In 1990, Katherine Kenny described the book as the most successful of Sayers' early fiction, coupling a slick detective plot with vivid details of post-war English life. "The book is a tightly constructed little drama based upon the old joke about an Englishman's club so stuffy that its dead members cannot be differentiated from the living-a pertinent comment upon the society so described.".

In 1973, the novel was the subject of a BBC TV mini-series starring Ian Carmichael as Wimsey.

Born in Oxford, Sayers was raised in rural East Anglia and educated at Godolphin School in Salisbury and Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with first-class honors in medieval French. She worked as an advertising copywriter between 1922 and 1929 before success as an author brought her financial independence. Her first novel, Whose Body?, was published in 1923. Between then and 1939, she wrote ten more novels featuring the upper-class amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. In 1930, in Strong Poison, she introduced a leading female character, Harriet Vane, the object of Wimsey's love. Harriet appears sporadically in future novels, resisting Lord Peter's marriage proposals until Gaudy Night in 1935, six novels later.