Lord Peter Wimsey an unofficial attaché to the British Foreign Office. Harriet Vane contacts him about a problem she has been asked to investigate in her college at Oxford ("Gaudy Night"). At the end of their investigation, Vane finally accepts Wimsey's proposal of marriage. The couple marry on 8 October 1935, at St Cross Church, Oxford, as depicted in the opening collection of letters and diary entries in "Busman's Honeymoon". The Wimseys honeymoon at Talboys, a house in east Hertfordshire near Harriet's childhood home, which Peter has bought for her as a wedding present. There they find the body of the previous owner,
Lord Peter Wimsey for their evocation of that period as much as for the intrinsic detective mysteries. It was left to Jill Paton Walsh to extend Wimsey's career through and beyond the Second World War. In the continuations "A Presumption of Death" and "The Attenbury Emeralds" Wimsey and Bunter have returned successfully from their secret mission in 1940 and his nephew Lord St. George is killed while serving as an RAF pilot in the Battle of Britain. Consequently, when Wimsey's brother dies of a heart attack in 1951 during a fire in Bredon Hall at Duke's Denver, Wimsey becomes the Duke of Denver.