Review: Unnatural Death

Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another strong book that, like the first in the series, rises above the usual level of the detective genre as it was practiced at the time. The prose is highly capable without being showy, the investigation complicated without being difficult to follow, the criminal clever, the detectives both human and humane. One way in which it differs from the usual crime novel of the time is that the action scenes are desperate and messy, and the crimes clearly portrayed as awful and tragic, giving a more realistic sense of the emotion of an actual murder investigation.

Not that it's clear for a long time that it is a murder investigation; a chance meeting in a restaurant with a doctor who felt that one of his elderly patients had died suspiciously suddenly (and had been hounded out of the community for acting on his suspicions with a postmortem) kicks the whole thing off, and it takes a while for Wimsey and his friend Inspector Parker to get hold of anything substantial to indicate that a murder had even occurred.

The relationship between the two detectives is different from the usual, too. They're not a Holmes and a Watson. Wimsey, the amateur/private/consulting detective, is more given to flashes of insight, and Parker, the professional Scotland Yard detective, takes on the role of doing the routine work (he reflects on it wryly but resignedly at one point), but they're both intelligent and capable of drawing a correct conclusion from a trail of evidence, and of observing that evidence to begin with. They're closer friends than most detective pairs, too, as signified by the fact that they routinely call each other by their first names - something that was not at all usual between men of their place, time and classes, particularly since Wimsey is upper class and Parker middle class. That's part of the greater sense of emotional warmth and involvement that Sayers creates, compared with the relatively cool atmosphere of a book by, say, Arthur Conan Doyle, Freeman Wills Crofts or R. Austin Freeman.

Another Goodreads reviewer has expressed the wish that Sayers was not so much "of her time" when it came to race, because of the language used around a character of West Indian origin. I think this is a superficial reading. As with antisemitism in Whose Body? , what she does is represent the attitudes of some people of the time without endorsing them. In both cases, a minor character, represented as small-minded, uses what is now a deeply offensive slur (and was then also a slur, though less deeply offensive) and dehumanizing language about a group of people that includes a particular individual; the narrative portrays that individual as a person with strong positive qualities, and the protagonist, Lord Peter, treats them with the same respect as any other person (and he's notable for treating everyone with respect, despite his upper-class origins). It's done with a level of subtlety that an author wouldn't risk today, in the age of Twitter hot takes; these days, the slurs would probably be alluded to but not put on the page, and the protagonist would more explicitly and clearly condemn the attitude expressed. But to me, it's clear that Sayers was not endorsing antisemitism in Whose Body? or racism here; just the opposite. She was portraying it in order to deprecate it.

In a similar vein, two couples in the book are clearly lesbians, though the closest we get to an explicit acknowledgement of that is a stumbling and still indirect reference by Miss Climpson, Lord Peter's contracted inquiry agent (who is a wonderful character in her own right). I have the impression, from reading books like this, that once women could legally own property in their own names in Britain, it became quite common for a pair of unmarried women who weren't blood relatives to set up housekeeping together in some quiet village, and everyone tacitly agreed not to speculate aloud or inquire about their exact relationship.

(view spoiler)[We do arguably get the "Bury Your Gays" trope, in that the first couple are dead at the beginning of the book (one made the money that's the motive for the crime, the other's death is the initial crime and the inciting incident for the book), and the second couple are dead by the end (one murdered for knowing too much, the other a suicide). As a counterpoint, I don't think this is necessarily just because they are lesbians; it's hardly uncommon for murderers in detective fiction of this time period, facing execution if convicted, to opt for a quicker exit, and the murderer also kills another straight woman and attempts to murder two men and another woman, so the fate of her lover isn't surprising in that context. (hide spoiler)]

I'm coming to the conclusion that Dorothy L. Sayers was the C.L. Moore of the detective genre, adding emotional depth to a genre that had largely been lacking it (though Sayers is the better prose writer by a good margin). Her detectives are more human and less purely plot devices, the crimes carry a genuine sense of regret and tragedy, and yet she doesn't lose the intellectual appeal of the solution of a complicated puzzle that is the defining characteristic of detective fiction. It's true that I did work out one of the key plot points well before the detectives did ((view spoiler)[the dual identity (hide spoiler)]), but I suspect a lot of detective fiction deliberately leads the reader to this kind of stuff to make them feel smarter, and I've certainly done it with other authors of the time too.

I'll certainly keep reading this series, and look forward to even more depth from it as it goes along.

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