The Wimsey Papers

The Wimsey Papers are a series of articles by Dorothy L. Sayers published between November 1939 and January 1940 in The Spectator. They had the form of letters exchanged by members of the Wimsey Family and other characters familiar to readers from the Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels, but were in fact intended to convey Sayers' opinions and commentaries on various aspects of public life in the early months of the Second World War, such as black-out, evacuation, rationing and the need of the public to take personal responsibility rather than wait for the government to guide them. The subjects range from very practical and detailed advice on such issues as how pedestrians can avoid being hit by cars in black-out to quite Utopian and far-reaching schemes for the post-war reconstruction of Britain.

Among other things the letters expressed Sayers' displeasure with the Appeasement policies enacted by Neville Chamberlain in the previous years, and her doubts about his fitness to lead Britain in war (at the time of writing, it was not yet known that Chamberlain would soon be replaced by Winston Churchill). The papers also attributed to Harriet Vane a reluctance to go on writing murder mysteries at the time when European dictators were committing mass murders openly and with impunity. This seems to have been Sayers' own feeling, as she in fact abandoned during World War II the writing of murder mysteries and never took it up again.

There is a repeated unfavorable opinion of the Soviet Union, in the aftermath of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the Soviet attack on Finland. The opinion that there was little to choose between Communism and Fascism, and that the two kinds of dictatorship are equally reprehensible, is given special prominence by being attributed to Lord Peter Wimsey himself. Other characters are shown as expressing the opinion that, even had Britain managed to conclude an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1939, the Soviets would have proven an unreliable ally of little military worth, given their army's weak performance in Finland. On this point Sayers' opinion, as of most other Britons, did not change in 1941. Getting the Soviets on Britain's side was highly welcome, but the lamentable performance and mass surrenders of the Red Army seemed to bear out the negative assessment. It was only in 1942, when the Germans lost an Army at Stalingrad and American supplies started flowing in, that the resiliency and true strength of Russia became apparent.

...
Wikipedia