The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club was published in 1928 and is one of Sayers’s most economical Lord Peter Wimsey novels. The setup is set inside a London gentleman’s club, the Bellona, which caters to ex-officers of the Great War. General Fentiman, an elderly member, has been found dead in an armchair in the club library on Armistice Day, presumably of natural causes. Then it emerges that his sister, who left her fortune to whichever of them outlived the other, has also just died, and the exact timing of the two deaths matters enormously for the inheritance.

Lord Peter is brought in to determine which of the two siblings died first. The investigation requires patient medical inquiry, careful timing, and a certain amount of social maneuvering inside the Bellona’s regimented atmosphere. The book is set entirely in upper-class Edwardian-survival London, and the Bellona Club itself is one of Sayers’s most fully imagined settings. The eventual reveal is satisfying. The shell-shock material around Peter and several of the younger ex-officers is handled with unusual seriousness for the period.