“His Appearance Is against Him”: Race and Criminality in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Unnatural Death

This essay places Dorothy L. Sayers’s novel Unnatural Death (1927 ) in the context of heightened xenophobia and racism in interwar Britain, arguing that Sayers attempts to challenge prevalent cultural associations of blackness and criminality. Like Wilkie Collins, Sayers works to critique and undermine racist assumptions and to generate sympathy for the colonial Other