Poison Pen and Poltergeist: Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers
“Do you know the Guest Room, miss? That would be after your time, perhaps. Well, it’s on the New Bridge, miss, between Tudor Building and the North Annexe where the Cottage used to be, miss, only of course that’s all done away with now and you has to go up by the main staircase past the West Lecture Room, miss, what used to be the Junior Common Room, miss, before they made the new entrance and moved the stairs, and then turn right and it’s half-way along the corridor. You can’t mistake it, miss.”
In Gaudy Night, Sayers returns to Harriet Vane, after showing Peter Wimsey on his own again in Murder Must Advertise and The Nine Tailors. In fact, a large part of Gaudy Night focuses on Vane on her own, while Wimsey is away doing something for the foreign service. The chronology is a little odd; at one point the events of The Nine Tailors, published just the year before, are referred to as three years in the past. Perhaps Sayers wants to make a point of how long Wimsey’s courtship of Vane has been at a standstill. In any case, Gaudy Night finally resolves that issue.
