Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night Essay -- Gaudy Night

Dorothy L. Sayers’ Gaudy Night When Gayle Wald wrote, â€Å"Sayers’s career writing detective stories effectively ends with Gaudy Night† (108), she did not present a new argument, but continued the tradition that Gaudy Night does not center on the detective story.   Barbara Harrison even labeled Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter/Harriet Vane books, Strong Poison, Gaudy Night, and Busman’s Honeymoon, as â€Å"deliriously happy-ending romances† (66).   The label stretches the definition of a romance, but Gaudy Night indeed has very little to do with crime.   Sayers encrypted the real story within her detective novel.   This story behind the story narrates love and human relationships.   In fact, the crimes in Gaudy Night only supply a convenient way for Sayers to place Lord Peter and Harriet Vane on equal footing to bring closure to their relationship.   So the story does not focus on the solving of a crime, at least from Sayers’s point of view.   Lord Peter, how ever, sees it differently.   As a character in the book, rather than the omniscient writer, Lord Peter, in fact, obsesses about solving the crime.   Sayers underlines this conflict between the writer and the detective by making us see Lord Peter entirely through the eyes of another character, Harriet Vane.   In Gaudy Night,   Sayers also provides the reader with a weak plot, at least compared to the rest of her opus, and a lack of details concerning the mystery, especially the content of the letters.   The story itself contradicts one of Sayers’s long held beliefs, that mystery and love stories do not, and should never, mix.   These facts, coupled with the grandiose detail given to us about Peter and Harriet’s personal interaction, show that Sayers had her mind more on love than on crime.   ... ...dy Night.   London:   V. Gollancz, 1951. Sayers, Dorothy L.   â€Å"Gaudy Night.†Ã‚   The Art of the Mystery Story:   A Collection of Critical   Ã‚  Ã‚   Essays.   Ed. Howard Haycraft.   New York:   Simon and Schuster, 1946.   208-221. Sayers, Dorothy L.   â€Å"The Omnibus of Crime.†Ã‚   Detective Fiction:   A Collection of Critical   Ã‚  Ã‚   Essays.   Ed. Robin W. Winks.   Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:   Prentice Hall, 1980.   53-83. Vane Dine, S. S.   â€Å"Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.†Ã‚   The Art of the Mystery Story:   Ã‚  Ã‚   A Collection of Critical Essays.   Ed. Howard Haycraft.   New York:   Simon and Schuster, 1946. 189-193 Wald, Gayle F.   â€Å"Strong Poison: Love and the Novelistic in Dorothy Sayers.†Ã‚   The Cunning   Ã‚  Ã‚   Craft:   Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Fiction.   Ed. Ronald G. Walker and June M.   Ã‚  Ã‚   Frazer.   Western Illinois University, 1990.   98-108.