Unnatural Death

Rating:
Summary: Win the Battle; Lose the War
Review: "Be careful what you wish for---"

Lord Peter makes a light-hearted wager with friend Charles Parker. To win, he was must prove a murder was committed in the death of a wealthy, elderly lady who had terminal cancer. Said lady, Miss Agatha Dawson, had made no will, and the medical certificate said "heart failure."

True, her young doctor was unhappy about the situation. He had thought Miss Dawson's death entirely too sudden and had made strenuous inquiries, so many in fact, the people of her village turned against him, and he had to give up his practice there. In fairness, it must be stated that the good doctor did seem rather egotistical, and perhaps he was just miffed that his prognosis of six more months was a shade too optimistic.

Further investigation divulges that Miss Dawson's young ex-servant has died mysteriously of a heart attack in a meadow. The more Lord Peter investigates, the more the injuries and mysteries pile up. A young lawyer has a near miss, Lord Peter is drugged, a young village lady is murdered while vacationing by persons unknown, and Lord Peter's associate is held hostage.

Lord Peter wins his wager, but at what a cost! The reader is left with an interesting moral dilemma. Is it better to let a complacent murderer be to avert the consequences of his or her obsession?

This is one of the earlier Lord Peter Wimsey books. It has a great deal of banter---what some would call silly dialogue, and poor Charles, Peter's brother-in-law to be and Scotland Yard detective, looks a bit like a stuffy fool. But in this book the mystery is real and the stakes are high. This will be good news to some Sayers readers who feel cheated when they find nothing of import has happened at all! I was relieved to note "Unnatural Death" is pre-Harriet Vane, as I find her perfection tiresome; other readers may miss her. This is a complex tale and will keep you turning the pages.

Rating:
Summary: Win the Battle; Lose the War
Review: "Be careful what you wish for---"

Lord Peter makes a light-hearted wager with friend Charles Parker. To win, he was must prove a murder was committed in the death of a wealthy, elderly lady who had terminal cancer. Said lady, Miss Agatha Dawson, had made no will, and the medical certificate said "heart failure."

True, her young doctor was unhappy about the situation. He had thought Miss Dawson's death entirely too sudden and had made strenuous inquiries, so many in fact, the people of her village turned against him, and he had to give up his practice there. In fairness, it must be stated that the good doctor did seem rather egotistical, and perhaps he was just miffed that his prognosis of six more months was a shade too optimistic.

Further investigation divulges that Miss Dawson's young ex-servant has died mysteriously of a heart attack in a meadow. The more Lord Peter investigates, the more the injuries and mysteries pile up. A young lawyer has a near miss, Lord Peter is drugged, a young village lady is murdered while vacationing by persons unknown, and Lord Peter's associate is held hostage.

Lord Peter wins his wager, but at what a cost! The reader is left with an interesting moral dilemma. Is it better to let a complacent murderer be to avert the consequences of his or her obsession?

This is one of the earlier Lord Peter Wimsey books. It has a great deal of banter---what some would call silly dialogue, and poor Charles, Peter's brother-in-law to be and Scotland Yard detective, looks a bit like a stuffy fool. But in this book the mystery is real and the stakes are high. This will be good news to some Sayers readers who feel cheated when they find nothing of import has happened at all! I was relieved to note "Unnatural Death" is pre-Harriet Vane, as I find her perfection tiresome; other readers may miss her. This is a complex tale and will keep you turning the pages.

Rating:
Summary: British Murder Mystery -- enough said
Review: Dorothy Sayers, a.k.a. Dorothy Leigh Sayers Fleming, one of the first women to ever be granted a degree from Oxford University, created one of the leading figures in, and indeed in so doing helped to create the genre of, the British mystery novels. Lord Peter Wimsey, an elegant, refined London-based aristocrat with a taste for books and a penchant for the piano, is again here the leading figure, in 'Unnatural Death', also published as 'The Dawson Pedigree'.

Wimsey is an old Etonian, Balliol Oxford (of course), served with distinction in His Majesty's forces during the War (this book having been written in 1927, I shall leave it to your good services to deduce which War), who resides both town and country somewhat fashionably, and takes great pride in the ancient family history (by the time one gets to be the fifteenth Duke of anything, the family can be easily considered ancient). Wimsey has a vocation as criminologist, not out of necessity, surely, and not by training either (for such training did not formally exist, but, as an Oxford Arts man, he was trained for most anything intellectual, or at least, that is what an Oxford Arts man would tell you). An interesting addition to the beginning of the book is a short biographical sketch of the fictional Wimsey by his equally-fictional uncle.

All of this, of course, is but preamble to the latest mystery to come calling upon Lord Wimsey. There are the requisite features: a dead woman, Agatha Dawson, wealthy and having left a will that might not be a will, but rather a sham (a delirious woman whose nurse insists that there was no possible way of having made a will during the last month, yet oddly there is a document, complete with a witness who claims that dear old Agatha Dawson wanted nothing to do with the signing -- ah, the plot thickens here).

Of course, to most of the world, Wimsey is, well, following a whimsey of his own. The woman was after all elderly and in poor health; surely his investigations are misplaced. The doctor (not the one who tended Miss Dawson's death, to be sure, but an earlier doctor, suspicious of Dawson's sole heir, her niece) was accused of having blackened the name of Miss Whittaker, the niece, unnecessarily, particularly as no evidence of mischief had been uncovered. Wimsey with the assistance of Inspector Parker are able to rectify the situation vis-a-vis the doctor, but there is still the mystery.

Then, more death. This time the maid. To lose one woman may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two women... (well, you can fill in the rest yourself).

Of course I won't spoil it for you; perhaps my tag-team reviewers will do that for you, but I sincerely hope not. Suffice it to say, Wimsey proves himself a consummate actor in which the truth comes out (in London, and in style!).

One of the glories of Sayers work is the intricacies of her plots. She tends to get a huge number of people involved (the number of people who seemed to have trouped through the ill woman's bedchamber is in itself surprising, given the era) each with subplots and agenda that nonetheless get neatly resolved in the end. Sayers' development of character (even of the already dead ones!) is done with style and subtlety; while Wimsey is developed over several novels, one doesn't feel him a stranger by reading this one alone. The other characters fit their parts admirably (had Sayers not been a writer, she may well have made a good career as a casting director in Hollywood), in physical and personality attributes.

Her descriptions of the milieu, both in town (London) and in the country (the village and surroundings, in this case, of Hampshire, are interesting reading. Sayers is very much the cosmopolitan, and somewhat condescending toward the countryfolk. However, that is not a heavy element, and perhaps can be written off to her attempt to make Wimsey even more the worldly character he turns out to be over the course of her novels.

In all, an excellent read, a great diversion, and well worth musing over while sipping tea on a Regency-style sofa in one's dressing gown.


Rating:
Summary: Unnatural Death
Review: Dr. Carr, who had been forced to give up his practice for believing the death of Agatha Dawson to be murder despite the absence of any cause other than natural causes, told his story to Lord Peter Wimsey and Chief Inspector Parker (who is erroneously called 'sir' by a Superintendent). While Parker remained unconvinced, Wimsey believed that he had found "the case [he had] always been looking for. The case of cases. The murder without discernible means, or motives or clue. The norm"-for he believed that there were far more unsuspected murders than the "failures" known to Scotland Yard. There was no evidence to suggest how Miss Dawson could have died other than from natural causes-yet all the clues pointed to murder having been done. For example, there was the death of Miss Dawson's maid, Bertha Gotobed, also of natural causes-yet the presence of an empty bottle of beer, the absence of a bottle-opener, and the presence of highly expensive ham, discovered in a Baileyesque investigation, all indicated that somebody else had been on the scene. And Bertha Gotobed's sister, Mrs. Cropper, returning from Canada, saw Miss Dawson's great-niece Mary Whittaker waiting for her at the train station. Mary Whittaker, who stood to gain if she killed her great-aunt before the New Property Act was passed, struck Wimsey as the main suspect-and this is one of Sayers' books, like WHOSE BODY? and STRONG POISON, where the villain's identity is obvious from the start, allowing Sayers to create a memorable portrait of evil, for "when a woman is wicked and unscrupulous, she is the most ruthless criminal in the world-fifty times more than a man, because she is always so much more single-minded about it." Wimsey sends Miss Climpson-who is his "ears and [his] tongue, and especially [his] nose. She asks questions which a young man could not put without a blush. She is the angel that rushes in where fools get a clump on the head. She can smell a rat in the dark. In fact, she is the cat's whiskers"-to Hampshire to sleuth, a prototype Miss Marple.

Rating:
Summary: The best Lord Peter Wimsey mystery
Review: I found this book to be probably the best of all of Dorothy Sayer's Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries. The plotting is tight and all the threads are pulled together for the reader. A nice touch is that neither Lord Peter nor Parker are superhuman detectives who miraculously discern the truth at every step. Instead, they are allowed to make mistakes and even be a bit slow sometimes in getting to the truth, which makes them completely believeable. But the best part of the book was the great atmosphere - Ms Sayers brings 1920's England vividly to life so much so you feel you are actually there. I liked the way the story shifts back and forth between London and the countryside. Also, what fun to be introduced to Mr. Murbles and Miss Climpson - surely some of the most entertaining characters ever created in detective fiction! I read all the mysteries written subsequently and was a little disappointed that their characters are not more fully developed in later books - both appear in other novels but not to the extent I would have wished. All in all, it's an unputdownable mystery - try it and you will be hooked!

Rating:
Summary: A lot of fun
Review: I had a lot of fun reading this story.. And thats the point! Its not just about complicated stories, or even about keeping the reader guessing till the end. This is a book for people who really love a good story of detection.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Medico-Legal Problem
Review: I really enjoyed this novel. I found the characterizations to be well-constructed and -detailed. I found the villain to be utterly convincing as a sociopathic murderess. I liked the fact that Wimsey and Parker weren't always ahead of the curve on everything, and even when they occasionally were they often laid back rather than expose their positions too soon. The chronology at the end was a little wonky, but not too bad. I appreciated that while Miss Climpson had a bit of a "deus ex machina" moment toward the end, Lord Peter didn't profit from it directly. Bunter's photographic memory was a bit much, but then, that's Bunter for you.

The majority of the plot in Unnatural Death is of such a sophisticated nature that it could have as easily been written in this century as in the last. In fact, with today's forensic-medicine/crime-solving thrillers on TV, Mary Whittaker would fit right in as a villain on Crossing Jordan or one of the CSIs or Law & Orders (to the benefit of those programs, as well). About the only thing that wouldn't really fit - without better explanation - is the suspected blackmailing angle (at least I was never sure how that was supposed to work).

The entrance of Miss Climpson gives the book moments of coziness in an otherwise technically-oriented investigation. I had previously encountered Miss Climpson in Strong Poison (a later novel), so it was great fun being in on Lord Peter's joke on his brother-in-law when he introduced D.I. Parker to his "mystery lady."

In addition to tackling issues of race relations, feminism, Catholicism, and the grade of ham enjoyed by the upper classes, Ms. Sayers delves into the topic of euthanasia and the ethics surrounding it. It's not the typical fare found in a mystery, but Sayers is not your typical mystery writer. I enjoy the way she weaves social issues into her novels without becoming preachy; here the debate, while complex, never slows the momentum of the story.

This is an extraordinary novel. Wimsey's eccentricities are at a minimum (a helpful biographical note before the story (in the 8th Avon edition, at least) does much to explain some of them) and the plot is really first rate. Of the several Sayers books I've read, this is the one I'd recommend reading first (I haven't read the two earlier mysteries yet, so my mind may yet change); Strong Poison is a good second, but it's probably best to meet Miss Climpson here first before reading the 6th Lord Peter novel.

Rating:
Summary: One of Sayers's most intriguing and suspensful stories!!
Review: I turned to Dorothy L. after exhausting most of Agatha Christie's works (yes, she wrote about eighty novels and plays, and I've read the majority of the novels, primarily the Poirot and Marple tales, as they are my favorites). I was pleased by Sayers's methodical and thourough spinning of a detective story, as well as the charm and wit of her hero, Lord Peter Wimsey.

Unnatural Death has become one of my favorite Wimsey tales. It has the suspense and threat of danger that some of her other books lack. Wimsey and Parker's unravelling of an intricately woven plan of crime is really a literary feat.

If you felt that suspense and chills were lacking in some of the other Sayers tales, give this one a shot. I will grant you, it takes a little while to dig into this story before it really gets going, but it is well worth the effort!

Rating:
Summary: Great to Listen To
Review: Ian Carmichael is one of the best readers I've come across. If you've seen him as Lord Peter Wimsey on TV and been, shall we say, ambivalent about his portrayal, don't let that turn you away from the audiotapes. On tape, Mr. Carmichael catches the essence of Peter Wimsey: the quick, light speech; the self-aware mockery; sensitivity covered up by quotations and babbling.

Unnatural Death has always been one of my favorite Sayers (and also has one of the most fabulous last lines in popular fiction). In Unnatural Death, you get a hefty dose of Ms Climpson, a pro-active Parker and vignettes of village life (something that Sayers does very well). The plot is a tad convoluted (there are some points I still puzzle over), but psychologically, the murders all make sense.

One of her earlier novels, Unnatural Death does not delve as deeply into morality or characterization as some of Sayers' later works. But it is still a satisfying listen that is more than a mere puzzle.

Rating:
Summary: An Indication of Greater Works to Come
Review: Originally published in 1927, UNNATURAL DEATH is the third of Dorothy L. Sayer's "Lord Peter Wimsey" mystery novels--and a novel in which Sayers manages to strike the same balance of literary style and humor that she previously created in the 1926 CLOUDS OF WITNESS. But also like CLOUDS OF WITNESS, UNNATURAL DEATH is not a murder mystery per se--a fact that may annoy readers in search of a classic "whodunit" novel. In this instance, the criminal is a foregone conclusion; it is catching her that poses the problem.

That problem proves remarkably convoluted. Miss Agatha Dawson, an elderly lady of considerable wealth, has died after a long battle with cancer--a reasonable death. Even so, the doctor in charge of the case feels uneasy; not only did the death benefit Miss Dawson's great-niece considerably, it seemed to him a little premature. And when Lord Peter Wimsey becomes intrigued, it seems that any individual who could give evidence against the niece suddenly dies! This poses an unexpected moral issue for Wimsey. Should he continue to pursue the case--even though his persistence seems to force the killer to kill again or again?

While somewhat marred by her occasional tendency toward a patronizing sort of racism, UNNATURAL DEATH is far from the worst of the worst of Sayer's work--it is not, mercifully, as painfully overworked as the slightly later THE FIVE RED HERRINGS or HAVE HIS CARCASS. And although it falls a bit short of her masterpieces of the mid-1930s (MURDER MUST ADVERTISE, THE NINE TAILORS, GAUDY NIGHT, and BUSMAN'S HONEYMOON, titles that continue to dazzle readers and inspire writers to this day), it not only indicates the style of those works but it holds up very well as a tightly written, fast-paced, and intriguing read. Recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer