The Nine Tailors

The Nine Tailors is a detective novel by the English writer Dorothy L. Sayers, first published in 1934 as the ninth book to feature her aristocratic amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey. Set among the isolated fens of Lincolnshire, the story begins when Wimsey's car breaks down on New Year's Eve near the village of Fenchurch St Paul, and he is pressed into helping the local bell-ringers complete a nine-hour peal at the parish church. Months later, an unidentified and badly disfigured body is found in a grave in the churchyard, and Wimsey's investigation gradually uncovers its connection to a twenty-year-old theft of a valuable emerald necklace, an escaped convict named Geoffrey Deacon, and a circle of former conspirators; the eventual solution reveals that Deacon died not by any human hand but from the physical effects of being trapped, unable to escape, in the church's bell chamber during a violent peal of ringing. The novel is unusually rich in technical detail about English change-ringing and campanology, and while some critics found its bell-ringing passages overlong, others, including the critic Howard Haycraft, called it one of Sayers' finest achievements and one of the great detective novels; it ranked eighteenth on the Crime Writers' Association's 1990 list of the top 100 crime novels of all time.