1930 epistolary mystery, Sayers' only non-Wimsey crime novel. An
expert on edible fungi dies after eating mushrooms he picked himself:
the mistake that was bound to happen eventually? A dossier of evidence
suggests otherwise.
There's not a great deal of mystery here: while there's some
question of accident, suicide or murder, if it's the last of those
there's only ever really one candidate for murderer. What it's really
good for, though, is the period atmosphere, particularly in the first
section, dealing with a mismatched couple (older widower, younger
second wife), their not-quite-a-servant (the wife's companion, one of
the millions of post-War "surplus women"), and the two young artistic
types who rent their attic rooms. Later, the widower's son by his
first marriage comes into it too.
I asked, why Bayswater, of all places? Why not Chelsea or
Bloomsbury? But Lathom said no, the rents were too high, and
besides, Chelsea and Bloomsbury were hopelessly arty and insincere.
They lived at second-hand and had no beliefs. To see life lived in
the raw, one ought really to go to Harringay or Tooting, but they
were really not central enough. Bayswater was near enough to be
convenient and far enough out to be a healthy suburb.
One of the artistic types is a writer, and we get his letters to his
fiancée as he works on a Life that he hopes will pay enough to let
them marry; we also have the thoughts of the companion. One of the
splendid things here is that each of the authors seems, in their own
letters, to be reasonably pleasant and the sort of person one might
like to know; and yet when they interact with each other, they don't
at all get on, and their opinions of each other tend to decline over
time. The epistolary style is also a way of getting round the problem
that the author's narration in a mystery is usually required to be
strictly correct (if misleading), while statements by characters need
not be; apart from a paragraph or two near the end, nothing here is
author's narration.
On the other hand, there's plenty of speculation about the nature of
life and the universe, and the reconciliation of the divine with
scientific fact, that shows where Sayers' own sympathy lay (rather
than with the fundamentalist tendency – the Scopes trial was only in
1925, after all – which was trying to keep them separate and opposed).
This may seem sluggish at times, but I found it fascinating in itself,
even if does bring the plot about the death and its solution to a halt
for a while.
"Robert Eustace", the physician Eustace Barton who also wrote mystery
and crime fiction (including The Sorceress of the Strand which I've
previously reviewed on the blog), apparently supplied the central
technical problem (one that's very common knowledge now), and provided
extensive medical and scientific details connected to it – though his
writing career was mostly in the 1890s and 1900s, and this was the
last book to which he contributed. The writing is very much in Sayers'
style.
"Oh, well, that's quite simple. Ordinarily speaking, the vibrations
in the aether — need I explain aether?"
"I wish you could," said Hoskyns.
In its way this feels like just as much a reaction to the
foundation-smashing revelations of relativity and quantum physics as
Lovecraft's horror fiction was:
It used to be considered highly unphilosophical to indulge in
speculations about coincidence, still more to base any work of art
upon it — but that was in the days when we believed in causality.
Now, thanks to the Quantum theory and the second law of
thermo-dynamics, we know better. We know that the element of
randomness is what makes the Universe go round, and that the writers
of sensation novels are wiser in their generation than the children
of sweetness and light.
And after all that there's still the core story; a reader familiar
with the
Thompson-Bywaters case
will recognise the way some of the characters here act and be led to
speculate about the degree of guilt of one person in particular. This
is a book of layers, one that's open to multiple readings, and one
that I think repays close attention.
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