Although Dorothy Sayers is best known for her mystery stories featuring amateur sleuths Lord Peter Wimsey and Montague Egg, this story features neither. Real estate agent Harold Mummery fears for his ailing wife. Police are hunting for a cook suspected to have poisoned several of her employers. His wife has recently hired a new cook, someone has been tampering with the arsenic-based weed killer in his garden shed, and he is beginning to feel ill. When a chemist identifies arsenic in some hot chocolate the new cook prepared, he rushes home. Themes: fear, suspicion, deception and betrayal, appearance vs. reality. More…
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The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head
Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy Sayers’s eccentric amateur sleuth, is saddled with his ten-year-old nephew while his parents are away overseas. As the two browse an antiquarian bookshop, the boy is attracted to the maps and pictures in a badly damaged copy of Cosmographia Universalis, an early description of the world. He buys the book, and shortly afterwards a strange man visits and offers Wimsey two hundred times what the boy paid. This leads to a “Boys Own” type adventure involving attempted robbery, Scotland Yard and a riddle leading to buried pirate treasure. Themes include curiosity, greed, mystery, deception, and philanthropy. More…