This year marks the 130th anniversary of Dorothy L Sayers’ birth and it is fair to say that her reputation has fluctuated over the years.  Many other writers have argued in detail about her anti-semitism, class-ism and anti-lesbian sentiments - Ros Coward and I addressed this in the essay we wrote on Women Crime Writers years ago. So I'm not going to rehash the arguments - there’s a link to them here if you're interested. I'm going to concentrate on why she is, IMHO, the best crime writer ever, male or female and why she is so important to the genre and beyond.

Oh I suppose I will have to address some of that stuff. Yes, her main character, Lord Peter Wimsey, starts out as a Wooster-ish figure all 'what-ho Bunter!' and cricketing analogies from the very beginning in 'Clouds of Witness'. I hate this book:  I forgive her some things because she is finding her voice but the  naive anti-Jewish tone is unforgivable.

Wimsey romps on through the next few books - 'Murder Must Advertise' is a lot of people's favourite, possibly because DLS's own experience of working in advertising gives it a shine - but it's another 'Meh' book for me.

If you want to see her brilliance, you need to read the sequence of novels in which she plays out the relationship between Wimsey and Harriet Vane, beginning with 'Strong Poison'. Harriet is a modern woman, explicitly feminist and independent and never a conventional romantic heroine. DLS was not lucky in her relationships -  she struggled with sex and we now know about her illegitimate son - but  it is a little trite to say she created the Wimsey/Vane storyline to compensate. Although, I have to say I've always quite liked the wonderful Alison Hennegan's wicked suggestion that Sayers' own complex sexual persona made her create Harriet as her own ideal partner!

The central masterpiece of this quadralogy is 'Gaudy Night'. As well as a cracking mystery, you'd look hard for better feminist  investigation of the position of academically-gifted women in a world that sees them as freakish, unwomanly and, frankly, a bit of an embarrassment. Remember, women had only just been able to graduate - Sayers herself had to return to Oxford for hers as, when she finished her time there women could still not take up their degrees. And we are only a few years since women won the vote.

An aside. A lot of friends won't read her because she created one of literature's worst 'evil lesbians' in 'Unnatural Death'; even the title's a bit of a giveaway. But she wasn't afraid to change her views.

By the time of the Wimsey/Vane novels, she has sympathetic lesbian characters who are primarily on the side of the angels. I asked her friend and biographer Barbara Reynolds about this some years ago as the timings coincided with a) the 'Well of Loneliness' trial and b) a period when DLS was mixing in a group of writers including Muriel St Clare Byrne, Helen Simpson and Clemence Dane (Winifred Ashton). Yes, said Barbara; DLS had her views changed by the trial and surrounding publicity and had corresponded with her Doctor friend and collaborator Robert Eustace about a friend that she believed was made of the same stuff as Stephen Gordon. We will read more about lesbians in mystery writing anon.

DLS eventually gave up crime fiction. She went on to write mainly about Trinitarian religion, alongside her popular religious radio and other plays. She also, memorably, embarked on a plan to translate Dante's 'Divine Comedy', still the most accessible translation in English, in my view.

And her legacy. A lot of writers on crime fiction date the 'Golden Age' from Agatha Christine's first book to DLS'S last: that shows the importance of her craft to the genre and that she set the standard for 'literary'  crime writing. I think we had to wait for Ruth Rendell (as Barbara Vine) until we saw her like again.