Dorothy L. Sayers edited a number of anthologies in the 1920s and 1930s, most notably three substantial volumes of short stories of “Detection, Mystery and Horror” for Victor Gollancz, who became the publisher of her novels at around the same time. Sayers put in a lot of hours leafing through back issues of magazines to find stories to include and, for the first volume, did all the admin as well, contacting authors and their agents, attempting to negotiate over fees, and finding alternatives if the costs were getting out of hand. As a result, her selections range from the canonical – Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ is in there – to works that were obscure at the time and remain so now. Sayers was pessimistic at this period about the future of the short detective story, wondering why anyone would waste a good plot that could potentially be spun out to fill a novel. But she continued writing short stories herself, albeit sporadically, and ‘The Leopard Lady’ has stuck in my mind since I first read it.
The conceit is an unusually sinister one for Sayers: an organisation called Smith & Smith agrees to undertake “removals” – that is, murders – on their clients’ behalf, to reduce the chances of detection. Sayers initially thought she could write a series of linked stories all based around ‘Smith & Smith’, but appears to have decided the whole idea was too discomforting. The fact that the intended victim is a child makes ‘The Leopard Lady’ particularly disturbing. Though Sayers is thought to have written it in 1928, it wasn’t published until some ten years later. There’s some striking description in the opening pages of the central protagonist’s journey across London, guided by a clue he finds in a literary journal – exactly the sort of publication in which a story like this might have first appeared.
First published in In the Teeth of the Evidence, Victor Gollancz, 1939
