According to critic Nancy Wingate, Heyer's detective novels, the last written in 1953, often featured unoriginal methods, motives, and characters, with seven of them using inheritance as the motive. The novels were always set in London, a small village, or at a houseparty. Critic Erik Routley labelled many of her characters clichés, including the uneducated policeman, an exotic Spanish dancer, and a country vicar with a neurotic wife. In one of her novels, the characters' surnames were even in alphabetical order according to the order they were introduced. According to Wingate, Heyer's detective stories, like many of the others of the time, exhibited a distinct snobbery towards foreigners and the lower classes. Her middle-class men were often crude and stupid, while the women were either incredibly practical or exhibited poor judgement, usually using poor grammar that could become vicious. Despite the stereotypes, however, Routley maintains that Heyer had "a quite remarkable gift for reproducing the brittle and ironic conversation of the upper middle class Englishwoman of that age (immediately before 1940)". Wingate further mentions that Heyer's thrillers were known "for their wit and comedy as well as for their well-woven plots".