Erik Routley:

In a perfect world there will be no need for detective stories: but then there will be nothing to detect. Their disappearance at this moment, however, will not bring the world any nearer to perfection. The high-minded would say that the removal of this form of relaxation would free the energies of the literate for the contemplation of real mysteries and the overcoming of real evils. I see no reason to count on that.

Quoted by P.D.James in her recent splendid little book, Talking about Detective Fiction. Alfred A.Knopf, New York, Toronto, 2009. p. 159

Janet Hitchman:

What she (Dorothy L.Sayers) could see ahead in 1938 was the coming war, and this appalled her. Wimsey, with his facetiousness, his dabbling in this and that, did not fit in, and the detection of crime for amusement, no matter how scholarly the sleuth, did not fit in either.

 From her biography of DLS, Such a Strange Lady. Harper and Row, New York …, 1975. p.112, describing the time when Sayers gave up writing her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries.

What do you say?