In a new group biography of Sayers and the school friends who served as her lifelong support system and creative collaborators, “ The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. But Harriet Vane is an earlier, often overlooked member of the same lineage. James’s Cordelia Gray, for example, and Sara Paretsky’s V. Many histories of feminist detective fiction find foremothers for today’s anti-heroines in the hardboiled sleuths of the nineteen-seventies and eighties-in P. The mystery genre, with its plots that patrol the outer borders of believable human behavior, has proved uniquely suited to illuminate a generalized hostility toward women, one so normal and pervasive that it’s often almost impossible to see. Writers like Tana French, Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott, and Celeste Ng have won both popular and critical praise with stories about the damage that the world inflicts on women, and, sometimes, about the damage that damaged women do. Mysteries and true-crime narratives seem to satisfy a need for women in particular, as the journalist Rachel Monroe writes in her new book, “ Savage Appetites.” Stories about the worst things that can happen to a person serve to excavate a “subterranean knowledge,” Monroe notes, opening up “conversations about subjects that might otherwise be taboo: fear, abuse, exploitation, injustice, rage.” In 2012, the novel “ Gone Girl,” by Gillian Flynn, introduced Amy Elliott Dunne, a character whose fury at the false promises of life and marriage prefigured the mass unleashing of women’s anger a few years later.

More than eighty years after “Gaudy Night” was published, in 1935, we’re enjoying another golden age of detective stories. Human beings were not like that.” Harriet wonders what might happen if she were to “abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change.” The relationships between her characters “were beginning to take on an unnatural, an incredible symmetry. Harriet is a successful author, like her creator, but suffers from writer’s block. Sayers, the heroine, Harriet Vane, wonders whether mystery novels can ever rise to the level of literature. In “ Gaudy Night,” a classic of the golden age of detective fiction by Dorothy L.

Sayers didn’t begin her career with the intention of writing mysteries.

The gaudy night