Dorothy L. Sayers

I "discovered" Sayers about ten years ago. Or, I guess it would be more accurate to say that I discovered her most famous creation, the gentleman detective, Lord Peter Wimsey.

Quite an achievement. She died in 1957 and wrote her last Wimsey novel in 1937.

Sayers was a contemporary of Agatha Christie. She was writing the Lord Peter Wimsey novels at the same time Christie was writing Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple novels.

I love Lord Peter. In my opinion, David Niven would have made a great Lord Peter.

I actually discovered Sayers more recently than Lord Peter when reading one of my favorite books, ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church, by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch.

Frost and Hirsch present Sayers as an example of someone who believed in Jesus and who lived a lifestyle reflective of their "wild messiah."

Sayers lived in Oxford and was good friends with C. S. Lewis. Lewis...and Frost and Hirsch...highly praise Sayers', "The Man Born to be King: A Play-Cycle on the Life of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ," written in the 1940s.

Lewis thought so highly of it that he read it every year during holy week. He said of it, "I shed real tears (hot ones) in places..."

Since being introduced to Sayers' radical life and faith, I've become an even bigger fan of Lord Peter, though I can't see much of Jesus in the character, nor the novels.

Incidentally, Sayers stopped writing murder mysteries because she was deeply disturbed by the fact that European dictators were committing mass murder so easily. Murder was no longer a source of entertainment to her.

I think I'd love to read a good biography of Sayers. She certainly didn't live a spotless life. She had a child outside of marriage in the 1920s!

Yet, twenty years later, she became someone whose devotion to Jesus stirred even C. S. Lewis.

All this to lead up to saying that the BBC serialized five of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels in the 1970s, featuring Iain Chamberlain, and three more in the 80s with Edward Petherbridge as Lord Peter and Harriet Walter as Wimsey's love interest and eventual wife Harriet Vane.

We bought the first series on DVD a while back when we found a good price on it. Considering that it's almost 50 years old, it holds up fairly well. But the second series was way out of our frugal price range. Evie won an EBay auction on the second series recently and the discs arrived the other day.

We'll watch one of them, at least, today.