A fun and very diverse collection of Sayers’ stories. There are a couple featuring detective Lord Peter Wimsey, but no Harriet Vane, as well as a few starring the relative nondescript Montague Egg. Some stories are more lighthearted than others, but most reveal the darkest parts of the human psyche: the man who contrives to have his young ward murdered for his inheritance or the man whose hatred of cats results in the death of his friend’s new wife. Sayers was a master of scene-setting; the spooky house in “Scrawns,” for example, creates the perfect location for murderous misunderstanding. One of my favorites was “The Milk-Bottles,” which demonstrates the wily ways of gutter-press journalists in creating a sensation out of “five mystery milk bottles” on a doorstep (or “mystery five milk bottles,” as one editor re-wrote the headline. “Nebuchadnezzar” took the golden age obsession with games and puzzles and turned into an opportunity to force a confession from a man with a guilty conscience. All in all, these fascinating short stories kept me reading.