Book Review: 'The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist' (1996)

Murder is the best revenge: After Dorothy Sayers was dumped by her true love, the writer John Cournos, she killed off a fictional version of him in the classic whodunit Strong Poison. Many such lively tidbits are to be culled from Sayers' letters in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 1899-1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist, which runs from her precocious youth to her fascinating days among the first generation of women at Oxford to her development as a poet, playwright, and one of the world's great mystery novelists. As P.D. James explains in her preface, Sayers raised the genre's status from ''inferior puzzle'' to ''respected craft'' through her witty, unassailably intelligent Lord Peter Wimsey books, later made into a popular PBS mystery series. B+