This article contains POTENTIAL OR ACTUAL MASSIVE SPOILERS for the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers. Also, shameless plug for my latest novel The Murderer's Lament, a sci-fi murder mystery inspired by Sayers among others.
The Murderer's Lament is out on the 29th of this month, and I'm still in the mindset of thinking about detective stories, which I used as heavy inspiration for this book. One of my favourite writers in the medium is Dorothy L. Sayers, who between 1920 and 1937 wrote stories about the aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey (with a posthumous short story trilogy in 1972). Is she perfect? No, not only because she was a British white woman writing in the interwar period, but because...her murder methods don't always hold up.
I've already done an entire article talking about my journey researching the now-debunked "Status Lymphaticus" as used by Margery Allingham in 1937's Dancers in Mourning. And while I love Sayers dearly for her characters and prose and aspects of her mystery crafting, I know that her murder methods are not being informed by in-depth medical knowledge. This is in contrast with Agatha Christie, who was a trained nurse and knew about poisons, along with doing copious research.
So I'll go down through most of her major works, and see which still hold up and which are just stories to enjoy rather than for a scientifically-compelling mystery. I'll be skipping over some stories like Whose Body? and Five Red Herrings because they're very analogue murder methods, things like getting bashed with a blunt instrument. I'm focusing on the stuff that gets unusual. Going by release order:
*Unnatural Death: One of my favourite stories, but also one that comes under the most fire. In this story, there is a lot of obfuscation, since all the victims seem to die from natural causes. But ultimately, the murder method is an artifically-induced air embolism in a major artery which causes heart failure. While sort of plausible (and I remember a version of this being used in an early NCIS episode), using a syringe to produce this effect has been ruled out as impossible. But it must be noted that there are modern documented cases of accidental air embolisms causing cardiac issues, it's just her described method wouldn't work.
*Strong Poison: So...this one really genuinely doesn't hold up, just saying that right now. The victim falls fatally ill from arsenic poisoning after taking a meal in one house and coffee in another. The meal has surviving elements from all parts except a jam omelette, and the other eater wasn't ill. Turns out, that other diner was immunising himself with small arsenic doses so an otherwise fatal dose didn't matter, aka "mithridatism". This has been categorically proven as impossible, as even in small amounts arsenic would cause health complications over a length of time. While it can work with some toxins, with a heavy metal poison like arsenic, it's a bust.
*Documents in the Case: This is a novel I've already written about, and it was one Sayers co-wrote with Robert Eustace, who in real-life was a doctor. The key point in the story is the difference between natural and artificial muscarine in terms of their chemical structure. The polariscope had only been invented within the last couple of years of the novel's publication, and takes centre stage in a mystery that Sayers wanted to balance scientific advancement with her own theological background. I believe there has been some recent doubt cast on the viability here, but it's still one of the most scientifically sound out of the Lord Peter series.
*Have His Carcass: This is an aspect of the murder that does hold up. The victim's time of death combined with various alibis causes endless headaches. Turns out, in one of the first major fictional uses of this conceit, the victim is a sufferer from either moderate or severe haemophilia, which to greatly simplify is a hereditary condition which in this case means the blood can barely clot, which here is accompanied by other physical symptoms. This holds up, as here it seems like Sayers really did her research about symptoms, severity, and impact on long-term physical health.
*The Nine Tailors: This one is a little odd, because...technically it isn't the most outlandish. A man dies while trapped in a snow-choked belfry during a nine hour bell peal during the New Year. The very, very, very end of the book has Lord Peter realising that the bells are the murderers in a sense, after his own near-death experience with the cacophonous bell sounds. The issue here is that bell sounds alone wouldn't have done that, but the novel covers itself with the additional dialogue: "I don't know what of exactly. Stroke, apoplexy, shock, anything you like." I've had my own unintended experience being right next to a belfry when bells rang, and it does go through you, but I doubt I'd get much worse than tinnitus unless one of the bells actually hit me. If the bells did cause death in this book, it was by triggering off a pre-existing condition.
*Honourable Mentions: The short stories collected in Lord Peter Views the Body and Hangman's Holiday. Not all the more outlandish elements are specifically related to murder, but I thought they were worth mentioning. These include a Sheffield-plated corpse (which was almost a thing and got patented in the USA as part of the funeral industry, but thankfully never actually happened because of inevitable unsightliness of certain parts), a situs invertus twin with some rather unrealistic shenanigans attached, and a woman coming under a doctor's coercive control due to her hypothyroidism.
This was a lot of fun to go through. If you'd like some murder methods where real work was put in for them to work in style, timing and symptoms, then The Murderer's Lament is available for pre-order now in hardcover, and the ebook shall be released on September 29 alongside the hardcover. The paperback edition will be releasing in March 2027.
