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Tea, Tonic & Toxin is a book club and podcast focused on the history of mystery. We’re discussing the best mysteries, detective stories, and thrillers ever written — in chronological order.

The Nine Tailors, a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, is quite possibly Dorothy Sayers’ masterpiece. The murder method in the 1934 novel is a stunner to be sure. The idea came from a sixpenny pamphlet that explained bell-ringing. Is it her finest literary achievement? Let us know what YOU think!

Dan Drake was born in Los Angeles two months after Pearl Harbor. A year or so after, his family moved to the Bay Area, where he has lived since, with notably rare exceptions – those exceptions being Portland OR, where he took a degree in biology at Reed College; UC San Diego for studies in biology; and San Diego State. At UC Berkeley, he studied in the newly renamed Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where he earned an MS and worked at a couple of computerish jobs. In 1982, he and some very sharp programmers started a software company for those fashionable new “personal computers.” That venture succeeded and has gone on succeeding for 40+ years under the same name, Autodesk.

Now, Dan’s parents were Sherlock Holmes fans, and Dan grew up in a home filled with Holmesiana. His father belonged to a local affiliate of the Baker Street Irregulars, for which he wrote a few pieces of Sherlockian fanfic. Dan found a book by Dorothy L Sayers called Unpopular Opinions, and then he read Whose Body? By good fortune, he read the Lord Peter Wimsey books more or less in order.

Dan eventually joined a new newsgroup dedicated to Lord Peter. When he learned about the Peter Wimsey Companion, he gave up his production of notes on the Wimsey corpus. Dan also collects Sayersiana, and on a few occasions he has attended conventions of the Dorothy L Sayers Society in England, along with one held at Wheaton College in Illinois. 

Today, Dan lives in Mill Valley, California, under redwood trees on a steep hillside, with his wife of many years. He has two adult children.

Sarah found Dan's incredible notes on the internet researching Whose Body.

Other references Dan Made:
His father (Stillman Drake - see, if you like, his entry in Wikipedia) was active in the Northern California Holmesian society, called the Scowrers, and wrote a couple of essays in that capacity. dandrake.com/porlock/index.html

A group called Lord Peter, which he joined. It's still alive (https://groups.io/g/LordPeter/topics) though not very active. And it got him to writing these annotations.

Dorothy Sayers Book on Education: The Lost Tools of Learning

VII: Journal of the Marion E Wade Center at Wheat

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