In 1941, the untimely arrival of the Luftwaffe caused an unfortunate interruption in the otherwise convivial dinner of the Detection Club. Taking refuge in the basement, crime writers Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers found themselves facing death as rather more than a paper puzzle.

 

To their millions of readers, Christie and Sayers were public celebrities, creators of the most famous and beloved detectives since Sherlock Holmes.  Sayers had ‘left a life of crime to join the Church of England’, a schoolboy’s assessment she loved to quote against herself; but Christie was as prolific as ever, with a public eager for the latest marvels of Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple.

 

As far as anyone knew, Sayers and Christie were respectable married middle-aged ladies.

 

In the basement, with the bombers circling overhead, the two ladies gradually divest their public personas. The private lives of Mrs Fleming - Sayers - and Mrs Mallowan - Christie - were riven with the sort of emotional upheaval and spiritual crisis carefully hidden from their novels, despite their complement of murders most foul.

 

In Mrs Fleming and Mrs Mallowan, the two-dimensional authors ‘Agatha Christie’ and ‘Dorothy L. Sayers’ step aside, and their three-dimensional counterparts take the stage.