"Where Do Plots Come From?":
Dorothy L. Sayers on Literary Invention

STEPHEN HAHN

The continued popularity of Dorothy Sayers's mystery fic¬
tion is evident in the recent republication of a series of the
Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries in Harper and Row's Peren¬
nial Library, and in the recent Masterpiece Theatre television series
shown on PBS. While never so popular as Agatha Christie, perhaps
because her novels are more challenging in ways that do not relate
directly to the "solving" of the purported crime, Sayers seems per¬
sistently as interesting both as a writer of mystery stories and as a
commentator on the genre. Trained as a scholar at Oxford, Sayers
was an inveterate "explainer." In the 1920s, the heyday of the
mystery story, she wrote what remains one of the most succinct
and accurate histories of the genre in her introduction to the formi¬
dable Omnibus of Crime (1927).

Her explaining went far beyond these parochial bounds,
however, for she wrote numerous expository essays on Christian
doctrine, on literary invention and creativity, on allegory, on major
myths such as those of Oedipus and Faust, and on Christian
esthetics and morality. Many of these are now collected in one
volume. The Whimsical Christian: 18 Essays by Dorothy L Sayers
(1987). In 1941, she published The Mind of the Maker, an attempt
to explain and explore the difficult analogy between the idea of the
creativity of God and the creativity of the literary artist. Readers of
her mystery fiction will be familiar, too, with the amount of
explaining that goes on in the novels on topics as diverse as the
draining ofthe fens of East Anglia, the ringing of changes in church
bells, intestacy laws, advertising strategies (circa 193 3), and cricket.

Sayers's detailed explanations suggest a strong need to know
about the "real world" as well as more arcane matters, to assert that
knowledge, and to communicate it. The amount of exposition that