Sir – The novel called Gaudy Night cited by Richard O. Smith (Oxfordshire Limited Edition, March) certainly can’t be the same as that written by Dorothy L. Sayers, as he gets practically every fact wrong.

No one would recognise his portrait of Harriet Vane, (who as a liberated woman of 1936 would never wear a whalebone corset): she says “Gosh” exactly once in the book, never does embroidery or has a cold bath, and what on earth is he talking about with “Occasional hints of her being had up for scandalous behaviour . . .” (Harriet was of course tried in a blaze of publicity for the murder of her lover and saved from the gallows by Peter Wimsey).

But to lovers of Sayers and Oxford, his worst error is placing Harriet’s final surrender to Peter on Magdalen Bridge when the actual location is in New College Lane in the shadow of the Bridge of Sighs.

Smith seems equally ignorant about Harriet’s creator. Dorothy did not “grow up in Brewer Street” — her family left Oxford when she was four; and she was not “a remarked presence in Oxford in the 1920s”, having come down from Somerville in 1915.

Nor does “Oxford feature prominently” in any of her stories except Gaudy Night and one short story. Incidentally, Lord Peter certainly does not have “untethered (unfettered?) optimism for things to all work out jolly spiffo in the end”, especially in the later novels, including Gaudy Night.

Sue Jenkins, Thame