S3 E9 – The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers

by | Oct 6, 2022

 

Transcript

Welcome to Mystery Books podcast where you’ll discover new mystery books and authors. I’m USA Today best selling mystery author, Sara Rosett. This episode is all about The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers. Published in 1928, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is book 5 in the Lord Peter Wimsey series.

Blurb

Here’s the blurb. Even the baloney club’s most devoted members would never call it lively. Its atmosphere is that of a morgue or at best a funeral parlor. In an Armistice day, the gloom is only heightened. The veterans of the Great War gather at the Bellona Club not to hash over old victories, but to stare into their whiskeys and complain about old injuries, shrinking pensions, and the lingering effects of shell shock. Though he acts jolly, Lord Peter Wimsey finds the holiday grim. In this Armistice day, death has come to join the festivities.

Here’s the first line. It is dialogue. This is someone speaking to Lord Peter. “What in the world, Wimsey, are you doing here in this morgue?” Demanded Captain Fentiman, flinging aside the evening banner with the air of a man released from irksome duty.

So we’re in the club with Wimsey and his friend, Captain Fentiman. So I love the way the book begins. It’s a very funny first chapter. The tone of this book is like this 1st chapter. It’s very, light, funny, joking, kind of jaunty. Even though it deals with some very grim, serious topics, The overall tone of the book is very light.

So this book, it was a reread for me, and I found that it held up very well. I enjoyed the mystery. It was well plotted and it was a fairly clued mystery. So if you’re trying to solve the mystery along with the sleuth, You’re able to do that.

It had an unusual structure. The first half, Wimsey is focused on trying to answer a question of when General Fentiman died. Now Captain Fentiman in the first line is not General Fentiman, a relative of his. I don’t think that’s a huge spoiler that General Fentiman dies because it happens in the 1st chapter. So he dies, and there is a question a legal question because of the isn’t the way his will is written. When he died is important to find out because that impacts the inheritance. So, basically, Wimsey is asked to look into this. It’s known that he’s good at sorting out these different problems and issues around death and murder. So will you check this out, basically, as he’s asked, and so he begins to look into it. The second half is when you get to the murder mystery where you realize that there’s more to his death than meets the eye.

And Lord Peter is the main character in this, and it takes place in London in 1928. And the narration, we get some of what’s going on in Lord Peter’s thoughts, some but not all. So it’s more an omniscient narration. So we’re seeing his actions, but we don’t get all of his thoughts. And that is one way that, Sayers makes the allows us to be sleuthing along with Lord Peter because we see what he’s doing and the questions he’s asking, but we don’t get the answers, and we don’t get his internal thoughts as he figures out some of the clues. That’s kind of veiled from us so that we’re able to sleuth along with him.

Themes and Tropes

In this, we also get the discussion of PTSD or what they called shell shock then. So that’s sort of moving into the themes, andthat is one of the main themes of the book. And Sayers deals with this in such depth. She shows us how it impacts different characters in different ways, And she shows us how the social economic situation of the different characters, how it either helps them or hurts them when they’re trying to deal with The effects of World War I.

Another theme of this is the class divide. There’s a lot of divisions in this. There’s the class divide, And we see that especially in the contrast between George and Wimsey. So George is one of the people that Wimsey knows From the war and how they each have dealt with their time in the war shows the impact of class on that.

And then you also have the division of old and new. There’s the modern era where things are different now, and you get that a lot. A lot of characters refer to, oh, well, things are different now. Then you have the kind of old school versus modern way of doing things.

The word unpleasantness comes up in this book many times. It’s in the title, but it comes up in the dialogue again and again. And unpleasantness to me makes me think of, like, a disruption, an inconvenience, you know, something that’s sort of minor. But in typical understated Brit fashion, this is the word that Is used in this book to refer to a lot of the impacts of World War I. So you have people who are dealing with all ranges of impacts in their life from this PTSD that they’re experiencing, which they called shell shock. You have a whole range of impacts. You have physical things that happen to people and they have to deal with their physical problems, then you have the psychological aspect, then you have the economic aspect. And Sayers does a great job of showing all these different impacts through the different characters. So you see George And Wimsey dealing with the psychological impacts. George has some physical impacts that he has to deal with. And then you have the economic, contrast in their lives.

And that’s another theme of the book is the class divide. So you have George who is scraping his family is just scraping along, trying to make ends meet, and you have Lord Peter who is very wealthy. And, it’s interesting to see how they each deal with PTSD and shell shock with the class that they’re part of, and how that either helps them deal with it, sort of like shelters them and gives them some additional resources or really makes things worse.

Another theme in this book is friendship. You’ve got Lord Peter, and then you have Charles, his friend who works in the police, and I really enjoyed seeing how they work together. And they do have a little kind of disagreement and how they kind of get through that. So it’s a very interesting portrayal of male friendship that I don’t think that we see a whole lot in Golden Age fiction.

So let’s talk about tropes. The first one most obvious is the gentleman detective. Wimsey is sort of the prototype of this, I mean, there were other gentlemen detectives in mysteries before this series was written by Dorothy Sayers, but I think Lord Peter Wimsey has given us a character that we can look back on and we still read today and enjoy. I’m actually surprised that there are no recent adaptations of this for television or movie movies. I think that there have been a couple of TV shows in the seventies and eighties. I haven’t seen them. I’ll have to see if I can find them. But, I think that with the success of Downton Abbey and different shows that are period specific, Poirot, in particular. I’m surprised that that Hollywood or Acorn or BritBox or somebody hasn’t made this into a new series given it a refresh, so I hope that happens.

But, anyway, back to the gentleman detective. So Lord Peter seems to be just a silly fop. Like, if you just glanced at him and you listened to him speak, you would probably think, oh, he’s just a wealthy fool. But as a reader, we know that He’s actually quite clever, and he is oftentimes fine with letting other people underestimate him, basically. Another, trope we have is the faithful friend or servant in Bunter. The scenes between Bunter and Lord Wimsey are some of my favorite. That was what actually hooked me on reading the Lord Peter books was the first scene in Whose Body when, I won’t have the quote exactly, but when Lord Peter tells Bunter that a dead body has been discovered, and Bunter says, how very gratifying. You know, that was just like, okay. I was in from that moment for this story and and for seeing how their relationship progresses.

So the interesting thing about Bunter is two things. He takes care of Lord Peter. And so because of Bunter, in many ways, he helps Lord Peter through these difficult instances where he’s dealing with shell shock. But he goes beyond just being a servant. He actually has a role in the stories, in the mystery aspect. He takes photographs, And he’s involved in the detection.

A related aspect to that is that if you are interested in, like, vintage CSI, then you would enjoy this book because it’s, they talk about fingerprints and photographs and autopsy and rigor mortis. So, yeah. It’s like Early CSI.

Recommendations

So let’s do some read-a-likes. If you enjoy, books by Agatha Christie, but you wish there was more character development, then I think you’ll enjoy probably all of the Lord Peter series, but I would definitely recommend this one because you get to see Lord Peter changing and dealing with relationships with different people and how his investigation is impacting him.

If you enjoy Downton Abbey or you’re fans, like I said, of CSI, then and you’re interested in how the scientific investigation of crimes developed, then this book could be really interesting for you.

Other read-a-likes would be if you’re interested in, mysteries between the wars with male protagonists, I would recommend A Gentleman’s Murder by Christopher Huang, and that’s spelled h u a n g. I hope I’ve pronounced that correctly. And then, that’s excellent. I’m going to be talking about his 2nd book, which is just coming out soon. I’m doing another episode on his 2nd book called Unnatural Ends, And it’s excellent. I highly recommend A Gentleman’s Murder as well, so you could look for that.

And then another male protagonist in between the wars series is Freddie Pilkington Soames series. Book one in that is called A Case of Blackmail in Belgravia. And the Freddie books have the same tone as the Lord Peter books. Very light and funny and, quick pace. So those are lots of fun too. Now Gentleman’s Murder has a more serious tone to it, but it has that very, 1920s, 1930s, Agatha Christie vibe that you don’t find that often in modern mysteries. So it is a contemporary author, but it’s set in the Golden Age of fiction.

Another book you might enjoy is my own book called Murder in Black Tie. It’s part of the High Society Lady Detective series. It has themes dealing with shell shock and World War I, and the effects of that, and how it impacts a family that Olive is very close to. So I’ll put a short clip of that at the end of this in case you’re interested in the audiobook.

So my question for you is, have you read any Lord Peter Wimsey books, and do you have a favorite? You can answer the question on Instagram. I’ll be there @sararosett. No h on Sarah and no e on rosette. Or you can leave a comment on the show notes for this episode, which will be at sararosett.com/unpleasantness. Here is Elizabeth Klett reading Murder in Black Tie.