Dante Alighieri and Lord Peter Wimsey: Dorothy L. Sayers' two mysteries

Pustilnik sees Dorothy L. Sayers as having used her detective mysteries to create a secret religious epic housing ideas which could have resulted in a utopia of knowledge, revealing some of the broad idealistic truths about the relationship between Christians and Jews and helping to eliminate the European atmosphere of anti-Semitism--the indifference and hostility--which eventually led to the extermination of six million Jews. Pustilnik sees Sayers as using her twelve mystery novels and three collections of stories to rewrite biblical sections as allegory, by which Sayers takes her protagonist Peter to his Harriet through the same kind of Virgilian progression found in Dante's Commedia, in which work Virgil brought Dante to Beatrice. Sayers is viewed as utilizing her biblical sections as the allegoric stopping points of Creation, the Fall, Pentateuch, Decalogue, Eden, Twelve Tribes of Israel, and Twelve Apostles. In order to expose this allegory, Pustilnik follows Sayers' complex stream of clues, employing architectonics--the interpretation of hidden meanings in names, words, and numbers. She finds the clues primarily in the titles of Sayers' writings, in the names of her characters, in her use of Yiddish--vane (cry), daven (pray), oy (an exclamation)--and rabbit as rabbi, and in her numerical arrangements and symbols. Pustilnik concludes that Sayers' purpose, in probing religious destruction and creating utopian human beehives, is to bring to the various religions greater understanding of one another. She views Sayers' detective mystery stories and novels, with their concealed religion, as belonging to a viable hybrid genre, ripe for further study and investigation, and the mysteries as a single epical work deserving of a prominent place in both utopian and Holocaust studies.