Wimsey strays into a bog, and Bunter saves his life.

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 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.

Wimsey served on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918, reaching the rank of Major in the Rifle Brigade.

For reasons never clarified in any of the books, after the end of his mission as a spy behind enemy lines Wimsey in the later part of the war moved from Intelligence and resumed the role of a regular line officer.

It is not exactly known when Wimsey recruited Miss Climpson to run an undercover employment agency for women, a means to garner information from the otherwise inaccessible world of spinsters and widows, but it is prior to Unnatural Death ( 1927 ), in which Miss Climpson assists Wimsey's investigation of the suspicious death of an elderly cancer patient.

To distinguish Death Bredon from Lord Peter Wimsey, Parker smuggles Wimsey out of the police station and urges him to get into the papers.

In the final Wimsey story, the 1942 short story " Talboys ", Peter and Harriet are enjoying rural domestic bliss with their three sons when Bredon, their first-born, is accused of the theft of prize peaches from the neighbour's tree.

" Whereupon Miss Murchison, the indefatigable investigator employed by Wimsey for much of this book, comments " Or, if one wasn't accustomed to be waited on, one might use the water from the bedroom jug.

Lord Peter Wimsey was played by Ian Carmichael in a series of independent serials that ran from 1972 to 1975 and adapted five novels ( Clouds of Witness, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Five Red Herrings, Murder Must Advertise and The Nine Tailors ) and by Edward Petherbridge in 1987, in which three of the four major Wimsey / Vane novels ( Strong Poison, Have his Carcase and Gaudy Night ) were dramatised.

Ian Carmichael starred as Wimsey in radio adaptations of the novels made by the BBC, all of which have been available on cassette and CD from the BBC Radio Collection.

However, Sayers ' first reference to Le Fanu appears in an earlier Lord Peter Wimsey novel, The Nine Tailors ( 1934 ), where he is quoted directly ( from Wylder's Hand, in the opening to the seventh " part " of Chapter II and again in the opening to the second " part " of Chapter III ) and a mysterious letter is referred to ( first by Wimsey's valet, Mervyn Bunter ) as " written by a person of no inconsiderable literary ability, who had studied the works of Sheridan Lefanu and was, if I may be permitted the expression, bats in the belfry, my lord.

Wimsey accepts an offer from the highly respectable management of Pym's Publicity, Ltd. ( a light disguise for S. H. Bensons, where Sayers worked ) to investigate a mystery and avert a scandal.

In Five Red Herrings ( 1931 ), a Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter ( a Balliol man ) is asked whether he remembers a certain contemporary from Trinity.

In Five Red Herrings ( 1931 ), a Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter ( a Balliol man ) is asked whether he remembers a certain contemporary from Trinity.

Wimsey discovers that Freke murdered Sir Reuben and staged his ' disappearance ' from home, having borne a grudge for years over Lady Levy, who chose to marry Sir Reuben rather than him.

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.

* Miss Harriet Vane-protagonist, a novelist with whom Wimsey is in love, having saved her from the gallows

Lady Thorpe, wife of Sir Henry Thorpe, the local squire, dies next morning and Wimsey hears how the Thorpe family has been blighted for 20 years by the unsolved theft of jewels from a house-guest by the butler, Deacon, and an accomplice, Cranton.

They plan to spend their honeymoon at Talboys, an old farmhouse in Harriet's native Hertfordshire which Wimsey has bought for her, and they abscond from the wedding reception, evading the assembled reporters.

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.

Lord and Lady Peter Wimsey, returned from a European honeymoon, are settling into their new home in London, where daily life is affected by the illness and then death of the king.

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

It is mentioned that Wimsey had previously also suffered similar pangs of conscience when other murderers had been sent to the gallows.