Authors Like Dorothy L. Sayers

Wilkie Collins

British · The Woman in White (1860), The Moonstone (1868)

Collins (1824–1889) serialised The Woman in White in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round in 1859–60. The Moonstone, about a diamond stolen from an English country house, helped set the ground rules of the detective novel; T. S. Eliot called it “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.”

E. C. Bentley

British · Trent’s Last Case (1913)

Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) was a school friend of G. K. Chesterton, who dedicated The Man Who Was Thursday to him, and he invented the comic verse form that bears his middle name. Trent’s Last Case has been called the first truly modern mystery, and Sayers was among its admirers. Bentley was president of the Detection Club from 1936 to 1949.

Margery Allingham

British · Police at the Funeral (1931), Death of a Ghost (1934), The Tiger in the Smoke (1952)

Allingham (1904–1966) was born in Ealing and introduced Albert Campion in The Crime at Black Dudley (1929); he was at first thought to be a parody of Lord Peter Wimsey. She is counted with Sayers, Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh as one of the four Queens of Crime of the Golden Age.

Every book by Margery Allingham →

Josephine Tey

Scottish · Miss Pym Disposes (1946), The Franchise Affair (1948), The Daughter of Time (1951)

Tey was the pen name of Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896–1952) of Inverness, who also wrote plays as Gordon Daviot. In The Daughter of Time, Inspector Alan Grant, confined to a hospital bed, has friends bring him documents to test whether Richard III murdered the Princes in the Tower; in 1990 the Crime Writers’ Association named it the greatest crime novel of all time. Miss Pym Disposes is set in a women’s physical training college.

Ngaio Marsh

New Zealand · A Man Lay Dead (1934), Artists in Crime (1938), Surfeit of Lampreys (1941)

Marsh (1895–1982) was born in Christchurch, trained as a painter and worked as an actress before writing 32 detective novels between 1934 and 1982. In Artists in Crime her Scotland Yard detective, Roderick Alleyn, meets the painter Agatha Troy, who appears in later novels and marries him. From 1942 she directed Shakespeare with students at Canterbury University College.

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Raymond Chandler

American-British · The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Long Goodbye (1953)

Chandler (1888–1959) was born in Chicago, educated at Dulwich College in London, and wrote his novels about the Los Angeles private detective Philip Marlowe. In “The Simple Art of Murder”, published in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1944, he attacked the English classic detective story for its contrived plots, named Sayers among the writers he took on, and praised Dashiell Hammett for realism.

Edmund Crispin

British · The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), The Moving Toyshop (1946), Swan Song (1947)

Edmund Crispin was the pen name of Robert Bruce Montgomery (1921–1978), organ scholar at St John’s College, Oxford, who also composed scores for nearly forty films, including six early Carry On films. His detective, Gervase Fen, is a professor of English and fellow of a fictional college placed next to St John’s.

P. D. James

British · Cover Her Face (1962), A Taste for Death (1986), Talking About Detective Fiction (2009)

James (1920–2014) was born in Oxford. Her first novel, Cover Her Face, introduced Adam Dalgliesh, a Scotland Yard detective who also writes poetry. She became a Conservative life peer in 1991, and her short study Talking About Detective Fiction won the Anthony Award for best critical non-fiction in 2010.

Every book by P. D. James →

Amanda Cross

American · In the Last Analysis (1964), Death in a Tenured Position (1981)

Amanda Cross was the pen name of Carolyn Heilbrun (1926–2003), who taught English at Columbia University from 1960 to 1992 and was the first woman to receive tenure in its English department. Her fifteen mysteries follow Kate Fansler, a professor of English; Death in a Tenured Position is set at Harvard. Under her own name she wrote the feminist study Writing a Woman’s Life (1988).

Elizabeth George

American · A Great Deliverance (1988), A Suitable Vengeance (1991), A Slowly Dying Cause (2025)

George was born in Warren, Ohio, in 1949 and sets her novels in England. Her detective, Inspector Thomas Lynley of Scotland Yard, is in private life the Earl of Asherton, and works with Sergeant Barbara Havers, who is from a very different class. The 22nd Lynley novel, A Slowly Dying Cause, was published in September 2025.