Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy L. Sayers is the “other” queen of the crime novel, and now that I’ve read my first book by her, I’m thinking it’s rather unfair. As readers often point out, her detective novels are a mixture of Poirot and Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster, but they also seem a bit more sophisticated. At least that is the impression I got from my first foray into her work. I’ve had this on my shelves for ages, and never gave it a chance. Now I’m hooked.
Published in 1927, Unnatural Death is Sayers’ third mystery. Her leading character is a gentleman of means with too much time on his hands: Lord Peter Wimsey. He lives in London on Picadilly, and often joins his Scotland Yard friend Parker on police inquiries. During a dinner one evening, the duo is told about the death of a wealthy spinster, miss Agatha Dawson. The doctor who treated miss Dawson for her terminal cancer tells them that miss Dawson had maybe just another half year to live, but that her earlier death while she was still very much alert and stable arose his suspicion about something being wrong. The great niece of the old lady, Miss Whittaker, is her only inheritor (and in-house carer), and as miss Dawson was aware of that and in agreement with the fact, an official will was never made. Still the doctor is puzzled. The ongoings at the old lady’s house during his service and the strange story of her life leads him to confide in the two friends. Parker is hesitant, thinking there is absolutely nothing there, but Wimsey smells a rat and decides to solve the almost non-existent case.
The narrative is joyous and serious at the same time, with many great puns and innuendos. It keeps one alert and focused throughout. What makes it more sophisticated as a crime novel of the 1920s are the different thematics, especially the treatment of lesbianism (referred to by some characters as “not the marrying kind”) and racism.
A recommended light summer read. I already ordered the next one…
Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers
Harper&Row, Perennial Mystery Library, New York, 1987 (my edition)
241 pages
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
“News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.”…
Reading Scoop reminds you that it’s often not wise to trust a news source, and that is a very troubling constatation. Isn’t journalism about freedom of expression, objectivity, and upholding democracy? Up to a point…
As is now famously known, It was William Randolph Hearst, the press baron, who said to one of his reporters complaining from Cuba that there was no war to cover that he should “furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war”. And this is exactly what Scoop is lampooning to perfection.
In a classic case of mistaken identity, young William Boot, who writes small articles about countryside animals for The Daily Beast (!), is sent against his will to far away Ishmaelia in Africa, to cover a possible revolution. Torn from his country estate in good old England, leaving behind a batty upper-class family, he has no idea what he is doing or how it’s all happening, but he meets a great number of other fellow reporters on the same mission and settles down to a routine. He quickly realises that the whole thing is not about news at all but about getting a story that will satisfy the editors back home and the readers’ thirst for sensationalism. What is really happening in Ishmaelia is also not very clear (and also very batty) and gives Waugh a good excuse to ridicule international politics and diplomacy, and most of all to actually hint at the fact that Western powers were ready to provoke a coup and a war in an African country, so as to appropriate its natural resources for themselves. I will not spoil the plot, but Boot goes heroically through numerous adventures, manages to encounter love on the way, and learn a few lessons about the vicissitudes and betrayals of life.
Written in 1938, Scoop was inspired by Waugh’s own travels as a journalist to Abyssinia (Ethiopia), just before Mussolini’s invasion in 1935. It is amazingly funny, witty, and subtle in a true “British humour” way one rarely finds anymore. It is also very bold for its time, satirising as it does the press in its heyday and denouncing western schemings in underdeveloped countries. It is a story about human nature as well, about the chasm between country and city people, about the muddled beliefs in all sorts of political ideologies, and the racism that was normal and matter-of-fact at the time. Although many modern readers complain about the racist allusions (again exasperatingly, as books need to be read in a historical context), what strikes me is how it’s the white people who are being completely and rightly ridiculed in this instance, except maybe Boot who serves as a Redemptor for a humanity gone mad.
Find it and read it. You will not be disappointed. You will be left with a nervous smile maybe, one of those that come about when things are funny but leave you with a slight bitter aftertaste, something cynical, when you want to slap people. For me, Waugh always has a lot of characters I want to slap. It means he got it right.
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Penguin Modern Classics, UK, 2011
304 pages
Bookish Felix 