General Fentiman is found dead in his armchair at London’s Bellona Club. His passing appears entirely natural for a ninety-year-old veteran. However, the exact time of his death sits at the centre of a fierce inheritance dispute. If the General died even a minute before his wealthy sister, Lady Dormer, his grandsons receive only a small fraction of a £500,000 estate. If he survived her, they inherit a fortune.
A solemn two-minute silence on Armistice Day, an unsupervised corpse, and an autopsy turn a simple family dispute to a classic British murder mystery when Lord Peter Wimsey notices medical anomalies. Wimsey must track down the mysterious Mr X who fled when wanted for questioning, uncover how the General actually died, and determine which Bellona Club member is lying. With the General’s grandsons suffering from the shell shock and poverty common among WWI veterans, they both have ample motive to secure the cash.
‘The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club’ started off as an amusing version of a Sherlock Holmes-type puzzle. Old General Fentiman has been found dead in his chair in the Bellona Club on Armistice Day. Complications in the man’s will lead to Lord Peter Wimsey being asked to figure out exactly what time General Fentiman died. What follows is a fun bit of deduction, with Wimsey, assisted by Bunter and his camera, trying to reconstruct what happened, weeks after the event. Then the story becomes darker; decisions have bigger consequences, more people come under suspicion, and anything Wimsey does may ruin lives.
‘The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club‘ is the fourth Peter Wimsey book, and I think it showed how much better Dorothy Sayers had become in constructing plots since ‘Whose Body?’ This novel has a much richer suspect pool. I also liked how the novel moved from interesting puzzle, through family conflict, to something sinister and calculated, while still returning to the clues Wimsey had available from the beginning.
Yet it was Wimsey who made the book shine for me. He was both compassionate and ruthless, fundamentally honest and skillfully manipulative. Almost everything he did was a performance, and yet he was driven more by empathy and a sense of justice than by ego. He also has a habit of seeing women as people, something that couldn’t be taken for granted in a man of his generation and class.
I enjoyed seeing the things that Dorothy Sayers seems to have regarded as normal but which might be surprising today: that the veterans of World War I weren’t keen on the fuss made on Armistice Day, that they felt the generations who’d been through earlier wars had no concept of the trauma of trench warfare, that Wimsey might come to blows with another member of the Bellona Club and no one calls the police or expects any repercussions or reprisals, that the chairman of the Bellona Club keeps a revolver in his office.
I bought this book because I’d enjoyed Robert Bathurst’s narration of ‘Whose Body?’ and wanted to listen to the other Wimsey books he has narrated. In ‘The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club’ he brought Wimsey alive for me. He is, I think, the perfect narrator for this series. I already have his narration of ‘Unnatural Death‘ in my TBR pile. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample of his work.
