Stranded in the Fenland village of Fenchurch St. Paul on New Year's Eve after a car accident, Wimsey helps ring a nine-hour peal of bells overnight after Will Thoday, one of the ringers, is stricken by influenza.

The appalling noise in the bell-chamber convinces him that Deacon, tied there for hours between New Year's Eve and New Year's Day while Wimsey helped with the all-night peal, could not have survived.

Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Times called the book " engrossing, intelligent and provocative ", praised the power of its descriptive passages, and found its darker tone more in keeping with the later Wimsey novels than with the " zest and flashy originality " of the earlier ones.

In the final scene, Inspector Sugg, last seen in Whose Body ?, is startled to find Wimsey, Parker, and Freddy Arbuthnot on the street after midnight, all drunk as lords.

In his infamous essay attacking detective fiction, Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd, American critic Edmund Wilson decried this novel as dull, overlong and far too detailed ; describing how he skipped a lot of the prose about bell-ringing ( quote: " a lot of information of the kind that you might expect to find in an encyclopaedia article on campanology "), and also large amounts of Sayers ' focal sleuth character, " the embarrassingly named " Lord Peter Wimsey.

Bunter helps Wimsey solve the crossword problem and find the missing will-" Bunter, I ’ d like to double your salary, but I suppose you ’ d take it as an insult.

Wimsey is relieved to find Bunter is human when he is given the slip by a lady he is tailing.

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.

Wimsey eventually arrives in Oxford to help her, and she gains a new perspective on him from those who know him, including his nephew, a current undergraduate at the university.

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.

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.

Finally Wimsey makes the connection.

Lord Peter Wimsey, who is in the region on a fishing holiday, points out the inconsistency which makes it impossible for Campbell himself to have worked on the painting.

* Fictional detective Lord Peter Wimsey makes his first appearance in print.

The fictional Lord Peter Wimsey makes a brief cameo appearance.

She and Holmes are also implied to be friends with fellow fictional detective Peter Wimsey, who makes a cameo appearance in A Letter of Mary.

Born in 1890 and aging in real time, Wimsey is described as being at best average height, with straw-coloured hair, a beaked nose, and a vaguely foolish face.

Wimsey was for a time unable to give servants any orders whatsoever, since his wartime experience made him associate the giving of an order with causing the death of the person to whom the order was given.

Emerging victorious after more than a year masquerading as " the disgruntled sacked servant Rogers ", Wimsey remarked that " We shall have an awful time with the lawyers, proving that I am me.

In one of the Wimsey Papers, a series of fictionalised commentaries in the form of mock letters between members of the Wimsey family published in the Spectator, there is a reference to Harriet's difficulty in continuing to write murder mysteries at a time when European dictators were openly committing mass murders with impunity ; this seems to have reflected Sayers ' own wartime feeling.

He attempts to murder both Parker and Wimsey, and finally tries suicide when his actions are discovered, but is arrested in time.

Working against time before the new trial, Wimsey first explores the possibility that Boyes took his own life.

Large parts of the book follow the various Scottish police officers, who are shown as highly intelligent and competent, and for time seem to overshadow Wimsey.

By the time of the short story " Talboys ", they have three sons: Bredon Delagardie Peter Wimsey ( born in October 1936 ), Roger Wimsey ( born 1938 ), and Paul Wimsey ( born 1940 ).

The 1942 short story " Talboys ", the very last Wimsey fiction produced by Sayers, is both a sequel to the present book, in having the same location and some of the same village characters, and an antithesis in being lighthearted and having no crime worse the theft of some peaches from a neighbour's garden.

* The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, a Peter Wimsey adventure