“Mock Turtle”: Dorothy L. Sayers, the Golden Age Detective Novel, and Modernist Fiction

Dorothy L. Sayers was leading practitioner and theorist of the Golden Age detective story. Her Lord Peter Wimsey novels have remained enormously popular since their publication in the 1920s and 30s, and she personally reviewed over 300 crime novels for The Sunday Times between 1933 and 1935: this has been calculated to represent something like twenty-five percent of the total output of crime fiction during those years (Hardy). She was, in addition, a founding member and president of the Detection Club, and through her numerous essays on detective fiction perhaps the foremost theorist of her day on the form and its limitations. 
Interestingly, Sayers’ career in detective fiction overlaps almost precisely with what can be described as the central era of British literary modernism. Her first novel, Whose Body?, was published in 1923, one year after the annus mirabilis of modernism. Her last detective novel, Busman’s Honeymoon, was published in 1937, by which time the impetus of the modernist movement had, broadly speaking, subsided. Although obviously very different in form, function, and purpose to modernist writing, her detective fiction responds to the same social, political, and historical factors that shaped modernist fiction. Yet Sayers was in many ways critical of the modernist movement, making what she saw as its excesses and inanities a frequent target of satire in her fiction. Her 1935 novel Gaudy Night, for instance, offers what Catherine Kenney has described as a “rollicking satire of contemporary literature” (20). Although Sayers’ targets are the fictional novels Mock Turtle and The Squeezed Lemon, in the real world this would have included contemporary or near contemporary works such as Virginia Woolf’s 1931 The Waves, John Cowper Powys’ 1933 A Glastonbury Romance, and Dorothy Richardson’s 1935 Clear Horizon. This vein of satirical disparagement of modernist writing runs through much of Sayers’ work. Thus Sayers’ crime writing can be seen as existing in a constant, if rather acrimonious, dialogue with literary modernity. Her work offers both a satiric commentary on modernism, and formulates an alternate fictional world, a form of anti-modernist genre fiction that is arguably as much defined by its opposition to modernist poetics as by its own coherent set of internal genre conventions.