I'm reading ... The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

This is the second time I’ve read Dorothy Sayers. The first was a big doorstop of a book, filled with exposition and strange, old-fashioned northeast-English names. I only remember giving up on that one before I got to the end.

I finished The Unpleasantness. I don’t often go back to read golden age mysteries, because the focus then wasn’t on character development. It was on plot, and building a puzzle, and if there are dated pieces to the puzzle, it can be difficult to decipher.

In this one, Lord Peter Wimsey is called in to help investigate the death of a very elderly man, found expired in front of the fire at his London men’s club. The death isn’t a problem, just the fact that he’s found at almost exactly the same time as his slightly younger estranged sister, who has died of a lingering illness at her home a few blocks away. The question of who died first, of course, has enormous bearing on who will inherit the sister’s fortune.

Was Lord Peter the first of the titled detectives? Amateur investigators bored with their money and estates, with entrée to every salon and drawing room, access to anyone they wish to interview. They breeze about, asking questions without the burden of having to explain who they are or why they’re there.

The character of Lord Wimsey points up the reason that these old mystery novels, particularly the British ones, are so dated. They rely on a certain layman’s knowledge of class divisions, and the privilege that attended even the upper middle class without deviation. It’s a knowledge that we really don’t live with anymore.

Agatha Christie’s novels are filled with plots that hinge on the “invisibility” of the housemaids and train porters and serving staff that populate the lower levels around the bourgeoisie and gentry who were most often Christie’s protagonists. Criminal members of the upper classes were always disguising themselves as butlers and messengers and stewards to commit crimes, with the understanding that these people could operate unnoticed around the people who really mattered.

Without spoiling this almost-century-old novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club could have played itself out as an ingenious double-fake, with a desperate upper-middle-class heir who has already created a diversion to hide some of the facts behind time of death, who could have also admitted to the first misdirection as a further cover-up. But instead, Sayers has settled on a guilty party who is lower down on the food chain, whose involvement is not so tied up in what the reader already knows. This ending is okay, it works, but it comes out of left field, and it’s not as satisfying. But maybe Sayers, whose own family was filled with clergy and minor gentry, had a hard time seeing those around and above her on the British class ladder as true criminals.