“No job for a gentleman”: Gentlemanliness, Romance, and Moral Ambiguity in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey Detective Novels

This thesis focuses on the series of detective novels written by Dorothy L. Sayers; and, in particular, on the characterisation of Sayers’s detective, the aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. While Lord Peter’s status as an aristocrat and English gentleman may have begun as a matter of pure plot convenience, with his wealth and background giving him the freedom to investigate crime at leisure, Sayers skilfully exploits the conflict between his gentlemanly sensibilities and the moral ambiguity of detection to create a more complex and layered approach to the interwar mystery story.
Sayers’s contributions to the field have often been dismissed or downplayed. As with other authors of Golden Age detective fiction – most of whom were women – Sayers was frequently subject to limiting, gendered judgements. The situation has shifted considerably in the past few decades, however. During the 1990s, in particular, critics such as Catherine Kenney and Gill Plain would bring more nuanced and positive views to the field of Sayers studies, and there is now a wealth of critical material focused on the Wimsey novels. To this can be added a number of important biographical studies chronicling Sayers’s life and literary career. Nevertheless, I argue that much more can be done to draw the full picture of how Sayers deepens the character of the detective. Through sustained close reading of Sayers’s fiction and essays, and guided by detailed engagement with scholarship on detective fiction and interwar culture, as well as modernist studies and affect theory, I set out to reveal the full depth and complexity of the gentleman detective in Sayers’s novels. The gentleman detective emerges, not as a stylish combination of the brilliant Holmesian sleuth and the stereotypical English gentleman, but as a flawed and traumatised human being who must grapple with the painful consequences of detective work.