The book has been described as Sayers' finest literary achievement, although not all critics were convinced by the mode of death, nor by the amount of technical campanology detail included.

Twenty years before the events of the novel, the family of Sir Henry Thorpe, squire of the Fenland village of Fenchurch St Paul, had suffered the theft of a guest's valuable emerald necklace, still unrecovered.

After a man's body in prison clothes was found two years later in a nearby dene-hole, Mary was declared a widow, and became free to marry one of the village bell-ringers, William Thoday.

Stranded for a few days while repairs are carried out, Wimsey helps ring an all-night peal on the church bells after William Thoday is struck down with influenza.

When Sir Henry dies the following Easter, a man's mutilated body is found in his wife's grave, believed to be that of a labourer calling himself 'Stephen Driver'.

Desperate to protect his wife and children from the scandal of an illegitimate marriage, he had tied Deacon up and locked him in the bell chamber, planning to bribe him to leave the country the next day.

[3] Writing in The New York Times on the book's first publication, Isaac Anderson said, "It may be that you, like this reviewer, do not know the difference between a kent treble bob major and a grandsire triple, but even so, you will probably enjoy what Dorothy Sayers has to say about them and about other things concerned with the ancient art of change-ringing, since her dissertation is all woven into a most fascinating mystery tale....

"[4] John Shand, writing in The Spectator in 1936, said "Those who would appreciate an artist's picture of a group of village bellringers – of the kind who can pull a rope with any Londoner – may find one in [this novel], [which] contains the best description known to me of the bells, the ringers and the art.

"[2] In his 1941 book Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, Howard Haycraft noted that Sayers has been called by some critics the greatest of living mystery writers.

He went on, "Whether or not the reader agrees with this verdict, he can not, unless he is both obtuse and ungrateful, dispute her preëminence as one of the most brilliant and prescient artists the genre has yet produced... [This book is] in the writer's estimation her finest achievement and one of the truly great detective stories of all time.

"[5] Taking the opposite view, the American critic Edmund Wilson, in his excoriating 1945 essay attacking the entire genre of detective fiction, Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, criticised The Nine Tailors in particular for being dull, overlong and far too detailed.

"[8] Also writing in 1989, H. R. F. Keating said that the author "incautiously entered the closed world of bell-ringing in The Nine Tailors on the strength of a sixpenny pamphlet picked up by chance – and invented a method of killing which would not produce death, as well as breaking a fundamental rule of that esoteric art by allowing a relief ringer to take part in her famous nine-hour champion peal.

In a letter discussing the book, Sayers said "I wrote [the novel] without ever having seen bells rung, by brooding over Troyte on Change-Ringing and trying to translate its technical descriptions into visual effects.