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Book Note: Dorothy L. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

I read this book about 29-Jan-2004. [an error occurred while processing this directive] I've read this book before. The book is copyright 1928. This note was last modified Thursday, 22-May-2014 19:48:16 PDT.

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This is book 4 of the "Lord Peter Wimsey" series.

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This note contains spoilers for the book.


Copyright is given as "Dorothy Leigh Sayers Fleming", actually. I hadn't realized she was married that early.

This is a nice little puzzle. The first time it looks like it's solved, we're only half way through the book. The first mystery is the sequestration of the body, to hide the time of death. Then, in investigating that, information comes out that shows the old general was actually murdered.

One of the characters, George Fentiman, is a fairly serious victim of "battle fatigue" from WWI. His brother and his father are career soldiers; his brother is much more sympathetic than his father. George apparently actually has fugues where he's not in control of himself. Peter has a very severe depression in his own history, after the war; which Bunter pulled him out of (this is detailed in Busman's Honeymoon). Probably a fairly big topic at the time; they'd have had a lot more of them than we had after Vietnam, and it was a topic here. (Remember that some of the big WWI battles killed as many people in a day as we lost our entire time in Vietnam. And England had a lot fewer people than the US.)

Not relevant to this book, but "battle fatigue" always makes me think of the later term "bottle fatigue". Nice transformation.

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David Dyer-Bennet