Editing Murder Must Advertise (section)

==Literary significance and criticism==
In their review of Crime novels (revised edition 1989), the US writers [[Jacques Barzun|Barzun]] and Taylor called the novel "A superb example of Sayers' ability to set a group of people going.  The advertising agency is inimitable, and hence better than the De Momerie crowd that goes with it.  The murder is ingenious and Wimsey is just right".<ref name="COFC">Barzun, Jacques and Taylor, Wendell Hertig.  ''A Catalogue of Crime''.  New York: Harper & Row.  1971, revised and enlarged edition 1989.  {{ISBN|0-06-015796-8}}</ref>

Writing in 1993, the biographer [[Barbara Reynolds]] noted that "Sayers herself disliked the novel, which she wrote quickly in order to fulfil her publisher's contract, and was unsure whether it would ring true with the reading public". Reynolds quotes a letter that Sayers wrote to her publisher [[Victor Gollancz]] on 14 September 1932:<ref name="Reynolds">{{cite book |title=Dorothy L Sayers: Her Life and Soul |last=Reynolds |first=Barbara |year=1993 |publisher=Hodder & Stoughton |isbn=0-340-58151-4 |page=238 }}</ref>
{{Blockquote|The new book is nearly done. I hate it because it isn't the one I wanted to write, but I had to shove it in because I couldn't get the technical dope on ''[[The Nine Tailors]]'' in time. Still, you never know what people will fancy, do you? It...deals with the dope-traffic, which is fashionable at the moment, but I don't feel that this part is very convincing, as I can't say "I know dope". Not one of my best efforts.}}

In her 1941 book ''[[The Mind of the Maker]]'' Sayers wrote: "I undertook (not very successfully) to present a contrast of two 'cardboard' worlds, equally fictitious—the world of advertising and the world of the post-war '[[Bright Young People]]'. (It was not very successful, because I knew and cared much more about advertising than about Bright Youth)". But she went on to quote a reader who pointed out that "Peter Wimsey, who represents reality, never appears in either world except in disguise". She commented, "It was perfectly true; and I had never noticed it. With all its defects of realism, there had been some measure of integral truth about the book's Idea, since it issued, without my conscious connivance, in a true symbolism".<ref name="Sayers">{{Cite book |title=The Mind of the Maker |last=Sayers |first=Dorothy L |year=1941 | page=62}}</ref>