city Centre, an extraordinary sight for tourists, and an attractive location for the consumer to visit, as well as being a good location for socializing. The Shopping centre and surrounding area (The West End) contains many major shops like Marks & Spencer and many other important shops.
The last of the three most important attractions in Oxford is Blackwells Bookshop, which claims the largest single room devoted to book sales in the whole Europe, the cavernous Norrington Room (10,000 Sq Foot).

Bibliography

As you already must know, she was one of the first women to get a degree in Oxford University, but what you may not know is that she graduated with first class honours in Modern Languages in 1915.
Given her knowledge in this subject, she published in 1923 her first novel, Whose body, which introduced her monocle-wearing detective character Lord Peter Wimsey for the first time. He was a hit among readers and Sayers’ most famous character through fourteen novels and short story collections, including Clouds of Witness (1926), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) and Five Red Herrings (1931). Gaudy Night was the culmination of the Wimsey saga, but thanks to Muriel Saint Clare Byrne (a Sayers’ friend who persuaded her to write a play), Lord Peter Wimsey was put on the stage in Busman’s Honeymoon, the last story starred by him on 1937.
Sayers then realized that she was fond of the stage and she was asked to write another play: The Zeal of Thy House, for the Canterbury Festival. This latter play was followed by six more, up to the Colchester Festival one, The Emperor Constantine in 1951. The most significant was The man born to be King, written for a BBC children program. She also wrote four other novels and two serial stories for means of communication.
Her work was widely diverse, including poetry, translations, letters, articles and essays. She also wrote many plays and radio broadcasts on Christian topics, such as Begin Here and The mind of the Maker (1941), in which she compares God with the human.
As Dante’s writings had intrigued her for a long time, she decided to teach herself old Italian and made a translation of the Divine Comedy after the end of the World War II. She also found time to finish her translation of Song of Roland from the old French, but not Dante’s third volume, Paradiso, because of her unexpected death on December 1957. Her friend Barbara Reynolds completed her work.

Lord Peter Wimsey

Lord Peter was born in 1890; he was the second son of Mortimer Gerald Bredon Wimsey and Honoria Lucasta. His brothers, Gerald and Mary, also appear in the novels of Sayers.
Lord Peter studied at Eton, the most elite school in England, and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he graduated in History. He served in the First World War, from which came out with the so-called war neurosis, something that creates problems to him on several novels, especially in the first ones. During the war, Lord Peter met the man who would be his best friend, Mervyn Bunter. Bunter was very skillful, and one of his ability was photography.
In Deadly Poison, Lord Peter meets Deborah Harriet Vane and falls in love with her. Harriet is a writer of mystery novels, licensed by Oxford, accused of murdering her old lover. Of course, Wimsey get Harriet escaping the gallows, and after proposing marriage to her (in Deadly Poison and Have His Carcase) Vane just accepting in Gaudy Night.
They married on 8th October 1935, at the Church of St Cross, Oxford, an event reflected in the collection of letters and journal entries of Busman's Honeymoon. The married couple Wimsey goes on a honeymoon to Talboys, a house in the east of Hertfordshire, which Lord Peter offers to his wife as a wedding gift. There, they found the corpse of the previous owner and, obviously, they spend the honeymoon solving the case. The Wimsey come to have three children: Bredon Delagardie Peter Wimsey (born in 1936), Roger Wimsey (born in 1938), and Paul Wimsey (born in 1940).
In addition to criminology, one of the hobbies of Lord Peter was to collect books. He also knew about food (and especially in oenology) and male fashion, as well as in classical music. He played quite well musical works of Bach on a piano. He pampered it even more than their books, their wines and their cars. He had christened one of his vehicles under the name "Madam Merdle" by the character of Little Dorrit, of Dickens.
Lord Peter was also author of two curious books: Notes on collecting and incunabula and The user manual of the murderer.
His clubs were the Marlborough and Egotists. He lived in the 110 Piccadilly, until he married Harriet Vane and moved to the neighbourhood of Mayfair. The family home is in Bredon Hall, duchy of Denver, Norfolk.

Filmography

Some film directors have recorded films based on Dorothy L Sayers’s novels. Here we can find some examples of that filmography, which includes films since 1935 until 2003.

Lord Peter Wimsey – Murder Must Advertise (2003)
Director: Rodney Bennett
Starring: Ian Carmichael
Synopsis: Lord Peter takes up employment as a copywriter for an advertising agency under the pseudonym of 'Death Bredon' (his middle names), investigating the recent death of one of the employees. In the process he finds out what it is like to actually work for a living.
Most of the action takes place in an advertising agency, a setting with which Sayers was very familiar. Many considered this to be the best book of the series, although she herself is said to have considered it something of a failure.

Have His Carcass (1987)
Director: Christopher Hodson
Starring: Edward Petherbridge, Harriet Walter
Synopsis: Based on the novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, this made-for-TV mystery features two of her best-known characters: Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey. Novelist Vane (Harriet Walter) is vacationing after being cleared on charges of murder when she stumbles across the body of a man who has been killed on the beach. The only footprints in the sand besides her own are those of the victim, and Vane is at a loss to explain what has happened. Finding herself a homicide suspect again, Vane calls upon her friend Lord Wimsey (Edward Petherbridge) to help solve the crime, and the two soon find they have stumbled upon a plot involving murder, suicide, and political radicals.

Five Red Herrings (1976)
Director: Robert Tronson
Starring: Ian Carmichael, Glyn Houston
Synopsis: The Five Red Herrings of the title are among the six suspects in the murder of an artist in the village of Kirkcudbright, Scotland. Whoever killed Campbell also painted a landscape in his style to confuse the time of death, so it had to be one of the six other artists in the village, and they all had reasons for murder. Now Lord Peter Wimsey has to figure out who done it and which are the five red herrings.
This book has a very complex plot and is particularly recommended to those who prefer to have to think about their whodunnits.

The Fountain Plays - chapter of Crime Never Pays

Mrs. Sayers is the author of The fountain plays, one of the stories included in the book Crime never pays, a compilation of crime and mystery stories by authors from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie.
The story is about a man called Mr. Spiller who has just installed an ornamental fountain in his garden. He is so proud of it that invites some friends to have dinner at his house to admire it. During the dinner, the guests give their opinion about the fountain in the garden, about the place and the bushes around it. But it doesn’t like to everybody, above all, to Mr. Gooch, who is offending the host all the time criticizing his new fountain.
At the end of the dinner, some of them decide to play bridge but Mrs. Digby, one of his neighbours, decides to leave, and Mr. Spiller offers himself to accompanies her.
Once he is back home, realizes that everybody has gone to bed but Masters, the servant. He has turned off the fountain and everything is ready to go to sleep, so Mr. Spiller tells him to leave. But not everybody was in bed… Mr. Gooch, who had declined to play bridge with the other guests after the dinner, had decided to go to the garden. Some minutes later, they both meet in the living room and start to talk. Mr. Gooch knows a terrible secret about Mr. Spiller, and blackmails him in order to get more money than in fact he is receiving to keep the secret. He threatens to tell her daughter about it, they argue, and the crime takes place. Mr. Spiller was not intended to kill him but, actually, he did.
He hides the body next to the fountain and turns it on so that the water keeps the body temperature and confuses the police the next morning pretending to feign a natural death.
In the morning the body is found and the Police thinks it is a natural death as Mr. Spiller planned, but when everything seemed to be finished, Masters the servant tells Mr. Spiller that he knows everything about the crime he committed, and in order to keep the secret of the recent murder, Mr. Spiller has to increase his salary and to give him money when he ask to.
Mr. Gooch blackmailed him before, and Masters is doing it now. The same story is repeated again, like the fountain, which uses the same water over and over again.