Education Quote by Dorothy L. Sayers

There is a delicious, slightly haughty pessimism in Sayers predicting the death of the detective story by overeducation. She isn’t lamenting a genre she dislikes; she’s warning that its central engine - misdirection - depends on an asymmetry of knowledge between writer and reader. Once the audience can spot the planted clue, the strategic red herring, the too-convenient alibi, the “least likely suspect” reversal, the form risks turning into a parlor game with worn cards. Her phrase “learnt all the tricks” is pointed: detective fiction, in her view, is craft, not magic. Craft can be reverse-engineered.

The subtext is less about readers becoming too smart than about the danger of formula hardening into dogma. By the interwar “Golden Age,” puzzle mysteries had developed recognizable rules and an almost competitive etiquette between author and audience. Sayers helped professionalize that game, so she’s also implicating herself: the better writers systematize the form, the easier it becomes to imitate - and to anticipate. It’s a critique of commodification disguised as a genre forecast.

Context matters. Sayers wrote at a moment when mass literacy, cheap periodicals, and publishing booms trained readers into savvy consumers. “The public” here is not a faceless mob; it’s an increasingly expert readership. Her prediction also smuggles in an artistic ambition: if the tricks run out, the genre must evolve toward character, psychology, and moral consequence rather than pure clockwork plotting. The line is a challenge to fellow writers: stop relying on the mechanism, or the mechanism will expose you.