I plucked this slim vol of shorters to read on a train because it fitted into a pocket of my top coat.
They are classic detective mysteries and, oh joy, they are short stories. And I met a new DLS character: Montague Egg. Dorothy Sayers has been portrayed as a bit of a spinster snob, doting on Lord Peter Wimsey, but Monty Egg is the “travelling representative of Plummet & Rose, Wines and Spirits, Piccadilly”. Dorothy, may I, uses a lot of ingenuity to find murders for Monty to solve. He stars in eleven short stories, six of which are in Hangers Hollers. My point, if there is a point, is that DLS is not a one-trick pony like Agatha Christie. She is as comfortable writing about public houses, her distinction between the commercial room and the bar-parlour is now forgotten, as about Lord Peter, his monocle, and Bunter.
Unlike Christie, Sayers inserts shafts of humour.
”Well, my lord, I suppose we can take Her Grace’s word for it?”
”I think you can,” said Wimsey, smiling. “I’ve known my mother practically since my birth, and have always found her very reliable.”
It’s a genre that works best in short stories. Who wants to wade through a heap of cardboard characters and red herrings for a whole novel?
There is one aspect of the genre that is a bit gritty: a murderer was hanged. In real life innocent people were, sometimes, sent to the gallows: never in the detective fiction of the 1930s.