Hangman's Holiday

Hangman’s Holiday is a lively collection of twelve short stories by Dorothy L. Sayers, featuring both her famous detectives—Lord Peter Wimsey and traveling salesman Montague Egg—as well as several standalone mysteries. The tales range from clever puzzles to darkly humorous crime vignettes, all showcasing Sayers’s sharp wit and mastery of deduction. In the Lord Peter stories, Wimsey unravels intricate cases of fraud, murder, and mistaken identity with his trademark intelligence and charm. Montague Egg, a practical and observant commercial traveler, solves crimes using common sense, business wisdom, and his “Salesman’s Handbook.” The remaining tales explore irony, coincidence, and poetic justice in ordinary lives touched by crime. Blending humor with human insight, Hangman’s Holiday demonstrates Sayers’s versatility—from elegant intellectual mysteries to moral parables about greed, pride, and chance. The collection highlights her gift for character-driven storytelling and the moral complexity beneath the surface of crime fiction.