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Unnatural Death is a 1927 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, her third featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. It has also been published in the United States as The Dawson Pedigree.

Plot introduction

The plot concerns Lord Peter's investigation into the death, three years earlier, of an elderly lady in the last stages of cancer. The lady's death has aroused no suspicion, despite her doctor's dismay at her end coming so quickly, but Wimsey suspects that it may, after all, have been 'unnatural'. The difficulty of discovering the method is compounded by the difficulty of discovering someone with the motive and opportunity to kill.

Plot summary

Overhearing a conversation in a restaurant between Wimsey and his friend Parker, a doctor tells the two of a death that affected his career. A terminal cancer patient, old and wealthy, died unexpectedly early; the doctor provoked outrage when he queried the cause, and local opinion forced him eventually to move away. Wimsey is moved to investigate.

Wimsey discovers that the patient's great-niece - popular locally - had nursed her through her illness and was the intended heiress. The patient had a horror of contemplating death, however, and refused to listen to entreaties that she must make a will to be sure that her fortune would pass to her great-niece as she wished. A change in the law was imminent and meant that a great-niece would no longer inherit automatically and the estate would probably pass to the Crown. Killing her great-aunt before the legislation came in allowed the niece to secure the fortune intended for her.

When Wimsey begins investigating, using the recurring character Miss Climpson as his intelligence agent, the great-niece is provoked into covering her trail. She kills a former servant, fakes a kidnap-murder and tries to frame a distant relative with an interest in the Dawson estate, and almost kills Miss Climpson. Lord Peter exposes the great-niece's motive and methods, including the false identity she has established in London, and she is eventually arrested and imprisoned on remand, where she commits suicide. The doctor from whom Lord Peter originally heard the anecdote has moved on and is not grateful to be vindicated.

Characters in "Unnatural Death"

• Lord Peter Wimsey – protagonist, an aristocratic amateur detective
• Detective-Inspector Charles Parker – Wimsey's friend
• Mervyn Bunter – Wimsey's manservant
• Miss Alexandra Katherine Climpson – a gossipy, harmless-seeming spinster employed by Wimsey to make clandestine enquiries
• Miss Agatha Dawson (deceased) – a rich elderly cancer patient who died suddenly 3 years prior to the novel's action
• Miss Mary Whittaker – Miss Dawson's great-niece and heiress
• Dr Carr – Miss Dawson's doctor
• Miss Vera Findlater – a friend and admirer of Miss Whittaker
• Bertha and Evelyn Gotobed – former servants of Miss Dawson
• Rev Hallelujah Dawson – impoverished West Indian clergyman and distant cousin of Miss Dawson
• Mr Murbles – a solicitor and friend of Wimsey
• Mrs Muriel Forrest – the secondary identity of Mary Whittaker

Major themes

The central murder in this novel exemplifies its theme: a crime identified as such is by definition a failure, whereas successful crimes are never even suspected, and we can have no idea how many of the latter are committed.

"If you murder someone in a brutal, messy way, or poison someone who has previously enjoyed rollicking health, or choose the very day after a will's been made in your favour to extinguish the testator, or go on killing everyone you meet...naturally you're found out in the end. But choose somebody old and ill, in circumstances where the benefit to yourself isn't too apparent, and use a sensible method that looks like natural death or accident, and don't repeat your efforts too often, and you're safe. I swear all the heart-diseases and gastric enteritis and influenzas that get certified are not nature's unaided work. Murder's so easy, Charles, so damned easy - even without special training."

— Lord Peter Wimsey, Unnatural Death, chapter VIII

In Gaudy Night, Peter reflects on this case and confesses that he sometimes faces a dilemma about whether or not to investigate a case; had he not done so in this case, the elderly lady would have been the only victim, and the niece would have gotten away with a single murder, inherited, and gone on living a harmless existence. Instead, because he started snooping, the niece went on to kill two other people, almost killed Miss Climpson and himself, and finally took her own life.

Lesbian relationships

Lesbian relationships (through they are not explicitly called that, and might not be physically consummated) form a significant part of the book's background. The old woman whose murder originally drew Wimsey to the case is mentioned as having lived with another woman for some forty years, a relationship of strong love and affection, described to Wimsey by a former servant:

Miss Agatha was never one for flirting and foolishness. Often she used to say to me: 'Betty' she said 'I mean to be an old maid and so does Miss Clara, and we are going to live together and be ever so happy, without any stupid, tiresome gentlemen' (Chapter XII, "A Tale of Two Spinsters").

In a later chapter (XVI, "A Cast-Iron Alibi") the character Vera Findlater, a young and not too bright woman, is clearly shown to be passionately in love with the murderess and aspiring to form with her the same kind of life-long liaison - indignantly flaring up at the suggestion that she should just "wait for the right man". Her love is not returned; she is cynically used and finally murdered by the object of her affection.

Racism

One of the fiendishly clever villain's ploys is to blame her crimes upon a non-existent gang composed of Blacks and Jews, depict her completely innocent distant Black cousin as its "Boss" and pretend to have been brutally kidnapped by it. Sayers shows how the ploy takes effect, immediately when police discover the carefully-planted false clues:

"God Bless my soul" said Sir Charles "An English girl in the hands of a nigger. How abominable!"

Later, the racist canard is shown to be eagerly picked up by the popular press:

The Yell came out with the gang story all over the front page this morning, and a patriotic leader about the danger of encouraging coloured aliens (Ch. XXI).

Finally, however, the anti-Black slant is exposed as a red herring, and the would-be Black scapegoat—a harmless, elderly West Indian clergyman—gets to keep the 10,000 Pounds (a very large sum at the time) that the murderess sent him in order to implicate him in her crimes.

Allusions/references to other works

Near the beginning of the story when first hearing of the titular death, Wimsey claims he feels just like Prince Florizel of Bohemia. This is a reference to The New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson and not the prince in The Winter's Tale.

Also near the middle of the book, Wimsey states that Parker's repeated comments are "...like the Raven never flitting, which, as the poet observes, still is sitting, still is sitting, inviting one to heave the pallid bust of Pallas at him and have done with it." This is a reference to "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe.

Allusions to actual history, geography and current science

The murder case Wimsey and Parker are discussing at the beginning of Chapter 1 is that of Dr Edmund William Pritchard, who was publicly hanged in Glasgow in 1865 for the murders of his wife and mother-in-law, who were poisoned with antimony. There are also references to several notable multiple murderers in chapter VIII, all of whom initially murdered undetected but who were caught after they continued to kill. The cases mentioned are those of Dr William Palmer, George Joseph Smith, Herbert Rowse Armstrong and Burke and Hare. Smith and Armstrong are mentioned again in Chapter XIX, along with Thomas Neill Cream.

The change in the law such that, in the case of intestacy, more distant relatives could not inherit was the Administration of Estates Act 1925.

Chapter XIX makes reference to several contemporary events, including the transatlantic flight by Clarence Duncan Chamberlin and Charles Albert Levine, Foxlaw's win in the Ascot Gold Cup, and the 1927 Wimbledon Championships. Chapter XVII mentions the New Zealand cricket team's 1927 tour in England.

In the final paragraphs, Parker and Wimsey leave the prison after 6am on a June morning having viewed Mary Whittaker's body following her suicide, and Wimsey comments on the unnatural darkness outside. Parker replies: "It is the eclipse". This is a reference to the short solar eclipse of 24 June 1927, whose path of totality crossed Wales and Northern England. It was largely obscured by cloud and rain but would have caused semi-darkness in London.

Literary significance and criticism

"The tale is perhaps a little forced in conception and remote in tone. That is the trouble with all the great masters -- they accustom us to such dazzling performances that when they give us what would seem wonderful coming from other hands, we sniff and act choosy. The mode of compassing death has been carped at, but no one could do anything but rejoice at Miss Climpson and her subterfuges."

"In Unnatural Death, she had invented a murder method that is appropriately dramatic and cunningly ingenious, the injection of an air-bubble with a hypodermic, but not only, in fact, would it require the use of an instrument so large as to be farcical, but Miss Sayers has her bubble put into an artery not a vein. No wonder afterwards she pledged herself 'strictly in future to seeing I never write a book which I know to be careless'."

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

In 1975, an adaptation starring Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey and with Peter Jones as Bunter, was made for BBC Radio 4.

References

1. BBC - h2g2 - Infamous Historical Poisoners
2. Barzun, Jacques and Taylor, Wendell Hertig. A Catalogue of Crime. New York: Harper & Row. 1971, revised and enlarged edition 1989. ISBN 0-06-015796-8
3. Keating, H.R.F. The Bedside Companion to Crime. New York: Mysterious Press, 1989. ISBN 0-89292-416-2

• 1927 novels
• Novels by Dorothy L. Sayers
• LGBT novels