Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers, Part II, “The Legal Problem”

I’ll save you some time and trouble. The gist, laid out in chapter XIV “Sharp Quillets of the Law,” concerns a new-at-the-time law: if a person died without a will after 31 December 1925, the estate went to the next of kin with emphasis on the vagaries of the word “issue.” In absence of “issue” things went to the Crown. Agatha Dawson wanted her great niece (who doesn’t count as issue) Mary Whittaker to inherit but was stubbornly against a will. So Miss W benefited if Agatha died before the end of 1925, which she conveniently did, thus igniting suspicion in Dr. Carr that he passed on to Peter that Miss W might have helped her along.

The section opens with Evelyn coming to town, and Miss W is in the crowd. V. sus. Evelyn says Mary tried to sneak a will by Agatha and have it witnessed by the sisters, but Agatha sniffed it out. Agatha used to live a happy life in the country with her cousin Clara, who bred and rode horses and angered the family by not marrying. Lots of lesbian coding in this section. Clara died and left all her money to Agatha. Miss Climpson dishes some deets on the lost relative, and quotes a lot of racist things someone else said. (Badly done, Dorothy.) Peter tracks Hallelujah Dawson down, that staple of gothic mysteries, the long-lost relative from the tropics who shows up to either make things interesting or ruin everything. Also he is *gasp* born out of legal wedlock, and *double gasp* “undoubtedly a man of colour” with “brown-olive skin of the Polynesian.” She later refers to him as “the old Indian.” I’m not going to quote more of the racist stuff, but unfortunately there’s plenty. (It’s garbage, Dorothy. And making him a kind man who’s obviously not out for the money doesn’t make it better.) Next there’s the chapter with a lot of boring law stuff. And then things get good.

Mrs. Forrest invites Peter back to her place. Weird vibes abound. He outwits her and dumps his doctored drink, then she tries (badly) to seduce him and he kisses her, and she almost vomits, then is furious as he hustles out!

Miss Climpson plies the naive young Miss Findlater with questions and learns that Miss W was never out of her sight, so couldn’t have killed poor Bertha who died before she could eat that delicious ham sandwich. *Edited to add, wait a moment, there is a bit in their convo where Miss C  says that if Miss W were to go to town for a day, Miss F would have to learn to not mind it. “Of course I shouldn’t mind. Why–” she checked herself. “I mean I’m quite sure that Mary would be every bit as loyal to me as I am to her.” That check suggests Miss F is about to give an example when Miss W left and she didn’t mind, until she corrects herself. So, perhaps the alibi isn’t quite as solid as it seems.

Agatha’s old lawyer writes from Italy. Interesting line: “I encountered Miss Dawson at a moment when her opposition to the obnoxious idea of making a will was at its strongest.” Wasn’t the noxiousness only her perception?

We get a lovely passage of Charles simmering in completely justified class resentment:

Parker was one of those methodical, painstaking people whom the world could so ill spare. [reminds me rather of the telephone sanitizers in the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker books.] When he worked with Wimsey on a case, it was an understood thing that anything lengthy, intricate, tedious and soul-destroying was done by Parker. He sometimes felt that it was irritating of Wimsey to take this so much for granted. He felt so now. It was a hot day. The pavements were dusty. Pieces of paper blew about the streets. Buses were grilling outside and stuffy inside. The Express Dairy, where Parker was eating a hurried lunch, seemed full of the odours of fried plaice and boiling tea-urns. Wimsey, he knew was lunching at his club, before running down with Freddy Arbuthnot to see the New Zealanders at somewhere or other. He had seen him–a vision of exquisite pale grey, ambling gently along Pall Mall. Damn Wimsey! Why couldn’t he have let Miss Dawson rest quietly in her grave? There she was, doing no harm to anybody–and Wimsey must insist on prying into her affairs and bringing the inquiry to such a point that Parker simply had to take official notice of it. Oh well! he supposed he must go on with these infernal solicitors.

p. 188, Bourbon Street Books.

Note the varying length of sentences, and the sensory details. I could feel the heat and smell the odours with a “u.” Poor Charles is almost literally stewing. He “fluttered Miss Climpson very much by calling upon her to get the Findlater info.

AND THEN! We get mesmerizing chapter XVIII, The London Lawyer’s Story. Parker’s work pays off when he finds the lawyer who got asked by Miss W how the new inheritance law would affect “a friend.” He recognizes her out on the town later, and since she’s pretty, intelligent, and now wealthy, he flirts a bit. They part. Not many days later, he’s summoned in the night to a dying woman’s bedside to make up a will. Things get deeply weird, and he recognizes the supposed dying woman has the same scar as the woman who asked about the inheritance! But he doesn’t say anything, because she’s drugged him. He only escapes because the cabbie whisks him to safety and summons a doctor. Hero! She tries to call him again, but he’s ghosting her, and Parker advises him to stay that course and resolves to ask Miss C if Miss W has a scar on her hand.

I had been feeling rather down about the book, what with the racist content and then the boring legal chapter. But the botched seduction of Peter and the London Lawyer’s bonkers night out brought me right back to the joy of this series. Like Clouds of Witness, I really enjoyed scenes from this middle section. I’ll be interested to see if Sayers can maintain momentum to the end better than she did in the earlier book. I feel like her skills as a novelist are growing, and with each book, the good stuff to boring/bad stuff ratio improves. (Signal to noise?) Perhaps this could be the book I could recommend to someone who wants to try the series out? We’ll see how I feel when I finish this re-read.