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As Her Whimsey Took Her fares better, largely because it addresses the most fascinating aspect of Sayers' career: how the same sensibility could embrace low crime and high church. "Part of her peculiar genius was to see connections and similarities between situations and concepts that to ordinary people might appear widely different," Alzina Stone Dale notes in one canny essay. The pieces devoted to Sayers' detective fiction show her increasing concern with questions of guilt and punishment, and Lord Peter's corresponding change from a Bertie Wooster type to a man whose conscience is as well-developed as his charm. Similarly, the essays on Sayers' religious dramas show her unique amalgam of piety and earthy wit. "Artists who paint pictures of our Lord in the likeness of a dismal-look ing, die-away person, with his hair parted in the middle, ought to be excommunicated for blasphemy," she once argued.
This collection is only a "first critical study," as Editor Margaret Hannay points out. Even so, it works too hard and omits too much. There is no analysis of Sayers' political and social ideas and no assessment of her literary value.
There is only one example of her great breadth of knowledge. She once noted that she had ten quotations in mind while describing the church roof in The Nine Tailors: "Incredibly aloof, flinging back the light in a dusky shimmer of bright hair and gilded outspread wings, soared the ranked angels . . ." The allusions ranged from the Bible, Milton and Donne to Keats and T.S. Eliot.
A pity Lord Peter could not write Sayers' biography. He would carefully assemble the clues and evidence, including a previously undiscovered manuscript or two exhumed from a country library. Then, over a bottle of Cockburn '80 port, with Purcell playing softly in the background, he would construct the ideal manuscript: analytic to a fault, but with a touch of inspired whimsey. As it is, Sayers must wait to be rescued from the sort of "unmitigated Grimth" that she deplored among Dante scholars. —Annalyn Swan