The Late Scholar The Late Scholar The Late Scholar is the fourth Lord Peter Wimsey-Harriet Vane detective novel written by Jill Paton Walsh. Featuring characters created by Dorothy L. Sayers, it was written with the co-operation and approval of Sayers' estate. It was published by Hodder & Stoughton (whose "yellow jackets" are alluded to in the book) on December 5, 2013 in the UK, and on January 14, 2014 in North America. "The Late Scholar" features the former Lord Peter Wimsey—now the Duke of Denver—and his wife, the former Harriet Vane, and is set in a fictional Oxford college called St. Severin's, mostly
Lord Peter Wimsey Wimsey was based, at least in part, on Eric Whelpton, who was a close friend of Sayers at Oxford. Ian Carmichael, who played the part of Wimsey in the first BBC television adaptation and studied the character and the books thoroughly, said that the character was Sayers' conception of the 'ideal man', based in part on her earlier romantic misfortunes. The novels are set in Britain contemporaneously with when they were written, from the early 1920s to the late 1930s. Sayers's final Wimsey story "Talboys" is set in 1942. Many episodes in the Wimsey books express a mild satire on