Indeed, some of her principles were codified in the ceremonial oaths she demanded of prospective members of the Detection Club: No writer should lie: “Any fool can tell a lie, and any fool can believe it but the right method is to tell the truth in such a way that the intelligent reader is seduced into telling the lie for himself.” She was obsessed with Fair Play-all the clues should be laid in front of the reader, all the deductions should be ones the readers could make, if only they were able. Why? We’ll get to that.īut first the novels! Entertaining, erudite, lucid, filled with ingenious puzzles and even more ingenious solutions, written with grace, elegance, flair, wit, and an acute attention to character and psychological development, these novels combined the best qualities of the detective story with a novelist’s attention to the mores and manners of the day. With minor exceptions, unpublished in her lifetime, she never again produced a work of detective fiction in any form. In the field of detective fiction, she was an overwhelming force, and seemingly everywhere.Īnd then she stopped. Chesterton, among many others, she was the driving force behind three collaborative novels and additional collaborative serials broadcast on the BBC. As a member and the long-term president of the Detection Club, a writers’ association that included Christie and G.K.

As a reviewer, she covered more than 350 detective novels for the Sunday Times, and her essays appeared widely in other publications. As an editor, she produced a magisterial three-volume Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (1928, 1931, 1934) and its sequel Tales of Detection (1936), accompanied by cogent analyses of the contents.

Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers