The Nine Tailors

The Nine Tailors is a 1934 mystery novel by the British writer Dorothy L. Sayers, her ninth featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. The story is set in the Lincolnshire Fens, and revolves around a group of bell-ringers at the local parish church. The book has been described as Sayers' finest literary achievement, although not all critics were convinced by the mode of death, nor by the amount of technical campanology detail included. Plot Twenty years before the events of the novel, the family of Sir Henry Thorpe, squire of the Fenland village of Fenchurch St Paul, had suffered the theft of a valuable emerald necklace, still unrecovered. The family's then butler, Geoffrey Deacon, and his accomplice, Nobby Cranton, had been convicted and imprisoned. In 1918 Deacon had escaped from prison but apparently died shortly afterwards, the body lying in a quarry where it was found two years later, still in prison clothes. Deacon's widow Mary subsequently married one of the village bell-ringers, William Thoday. The novel opens with Lord Peter Wimsey running his car into a ditch near Fenchurch on a snowy New Year's Eve. Stranded for a few days while repairs are carried out, Wimsey helps ring an all-night peal on the church bells after William Thoday is struck down with influenza. Lady Thorpe, Sir Henry's wife, dies the next day. When Sir Henry dies the following Easter, a man's mutilated body is found in his wife's grave, believed to be that of a labourer calling himself 'Stephen Driver'. Oddly, the dead man was wearing French-made underclothes. The rector writes to Wimsey asking him to return to investigate.