Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night Essay -- Gaudy Night

Dorothy L. Sayers Gaudy Night When Gayle Wald wrote, Sayerss career writing spy stories effectively ends with Gaudy Night (108), she did not present a red-hot argument, but continued the tradition that Gaudy Night does not touch on the police detective story. Barbara Harrison even labeled Dorothy Sayerss churchman neb/Harriet Vane books, self-coloured Poison, Gaudy Night, and Busmans Honeymoon, as deliriously happy-ending romances (66). The label stretches the definition of a romance, but Gaudy Night thus has very little to do with crime. Sayers encrypted the real story within her detective novel. This story behind the story narrates love and human relationships. In fact, the crimes in Gaudy Night only supply a convenient instruction for Sayers to place professional Peter and Harriet Vane on equal priming coat to bring closure to their relationship. So the story does not focus on the solving of a crime, at least from Sayerss point of view. Lord Peter, however, sees it differently. As a character in the book, rather than the omniscient writer, Lord Peter, in fact, obsesses about solving the crime. Sayers underlines this conflict between the writer and the detective by making us see Lord Peter only through the eyes of another character, Harriet Vane. In Gaudy Night, Sayers also provides the referee with a weak plot, at least compared to the rest of her opus, and a neglect of details concerning the mystery, especially the content of the letters. The story itself contradicts one of Sayerss capacious held beliefs, that mystery and love stories do not, and should never, mix. These facts, coupled with the grandiose detail given up to us about Peter and Harriets personal interaction, show that Sayers had her brainpower more on love than on crime. ... ...dy Night. London V. Gollancz, 1951. Sayers, Dorothy L. Gaudy Night. The craft of the Mystery Story A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. cutting York Simon and Schuster, 1946. 20 8-221. Sayers, Dorothy L. The bus topology of Crime. Detective Fiction A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Robin W. Winks. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey Prentice Hall, 1980. 53-83. Vane Dine, S. S. Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories. The machination of the Mystery Story A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York Simon and Schuster, 1946. 189-193 Wald, Gayle F. Strong Poison Love and the Novelistic in Dorothy Sayers. The Cunning Craft Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Fiction. Ed. Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer. Western Illinois University, 1990. 98-108.