Wimsey eventually meets Ann Dorland, who is miserable.

Another theory is that Wimsey was based, at least in part, on Eric Whelpton, who was a close friend of Sayers at Oxford.

* Lord Peter Wimsey portrait at Balliol, Oxford

But Wimsey, provoked by a ball which clips his elbow, shows off the form which made him a first-team star at Eton and Oxford.

* Dorothy Sayers ' 1936 mystery novel Gaudy Night is set in Oxford, and one of the most important concluding conversations between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane takes place on the balustraded circular rooftop of the Radcliffe Camera.

Wimsey and Vane have a small wedding in Oxford with no notice to the press, and escape to their new country residence, Talboys, a Tudor farmhouse in North Hertfordshire which Harriet had admired as a child and which Peter had given her as a wedding present.

The Lord Peter Wimsey mystery Gaudy Night, by Dorothy Sayers, is set at such a reunion at a fictional women's college at Oxford.

Wimsey is asked to help solve the puzzle by his friend Mr Murbles, the solicitor for the Fentiman family.

After two years ' marriage the Harwells are famously still devoted to one another, and when she is found dead at their weekend cottage in the country Wimsey is asked to help interview the distraught husband, and becomes involved with the investigation.

The press is naturally interested ; Wimsey hastens to the scene, after receiving a tip from a journalist friend, to help shield Harriet from suspicion.

) After months of data gathering but with no resolution in sight, Harriet turns once again to Wimsey for help.

* Mervyn Bunter, created in 1923 by Dorothy L. Sayers in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, likewise a paragon of discreet competence, taking his duties beyond what was expected of a valet to help his master.

Wimsey begs to help and is given some crystals to dissolve in water – here follows an example of Bunter ’ s understated sarcasm:

Gaudy Night ( 1935 ) is a mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, the tenth in her popular series about aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, and the third featuring crime writer Harriet Vane.

Desperate to avoid a possible murder in college, Harriet asks her old friend Wimsey to investigate.

Harriet is forced to re-examine her relationship with Wimsey in the light of what she has discovered about herself.

In " Busman's Honeymoon " Wimsey facetiously refers to a gentleman's duty " to remember whom he had taken to bed " so as not to embarrass his bedmate by calling her by the wrong name.

There are several references to a relationship with a famous Viennese opera singer, and Bunter-who evidently was involved with this, as with other parts of his master's life-recalls Wimsey being very angry with a French mistress who mistreated her own servant.

Wimsey likes her, respects her, and enjoys her company-but that isn't enough.

Wimsey saves her from the gallows, but she believes that gratitude is not a good foundation for marriage, and politely but firmly declines his frequent proposals.

Wimsey is at her hotel the next morning.

In effect, rather than killing off her detective, as Conan Doyle unsuccessfully tried with his, Sayers pensioned Wimsey off to a happy, satisfying old age.

Ian Carmichael, who played the part of Wimsey in the BBC Television series adaptation and studied the character and the books thoroughly, said that the character was Sayers ' conception of the ' ideal man ', based in part on her earlier romantic misfortunes.

Clouds of Witness is a 1926 novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, the second in her series featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.

Wimsey travels to New York to find her, and makes a trans-Atlantic flight-at the time, a very risky adventure which makes the headlines in all British papers-to return to London before Gerald's trial in the House of Lords ends.

From her, Wimsey brings a letter that Cathcart wrote on the night of his death, after receiving her farewell letter.

Unnatural Death is a 1927 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, her third featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.

The lady's death has aroused no suspicion, despite her doctor's dismay at her end coming so quickly, but Wimsey suspects that it may, after all, have been ' unnatural '.

Wimsey discovers that the patient's great-niece-popular locally-had nursed her through her illness and was the intended heiress.

When Wimsey begins investigating, using the recurring character Miss Climpson as his intelligence agent, the great-niece is provoked into covering her trail.

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is a 1928 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, her fourth featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.

Strong Poison is a 1930 novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, her fifth featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.

In " Strong Poison ", she is the first person other than Wimsey himself to realize that he has fallen in love with Harriet.

Though Sayers lived until 1957, she never again took up the Wimsey books after this final effort.

Wimsey also inquires into the character of Ann Dorland, trying to learn why she won't compromise.

Suspecting Urquhart's story that he, not Boyes, is in line to inherit the considerable fortune of their senile great aunt, Wimsey sends Miss Climpson to get hold of the great-aunt ’ s will, which she does in a comic scene exposing the practices of fraudulent mediums.

Exhausted by her ordeal, she again rejects Wimsey ’ s proposal of marriage.

Some editions include as a foreword a letter written by Sayers " To my friend Joe Dignam, the kindliest of landlords ," from which it becomes evident that she herself was in the habit of having holidays in Galloway-a habit attributed to Wimsey in the book-and that on one of them she promised her landlord to write a detective novel set in this area, of which the book was a fulfilment.

Vane, a mystery writer, initially meets Lord Peter Wimsey when she is on trial for poisoning her lover ( Strong Poison ) — he falls in love with her and proposes marriage but she refuses to begin a relationship with him, traumatised as she is by her dead lover's treatment of her and her recent ordeal.

In Have His Carcase she collaborates with Wimsey to solve a murder but still finds Wimsey to be overbearing and superficial.

However, failing to reach either Miss Climpson, at the female detective agency set up by Wimsey, or Wimsey himself, she agrees to assist the college.

Sayers told friends orally that Harriet and Peter Wimsey were to have five children in all, though she did not disclose the names and sexes of the two youngest children.

Since he fell for her at first sight ( even as, like Harriet Vane when Wimsey first saw her, she stood accused of a crime ) this is not hard.

She has said that she based Clare and Henry's romance on the " cerebral coupling " of Dorothy Sayers's characters Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.

In 2007, she played Miss Wimsey, a teacher in the movie Hairspray.