Sophie Gee

Yeah, she got there first.

Jonty, moment of truth, overrated or underrated?

But the mashup of Graham Greene with this kind of world of interiors, gut reno sensibility, it's just irresistible.

Absolutely fantastic with all the Dickens, Conrad thrown in, fantastically complex.

There's notes of Sherlock Holmes.

What an amazing amalgam of all the different things that are happening in fiction out of the back of the 19th century into the wars and taking us into a new half century of literary innovation.

It's so incredibly good.

Yeah.

Can't wait.

You've been listening to The Secret Life of Books.

A door at the far end opened, as all doors in detective novels open, slowly.

In came Miss Dorothy Sayers in her academic robes, lit by a single taper.

She mounted the rostrum.

Judge my alarm when I saw that among the folds of her gown, she secreted a large automatic revolver.

In came the others in a solemn procession bearing lighted tapers and lethal instruments.

and last of all, John Rode with a grinning skull on a cushion.

And there, in the middle of them, looking apprehensive as well he might, was poor Mr Bentley.

With huge solemnity, Sayers administered the Detection Club oath to Bentley, who promised, under pain of every horror that every concocter of crime fiction has ever invented...

to obey the laws of detective fiction.

He took the oath and then, close to my ear and without the slightest hint of warning, in a private drawing room at Grosvenor House at about 11pm on a summer evening, Miss Dorothy Sayers loosed off her six-shooter.