Gaudy Night

⚖The case for it

Harriet Vane investigates a poisonous campaign of harassment at an Oxford women's college. Sayers uses the mystery form to interrogate the place of intellectual women in society; a genuinely feminist novel disguised as detective fiction. Lord Peter Wimsey proposes in a Latin sentence. Readers have been weak-kneed ever since.

— the canon

✕The case against

Sayers wrote a detective novel with no murder, then let it run nearly five hundred pages of senior common room talk, untranslated Latin, and Wimsey adoration. The culprit, when revealed, gets handled with a class condescension the novel never questions. As a meditation on women's intellectual life, it earns its length; as a mystery, it idles.

— the honest librarian