They were a smash with audiences on both sides of the Atlantic and showed up later with a new series title, 'Murder Most British,' which included only three of them. Five of the Wimsey mysteries were filmed and shown a year later on 'Masterpiece Theatre': Clouds of Witness, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Five Red Herrings, Murder Must Advertise and The Nine Tailors. But he got the part and the rest is history. So when the BBC decided back in 1972 to film several of her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, mostly at the urging of comedian Ian Carmichael, that actor was not even on the short list of candidates for the part since he was too closely associated with Bertie Wooster, whom he had shortly before that played on British telly.

(Contact me if you want the titles of these books.) With Dorothy Sayers we have far better written novels-though not necessarily better mysteries than those solved by Poirot and Marple-with characters far more human and therefore interesting. Agatha Christie broke all the rules when she made the first-person narrator the killer and again when she made all the suspects the collaborating killers and most outrageously of all when she made the Master Detective the killer.

The most overused is 'the least likely suspect' solution, a variant being found in an early Ellery Queen novel when a character already proven to be innocent turned out to be the guilty party. There are several ways for a writer to startle the reader at the end of a mystery.

Wimsey clouds of witness