Professor Jeffrey Richard delves into the case file of Lord Peter Wimsie in,

As My Wimsie Takes Me. We present Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey in Have His Carcass by Dorothy L. Sayers, adapted for radio by Alistair

with Mariah Aitken as Harriet Vane and Nigel Stock as Inspector Umpelty.

The classic detective of the Golden Age of Crime Fiction was the gentleman amateur, elegant, witty, well-bred and

well-spoken.

He concealed beneath a languid manner and a lazy charm, a shrewd brain, a wide knowledge

and an unrival capacity for logical deduction. The perfect embodiment of this

archetype was Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsie, whose origins and background are

succinctly described in the spoof who's who entry she devised for him.

whimsy Peter Death Breeden D.S.O. Born 1890.

Second son of Mortimer Gerald Breeden,imsie, 15th Duke of Denver, and Honoria

the Kaster, educated, Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford, served with H.M. Forces, 1914-18, Major Rifle Brigade, author of notes on the

collecting of incunabula, the murderers Vade Macham, etc. Residences 110 a Piccadilly, Breeden Hall, Jukes Denver, Norfolk.

Family motto, as my whimsy takes me.

Dorothy Alsayers was a vicar's daughter from East Anglia who gained a first-class

honours degree in French at Oxford.

She was a lover of music and books and became a considerable expert on crime fiction.

She gave many of her own attributes to her fictional

creation. whimsy first appeared as a supporting character in a Sext and Blake

story which Sayers wrote in 1920 but never published. His physical appearance, boyish, fair-haired

and pleasantly spoken, was apparently inspired by Oxford undergraduate and

Newdigate Poetry Prize winner Roy Ridley, and his background and character by public school educated

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