Sayers's Characters, including Villains, in the Golden Age of Mysteries

The Golden Age mysteries often get compared to each other. 

Comparisons seem to be how humans survive (Is that dark alley safe or unsafe? Is that person a stranger or friend?). Consequently, I think that comparisons are often inevitable. 

However, I think the impulse should be fought. Or at least monitored. It is completely unnecessary to consider Christie better than Sayers or Sayers better than Christie or Marsh better than either of them. I've read all three. I enjoy all three. I'm not going to stop enjoying all three. 

I think where comparisons get interesting is not deciding who is better or worse. I think comparisons get interesting in examining how the writers differ.

Marsh, who worked in the theatre, wrote characters from the perspective of a playwright: where they stand in a scene, how they look, how they move. 

Christie distilled human characteristics into brief and very relatable portraits. 

Sayers creates individuals within context. 

One of my favorite Sayers' character is Charles Parker. In Unnatural Death, Sayers describes him as "one of those methodical painstaking people whom the world can ill spare." In many ways, Parker is like Bell from Elementary: a guy who looks at an issue from as many sides as possible. AND does the hard work of collecting the requisite information. He also has the masterful ability to be unafraid and unimpressed by Wimsey. He isn't tactless or revolutionary but he also isn't a sycophant. If he thinks Peter is behaving pompously, he says so. 

Sayers's villains also have a quality that I think most villains have (and the reason villains who confess when faced with THE TRUTH never entirely convince me). They think themselves justified. Even the most evil of her villains, from Unnatural Death, is entirely normal on the surface. That villain's world has narrowed to MY rights, MY needs, MY desired outcome. 

In fact, like C.S. Lewis, Sayers conveys the normality of the villainous behavior, so the villain of Murder Must Advertise is NOT, as Wimsey recognizes, the Big Bad. He is too impulsive; too easily caught in dumb behavior. He got away with the murder initially because it was put down to an accident. But he was never going to get away with much for long. 

Sayers understood the stories and justifications that heroes and villains tell themselves.