A Presumption of Death

Born in 1937, Jill Paton Walsh was an award-winning British novelist and children's writer. Her adult novels include Knowledge of Angels, which was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, and the Imogen Quy Mysteries. She also completed Dorothy L. Sayers's unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane series. In 1996, she received the CBE for services to literature. She died in 2020.

Dorothy L. Sayers, the greatest of the golden age detective novelists, was born in Oxford in 1893. She was one of the first women to be awarded a degree by Oxford University and worked as a copywriter in an advertising agency from 1921 to 1932. Her aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, became one of the most popular fictional heroes of the twentieth century. Dorothy L. Sayers also became famous for her religious plays, notably The Man Born to Be King, which was broadcast controversially during the war years, but she considered her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy to be her best work. She died in 1957.