The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

[sawyl]

The fourth of Dorothy L Sayers' Peter Wimsey novels, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, is a charming two part mystery packed full of misdirects and artful clues that require Peter to do a lot of heavy spade-work before he can call upon the assistance of Inspector Parker.

Meeting a friend in the Bellona Club on the afternoon of Armistice Day, Lord Peter happens to be on hand when one of the club's fixtures, the nonagenarian General Fentiman, is found dead in his armchair. When it transpires that the size of the General's estate depends on whether he was alive at 10:37 AM and so able to inherit his sister's considerable fortune, Wimsey is asked by Mr Murbles, solicitor to the Fentiman family, to try and pin down the exact time of the old boy's death. Once this is eventually established, Wimsey starts to wonder whether the General's death might not be a touch too convenient for someone and might not be as natural as first thought.

As with Sayers' other novels, the book bustles with interesting characters from the grumpy old buffers of the Bellona Club, to a group of bohemian do-gooders who've become convinced that that ductless glands are the answer to all society's problems. Of the principal characters, both George Fentiman and Anne Dorland and very well drawn. George, struggling with a combination of shell shock and the after effects of being gassed in WWI, is both sympathetic and difficult to take, causing his friends and family to struggle to relate to him in any helpful. Anne Dorland, meanwhile, is a nice example of show-don't-tell. Her initial manner with Parker is very at odds with what Wimsey is told about her, but in a later meeting with Wimsey, once she's bucked herself up a bit and decided to talk about things, she gives the impression of being as incisive and intelligence as billed.