Let’s Have Eight Other Gaudy Nights: Tracing Allusions to One Novel

This chapter examines the allusions to and appropriations of Sayers’ novel Gaudy Night in a series of later detective novels from the 1940s to the 2010s. It argues that this is the novel in which Sayers wrestled most explicitly with the difficulties of allusion, and which in turn became the novel which was most frequently alluded to by later writers. It examines novels by Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell, Gladys Mitchell, Nancy Spain, P.D. James, Reginald Hill and Sujata Massey. These variously allude to Sayers’ novel in order to extend, reimagine, critique or subvert it, and the chapter argues that in the process Gaudy Night has become a canonical touchstone text for the genre.