Lord Peter Wimsey Lord Peter Wimsey Lord Peter Death Bredon Wimsey is the fictional protagonist in a series of detective novels and short stories by Dorothy L. Sayers (and their continuation by Jill Paton Walsh). A dilettante who solves mysteries for his own amusement, Wimsey is an archetype for the British gentleman detective. Lord Peter is often assisted by his valet and former batman, Mervyn Bunter; his good friend and later brother-in-law, police detective Charles Parker; and in a few books by Harriet Vane, who becomes his wife. Born in 1890 and ageing in real time, Wimsey is described as being of average
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