With the younger son of a duke as the detective hero, Clouds of Witness, like the other Wimsey novels, creates a world of immemorial aristocratic values that might seem at first impervious to social concerns. Indeed Sayers has often been called a snob and accused of anti-Semitism and of patronizing the lower classes, and it must be conceded that she does to some extent share these values with the British reading public of the 1920s. Martin Green has rather unkindly called her the "Fanny Hill of class distinctions." While her lower-class characters have distinct mental limitations and her professional men are often without aesthetic sensibilities, she distributes moral sensibility with an even hand. Cathcart, the victim in Clouds of Witness, is a completely amoral member of the social elite, and the Duke of Denver, the accused, is a good-hearted oaf who may go in for a...