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unusual facts about Plays of Dorothy L. Sayers



Alfred Walter Stewart

Dorothy L. Sayers paid tribute to Stewart's The Two Tickets Puzzle in her The Five Red Herrings.

Barbara Reynolds

She completed and annotated Paradiso, the last volume of Dorothy L. Sayers' three-volume translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, which was left unfinished at Dorothy Sayers' death.

Brian Way

There he produced plays in the round including Philoctetes and Pinocchio, which he wrote with Warren Jenkins and an abbreviated version of The Man Born to be King by Dorothy L. Sayers.

Canterbury Festival

Guest artists during his time included John Mansfield, Gustav Holst, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T. S. Eliot (whose 1935 drama Murder in the Cathedral was commissioned by Bell for the festival).

Detection Club

The Detection Club was formed in 1930 by a group of British mystery writers, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Arthur Morrison, John Rhode, Jessie Rickard, Baroness Emma Orczy, R. Austin Freeman, G.D.H. Cole, Margaret Cole, E.C. Bentley, Henry Wade, and H.C. Bailey.

Gaylord Larsen

He is well known for his fictional murder mystery Dorothy and Agatha, incorporating the well-known mystery novelists Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie as title characters, where Sayers must solve a crime when a man is murdered in her dining room.

Gervase of Canterbury

A play by Dorothy L. Sayers, The Zeal of Thy House is based on Gervase's account of the death of William of Sens.

James Brabazon

Leslie James Seth-Smith (12 January 1923 – 5 November 2007), known as James Brabazon, was a screenwriter and the author of two well-received biographies of Albert Schweitzer and Dorothy L. Sayers.

John Cournos

However, he is probably best known for his unhappy affair with Dorothy L. Sayers, fictionalized by Sayers in the detective book Strong Poison (1930) and by Cournos himself in The Devil Is an English Gentleman (1932).

Law of Property Act 1925

The Property Act has a major part in the background to the 1927 mystery novel Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers, its passage in Parliament providing the motive for the seemingly motiveless murder which Lord Peter Wimsey must solve.

Lifeline Theatre

Lifeline also produced world premiere adaptations of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the Ring) and four installments of the Dorothy L. Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries (Whose Body?, Strong Poison, Gaudy Night, and Busman's Honeymoon).

Marcelline Jayakody

Eventually there were over 250 live actors taking the place of puppets in his adaptation of Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Man Born to be King Dukprathi Prasangaya in Sinhala.

Marion E. Wade Center

The Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College (Illinois) is a special research collection of papers, books, and manuscripts, primarily relating to seven authors from the United Kingdom: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and George MacDonald, as well as C. S. Lewis's wife, the poet Joy Davidman.

Mary Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury

There is a brief sketch of her character in the mystery novel Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, which is set in Shrewsbury College, a fictional Oxford college named in her honour.

Roy Ridley

Dorothy L. Sayers based the physical description of her fictional character Lord Peter Wimsey on that of Ridley after seeing him read his Newdigate Prize-winning poem "Oxford" at the Encaenia ceremony in July 1913.

St Cross Church, Oxford

The marriage of Dorothy L. Sayers' fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey to Harriet Vane was in the church on 8 October 1935 in Busman's Honeymoon.

The Floating Admiral

The twelve chapters of the story were each written by a different author, in the following sequence: Canon Victor Whitechurch, G. D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson, Clemence Dane and Anthony Berkeley.

The Image in the Mirror

"The Image in the Mirror" is short story by Dorothy L. Sayers, featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and published as the first story in Hangman's Holiday.

The Return of the Soldier

Unlike Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Dorothy L. Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, other postwar novels which emphasize the lingering effects of war after despite attempts at reintegration, The Return of the Soldier lends a certain optimism that the soldier can reintegrate back into the society.

Thrones, Dominations

Thrones, Dominations is a Lord Peter Wimsey murder mystery novel that Dorothy L. Sayers began writing but abandoned, and which remained as fragments and notes at her death.

Trichinopoly cigar

In Dorothy L. Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928), Lord Peter Wimsey remarks that an acquaintance who once "polluted" a Cockburn 1886 port wine by drinking it while smoking a cheap Trichinopoly cigar was "ear-marked for a bad end".

Vavasour

Used twice as a surname by Dorothy L. Sayers, once in Murder Must Advertise (Miss Ethel Vavasour, Jim Tallboy's girlfriend), and once in Have His Carcase (Maurice Vavasour, a pseudonym of the murderer).

Vehmic court

A character in the Dorothy L. Sayers novel Murder Must Advertise appears at a fancy-dress party as a member of the Vehmgericht, which allows him to wear a hooded costume to disguise his identity.


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