The imperial detective: empire and Englishness in the detective fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers and P.D. James
Journal: UWA Profiles and Research Repository (University of Western Australia)
Year: 2011

Dorothy L. Sayers and P. D. James are writers of classical detective fiction whose work is firmly anchored to a recognisably English culture, yet little attention has been given to this aspect of their work. I seek to redress this. Using Simon Gikandi’s concept of “the incomplete project of colonisation” (Maps of Englishness 9) I argue that within the works of Sayers and James the British Empire informs and complicates notions of Englishness. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey and James’s Adam Dalgliesh