"I could not marry Peter off to the young woman he had (in the conventional Perseus manner) rescued from death and infamy, because I could find no form of words in which she could accept him without loss of self-respect. I had landed my two chief puppets in a situation where, according to all the conventional rules of detective fiction, they should have had nothing to do but fall into one another’s arms; but they would not do it, and that for a very good reason. When I looked at the situation I saw that it was in every respect false and degrading; and the puppets had somehow got just so much flesh and blood in them that I could not force them to accept it without shocking myself. […] Harriet had been a human being from the start, and I had humanized Peter for her benefit; but the situation between them had become still more impossible on that account."
— Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, from Howard Maycraft’s Art of the Detective Story (via smokeandsong)
(via sangfroidwoolf)
