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. She and the producer of the ''Children's Hour'' plays she was doing for the BBC ''exchanged very amicable letters about the play. Yet they are rather sad, for Sayers expended herself in projects not always worthy of her talent, and in letters of protest that must have been draining and demoralizing. She seems to have been minimally engaged with the literature of the theater or with other playwrights, though she admired George Bernard Shaw.