Serious fiction …

…'No Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition or Mumbo Jumbo': Dorothy L Sayers and the Detection Club | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

These archives show Sayers at her dynamic best, and reveal just how much energy she expended, over several decades, to keep the club afloat. She informed new candidates of their selection and assuaged their doubts about the sinister initiation ceremony. (Josephine Tey was anxious to know whether she was in for “a quiz? an endurance test? A ritual???”) She deliberated on the merits of potential candidates, pondering whether an excellent stylist had put quite enough detection in his last novel to qualify for membership, and whether an ingenious plot could compensate for a fictional detective who was “rude and cruel”. She cajoled friends to attend lectures by coroners, chief constables, philosophers and, once, a “genuine Viennese psychoanalyst”, who was imported to address the club on murder.