Strong Poison
Number of episodes: 3 - Length: 55 mins
25-Mar-1987
Lord Peter Wimsey is involved in a race against time, and against the executioner. Harriet Vane stands accused of murder. The counsel for the prosecution claims that she poisoned her lover. Is she not a writer of detective stories, and therefore privy to all the expertise required? And was she not seen buying arsenic, prussic acid, and strychnine shortly before her lover's death? Fortunately for her, the jury cannot agree among themselves and a retrial is ordered. Wimsey has only a month to prove her innocence, and he is by now a man in love - which can only complicate his hunt to find the killer, who is still at large, and as dangerous as ever.
Have His Carcase
Number of episodes: 4 - Length: 50 mins
15-Apr-1987
Murder brings Lord Peter and Harriet together again: when walking on a Dorset beach, Harriet discovers a corpse, the throat cut from ear to ear. Lord Peter comes to her assistance, and their inquiries lead from a distinctive razor blade to the salons of London's fashionable Jermyn Street, from a Russian émigré and professional dance-partner to a mysterious man with one shoulder higher than the other. As they investigate the trail of coded messages and secret agents, Harriet and Lord Peter's relationship becomes as tangled as the cat's-cradle of hints and clues that they are trying to unravel.
Gaudy Night
Number of episodes: 3 - Length: 55 mins
13-May-1987
Harriet calls in Lord Peter to help her unmask an invisible foe, hiding behind a poison pen at Shrewsbury College, Oxford. Ten years after graduation, Harriet, now a successful novelist, returns to her alma mater for the Gaudy Night celebrations. It should be a time for fond reminiscence, as Harriet is reunited with her fellow-students. But it turns into something far more sinister when obscene graffiti start appearing, followed by vitriolic letters. A ten-year hatred is the subject of Lord Peter and Harriet's investigation - in the case that, ironically, finally saw their relationship turn to love. |
Legendary crime author Dorothy Leigh Sayers's quintessentially aristocratic amateur criminologist, Lord Peter Wimsey, mixes sleuthing and wooing in Dorothy L. Sayers Mysteries, the 1987 3-part, 10-episode BBC TV production that aired in the US on PBS's Mystery! series. Edward Petherbridge stars as the monocled crime solver, and the three novels adapted for the series chronicle Wimsey's romantic pursuit of mystery writer Harriet Vane (Harriet Walter) in 1930s England.
Number of episodes in regular seasons: 10
