The Case of the Unknowable Human

World War I is over. Humanity has gone through hell and emerged strung between merry, hectic giddiness and entrenched, unspeakable grief. And Lord Peter Wimsey—scion of the aristocracy; military hero; buoyant connoisseur of wine, rare books, piano music, and women—is on the hunt for his next beguiling case.

I first encountered Wimsey, the most famous creation of the mystery novelist Dorothy L. Sayers—whose first novel, , was published a century ago this year—in January 2022. The unexpected, devastating end of a COVID-era romance had left me feeling everything, even boredom, with frightening intensity. I have always turned to detective stories when I feel vulnerable; there is nothing so relaxing as the, had sat on my shelf for years; I picked it up. And it, in turn, plucked me out of the sense that I was trapped on some perilous brink. I set off on a year of obsession, first with Wimsey and his fictional cohort, then with the rest of Sayers’s oeuvre.