Books with title Gaudy Night: A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery

“Gaudy Night stands out even among Miss Sayers’s novels. And Miss Sayers has long stood in a class by herself.” —Times Literary SupplementThe great Dorothy L. Sayers is considered by many to be the premier detective novelist of the Golden Age, and her dashing sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, one of mystery fiction’s most enduring and endearing protagonists. Acclaimed author Ruth Rendell has expressed her admiration for Sayers’s work, praising her “great fertility of invention, ingenuity, and wonderful eye for detail.” The third Dorothy L. Sayers classic to feature mystery writer Harriet Vane, Gaudy Night features an introduction by Elizabeth George, herself a crime fiction master. Gaudy Night takes Harriet and her paramour, Lord Peter, to Oxford University, Harriet’s alma mater, for a reunion, only to find themselves the targets of a nightmare of harassment and mysterious, murderous threats.

“Gaudy Night stands out even among Miss Sayers’s novels. And Miss Sayers has long stood in a class by herself.” —Times Literary SupplementThe great Dorothy L. Sayers is considered by many to be the premier detective novelist of the Golden Age, and her dashing sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, one of mystery fiction’s most enduring and endearing protagonists. Acclaimed author Ruth Rendell has expressed her admiration for Sayers’s work, praising her “great fertility of invention, ingenuity, and wonderful eye for detail.” The third Dorothy L. Sayers classic to feature mystery writer Harriet Vane, Gaudy Night features an introduction by Elizabeth George, herself a crime fiction master. Gaudy Night takes Harriet and her paramour, Lord Peter, to Oxford University, Harriet’s alma mater, for a reunion, only to find themselves the targets of a nightmare of harassment and mysterious, murderous threats.

“Gaudy Night stands out even among Miss Sayers’s novels. And Miss Sayers has long stood in a class by herself.”—Times Literary Supplement (London)Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night takes mystery writer Harriet Vane to Oxford University, Harriet’s alma mater, for a reunion, only to find herself the target of a nightmare of harassment and mysterious, murderous threats. Now available as a limited Olive Edition from Harper Perennial.When Harriet attends her Oxford reunion, known as the Gaudy, the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obscenities, burnt effigies, and poison-pen letters, including one that says, "Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup." Some of the notes threaten murder; all are perfectly ghastly; yet in spite of their scurrilous nature, all are perfectly worded. And Harriet finds herself ensnared in a nightmare of romance and terror, with only the tiniest shreds of clues to challenge her powers of detection, and those of her paramour, the dashing private investigator Lord Peter Wimsey.

From Dorothy L. Sayers, “one of the greatest mystery story writers of the [twentieth] century” (Los Angeles Times), the first mystery featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.A corpse has been found in the bath of an architect's flat, wearing nothing but a pair of pince-nez. A financier has seemingly vanished into thin air from his bedroom.The ever-curious Lord Peter Wimsey is intrigued by these odd events. Ignoring the clumsy efforts of the official investigator looking into the death, the aristocratic amateur sleuth, accompanied by his valet, Bunter, a skilled photographer, begins his own inquiry. The gentleman detective soon becomes convinced that the two cases are somehow linked. Now, he must uncover the connection—and the investigation quickly begins to bleed into his own life, stirring up dark memories of World War I that will have unexpected consequences for Wimsey and the faithful Bunter.

The stark naked body was lying in the tub. Not unusual for a proper bath, but highly irregular for murder -- especially with a pair of gold pince-nez deliberately perched before the sightless eyes.What's more, the face appeared to have been shaved after death.The police assumed that the victim was a prominent financier, but Lord Peter Wimsey, who dabbled in mystery detection as a hobby, knew better.In this, his first murder case, Lord Peter untangles the ghastly mystery of the corpse in the bath.