12 Reasons the Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries Should be on Your 2017 Reading List

Cover to Murder Must Advertise, by Dorothy L. Sayers. Image via Open Road Media, digital publisher of this edition.

10. The Length of the Series

There are times where you don’t really want to commit to a huge, long story or a massive canon like the works of Agatha Christie. For comparison, she wrote 66 detective novels and has 14 sets of short stories. Honestly, that’s practically a year-long challenge all in itself.

For Dorothy Sayers and Lord Peter Wimsey, the challenge is far, far shorter. Sayers wrote 11 novels from Whose Body? to Busman’s Honeymoon. All of the Wimsey short stories show up in one collection called Lord Peter, so you can skip earlier collections like Lord Peter Views the Body. A few continuations by Jill Paton Walsh also exist, starting with Thrones, Dominations, which is actually based off of a manuscript from Sayers herself. Walsh added three more novels. Counting them all brings the total up to a very manageable 15 books.

For additional reading, you can check out The Wimsey Papers, a name for a series of articles purporting to be letters from the characters in the cast during the Second World War.

Now, some novels are actually quite long. For example, this edition of Gaudy Night clocks in at about 544 pages. However, since you only have a few more novels to get through after you’re done, you have time for a palate cleanser before polishing off the rest of the series towards the end 2017.