The Nine Tailors

The Nine Tailors is a 1934 mystery novel by the British writer Dorothy L. Sayers, her ninth book featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. It is set in the Lincolnshire Fens and revolves around a group of bell-ringers at the local parish church.

The plot reaches back two decades. Twenty years before the events of the novel, the family of Sir Henry Thorpe, squire of the village of Fenchurch St Paul, suffered the theft of a guest's valuable emerald necklace. The family's butler and his accomplice were convicted and imprisoned, but the emeralds were never recovered, and the butler escaped from prison in 1918 and disappeared, leaving his wife without any explanation.

The discovery of a body in the wrong grave brings that history back into the open, and the ringers' art is treated as technical material rather than atmosphere. Critics were not unanimous about the method of death or the amount of campanology detail, but the book's evocation of the fens and the village is what carried its reputation, and the title comes from bell-ringing terminology for the knell of a death.