How do you mark up your books? Flags? Underlining? Turning down pages? Margin scribbles? I’ve gone back and forth and round and round over the years. My current markers of choice are Book Darts, slim metal pointers that slip over the edge of a page without damage. I like to look at the edges of the pages of the book, a term that’s escaping me at the moment; the more sparkles the more I’ve loved a text.
On this, my second read of The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, I had ten darts in the first eight chapters, and only 1 in this group of the second 8 chapters. It was one of two, though, that I’d used on my first read of the book. Lord Peter goes to the house of Ann Dorland, who is likely to inherit half a million pounds after a wealthy relative died. She snubs him, and as he wonders aloud at this, “The servant still stood mutely by, with an air of almost violently disassociating himself from all commentary.” (73, Bourbon Street Books 2014) It’s a tremendous sentence, with poetic elements (the servant still stood mutely by) and conjures such an image, of someone almost vibrating with the dissonance of being a thinking/feeling person yet being a servant in the presence of a lord thinking aloud.
Spoilers ahead: This middle section is very plot-driven, and things are happening all over the place. It’s a propulsive segment, and a surprising one. About halfway through the book, we learn that what we thought was the mystery—when did the General die?—isn’t the right question. It’s how did the general die: by a fatal overdose of his heart medicine.
The case is now about murder, not inheritance, and the two main suspects are Ann Dorland and PTSD-suffering George Fentiman, who can’t hold down a job, and is unkind to his wife. Sheila has to work outside the home to make ends meet, and understandably doesn’t have a lot of emotional reserves to weather his insults to her when she is home.
It’s a depressing portrait of a marriage strained by circumstance and money. Sayers’ real-life husband Mac Fleming suffered from some of the same physical ailments as George did, and she earned the money in their family, so it’s hard not to wonder at these biographical elements portrayed in the book that was written during Mac and Dorothy’s early marriage.
Peter enlists the help of his “friend” Marjorie Phelps, a young sculptor, to find out more about Ann Dorland. Marjorie and Peter attend a party where he is surprised to find Dr. Penberthy, the doctor from the Bellona Club, giving a lecture on glands, but Ann does not show.
K.J. Boldon 