Why, my soul, are you downcast?
    Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
    for I will yet praise him,
    my Savior and my God.

• Psalm 42:5

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.

• 1 Peter 1:3-5

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

• Romans 15:13

SPOILER ALERT WARNING

If you intend to read this book, the following may give away the mystery

Not really, as the quote is from the investigation phase.

“’L’amour! These ladies come and dance and excite themselves and want love and think it is happiness. And they tell me about their sorrows – me – and they have no sorrows at all, only that they are silly and selfish and lazy. Their husbands are unfaithful and their lovers run away and what do they say? Do they say, I have two hands, two feet, all my faculties, I will make a life for myself? No. They say, Give me cocaine, give me the cocktail, give me the thrill, give me my gigolo, give me l’amo-o-ur! Like a mouton bleating in a field. If they knew!’
“Harriet laughed.

“’You’re right, M. Antoine. I don’t believe l’amour matters so terribly, after all.’
“’But understand me,’ said Antoine who, like most Frenchmen, was fundamentally serious and domestic, ‘I do not say that love is not important. It is no doubt agreeable to love, and to marry an amiable person who will give you fine, healthy children. This Lord Peter Wimsey, par exemple, who is obviously a gentleman of the most perfect integrity-‘
“’Oh, never mind about him!’ broke in Harriet, hastily. ‘I wasn’t thinking about him. I was thinking about Paul Alexis and these people we are going to see.’
‘’’Ah! C’est different. Mademoiselle, I think you know very well the difference between love which is important and love which is not important. But you must remember that one may have an important love for an unimportant person. And you must remember also that where people are sick in their minds or their bodies it does not need even love to make them do foolish things.”

• Dorothy L. Sayers, Have His Carcase

Boilerplate

In this mini-series, I will fulfill a promise.  Some time ago, published 14 January 2025, I wrote a brief synopsis of the book, Subversive by Crystal Downing.  The post is called A Subversive Christian.  In that book, I talked about the three books in the photo above.  And I especially wanted to do a mini-series on the book on the right, The Gospel in Dorothey L. Sayers.

Note that the title uses the preposition “in.”  Dorothy L. Sayers did not write a fifth gospel.  She did not write as if inspired directly by God.  The canon of Scripture is complete.

But in stating what this is not, then what is it?  All Christians have the Holy Spirit within them, guiding them.  When being a Christian is something you have inside you and through you, then your life will reflect that.  This book is how you can see various aspects of the Christian life in the works of Dorothy L. Sayers, mystery novels, plays, letters, and essays.

After the Introduction, it starts with Whose Body?  The editor’s attribute of a Christian that she focuses on is “Conscience.” Whose Body? is her first detective fiction novel featuring her main character, Lord Peter Wimsey.  Then in Death Must Advertise, we find Lord Peter has a couple of middle names.  His full name is Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey.

But we will stay in the Introduction for more than a week.  There are at least a half dozen quotes just in the introduction that look interesting.  I am not in a hurry to speed through this book.  I was not in a hurry to start it with me being over a year since I promised to make it into a mini-series.

But I would hope people could read my short stories and see the gospel being acted out in the characters in my fictional stories.  Deviled Yeggs grew up in a family of safe crackers, robbing from others.  He set out as a policeman, and then homicide detective, to redeem the family name but learning each person must have Christ redeem them individually.  Deviled’s wife, Trinity Naomi Tesla (TNT) Yeggs, was nicknamed “Nitroglycerin” (Glyce for short) by her parents because she was explosive when shaken.  But she found calm and peace in her husband’s arms, and eventually she found the same comfort and peace in the arms of Jesus as she faced “shaky” experiences.

Even when not writing about Jesus directly, the Good News (Gospel) appears in many ways in what a Christian writes.  Let’s enjoy this journey with possibly my favorite author (outside the Bible with C.S. Lewis in a tie with her), Dorothy L. Sayers.

Discussion

Not reading any notes about the plot of this story, I can remember the discovery of a body by Harriet Vane who is on a walking tour.  She is alone by the seashore.  She finds the body.  She gathers loose items around the body that might get washed out to sea.  She takes pictures of the body.  Then she runs for help, but the tide has washed away the body.  Without a body, without proof of the man’s throat being slashed, there was no crime to report.  The police needed to “have his carcase.”

These were the days in 1932 where photographs were taken on film and there were no developers on every street corner.  These days, she would whip out her phone and show the police what she had found.  She was not believed.  And somehow, a friend noticed Miss Vane and called Lord Peter.

What else did I remember without reading the plot of a book that I read possibly forty years ago?  Lord Peter was smitten with Harriet Vane and Harriet thought Lord Peter’s advances were tedious at best.  Strong Poison, where Harriet was saved from the gallows by Lord Peter, was written in 1930.  This book came out two years later.  Harriet wanted to be equal to her partner, if she ever thought of love again.  Lord Peter was bigger than life.  But the book showed a slight flaw in Lord Peter.  He was distracted, thinking of the crime and thinking of Harriet, and Ms. Sayers does a wonderful job of describing a distracted driver with a heavy foot.  I think no one was injured, but there were close calls.

Dorothy L Sayers wrote The Five Red Herrings between these first two stories involving Harriet Vane.  But she would write three more novels between this book and Gaudy Night.  While some people never liked Harriet Vane, those that wanted Lord Peter to have a romantic interest would have to wait until 1935.  Those that wanted romance got romance, but after the next novel, Ms. Sayers felt she had taken the character as far as she could take him.  She wrote many starts of stories, but she devoted the rest of her life to a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

But back to the story.  Harriet Vane finds accommodations at a resort in Wilvercombe.  She meets M. Antoine, a French taxi dancer.  His colleague, Paul Alexis, a Russian taxi dancer, is missing – eventually determined to be the body Harriet had found.  Note: a taxi dancer was a dancer for hire.  And usually those men were gigolos.  M. Alexis was engaged to marry a wealthy widow.  Thus, the investigation could take a number of different turns.

Now, at some point further in the detection work, Harriet has the quoted conversation with M. Antoine.  M. Antoine speaks of how these ladies at the resort had no real hope of anything in their future.  They were chasing after worldly excitement: the cocaine, the mixed drink, the romance, etc.

The entirety of the lives of these wealthy ladies was a constant series of cheap thrills with no substance.

It was a murder mystery.  In the process of creating a timeline, Harriet’s observations did not fit until Lord Peter surmised that the deceased had a particular malady which changed the timeline to fit Harriet’s observations.

But as a murder mystery, it falls short of an allegorical tale of our constant despair and the lack of the Hope that can be found in Jesus.  As a romantic novel, it was very one-sided as Harriet found Lord Peter to be tedious.  But there must have been a spark or the next Harriet Vane – Peter Wimsey novel creates some sparks.

But momentary highs from drugs and alcohol or a fling with a hired dancer at a resort…  All of that does not fill the void when God is not in your heart.  And the despair of God not being the center of your heart begs for something to fill that emptiness.

Even romance cannot fill that void.

Only God can do that.  God is our hope in this life and forever.

Closing Prayer

Father, guide me.  We have our misconceived notions about thrills, romance, and other earthly things being greater than they really are.  None last very long.  Romance might lead to something similar to love, but without God in the marriage, that can get rocky at times.  Help us to focus on You.  Even within a marriage, our focus on You mends the brokenness in the relationship if both love Jesus.  And keep us from self-destructive paths.
In Thy Name I pray.
Amen

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.