Dorothy Sayers character

Unnatural Death

Now I wont feel too ashamed to admit that Ive read all the Nero WOlfe mysteries

how were they?

I misread your question. My answer was for the FIRST novel in which she appears...I don't know if she was in all the others

Really? I just re-read that recently, and i don't remember her. Is she the spinster-sleuth?

yes, in fact I read that Sayers was motivated to write about spinsters by the fact that there were so many in the population, probably due to the fact that a whole generation of men had been wiped out in the trenches

Yup, that's for sure. J. R. R. Tolkien was one of only two survivors of his class at university.

i didn't know that

Well, Miss Climpson does investigation for Lord Peter Wimsey. She is mentioned in Gaudy Night but doesn't appear; she may be mentioned in others. She is definitely involved in Unnatural Death, but what I'm really looking for is the novel in which Wimsey asks her to investigate the circumstances surrounding a will by posing as an elderly tourist in a small village. She worms her way into the confidence of the companion to a wealthy old lady by participating in a seance, she (Miss Climpson, that is) is good at the deceptions that lend credibility to table turnings, etc.

He tells about in one of the prefaces he wrote for The Lord of the Rings. It's rather ironic, because he says in the same preface that The Lord of the Rings was no an allegory for the Second World War. That seemed a no brainer to me, since the first volume came out before the war began in Europe. However, i had always thought that he was influenced by the Great War, and that bit of trivia convinced me of the case.

Here we go, the two relevant passages from the foreword to the second edition, George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1966, pages 8 and 9:

"As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. As the story grew it put down roots (into the past) and threw out unexpected branches; but its main theme was settled from the outset by the inevitable choice of the Ring as the link between it and The Hobbit. The crucial chapter, 'The Shadow of the Past', is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted."

. . .

"An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous. It is also false, though naturally attractive, when the lives of an author and critic have overlapped, to suppose that the movements of thought or the events of times common to both were necessarily the most powerful influences. One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead." (emphasis added)

Two emendations here (corrections of errors on my part): the obvious one is, of course, that he said "my close friends," and not members of his class at university. The other is that it was The Hobbit which was published in the 1930s, not the first volume of The Lord of the Rings.

goody, I love it when you go through the boneyard

The swamps of Mordor in the Lord Of The Rings, a reverse allegory for The Somme

Sorry Tom, without having read any other Sayers books I can't help

I don't think that woman appears in any of the other Peter Wimsey books--she may appear in other short stories, but i believe i've read all of the Wimsey novels.

She was a more minor character in Strong Poison...where Peter's love interest, Harriet Vane appears

I missed that one, then.