In this previously unpublished short story you will encounter one of Sayers’s most intrepid detectives in the person of Miss Jane Eurydice Judkin. As the newly hired house-parlourmaid at remote Mannering House, Judkin strives to keep her new mistress content, a cheeky chauffeur at bay, all the while unraveling the machinations of a mysterious poltergeist that seems to hold the entire household in a grip of anxious fear.

Praise for The Travelling Rug

The publication of Dorothy L. Sayers’s short story, The Travelling Rug, is a delightful treat for her many admirers. Not only is it an amusing and authentic Sayers version of “Upstairs, Downstairs,” with a postwar English household staff that reminds one of her other characters like Miss Climpson and Bunter, but this story also has for its heroine a clever and amusing housemaid called Jane Eurydice Judkin—a feminist in the making. Reading it makes one sorry Sayers did not tell us more about J.E. Judkin.
—Alzina Stone Dale, author of Maker and Craftsman, The Story of Dorothy L. Sayers