The Nine Tailors

The Nine Tailors is a 1934 novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, her ninth featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.

For this novel, Sayers had to learn about bellringing: In it, Lord Peter not only rings one of eight church bells in a record-setting series of sound-patterns called "changes" but also uses his knowledge of bell-ringing to solve a 20-year-old mystery, located in the Fens, of a stolen emerald necklace.

The title refers to the nine times a church bell was rung to signal the death of a man in the parish; for a woman it was six times.

The Nine Tailors was adapted for television in 1973 as part of a series starring Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter.