Clouds of Witness Review: Dorothy L. Sayers, Fair Play and a Vanished World
Cover image: Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers, HarperCollins US paperback edition. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. I read Dorothy L. Sayers’ Whose Body? a couple of years ago and was more impressed than I expected to be. Its combination of Lord Peter Wimsey’s frivolity with a surprisingly gruesome mystery made the book feel stranger than my vague idea of Golden Age detective fiction had suggested. Clouds of Witness , the second Wimsey novel, did not hit quite as hard. The mystery kept me guessing almost until the end, but I am not convinced it gave me enough information to have solved it. What surprised me is that this mattered less than it should have. Published in 1926, the book is now almost exactly a century old, and the social world surrounding the murder has become almost as interesting as the murder itself. That gives Clouds of Witness a second function it did not originally need. It remains an entertaining detective story, but it is also an acci...