Dear Jim: This book is your fault. If it had not been for your brutal insistence, Lord Peter would never have staggered through to the end of this enquiry. Pray consider that he thanks you with his ac...

“Oh, damn!” said Lord Peter Wimsey at Piccadilly Circus. “Hi, driver!” The taxi man, irritated at receiving this appeal while negotiating the intricacies of turning into Lower Regent Street across the...

“Excellent, Bunter,” said Lord Peter, sinking with a sigh into a luxurious armchair. “I couldn’t have done better myself. The thought of the Dante makes my mouth water⁠—and the Four Sons of Aymon. And...

Lord Peter finished a Scarlatti sonata, and sat looking thoughtfully at his own hands. The fingers were long and muscular, with wide, flat joints and square tips. When he was playing, his rather hard ...

“⁠—So there it is, Parker,” said Lord Peter, pushing his coffee-cup aside and lighting his after-breakfast pipe; “you may find it leads you to something, though it don’t seem to get me any further wit...

Mr. Parker was a bachelor, and occupied a Georgian but inconvenient flat at No. 12A Great Ormond Street, for which he paid a pound a week. His exertions in the cause of civilization were rewarded, not...

It was, in fact, inconvenient for Mr. Parker to leave London. He had had to go and see Lady Levy towards the end of the morning, and subsequently his plans for the day had been thrown out of gear and ...

On returning to the flat just before lunchtime on the following morning, after a few confirmatory researches in Balham and the neighbourhood of Victoria Station, Lord Peter was greeted at the door by ...

Lord Peter reached home about midnight, feeling extraordinarily wakeful and alert. Something was jigging and worrying in his brain; it felt like a hive of bees, stirred up by a stick. He felt as thoug...

Mr. Parker, summoned the next morning to 110 Piccadilly, arrived to find the Dowager Duchess in possession. She greeted him charmingly. “I am going to take this silly boy down to Denver for the weeken...

Mr. Parker, a faithful though doubting Thomas, had duly secured his medical student: a large young man like an overgrown puppy, with innocent eyes and a freckled face. He sat on the Chesterfield befor...

“A regular pea-souper, by Jove,” said Lord Peter. Parker grunted, and struggled irritably into an overcoat. “It affords me, if I may say so, the greatest satisfaction,” continued the noble lord, “that...

The vile, raw fog tore your throat and ravaged your eyes. You could not see your feet. You stumbled in your walk over poor men’s graves. The feel of Parker’s old trench-coat beneath your fingers was c...

Dear Lord Peter⁠—When I was a young man I used to play chess with an old friend of my father’s. He was a very bad, and a very slow, player, and he could never see when a checkmate was inevitable, but ...

This is the first Florence edition, 1481, by Niccolo di Lorenzo. Lord Peter’s collection of printed Dantes is worth inspection. It includes, besides the famous Aldine 8vo of 1502, the Naples folio of ...