ABLED Victorian mansions, attractively proportioned Georgian houses, picturesque villages, London's chic West End, Soho's labyrinth of streets, narrow and winding rural roads and lanes, cliffed coasts, the British railway network, landscape changes wrought by the encroachments of developers, the engineered environment of the Fens-these are only a few of characteristics of places that a reader may encounter in British detective-mystery fiction. Although at first thought such fiction may not seem the place to look for the use of geography, mystery writing is an abundant source of literary geography. One may ask why geography is used, what its role is, and why geographers have ignored mystery fiction in their studies of literary landscapes. The last question is the easiest to answer. The study of literary landscapes or of the use of geography in fiction writing has for the most part concentrated on serious literature and has left to comparative neglect writing that the arbiters of literary standards have decreed to be popular entertainment or escapist reading. Although the status of detective-mystery fiction is a matter of dispute, only rarely are examples of the genre categorized as a higher form of literature.' Nevertheless, the fact that a vast reading public is exposed to a host of geographical information from the detective-mystery genre makes it worthy of analysis for its geographical components. To answer the questions of why geography is used and what its role is in the genre, I shall turn to the writings of two women who have been among the most popular of British fiction writers since the 1920's.2 At a time when activities of women in creative and artistic endeavors are being stressed, the choice of the works of female authors here highlights the unique contribution of the sex to British detective-mystery fiction. The writers surveyed here are Dame Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. They have been selected because of their familiarity to American readers and because of the quality of their novels, although aficionados of the genre may object to the exclusion of favorites such as Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth Lemarchand, or P. D. James. Dame Agatha is the most widely read of these writers. She enjoyed a long and prolific career that began in 1920, and posthumous volumes have been published since her death in I976.3 Dorothy Sayers, in contrast, had a relatively short career as a writer of detective fiction, but she created a character who continues to captivate readers and to attract followers, as the recently televised versions of her novels attest.4