When they did the unreal things, they ceased to be real themselves. . . . Yet Chandler's own ''realism'' has become fantastical, set beside the work of writers as disparate as Ed McBain, Thomas Harris and James Ellroy, in which murder is rarely an art, still less a genteel one. Chandler might have found much to admire in ''Thrones, Dominations,'' for there is relatively little that is contrived in the tangled plot, and the psychological motives for the murder are respectfully explored. As Sayers's heroine Harriet Vane thinks, her ''new story was going to be a tragedy. Previous books, written while their author was struggling through a black slough of misery and frustration, had all been intellectual comedies.
Detective stories contain a dream of justice.
In the second volume, her vibrant emotional life seems to have burned itself out. In her early 40's, an elephantine, formidable woman who'd fashioned herself into an eccentric with a curious wardrobe and a magisterial public style, Sayers seems to have imagined herself an authority on such nugatory subjects as the resurrection of the body, as if she'd had firsthand experiences of them. Sheer dogma makes for dry reading indeed. Sayers's plays are little known at the present time. The letters dealing with the vicissitudes of play development and productions are amusing.