Season Break and Re-releases
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Hi, it's Sarah. Brooke and I are taking a short break from recording new episodes to catch up on our reading lists and plan for the next season of Clued in Mystery. While we're off, we are re-releasing a few of our favorite episodes.
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We hope you enjoy.
Podcast Recommendations: Mystery Rats Maze
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Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I'm Sarah. And I'm Brooke. And we both love mystery. Before we get started today, I have another podcast I'd like to recommend to our mystery-loving listeners.
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It's called Mystery Rats Maze Podcast by Kings River Life. Their episodes consist of mystery short stories and first chapters of mystery novels read and brought to life by professional narrators and actors.
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I've listened to a few episodes already and have grown my ever-expanding TBR list. You can find Mystery Rats Maze podcast on all your favorite apps or on their website, which is mysteryratsmaze.podbean.com,
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and we'll list that in our show notes.
Dorothy L. Sayers: Mystery Genre Icon
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Brooke, today we're going to talk about Dorothy L. Sayers, and I'm really looking forward to this. I know. i am, too. ah I feel like a broken record. I had so much to learn once again, and it was a really fun time learning more about this other pioneer of the mystery genre.
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And I mean, I feel like I could have spent even longer learning about her. There just seems to be so much to her. And I feel like, I mean, we'll we'll talk about her, but as with Christie and Doyle, we're really just going to scratch the surface of of her personality and and her writing, I think. But let's get started. For sure.
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Dorothy Lee Sayers was an only child born in 1893 in Oxford, England. She attended a boarding school in Salisbury and went on to graduate in 1915 with first-class honors from Somerville College, Oxford University, where she studied modern languages and medieval literature.
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Although at the time she finished, women weren't granted degrees, she was awarded one a few years later when the university changed its policy. In 1916, Blackwell Publishing published Sayre's first book of poetry and would go on to publish another in 1918.
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She actually ended up working for Blackwell for a period of time. In addition to her experience in publishing, she also worked in advertising and is credited with famous campaigns for Guinness beer and Coleman mustard.
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And it was during this time that Whose Body was published, which is the first of 14 novels and stories featuring Lord Peter Whimsey as a sleuth. When she finished the whimsy series, she turned to writing plays and writing works with more religious theme, including translating Dante, which was a passion for her and what she considered to actually be her best work.
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In total, she published 16 novels, 10 plays, six translations and 24 nonfiction works. Her father was a reverend in the Church of England, and i think it's that she grew up in religious circles that really influenced her writing religious works.
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I found reference to her being offered an honorary doctorate of of divinity that she actually declined because you know she didn't feel like she had enough to to warrant that. In terms of her personal life, in 1926, she married a Scottish journalist, Captain Oswald Atherton Fleming.
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She actually had a son following a relationship with another man before her marriage to um to
Personal Life and Career Shift of Sayers
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Fleming. and And the boy was raised by her aunt and her cousin, which allowed her to play a role in the boy's life. She moved away from writing detective novels shortly before the start of the Second World War. and that's when that shift to her focus on Christian works and translations happened.
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And she's often associated with many literary figures, including The Inklings, which is a literary discussion group of Oxford academics that included J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and others. Although she, from what I read, never actually attended any of their meetings. But she was a founding member of The Detection Club, which included several mystery writers, or is made exclusively out of fiction.
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mystery writers and included Agatha Christie and GK Chesterton, who wrote the Father Brown series. She served as the club's third president from 1949 to 1957.
Sayers and The Detection Club
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And I was fascinated by this club. I think I'd heard of it before, but you know they have this very elaborate initiation ceremony.
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They have to commit to the rules of of fair play detection. And they would co-write stories. So I just can imagine this wonderful environment that that they've created. And it still exists. Right. Like it's now it's invitation. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Yeah. To become a member. Yeah, it it would be.
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i just can imagine these fascinating conversations that they that they must have had. But the set of ah fair play rules that they that they established, they're largely followed by today's mystery authors. right they They just really set some some of the those rules that we we've talked about a little bit in in some of our other episodes.
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ah The origin of of those seems to be certainly formalized with the Detection Club. She was, i think, I read something about her, you know, insisting on wearing trousers, which at the time would have been perhaps not super well accepted in terms of the the fashion of the day.
Sayers' Writing Style and Character Depth
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i would have set her apart as a um as a very perhaps opinionated woman. Yeah. But she was, I think, you know, passionate about about mystery and passionate about writing. And we can talk a little bit a little bit more about that.
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Yeah, I think that she was a very like confident and independent woman. um Some of the things that I read was that she had a very outgoing kind of big personality and maybe was even a little bit hard to get along with.
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And I don't know if we would say that the same now or if it was just in that time period for a woman. She was, you know, very outgoing and very um confident. And I was reading some things about her early life and found some things that I thought were similar to Agatha Christie, which was fun.
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They both taught themselves to read by the age of four. and so um Fascinating. Yeah. And they also had large, fairly large houses with ah lawns and and grounds that they could explore. And I remembered that we talked about that with Agatha as well.
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Agatha had her imaginary friends and I read that Dorothy, her only playmate was a cousin, Marguerite, who she saw intermittently.
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And so she entertained herself with two stuffed monkeys, one named Jacko and one named Jocko. One was good and one was evil and a villainous rag doll that she called a Frenchman.
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I just thought that was so cute. I love that.
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I know. It's great. That's wonderful. They have these story, you know, these storytelling minds, even as little girls. So that was really great. But something very different from Agatha is that, and and you alluded to it because she went on to get a college degree. She was highly educated as a child and learned Latin and various other languages and lots of music and literature.
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I think you're right. That really shaped her along with having a father who was in the ministry and her interest in philosophy and theology and religion.
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I think you see that influence of her education, certainly in the whimsy stories that I read. There's quotes from literature at the beginning of each chapter. And i think that's one of the criticisms that I read about whimsy was that he was perhaps a little too educated. He was a bit too rich. Like he was, he was a bit too much, but I saw, I read a really interesting quote from her about him because she started writing those stories when she was, you know, living on her own in London, working in an ad agency and didn't have a lot of money. And so
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Essentially, she was talking about how he was her escape, right? And so if she was craving um a nice meal, she would let Whimsy eat a nice meal. And it was it she was kind of living vicariously yeah through him.
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ah She gave him a really nice car because that was something that you know she didn't have. He had this this very lavish lifestyle that you know she she did not Yeah. So the quote from Whimsy or about Whimsy was, and at that time I was particularly hard up.
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When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room, I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered an Abusen carpet. When I had no money to pay my best fare, I presented him with a Daimler double six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence. And when I felt dull, I let him drive it.
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That's so, that's so fabulous. When I read that quote, it reminded me that as an author, you can create that world for yourself, right? And and for your characters.
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And, and by extension, that that world is it exists for your readers. And I thought that was, I thought that was really interesting. I thought the same thing. I thought, man, I need to make myself a very wealthy character in my series so that I can, you know, that's a really fun thing to do.
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Or for instance, i am not very sporty, so I could make this, you know, incredibly athletic person who, you know, wins all the golf tournaments and live vicariously through her.
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Yeah, i had I had a very similar thought and it was, I'm going to write a character who's very, very assertive. Yes. Oh, perfect. I love it.
Romance in Sayers' Mystery Works
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interesting. And and she, i mean, she loved mystery and I read, it was the introduction to a anthology of crime writing Yeah. Anyway, she, you know, she wrote about, wrote about writing or sorry, not about writing, wrote about mysteries, really advocated for mystery authors to create fuller characters to engage their readers.
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Her concern was that if the mystery is just like a crossword puzzle, you know, it's, if if it's one dimensional or or not deep enough, then it won't um engage readers. And so she really wanted characters that readers fell in love with.
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And I think as an author, that's really terrific advice. Right. If I think about Louise Penny and Ian Rankin, i read them as much for their for the mystery as i do for the detectives that they've created.
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And I think I think you need to have both of that for a reader to really fall in love with the with the piece. Those are definitely my favorite types of mysteries so that you get the storyline that is the mystery and the puzzle to figure out, but that you're also invested in those characters and that you have a character arc, which actually is something that we see in the whimsy stories that we don't necessarily see in Poirot and
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Sherlock Holmes. Perrault and Sherlock Holmes are essentially static characters throughout the entirety of the series. so We've talked a little bit, you know, they there are some changes towards the end, but essentially they're the same person.
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And Whimsy changes. At the beginning, when she's writing, he's young. And when her series finishes up, he's middle-aged. He goes from being ah single kind of maybe kind of immature and in the first stories to a family man who's married to Harriet Vane, which I hear is a character that she based quite a bit on herself. So we definitely have a yeah character arc in her work.
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Yeah. And I think that's really interesting. Again, I just think that's really good advice for ah for authors to be thinking about, right? That you know there needs to be something for for readers to be invested in.
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Right. i I can imagine that that readers were well, they probably had opinions about whimsy getting married. For sure. And I think actually she had an opinion about it um because one of her, you know, one of the things that she talks about in this, um it's the introduction to the omnibus of crime, 1928 to 1929.
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One of the things that she talks about in there is that she doesn't think that there's a large place for romance in mystery that really the focus should be on the mystery ah but she as you say whimsy ends up ends up getting married uh and then i read um i don't think this was her criticism i think it was someone else's criticism of the final whimsy book where it's you know he's on honeymoon and and The mystery is sort of really the the subplot to what is essentially a ah love story.
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And so I didn't i haven't read that um that final book in the in this series, so i can't I can't speak to my opinion on that. But, ah you know, I think
Sayers' Literary Influence and Complex Themes
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it's interesting. She would have changed her own mind because she would have written that final book um after she'd written this introduction to the to the omnibus of crime.
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Right, right. And i I think I read that criticism as well. and And I too haven't read the book, but there were definitely detection fiction fans that didn't feel like there was enough of a mystery in that ah final book.
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And I find it really interesting that you said that she... didn't really feel like there was a great place for romance and mystery because I feel like in her own life, she was a actual romantic. She had a lot of sort of, um, I guess, turbulent, uh, love affairs. She kind of had some on again, off again things with a couple of fellows. And then, um, you know, she had the, uh, hidden pregnancy. She kept that a secret from her family and kept the boy a secret from her parents and, and, uh, didn't,
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make it known ah really until he was an adult. Um, I think there was a lot of romance in her life, so maybe she couldn't help herself, but give whimsy Harriet Vane.
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So the other thing in this, um, introduction to the omnibus of crime is she talks about kind of the history of the genre. Um, and I'd keep reminding myself that it was the history until 1928 or,
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1929 when she when she wrote this right um but she talks about poe being one of the kind of real fathers of um at the time would be modern mystery right she actually talks about how mystery you know appears in kind of classic uh stories and and fables and and detection um how how characters yeah detect uh uh in kind of in the way that that sherlock does and then she draws a line between the formal establishment of police forces in england uh and the public's general interest in detective stories that the the establishment of the police force needed to happen for people to become really interested in in mystery And she also credits the Industrial Revolution and and yeah resulting advances in technology with creating the circumstances that shifted the focus from knights and adventurers to policemen as protectors.
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Oh, that is so interesting. Yeah, yeah. I thought that was really interesting. I think she is one of the people that if someone you know said you can have dinner with six people of your choosing live or dead, I think she's one of the people that I would that i would choose to have dinner with because she just seemed like a really fascinating, a fascinating person. Wouldn't she have been and a wonderful guest to have podcast? Oh my goodness.
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Yeah, absolutely. But she was concerned that detective mystery or detective detective fiction or mystery fiction would lose favor with audiences because of the risk that ah characters were drawn kind of too thin.
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um and that, what did she say? it was something like, you know, after someone has read half a dozen stories by a certain author, The reader understands the author well enough to predict the solutions to their mysteries and so would would grow bored.
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um And she certainly had in the in the books that I've read, very interesting methods of death. Definitely. I guess that was her way, one of the ways that she wanted to capture audiences' interests. Yeah.
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Definitely. um So I was wondering about this. Remember when we talked with um our interviewees, Sherry T. Mitchell and Chronicles of Crime, and we were talking about the idea that um Agatha writes so simply, right? It's a very...
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um They're simple stories to read and understand and enter into the genre. And then we also contrasted that and said, you know what, but Doyle, he it wasn't simple. you know it therere It's complex writing and this and that.
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So I was trying to put Sayers on that continuum. And where do you think that she fits? Because i don't I certainly don't think that they're as simple and accessible as Christy.
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But I just wanted to hear your thoughts on that. I would agree with that. I think, yeah, she's not as accessible as k Christie, but perhaps more accessible than Doyle. h Yeah, that's kind of where i I kind of put her in the middle.
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And part of that may be that she was writing, certainly later than Doyle, was writing his Sherlock story. So, you know, Whimsy had more technology, you know, there's There's fingerprints and some of those forensic sciences that, that, uh, Sherlock was responsible for, right.
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We're being, we're being used. And so as a reader, it's kind of easier to picture or to imagine a world where, where that's, where those are available. Right. But yeah, I would, I think I would put her, put, put Dorothy in the middle. Mm-hmm.
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And you can definitely see when you're reading her stories, her her love and her fascination with philosophy and theology, because sometimes you have a character sort of go off on a little tangent talking about, you know, the way they think of about something or the way the world works or something. And she still brings in some of those themes into a murder mystery. It's pretty interesting.
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I really liked that about her work because in it was ah in Unnatural Death where there's this conversation about essentially about assisted suicide or assisted death. And I thought it was really interesting. you know, it it reminded me that this is something that people would have been thinking about before.
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almost 100 years ago, right? But it's it's not a new concept necessarily. And yeah, i just I thought that was really interesting that she that she brought that in. And it had me thinking about, okay, how can I do some of that in my own writing?
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Right. And, you know, I think we talked about that with with Agatha Christie as well, that, you know, she wasn't afraid to talk about things that might have been a little bit more controversial or a little bit more. What are people talking about today? hmm.
Revival of Interest in Sayers
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Yeah, I had the same thought. I said, oh, okay, she's doing this too. I mean, um in Whose Body, it was 1918, and they were in the middle of the Spanish flu, or had just, I think it it had just passed is kind of the way the book is set.
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And, you know, she refers to it a few times, and you know that people are still dealing with that. And exactly, I think that she definitely tackles some deeper topics within what's really, you know, a commercial fiction story. And she, it is really well done, but you do have to be like, when we talked about being able to introduce someone to the, to the genre, you could see why that wouldn't be something you'd hand 10 or 12 year old.
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It's a pretty dense read. Yes, I, I agree. I hadn't actually read any of her work until we decided we were going to talk about her. Yeah. I read, you know, lots of Christie and and lots of of Doyle before that.
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So I think it's interesting that she's considered one of the classics of the genre. Yeah. But, you know, I don't know how many, um how many shelves have a have a copy of of one of her books. For sure.
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Yeah, I was surprised to
Community Among Mystery Writers
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read. And this is back from that oh Women of Mystery that we'll link in the show notes that because I refer to it often. um But that in 1973, her work had just about been forgotten, but the BBC adapted it into the television series and sort of brought her back from this obscurity, which is wonderful because...
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Of course, she is such a pioneer and especially a female pioneer that it would have been terrible to have, um you know, have lost some of that history. Yeah. Well, and she, in this introduction to the omnibus of crime, talks about other mystery writers, many of whom I had never come across before.
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And, know, In reading how she talks about them, I thought, okay, mate you know, these are some other people that I'd like to read more of. ah A.A. Milne, who wrote Winnie the Pooh, ah he was a member of the Detection Club. I had no idea.
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and No, me neither. Me neither. But he wrote one or two mysteries and she talks about him in this, in this piece. That's neat. I think that's interesting that obviously some authors who at the time were quite popular, who have been all but forgotten. So, you know, maybe that's something, another thing we can explore in a future episode, right? Talking about some of those forgotten mystery writers. Yes, yes, definitely.
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And I think it also speaks to the popularity of the genre. You think about even in this day and age, there'll be a ah trend of a genre. And so you'll have writers jump on the bandwagon. Not to say that it was simply for commercial reasons. I don't mean that. But I do think that maybe some of those authors were thinking, oh, well, hey, i want to try my hand at this.
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um I thought it was cute in whose body she turns Sherlocking into a verb. so you know, Peter Lindsay is Sherlocking about and like she throws that around and sort of pokes fun at the detective fiction a little bit. And I just loved that. it was so much fun.
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um One time he says, no one does that unless they're in a murder mystery. It's just really fun. It's like, you know, like kind of like breaking that fourth wall or whatever. It was adorable. I loved it. I think it's interesting that in Sayre's, you know, she references Doyle because I i caught a couple of of references to Sherlock as well.
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And I can't remember but if she referenced Poirot or not. um Oh, how fun. Yeah. Yeah, like I think that she was certainly willing to to reference other other authors. And we we talked about that with with Vicki Delaney, right in in her stories. And they were friends, right? Because they were all in the detection club together. So they were actually acquainted.
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Well, and and that just speaks to the history of the supportive author community, right? That it's it's always been a supportive community. Oh, yes. I love that. And that's that's kind of nice that that continues. For sure. Yeah, I completely agree. That's really neat.
Sayers' Humor and Literary Engagement
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Also, um sort of like the playing with the detection fiction genre in her work, I found this funny quote by Peter Whimsey, which I feel like we've had a spinoff in Contemporary Mystery, because he says,
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I may be wrong. I hope I am, but I know I'm not. And it reminds me so much of the, um you know, you see the meme of Jessica Fletcher and she says, I may be wrong, but frankly, I doubt it.
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I'm like, they just lifted that from Dorothy Sayers.
00:25:01
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Yeah, I was like, I have to go back and listen to that again. And ah and then I wrote it down. I thought that's perfect. Yeah, one ah one of the things I think that I'm enjoying about doing this podcast is getting a deeper understanding of the history of of mystery and history.
Podcast Journey and Listener Feedback
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kind of seeing those connections that ah both through the connections of authors who are writing at the same time, but then also just seeing the threads of, of mystery and and the threads of those, those connections as they're pulled through to, to modern day or people who are writing now. Yeah. It's, it's very fun to see that and to learn more about the foundation of it all.
00:25:43
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Um, yeah, I really enjoy that part too. And it just makes me feel like there's so much more to learn. Yeah.
00:25:51
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Every time we open up a subject, then we learn about new authors or new topics and our list of episodes we want to do just keeps growing. So, well, and I'm really happy to say that we've had some great comments from people that are also enjoying the show. I'd like to just ah thank them and read some of our comments from listeners.
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Lori Lewis-Ham from Mystery Rats Podcast says, says, I highlightler highly recommend Mark Aldrich's books on Agatha Christie. They answer some of the questions you brought up in the Christie episode.
00:26:28
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So I thought that was really great. And we're going to link to that book by um Mark Aldrich. And then author JC Fuller says, great second episode, interesting points, bring on episode three.
00:26:44
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So we'll just share some of these comments that we get. And ah please reach out and let us know what you all are thinking. Brooke, I think this was a really great conversation about Dorothy Sayers. I feel like we've both already said there's there's a lot more to learn about her, but maybe we've inspired some some people who are unfamiliar with her detective fiction to to give it a read.
00:27:07
Speaker
Thank you for joining us today on Clued in Mystery. I'm Brooke. And I'm Sarah. And we both love mystery. Clued in Mystery is produced by Brooke Peterson and Sarah M. Stephen.
00:27:20
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Music is by Shane Ivers at SilvermanSound.com. Visit us online at CluedInMystery.com or social media at CluedInMystery. If you liked what you heard, please consider subscribing, leaving a review, or telling your friends.