Among her many talents Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957) was a crime fiction critic, reading and evaluating books weekly for the Sunday Times from 1933 into 1935. Seeking to make Sayers’ insights and observations available to the wider reading public, the Dorothy L. Sayers Society (https://www.sayers.org.uk/) published Taking Detective Stories Seriously: The Collected Crime Reviews of Dorothy L. Sayers in 2017. With a foreword by Simon Brett, himself a distinguished author of novels and plays, and an introduction and commentary by Golden Age luminary Martin Edwards, Sayers’ reviews of crime fiction have been faithfully reproduced in a 300+ page trade paperback. A useful index lists the nearly 400 books reviewed by Sayers alphabetically by author.
Her reviews are considered, concise, and thought-provoking. I know exactly what she thought of the work in hand when I finish reading her comments. Sometimes I don’t agree but that’s beside the point. I can’t help but imagine her acerbic response to some of the vacillating blurbs from current day reviewers anxious not to give offense to an author, probably a friend, whose work definitely needs work.
In the analysis that leads into the reviews, Martin Edwards meticulously examines Sayers’ approach to reviewing, her insistence on sound writing, and her impatience with weak plots and too frequently used tropes. This comprehensive essay, more than 40 pages, is worth the acquisition of the book all by itself.
As Edwards points out, these reviews cite books that appear to be lost forever, maddening to a voracious reader. But Sayers’ opinions also help steer the reader toward the gems of the time while identifying those titles that might be set aside for later.
For other perspectives on Sayers as a reviewer, Edwards mentions “Reviewing the Reviewer: Dorothy Sayers as Crime Critic, 1933-5”, a 1999 lecture by Mike Ripley, author and former crime fiction critic for the Daily Telegraph, and “Dorothy L. Sayers: Critic of Detective Fiction” by Ralph E. Hone in Volume 6 of SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review.
Taking Detective Stories Seriously is readily available from The Dorothy Sayers Society or on the secondary market.