Sayers Covers

Because mystery novels from the 1920s and 1930s were a) hugely popular and b) paperback-format friendly, pretty much all of the books by the major writers from that era, whether cozy or hard-boiled, feature a range of covers from wonderfully apt to puzzling, odd, or off-putting.

Dorothy L. Sayers is one of the less prolific writers from the period. Agatha Christie wrote at least 80 mystery novels and had two major recurring detective-characters; Ngaio Marsh wrote 32 books featuring Roderick Alleyn; not counting posthumous releases, Margery Allingham published 20 books featuring Albert Campion. A slightly later writer who was strongly influenced by Christie, Patricia Wentworth, wrote 32 books featuring her Miss Marple-style spinster detective, Miss Silver. In comparison, the Lord Peter Wimsey books amount to only fourteen titles, although a few additional short stories do appear in a few other story collections. Maybe the more limited number of books prevented cover design teams from succumbing to fatigue, which I think is at work in some of the "slap together three concrete items relevant to the plot and photograph it" style of covers I see on some Christie titles. Fourteen books are not inconsiderable, but the covers for Sayers's books (at least the ones that I happen to own) tend to be much nicer than some of the covers for detective fiction by writers from roughly the same time period.


This is one of the older style of paperbacks I've picked up over the years, dating to sometime in the late seventies, probably. While it's not fantastic, it's also not bad--certainly, it's better than most of the seventies-era book designs I happen to own, whether literary or genre fiction. The book-title-to-author-name ratio is more radical than on other editions, but Sayers's name is always bigger than the book's name. "Dorothy L. Sayers" actually tells you more about the story you're going to read than a generic-mystery title Strong Poison. Also of note is the fact that this is my personal favourite of her books (along with Murder Must Advertise, which is actually a rare example of a book with a relevant and not-exactly-generic title).


This is also an older paperback, from the mid-eighties, and to me it looks like a circa-1986 idea of vintage Englishness. This is possibly my least favourite of the Wimsey covers I own. Again, it isn't terrible, but it is busy, with the Wimsey caricature, the addition of Harriet Vane's name above the title, some gratuitous lines surrounding Sayers's last name, and the quotation from the LA Times. The optic-illusion-ish check on the dead man's shirt isn't helping the overall situation. A narrower range of colours for the illustration, and a relocation of some print below the picture, might improve the cover, but I suspect it's just plain trying to communicate too much information at-a-glance.


This one is not a good cover by any means, but it's so bare bones that there is not much to offend. Four titles, the author's name in a different-coloured band, a drawing of two guys in full evening dress standing in a blue void. Bunter looks all right, if rather saucy-Cockney (which he emphatically isn't in the books), but Wimsey's face is a little...off. The shading on his face is heavy-handed and his lined hair looks like the kind of hair that I, who am not a professional illustrator, would draw. Drawing him with the monocle-in was probably a mistake, given the illustrator's apparent abilities.

This is a nice stylized sort of cover that seems to have been available for about two decades (eighties and nineties), with period-appropriate illustrations and a good font. I've got nothing bad to say about any of the covers I've seen in this series.

This is the most recent style of covers for a series-reissue, and it's one that I like quite a bit. While I'm not always crazy about photographs, these deliberately vintage pictures really work. I've seen a few of these covers, and most of them are careful not to show the pictured person's full face, which keeps the covers abstract despite other period details in the photos.

This cover includes almost as much information as the Busman's Honeymoon cover above, moreover, but has managed it much better. Here's the narrower colour-scale I was talking about; no one slapped gratuitous lines and frames all over the place to split up the pockets of information; the text spacing makes sense. The end product doesn't look all clip-arty the way the Busman's Honeymoon final product does.

I guess I have a lot of negative things to say about that cover described above as "not terrible," but, really, its clumsiness isn't totally off-putting. If the illustrator for the Omnibus above had also drawn a whole bizarrely-scaled but detailed background, and inserted those shading-heavy well-dressed characters into it, that would probably have been a god-awful cover, but the relative restraint there makes the final product okay (if a little amateurish looking, which is a problem throughout that edition--it's possibly the most typo-ridden book I own). I'll take some pictures of the some of the seventies- and eighties-era Agatha Christie paperbacks I've got to really illustrate "terrible" in this genre; there are a few doozies.