Sayers was *very* big on forensics -- from the beginning, but most particularly so in "The Documents in the Case", which she wrote together with a trained doctor, Robert Eustace. She also had a lot of respect for the most prominent real-life forensic pathologist of the age, Dr. Bernard Spilsbury, who inter alia worked on the Crippen case, and whom she used as the model for the pathologist that Wimsey and Parker work with.
Martin Edwards writes in "The Golden Age of Murder" that Sayers and several other Golden Age authors, whose first / original career training was in chemistry and medicine, would have liked to take things even further in the direction of what is CSI today, but the idea was turned down by their publishers, who thought that it didn't hold enough appeal with their readership. One of several instances where the authors' instinct was dead-on, and their publishers' wasn't ...
True, but taken together with today's success and the success of those Golden Age books (and writers) I think the point can fairly be made. Also, there were several prominent real life murder cases at the time that turned significantly on forensic / pathological evidence, and it seems people were following those cases in the news with just about the same level of interest as is the case today ... including gobbling up nonfiction true crime books written about those cases. (Hence, too, the prominence of Dr. Spilsbury.) If people were interested in forensics in real life cases -- and were also turning crime novels that included a fair amount of forensic detail into bestsellers -- why wouldn't they then not have wanted to read a novel where a forensic pathologist was the detective? Pretty much everybody else (including doctors, cf. "Murder of a Lady" and other novels by Wynne) *were* showing up as fictional detectives anyway ...
Martin Edwards writes in "The Golden Age of Murder" that Sayers and several other Golden Age authors, whose first / original career training was in chemistry and medicine, would have liked to take things even further in the direction of what is CSI today, but the idea was turned down by their publishers, who thought that it didn't hold enough appeal with their readership. One of several instances where the authors' instinct was dead-on, and their publishers' wasn't ...