The Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane Mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers

HarperCollins's new mystery imprint, Bourbon Street Books, has four reissued trade paperback titles out this week: the four titles in Dorothy L. Sayers's "Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane" series, first published between 1930 and 1937.

The two first meet in Strong Poison, with their relationship developing over the next two books — Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night — and they finally marry in Busman's Honeymoon. More information about each of the titles is below.

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Strong Poison
Dorothy L. Sayers
A Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane Mystery

Mystery novelist Harriet Vane knew all about poisons, and when her fiancé died in the manner prescribed in one of her books, a jury of her peers had a hangman's noose in mind. But Lord Peter Wimsey was determined to prove her innocent — as determined as he was to make her his wife.

  

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Have His Carcase
Dorothy L. Sayers
A Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane Mystery

Mystery novelist Harriet Vane, recovering from an unhappy love affair and its most unpleasant aftermath, seeks solace on a barren beach deserted but for one notable exception: the body of a bearded young man with his throat cut. From the moment she photographs the corpse, which soon disappears with the tide, she is puzzled by a mystery that might easily have been a suicide, a murder, or a political plot. With the appearance of her dear friend Lord Peter Wimsey, however, Harriet finds yet another reason to pursue the mystery, as only the two of them can pursue it.

  

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Gaudy Night
Dorothy L. Sayers
A Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane Mystery

When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the Gaudy, the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obscenities, burnt effigies, and poison-pen letters, including one that says, "Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup." Some of the notes threaten murder; all are perfectly ghastly; yet in spite of their scurrilous nature, all are perfectly worded. And Harriet finds herself ensnared in a nightmare of romance and terror, with only the tiniest shreds of clues to challenge her powers of detection, and those of her paramour, Lord Peter Wimsey.

  

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Busman's Honeymoon
Dorothy L. Sayers
A Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane Mystery

Murder is hardly the best way for Lord Peter and his bride, the famous mystery writer Harriet Vane, to start their honeymoon. It all begins when the former owner of their newly acquired estate is found quite nastily dead in the cellar. All too quickly, what Lord Peter had hoped would be a very private and romantic stay in the country has turned into a most baffling case, with a misspelled "notise" to the milkman at its center and a dead man who's been discovered in a most intriguing condition: with not a spot of blood on his smashed skull and not a penny less than six hundred pounds in his pocket.