In Strong Poison (1930), Wimsey met novelist Harriet Vane, whom he would save from a charge of murder, then (in reckless disregard of the rules against romance in Golden Age detective novels) woo through several novels, including the academic classic Gaudy Night (1935), and finally wed in Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), the final detective novel completed by Sayers. (The fragmentary Thrones, Dominations would be completed with remarkable fidelity many years later by Jill Paton Walsh and published under their joint byline in 1998.)

Sayers, who became a feminist icon in the 1970s, in part because of the independence she personified in her own life and in part because of her creation of Harriet Vane, has been the subject of more biographical works and critical analyses than any Golden Age of Detection figure save Agatha Christie, and certainly few equaled her in her devotion to the games-playing elements of the detective story. However, she left detective fiction in the latter part of her life in favor of other literary pursuits, including some highly regarded religious plays and a translation of Dante.

Though Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a number of short stories about Lord Peter Wimsey, her best shorter works tend to be those without a series detective. In “The Man Who Knew How,” Sayers is able to comment wittily on her detective fiction speciality while developing a situation that could as easily have taken the title of another of her best short stories: “Suspicion.” “The Man Who Knew How” is the sort of crime story ideally suited to radio adaptation, as it was in a memorable Suspense broadcast starring Charles Laughton as Pender, with Hans Conreid in the title role.