Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. And welcome to the very first Green Penguin Book Club, a new kind of Shedunnit episode that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers, which was originally published in 1928, and then republished in 1935 by The Bodley Head as one of the first ten books in their new Penguin series. It is officially Penguin number five and the first crime title, or green penguin.
My guest for this book is Helen Zaltzman, maker of the wonderful Allusionist podcast, co-host of question-answering show Answer Me This, and, perhaps most pertinently to this project, one half of Veronica Mars Investigations, an episode-by-episode analysis of the 2000s era mystery TV show Veronica Mars. Long time Shedunnit listeners will have heard me talking to Helen before, on an episode from 2022 titled A Mysterious Glossary, and I’m delighted that they’re to be the very first Green Penguin Book Club guest.
Since this is our first time doing this, let me explain how this is going to work. I’m going to give a brief, non-spoilery introduction to The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and then Helen and I will discuss it. To start with, we’ll be talking without spoilers, but after you hear us say that we are entering the spoiler zone, you can expect to hear major spoilers from then on. The timestamp for that point will also be included in the episode description. And then at the very end, we will award the book a rating, so stay tuned to the end to hear how many green penguins out of five we give it. For maximum enjoyment of Green Penguin Book Club episodes, I recommend that you read the book ahead of listening — there’s also a link to a complete list of the whole Penguin series in the episode description so you can see what will be coming up next.
And speaking of forthcoming books, let me just remind you that I have a new book coming out soon — A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria. It’s a memoir and a non-fiction book all about illness, health anxiety and the literary resonances thereof, and I think if you enjoy what I do with Shedunnit you will this too. It’s out in April and is currently available to pre-order everywhere books are sold. If you are able to pre-order it, I would really appreciate that, as it’s hugely helpful in getting shops and libraries to stock the book. If just ten per cent of the people who listen to this podcast were to order the book, it would be genuinely life-changing for me! You can find links to do that at carolinecrampton.com and in the description of this episode, as well as links to where you can claim some exclusive bonus material once you’ve done your pre-order.
With all of that established, let’s get into The Unpleasantness at the Bellona by Dorothy L. Sayers. This was Sayers’ fourth novel, and the fourth to feature her aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. When she was writing it, she was still employed full time as an advertising copywriter, and she was also heavily involved in the popularisation of detective fiction. In the same year that this novel came out, she edited an influential anthology titled Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, and not long after she was involved with Anthony Berkeley in co-founding The Detection Club.
The novel opens with Lord Peter at the Bellona Club, a private members’ club in London, to attend an Armistice Day dinner hosted by the father of an old friend who died in the First World War. While there, he runs into another acquaintance, George Fentiman, who also served in the war and is still suffering the consequences of what he experienced in the trenches. Together, they discover that George’s 90-year-old grandfather, General Fentiman, a long-standing Bellona member, is not sitting by the fire reading a newspaper as everyone has assumed. He has actually died in his chair some hours ago.
Soon after, they learn that General Fentiman’s sister, Lady Dormer, has also passed away at her home nearby. Since Lady Dormer was exceedingly wealthy and General Fentiman left a rather peculiar will, it becomes very important to find out which of them died first — and so Lord Peter, as the handy local sleuth, is asked to make some discreet inquiries around the club to establish the general’s time of death. He quickly uncovers a very tangled and difficult case, with George Fentiman, Robert Fentiman, and Lady Dormer’s erstwhile companion Ann Dorland, all in the frame for potential skulduggery. With the assistance of his friend the Scotland Yard detective Charles Parker and his ever-faithful valet Bunter, Lord Peter Wimsey sets about discovering the truth of what really happened on Armistice Day at the Bellona Club.
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Caroline: So, Helen, before we get into The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, tell me a bit more about your background with detective fiction generally, and this kind of detective fiction particularly. Have you read anything like this before?
Helen: Yeah, I think when I was a teenager particularly, I would have been reading a lot of this because in the late 90s, in between school and university, I worked in a secondhand bookshop in Tunbridge Wells, and so I read a lot of what came in, and it was also really cold. It was a very cold shop, and people were always opening the door.
I remember one autumn, someone brought in dozens of the Green Penguin Agatha Christies, and so I read them to keep warm because it did feel like there was a palpable change to my body temperature even though it’s purely illusory by reading this kind of thing, and I suppose because no one seems to get cold in the Agatha Christie ones anyway.
I think some of them have a bit more harshness. And it was interesting, I can’t remember if I read Sayers then. I definitely knew about her, and I knew about Marsh and quite a lot of them, but I think my main focus was Christie at the time, but that might have just been access. It was really interesting reading this because I felt like people’s emotions were that closer to the surface and their problems felt a bit more like problems.
Caroline: Since then, have you read any other Dorothy L Sayers’s novels before you came to this one?
Helen: I read Strong Poison a couple of years ago, probably because of Shedunnit. And I found it a bit monologue-y in style.
There’s just pages and pages of one person talking and a lot of like indirect reporting of events. So I didn’t not enjoy it, but I did find it a little harder to engage with than this one.
Caroline: That’s interesting. Yeah, because Strong Poison actually comes after this one. So I can’t even easily say that, you know, Strong Poison, she was a younger novelist because that one’s actually, I think that was 1930 and this one’s 1928. So yeah, interesting. We can probably say some background with Golden Age detective fiction, but completely fresh take on this particular novel.
Helen: Yes, this is my first time with this novel.
Caroline: Did you have any expectations based on either what you knew about Sayers or what the title of the book was?
Helen: I loved the term “unpleasantness” was in the title. How often do you see that word? Particularly on a book cover.
And it made me think, “Oh, did someone piss in the trifle or something?” It could just be something that is not very decorous, rather than a death-based plot.
Caroline: Yes, no, absolutely. And I think that fits in with the vibe of maybe the opening third of the book, where the club members very much treat this on the level of has, you know, made a mistake with the catering rather than has someone actually expired in our midst.
Helen: It must have happened to them before that someone has expired at the club because the club is full of old buffers.
Caroline: Yeah, I think that’s definitely the sense you get that it’s just not that surprising to them.
Helen: And this guy is 90 that dies. That is an age where you might just die at your club.
Caroline: And even though he’s described as being very active and very careful of his health, and he walks everywhere and all that sort of thing, still not a surprise, is it?
We come to the club at the very opening of the novel. How did you feel about your introduction to it and its atmosphere and its members?
Did you feel like it was somewhere you would want to spend time, shall we say?
Helen: It confirmed some of my assumptions about gentlemen’s clubs, which of their environments I would not enjoy and do not envy them. It sounds like this is not a top tier club.
The way that they talk about it, they’re like, “Oh, it’s gone to the dogs a bit.” And I don’t know whether that’s because there has been a fairly recent world war and people are still reeling from that and maybe not in ways that, whether fully admitting that, but maybe they are nostalgic for a time 20 years before. But I mean, it’s a lot of men. It’s a lot of men! It’s a lot of similar men.
And you sent me a link to the TV adaptation, and I watched the first couple of episodes. I was like, how am I supposed to know which of these white men in a dinner jacket is which?
But it would make a very good radio play, I thought, the TV adaptation. You don’t really need to see anything.
Caroline: Yes, that’s a very good point. And actually, hearing different voices may make it easier to distinguish the different club members.
I did some research into clubs when I did an episode last year about, because this is by far from being the only mystery novel that is set in a club like this. And I did some research into what was happening in real life clubs at this time.
And it’s exactly, as you say. The war really had a major impact on them financially, both because of just economic downturn, but also because so many of the middle-aged or young middle-aged men who would have been joining either died or themselves were so hard up after the war that they couldn’t maintain a membership to a place like this. So membership was really down, and that meant subscriptions were really down, which meant these places had way less money to spend on everything.
So they were trying to do the same or more with less.
Helen: Yeah, they’d lost so many young men, they didn’t have fresh intake to keep it feeling lively.
Caroline: And that, which I only, as I say, learned very recently, but I’d rather read this book many years ago, kind of added something to me because this club seems to have a very military skew to its membership and the name of the club is a reference to, I think it’s the Roman Goddess of War or Bellona is something to a martial goddess.
It really sort of added something to all the complaints about the heating and the food and the general shabbiness of the place. It’s that this one probably suffered more than most if it was aimed at people who were likely to be in the forces and therefore have died.
Helen: Yeah, that’s brutal. It’d be very interesting to reread that with that knowledge because you get hints of it. And it is interesting to compare with Christie because Christie kind of pretends that the world wars didn’t happen.
And this, you know, you’ve got a main character who is dealing with the trauma sustained in the First World War and one of the other characters, it’s very obvious too. But I did think that it was sad. It’s not really the adjective, I think, but that these men would still rather be in this club that doesn’t sound particularly fun or delightful than they would be outside mixing with women and poor people.
Caroline: Yes, I think that’s just a fundamental problem with these places and the books that are about them, because not so much in this one actually to be fair, but in some of the other examples, we are encouraged to see the club as this quite cosy refuge.
Helen: Yeah, I get that. It must be nice going into a room where you can say hi to everyone.
Caroline: Yes, and I suppose, especially as with General Fentiman, who dies at the beginning of the book and is found in the armchair after many hours, he was such a creature of routine and habit and the club was so integral to that he always arrived at the same time. He said hello to the dorm, and he greeted the same people each time. I can imagine there being something very comforting about structuring your life in that way.
Helen: Yeah, you know what? You’re right. And reminds me a bit of being at college where if I wanted to be around people, I knew that I could go into the common room or something and I might see an actual friend or someone who I was happy to spend time with. There’s just people on tap, and you don’t get that many circumstances in your life.
So all right, I’ve come around. If this club didn’t have economic and gender barriers to entry, maybe I could approve of it.
Caroline: Yes, okay. We’ve touched a little bit on this already, but the discovery of the dead body of General Fentiman, part of I think what we’re supposed to find surprising and a bit horrifying about it is that he’s just been there all day and nobody noticed.
Helen: Yeah, although I can sort of see if people are in and out, maybe they think, “oh, he’s dozing by the fire, I don’t want to wake him,” or he’s just positioned in such a way they don’t get a close look at him, because there were some very high backed armchairs at the time with the little wings at the top.
But yeah, maybe it is depressing. Also, death is not clean. There’s certain issues from the body with associated smells.
Caroline: Yes, so I don’t know how plausible it is actually, but I think the way they describe it in this book is a little bit more cognizant of that than perhaps a lot of murder mystery because I think after they’ve discovered the body, I think he’s in an armchair as you say, and I think he’s holding a newspaper and his fists have kind of clenched around it. They have to really wrench the newspaper out of his hands. And then also his legs have gone rigid in the position and they have to almost like break the knee in order to get him out of the chair.
So there’s more, I think, recognition of the bodily mechanics of death than you perhaps get in some other books where it’s all tidied away very neatly without discussing that.
Helen: Yeah. Well, it’s important, isn’t it? The progress of rigor mortis and when it comes on and when it starts to wear off. And those are pivotal plot points in this book. And one of his legs having been, I see, snapped for maneuvering his body. And they say, “Oh well, if he had died later, then I wouldn’t have been able to get this newspaper out of his hands without breaking his hands. But the rigor had started to slacken enough to move the newspaper.”
So it is all relevant. How common was that that level of forensic attention to bodily decay?
Caroline: It really varies. I think the attention to bodily decay is fairly rare, actually, because golden age detective fiction doesn’t go in for that much description of corpses, actually.
Helen: Indecent!
Caroline: Exactly. You very rarely get, for instance, a description of a post-mortem in the present tense. It’s always just delivered in a few sentences as a report. It happened off page, off screen, as it were.
Agatha Christie is very good on the forensic details in her book, so all of the descriptions of poisons and so on that she has in her book are all extremely accurate, but she does doesn’t really go that heavily into the bodily significance of them. She’s more focused on the science and the substances, I think because, again, it’s just a bit more palatable for the genre. So I do think that this is a somewhat unique feature of this book, is the firsthand description basically of the corpse. Because Wimsey is there as Sayers’s regular detective Lord Peter Wimsey. He’s in the club, he’s a member, he’s there having a chat with a friend when the body is discovered. So he’s on the spot from the start, and he’s therefore able to have those kind of observations that are then immediately passed on to the reader.
Helen: Yeah, I thought it was perfectly plausible that he would be there. A gentleman’s club seemed like exactly the environment you would expect Peter Wimsey, a single man in his forties to be.
Caroline: Yes, I think if you read more into the Wimsey canon you learn that he’s actually a member of multiple clubs.
Helen: Unsurprising.
Caroline: It’s to do with him having this kind of multifaceted personality where he can be different things to different people as the case demands. So he’s in this club because he did serve on the front in the First World War.
He experienced some trauma from that too. And then he’s in a club, I think called the Egotist’s Club that’s much more artsy for when he’s hanging with those people. He’s probably in, I don’t know, a school or university one as well, because he comes from that background. It gives you these different faces that he presents to different aspects of his life. But this one, he absolutely belongs there as much as General Fentiman’s grandsons do, as, you know, men of middle age who have served in the First World War and are now coping with everything that comes after that.
Helen: Yeah. An interesting thing about Peter Wimsey as a character is he could just hang with aristocrats but he seems very comfortable in quite varied social situations and in this book you see him like being friends with artists and so on and that wouldn’t work for every aristocrat private detective. But I will say just on a basic plot level, him being at the club when Fentiman’s body’s discovered saves quite a lot of time in explaining how he becomes involved in the case.
So I think a fine choice.
Caroline: It really does. And it also fits in very well with the fact that at the start, we’re not even sure that this is a crime that we’re investigating here.
He’s initially asked to look into it because he shares a solicitor with the family of General Fentiman. And there’s this question mark because another member of the Fentiman family has died, they think, almost around the same time. And it’s very important to establish which of them died first because it affects the way an inheritance is going to work. So the solicitor says, “Could you look into this? We don’t want to involve the authorities because we don’t think there’s any crime here, but it would just be really helpful from a legal standpoint to be able to prove which of them died first.”
So the fact that he’s on the spot and they’re all friends fits in with the general unofficial nature of the situation.
Helen: Yeah, absolutely. And it does make sense that someone who is not a police officer would be involved because for a long time, this isn’t the case that official police would think was the thing they should be involved with.
It doesn’t look like foul play. Even if it looked more foul than it looks on the surface, they’d probably be like, “Why are we bothering? Why are you trying to get us to be involved with this?” I like this site, which gives you the likelihood of every Colombo episode resulting in a conviction. And Colombo is an officer of the law, he’s in the LAPD, and even then, when you’ve got stories like this, most of them are going to operate outside of conventional justice systems, and particularly this one, because the crime is non-obvious as crimes go.
Caroline: Yes, exactly, and that actually is, I think, a positive contrast with some other amateur detective novels, this one, because as you say, this one. It seems totally plausible and fitting that Lord Peter, friend of the family, known to have this hobby in detection. He fits into the social situation already. He would look into it. There are I think other examples of novels from this period where you’re really stretching credulity that an amateur would be allowed into these cases where really it’s a matter for the police and the police have got it under control, and why would they share information with a random posh person who happened to be passing?
But this one’s not like that.
Helen: I can imagine even in the present day this might be the kind of thing, inheritance problems might be the kind of thing that you get a private investigator involved in.
Caroline: Yes, and especially one that can be discreet and not cause a fuss because, you know, him asking questions around the club is a bit annoying to people, but it isn’t seen as the total, unrespectable intrusion that it might be if he was a different class of person.
Helen: Yeah, you’re not going to get pissed off with a lord as quickly.
Caroline: And we do have a police character in this book, though, who is Wimsey’s friend, Inspector Parker, who I’d say acts more as a kind of friend and confidant than he does as a colleague.
Helen: Yes, he’s almost like a sounding board. And I do wonder what the interaction is between actual police investigators and private investigators. Like sometimes they must be a useful relationship to each other and the police must benefit from knowing those people. But other times they’re probably just like, piss off!
Why are you, you shouldn’t be interfering with this. You’re not qualified. And also we’re handling it. So for Inspector Parker to be a sounding board for Peter in this case, and also sometimes validating a private investigation just by being there, I think that works as well. But I did kind of forget that he was there. I read this book less than a week ago, and I had forgotten Inspector Parker’s name and role in it.
Sorry to him.
Caroline: He is a recurring character in the Wimsey books. So you do get more of him in later books, but yes, I don’t think he ever really develops a very strong identity.
And in that he’s part of quite a long tradition of golden age Scotland Yard detectives who are very nice and very capable, but utterly forgettable.
Helen: I think, yeah, it’s not his fault I forgot him. I think it’s just that he’s not in it all that much and there are so many men. And my brain has a limited capacity for all these men.
I did like that Wimsey a few times in the book just expresses that he really hates this case and he wishes he wasn’t involved.
Caroline: Yes, you’re right. He doesn’t seem to get off on it, shall we say?
Helen: No. No, it seems quite a strong obligation. No one’s paying him, are they? Does he ever get paid? No, he doesn’t hate diseases. Does he just do it for his own fund or his lordly income?
Caroline: I’m trying to think if there’s any cases where he gets paid. None that immediately spring to mind because he doesn’t really operate professionally, doesn’t have an office or anything. All of his cases seem to come to him either by circumstance or via a friend or family member.
Helen: I wonder whether just he wouldn’t usually do a case that he wasn’t that interested in and he wasn’t enjoying. Does he usually not enjoy cases?
Caroline: No, he normally has quite a sort of intellectual passion for what he’s doing.
He doesn’t ever really seem to enjoy the end of cases. At least one of her novels goes quite deeply into the ethics of what he does because I’m thinking particularly of Busman’s Honeymoon where he grapples with, especially in an era of capital punishment, what the ultimate outcome is of what he does as a hobby, which I think is very interesting that she even goes there since a lot of the time Wimsey is portrayed is this very sort of frivolous, upbeat character. And actually he has some really dark aspects to him, especially in later books. But no, in general, he seems to at least enjoy the sort of beginning and middle of the case, if not the end.
Helen: So I wonder why he vocally dislikes this one? Is it just, it’s a lot of dead ends after while it just seems frustrating. It’s not frustrating to read! I felt it was all pretty compelling to read.
But when you look at it, bare bones of plot, he’s stuck a lot of it.
Caroline: He’s stuck, and he’s being deliberately misdirected at times, and I think he senses that but can’t quite put his finger on how it’s happening.
I think he’s looking for patterns in things. that are deliberately have no pattern and so on. So I think he feels like the tools of his intellect that normally enable him to see his way clear aren’t helping him.
Helen: Yeah, maybe he’s sick of spending all this time with men as well.
Caroline: Well, it’s true that we’ll get onto this a bit later on as well, I think, when he does go out of the club and start investigating in other places, several of his friends that he appeals to for help all women that he does have friends who are women.
Helen: Yeah, maybe it’s the men and the bad food that are failing to enliven this case.
Caroline: So one of the other men who assists him with this case is Bunter, his valet. He acts a bit as his sidekick in going around the club, looking for fingerprints and so on. What did you make of Bunter?
Helen: Bunter deserves a promotion because Bunter is incredibly capable. He seems to have a lot of skills. Including photography and developing the photographs, how useful to an investigator. And then Peter complains because if Bunter’s off doing that for Peter’s cases, Bunter is not warming his slippers and serving his food.
Caroline: Yes, it does seem incredible that Bunter can do it all. And I think maybe he starts out at the beginning of the sort of Wimsey canon as a real person. I think as it develops, he becomes more of a kind of deity who just floats around doing everything and managing everything. Sort of in the way that Jeeves isn’t really a real person.
Helen: Yes. It’s more of just a kind of magical automaton. Yeah, there’s a bit of a Batman and Alfred situation with these two. Is it Alfred or Albert? Oh, no.
Caroline: I think it’s Alfred. Don’t come for us, comic book people.
Helen: No, I’m really sorry to the Bat fans, it’s been a while. I think Peter’s certainly very lucky to have all of these things rolled up in one person who seems to be able to work 24/7 on his behalf.
Caroline: Yes, that’s the thing that always fascinates me about these valid characters is, when do they sleep? When do they eat? When do they change clothes? It doesn’t seem to happen.
Helen: When do they do the things to stop them from just losing their rag about serving their rich masters?
Caroline: Exactly, yes. So another interesting aspect of this case that stems from the fact that Wimsey was there on the spot and he is sort of a friend of the family that this case centres on is that he sort of has to treat as suspects people he’s previously considered to be friends, which I think again makes an interesting difference between if it was a police detective investigating this as opposed to just a friend of the family dropping in to ask a few questions, you know?
Helen: Yes, you’re right. The boundaries with a police detective would be more clear, but it is those lack of boundaries that allows Peter to be in with a lot of the people who used to be in with this story. Tricky.
Caroline: So we’ve got, I’d say, four main suspects. We’ve got the two grandsons, Robert and George Fentiman, and then Ann Dorland, who is this ward / comrade of the dead man’s sister.
And then we’ve got a mysterious Mr Oliver, who no one really knows anything about, but he seems to be un-alibied for the crucial period of time. And I think also what he represents actually is that what everyone always wants in a Golden Age murder mystery is for it to be some outsider they don’t know.
And it never is.
Helen: Do they? Yeah, I don’t want that. I feel like that’s cheating.
Caroline: No, no, the characters want that, I mean, we as readers don’t want that. The characters who forced with the choice of confronting that, you know, their brother or their best friend killed someone or some stranger they don’t know jumped in through the window and did it, would always go for the stranger because it’s much more palatable. So I think the hunt for Mr Oliver is partly just that impulse rearing its head that we just want it to be some bloke we don’t know.
Helen: Are we permitted to enter the spoiler zone yet?
Caroline: I think we will now enter the spoiler zone, yes.
Helen: Okay. Well, Mr Oliver, I always assumed was made up by any of these people or at least a patsy. Initially, I thought, well, it’s possible that they paid someone to go and do Mr Oliver stuff for them, but also this person certainly doesn’t exist as they are being portrayed to exist. And I feel like the book was not very committed to Mr Oliver as a real character. And it entirely made sense that Mr Oliver was not one. And it became pretty obvious to me quickly, the truth of what the Mr Oliver thing was.
Caroline: Yeah, so Mr. Oliver, it was invented by Robert Fentiman as a way of trying to muddy the waters, essentially. So he was conceived of as a red herring. And that is how he runs. And you get some comedy in the book from Wimsey’s attempt to make Robert Fentiman acknowledge that Oliver doesn’t exist. You know, so he puts this private detective on to follow, quote, Mr. Oliver. Robert Fentiman ends up, I think, traveling all the way across Europe in fake pursuit of Mr. Oliver to try and keep up the pretense.
Helen: Well, lucky him. He gets a trip, I suppose. I guess that Mr. Oliver was one of the suspects or someone that one of the suspects got to make a phone call for them. But once Robert starts attacking a stranger claiming they’re Mr Oliver and the person is like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Well, it’s obviously Robert’s thing then. But presumably by then the reader is meant to know that it’s Robert’s chicanery.
Caroline: Yes. And in amongst all of that kerfuffle going on, we get the confirmation that General Fentiman was actually murdered, which up until out I forget exactly how far through the book, but you’re a good way into the book before it is sort of officially declared a murder mystery as opposed to just investigating inheritance stuff relating from a natural death.
Helen: Yes, you don’t get the confirmation until he’s been dead for two or three weeks because they have to exhume him, which is a pretty grim thing to have to do.
Caroline: And again, I think you get more detail about that than you would generally expect to in a golden age murder mystery. There’s actual description of it happening, of how it happens in the sort of chapel at the cemetery, and there’s discussion of the home office analyst removing samples from organs.
So even if there’s not actual descriptions of viscera, we are put in the picture about what’s happening.
Helen: Yeah, this almost could have been just a very theoretical, tidy problem being who inherits based on the time of death. They could have just been talking about that the whole book and instead it gets quite grim in a way that your death is grim, and murder’s very grim. So I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it but I admired that that was the approach taken with the exclamation.
Caroline: I think inheritance was something that Sayers was really interested in because her book, just before this one, it’s a completely different kind of inheritance problem, but it’s all to do with a question of inheritance and the crimes that arise from a situation regarding that.
And again, that’s where we are here. We’ve got three people who stand to benefit, but depending on which way round the two old people’s deaths are declared, one side or the other becomes very wealthy. Once that’s all outlined, it seems again quite plausible that somebody would murder. because of the sums of money involved. And George Fentiman in particular, we’re shown the sort of desperateness of his circumstances really. They call it shell shock. He’s suffering very badly with what we would now call PTSD after his experiences in the First World War. He hasn’t been able to keep a job.
He and his wife are running out of money, essentially.
Helen: Yes, and he seems to have quite a lot of compounded mental health conditions. Perhaps there seems to be like somewhere, I don’t want to diagnose a book character, but because they have given him the characteristic of mental health conditions, it means that she can kind of do what she wants with him as a plot device. And I was glad that Wimsey and some of the other characters are quite sympathetic to psychological injuries because they understand because Wimsey has been through that himself to some extent. But I’ve noticed this in other things as well. Sometimes you get a character where because they are “the mental health one,” then it’s written in a bit of a chaotic way that isn’t always fully anchored, I think.
On the other hand, I kept forgetting what Robert’s schtick was supposed to be entirely. So at least I could remember George and where he lived and what his life was supposed to be like and what he wanted. I wasn’t sure—So two of them need the money, like George needs the money because he and his wife are demonstrated to be in dire financial straits. Ann need some money because she doesn’t really have any other backup.
Does Robert need it? What’s Robert’s situation?
Caroline: No, he doesn’t really. He’s part of the regular army. So he’s a professional officer. He stayed in the army after the First World War.
And as a major, he would be paid for his work. I think he doesn’t have that same need. He might want to be able to retire from an active role in the services and just live on his income and basically live as his grandfather did: go to the club every day, talk about your war stories and then go home and enjoy your comfortable house with your servants. That’s not the life he has at the moment because he is just a soldier, as it were, but still a very privileged and comfortable one. So he doesn’t have that same need for money from necessity, but you can see how he would aspire to what he would see as a more comfortable life than the one he has.
Helen: Yes, and he is the one who is trying to cheat the time of death in his favour. George kind of doesn’t benefit nearly as much as the other two, whatever the outcome, does he?
Caroline: No, he doesn’t because General Fentiman’s will does make this difference between Robert and George that I think one gets some and then the other gets the rest. So it’s more the total amount of General Fentiman’s bequest that affects how much they get rather than how it shakes out between them.
Helen: And it seems like George and Robert don’t necessarily have that strong and emotional connection with their grandfather. Is that fair? Whereas Ann I think is probably most upset that anyone has died.
Caroline: Yes, so let’s talk a bit about Ann because I think she’s a really interesting character. We get various different perspectives on her. We get told about her quite a lot before we actually meet her.
Helen: Yes, she doesn’t appear for a long time because she refuses to see Wimsey, as is her right.
Caroline: She refuses to see Wimsey. She wants to do everything through lawyers. And so yes, we don’t see her personally. We just learned that she was companion to this old lady that she’s a kind of middle class paid dependent in that way.
And that, yes, she doesn’t really have any other options. She doesn’t have a profession or a trade that she’s going to just go back to. She’s basically been paid to sit around and pander to an old lady’s whims and now the old lady isn’t there to pay her to do that anymore.
Helen: Yes. And okay, I’m curious as to your opinion about the way that Ann is described because this book is so insistent on constantly describing her as unattractive and that being pitiful, and how her worth is virtually nothing because she’s so unattractive.
They use the phrase almost aggressively unalluring. Is that Sayers’s own opinion or is that just a realistic description of what her social value would have been in those times as a young unmarried woman? Or is this just the narrative really trying to impress, maybe a bit too hard, about how when she is not considered a marital prize she would have just been very grateful for any crumbs of romance that came along and would have done virtually anything to keep that romance?
Caroline: So I think it’s a mixture of two and three. I definitely don’t think Sayers, who herself I would want to say struggled but was aware of the fact that she was not conventionally attractive.
She was not thin. She put on weight quite quickly, I think, in her sort of 30s and then was quite fat for the rest of her life.
Helen: How dare she?
Caroline: She was very aware of that. She writes about it in her letter. She makes reference to it. So I don’t think that she could have written unknowingly. unknowingly this about another woman’s appearance, shall we say. I think she’s trying to do two things. She’s trying to show you, exactly as you say, how a woman like Ann Dorland would have been viewed by the other characters in the book.
It’s pathetic and sad that she isn’t going to be able to use her looks to trap a man, basically, is how someone of the time would view her. And then also, I like to think that there’s something to Ann Dorland that she doesn’t want to be thought attractive. She has other interests. She’s interested in art. She’s interested in books. And so she doesn’t do the things that would make her appearance that bit more palatable.
Helen: No, and good for her.
Caroline: Exactly. So I think that’s also trying to tell us something about her as a character, that she doesn’t dress in a way to make herself more attractive. She doesn’t do hair or makeup, etc. She’s interested in modernism and angularity and all this kind of stuff.
Helen: Yes. So they keep saying how terrible she is at painting, but is it just she’s painting in a style that these people don’t understand?
Caroline: Yes, could well be. And I think it becomes interesting around that when Wimsey goes into Ann’s artistic social circles to investigate what’s been going on there.
And he asks this character who recurs in a few books as a friend of his Marjorie Phelps, who is herself an artist, and he sort of asks her, “What do you think of Ann’s art?” I think Marjorie says, you know, she has got something, but I think she’s, at the moment, she’s very much just copying different styles. She’s not really doing original work, but she does have ability and interest.
Helen: But that’s part of the creative journey, isn’t it?
Caroline: Exactly. So he seems at least interested in taking her seriously in her pursuits. He’s not falling at her feet or anything like that, but he is interested in her. And I think he also, I think he feels sorry for her as well. I think he feels like of all of them, she’s had the shortest straw.
Helen: Yeah, presumably with the death of her employer. If she doesn’t have this money, she also has nowhere to live.
It’s a very complicated situation. She seems like someone who just wants rightness to prevail rather than someone who would do anything dramatic to ensure that she was the one who inherits.
Caroline: Yes, I don’t think she’s a plausible candidate for murderer at any point.
Helen: No. And it occurs to me that Inspector Parker’s main utility in the book is, thanks to him, Peter gets to go and rifle around in Ann’s things and look at her paintings and look at her book collection before ever meeting Ann and he wouldn’t have been able to do that without the Inspector letting him in.
Caroline: Yes, so Parker does give him the official entree to Ann’s world, because as you say, she had been refusing to cooperate until forced, essentially, which completely her right.
Again, I think makes her interesting that she’s as a woman and so on, she is still asserting her position as a citizen that she doesn’t just roll over and say, “Yes, of course, you can look at whatever you like.”
Helen: Yes, she’s quite difficult towards Peter for a while, but you understand it’s because she just is being bothered by a lot of different men and doesn’t want to be pushed into things because of these men.
Caroline: I think she also thinks that he is on the side of his friends, the Fentimans.
Helen: Understandable.
Caroline: Yes. It’s not an unreasonable assumption to make that he’s trying to find a way of making sure his friends get the money instead of her. When the reader knows because we get more access to, as you say, all of Wimsey’s complaints about how much he hates the case, and also because we know that he is written by Sayers to have this moral strength, that he’s actually just trying to find the truth.
He doesn’t really care who it belongs to.
Helen: Yeah, I think the book is trying to make Ann seem more unsympathetic than she is just from the facts. Of course, the book’s got to do that.!
Caroline: Yes, it can’t immediately lead you straight to the suspect, but I think in relation to Ann, we should talk about Dr. Penberthy, who has treated her very badly, basically, in a number of different ways.
Helen: Yeah, I mean, this is what happens when you’re considered unattractive in the late 1920s. You just have to have a relationship with someone who seems to just really not have any redeeming characteristics.
Caroline: I think maybe this is the most unbelievable thing in the whole book, is that Sayers writes Ann Dorland really interestingly as a character with intellectual autonomy and artistic ideas and thoughts about politics and gender and so on. And then also wants us also to believe that a person like that would just immediately fall into the arms of the first man who offered.
Helen: I mean, I do know some terrific people that are in relationship with terrible people and seem grateful for it. Don’t we all?
Caroline: Yes, so maybe Ann does have that not unusual combination of intellectual ability and total lack of confidence that might result in this kind of relationship.
Helen: Yes. It feels a bit sad to reflect upon it that so much of the plot and dynamic of this book hinges on whether Ann is considered attractive.
Caroline: Yes, yes, that’s true. Do you find Dr Penberthy to be a plausible murderer? Do you think he fits the case?
Helen: I really think that he has hatched a plot that is quite a stretch and ultimately for naught because in order to save himself he gives up the relationship with Ann and thus his claim over the fortune. So he’s really messed up. But that also was going to be the case in most scenarios of this plot because he came up with something that had so many, so many contingencies, so many things that wouldn’t be to his advantage.
Caroline: Yes, I think something that stretches credulity for me a bit about Penberthy is that we’re supposed to believe that he came up with some of this on the fly, that he didn’t know that the old lady was going to die when she died. It’s not like he could have plAnnd it all in great detail, that he was to an extent just going with the flow and moving with events. And to have constructed such an elaborate time of death plot without having had lots of time to think about it, I don’t know how much I buy that.
Helen: Yeah, and also he still—he wasn’t married to Ann so he just would have had no right to the money and it wouldn’t have come to her straight away. There were so many things that could have gone wrong before he managed to get any claim to it.
Caroline: Yes and Sayers does acknowledge this implausibility in a way, in the way that she brings the story to its ultimate conclusion because this hasn’t been a case investigated by the police and subject to all of the, you know, standards of evidence that an actual prosecution would require. It all still exists in this slightly murky world of, well, he was trying something but it didn’t quite come off.
And we morally know that he’s the bad person. But we couldn’t make it stick to him if we tried to actually prosecute him. And that’s why I think Wimsey gives Penberthy this out.
You know, he gets him to write a confession so that nobody else can be blamed for his actions, and then he gives him the option to shoot himself in a way that is, in a really twisted way, deemed a more respectable death.
Helen: Yeah, I know that Wimsey’s concern is really for Ann not having murder associations stuck to her because it was like, you know, she is going to be hard for her to clear her name if she’s charged with anything or she has to appear in court at all.
And he is right, but I didn’t love it. That that was the natural next step. I suppose unlike them, I haven’t been alive at a time when Britain has had capital punishment. So I suppose, what was the attitude towards death penalties at this time?
Was it just still accepted that if you murdered someone, then it was your rightful consequence, that you would also die? Or were people already protesting it? Are you just meant to think, well, he’s going to be executed if this did go through the proper channels. So this is just that verdict happening much more quickly. And in a club where someone has to clean up all this mess.
Caroline: Yes. I actually don’t know the answer to that and it makes me think I should be doing an episode about the way the death penalty interacts with detective fiction, I think. This is a very interesting subject. I don’t know whether there were already people at this point who opposed the death penalty and wanted to see it abolished. I would like to think that there were.
I think in Sayers’s fiction, there’s quite a lot in relation to this that makes me think that she did have thoughts about that because this is not the only time that Wimsey does this in her stories.
And he also seems to give himself a hard time about it, a lot of the time. Like I said, he really does seem to struggle with the ultimate consequence of a successful detective investigation being that someone’s going to die.
So I think this warrants further investigation. I do think that sometimes this is a very lazy ending to this kind of story. And it’s also it’s always posh people who are given this opportunity. When it’s saying poor or working class criminal, they never get the option to peaceably shoot themselves in the library before the police van comes. They always have to go to court.
So in that sense, I don’t like this ending. I have a little bit more time for the way it’s done in this book than in others because there is an actual motivation for him doing this beyond just, oh, he’s too posh to face a trial. And as you say, it’s because of Ann. Because it’s all been so murky and difficult to prove, he is right in saying that he would never be able to clear her.
Helen: Yes, it seems more important to clear Ann than it does to achieve a conviction of this murderer.
Caroline: Exactly, yes. So I think it happens with a purpose here. But I still, like you, I don’t love it as a conclusion to a detective novel.
Helen: No, I’m partly just, it’s not satisfying because it’s suddenly like, okay, well, this person exists. existed, and now they immediately don’t.
It doesn’t feel like it’s a culmination of anything.
Caroline: Yes, and actually thinking about it in relation to the other deaths that we’ve experienced in this book, which as we’ve said have been described in a bit more of a visceral way.
This one is completely tidy and bloodless in a way that you might expect to be more typical of golden age detective fiction. The gunshot is just overheard from another room. room and then he’s just never mentioned again.
Helen: Yeah, but you know it’s not bloodless for whoever has to clean it up! That room is going to be a mess!
Caroline: Scrub it out of the carpet. Exactly!
Helen: Yeah, on the walls. It’s going to be horrible. It would have been cleaner for him to be like, “Okay, we have to take one of your poison tablets and do it in a bath so it can be easily scrubbed clean.” But this is horrible. I guess it gives the club members something to talk about for weeks.
Caroline: True. True. But I think all of the things you just described, those are servant problems.
Helen: I know! I hate the servants having the problems!
Caroline: I do think that the Bellona Club is ultimately such a microcosm of the British class system, and no events show it more than that one.
Helen: Yeah. That’s the true unpleasantness.
How did you feel about Penberthy being the murderer? I think he’s the right choice for the murderer. Especially because I don’t think it worked for any of the other suspects to have done it. And I did like, and this is just something I like in detective novels generally, I like when there are two overlapping plots going on, where the explanation for the complexity is that there is no one explanation that explains everything. So in this one, it’s because we’ve got Robert Fentiman concealing his grandfather’s body and mucking around with the time of death in his favour. And then we’ve also got Penberthy killing the old man and trying to muck around with the time of death in his own favour. And the two things together create this apparently impossible tangle.
But when you realise that it’s actually two different agencies instead of one, then you start to see. So that’s generally a trope I like in detective fiction, where an impossibility can be solved almost by like pulling the filters apart and seeing that there are two of them.
I liked that, and I liked Penberthy for the one side of it and then Robert for the other. But I do find Penperthy a pretty unsatisfactory character. And he’s also a type that recurs in Sayers.
He’s not the only bad doctor that we encounter. Bad unscrupulous doctor. And it makes me wonder whether was she referencing something that was sort of extant in society at the time?
Was she referencing something in her own life? I don’t know.
Helen: Yeah, who hurt you Dorothy?
Caroline: It seems to happen quite often where these doctors, or maybe she just feels like it’s plausible that someone who, you know, works in matters of life and death would cross that line more easily.
Helen: I think it probably would feel very easy to give someone a pill and they go and die somewhere else.
You could probably convince yourself that you weren’t even doing a murder.
Caroline: Especially in this case when it’s someone very old with a pre -existing heart condition and so on.
Helen: Yeah, there seem to be quite a lot of medical and chemical knowledge happening. I can’t verify it. I assume that she did some research into how these heart medicines work and also how they are poisoned depending on how they are used.
But I didn’t find Penberthy that satisfactory, I think, because you don’t care about him, you kind of know that it’s not going to be any of the main suspects, but I think it would have been more interesting if it had been someone you’d spent more time with, but their motive maybe had been different.
Caroline: Yes, that’s definitely a possibility that it could have been one of the sentiments or Ann, but for a reason that you would never expect, rather than it was nothing to do with the money ultimately.
Helen: Yes, or if one of the men really wanted to cheat the time of death because they didn’t want to inherit, I don’t know. I also thought why are they throwing in so late and in such a scant way, George confessing to the murder? That feels like too much. They’re not committed to that as a plot.
Caroline: I don’t like that episode at all actually, and I do think it undermines the novel a bit because I think she’s done a good job up to that point of making George a character that really straddles the line between you feel sympathy for him but also you don’t because on the one hand, yes, he has this war trauma and he’s had a really hard time. But on the other hand, he says some stuff about his wife that is really reprehensible and he really hates the fact that his wife is the main wage earner and you feel like that’s not the trenches, that’s just you having bad opinions.
Helen: Yeah, toxic masc.
Caroline: So up until that point, she’s done, I think she’s built of not a very likeable character necessarily, but a really complex and well-rounded one. And then he just sort of quote goes crazy and starts confessing to the murder.
And suddenly I think it undoes a lot of what she’s done there.
Helen: Yeah, it just feels flippant because it’s thrown in there, but it doesn’t really amount to much and then they just evaporate it. Like what are the consequences for him? Like that’s a huge thing to have done and I don’t think it’s really excused by them having, I say they, I mean it’s specifically Dorothy Sayers, like I don’t know why I’m referring to her as if she’s a team. She’s made him the mental health one and I don’t like it when writers make a mental health one just so they can do whatever. I did a long-term study of the detective show Veronica Mars and there’s a character in that where they’re like, he’s got some mystery mental health condition and epilepsy, which means this episode, we’re going to do this with him.
No, that’s not how this works.
Caroline: It’s not a free pass to just make people do anything.
Helen: No, for drama points. And then it just miraculously goes away. And then with Robert, Robert has tampered with what he doesn’t know is a crime scene, but he has interfered with a dead body and not reported to death for what is presumably fraud. It’s not nothing.
Caroline: This is one of the loose ends that I feel this book leaves untied up, is that Robert is seemingly going to face no consequences for any of that.
Helen: Posh man though, innit?
Caroline: Yeah. And then also it’s hinted at the end that, you know, Robert’s going to end up with Ann. He fancies her and he’s been taking her out. And I think the novel wants us to think that this is a kind of all’s well that ends well, happy ending all round thing. Whereas actually, I think it’s a bit dark that he tried to cheat her out some money. Now he’s going to marry her.
Helen: Yeah, leave Ann alone! Leave Ann alone is just let her money on paint or whatever she wants.
Caroline: Yes, paint and forensic textbooks. That’s all she wants.
Helen: Yeah, let her not be bothered by these awful men.
Caroline: Speaking of the minor romantic subplots of this book, I didn’t remember until I reread it for this that Wimsey also receives a sort of proposal of marriage at the very end of this book.
Helen: He also receives a proposition earlier than that. It’s quite interestingly played because it is an awkward thing to ask someone when their romantic interest in you has not been demonstrated at all.
Caroline: Yeah, so this is his friend Marjorie who basically says, “You know, I’d take you on if you want to do.”
Helen: And then she gets friendzoned!
Caroline: And then she gets friendzoned because he’s like, “Thanks awfully, but no. But anyway, to show there’s no hard feelings, should we go out for lunch?”
Helen: Yeah, to be fair to him, that’s a reasonable response as well.
Caroline: Given that, especially in the novels that were to come in the 1930s, Wimsey’s romantic life becomes so much in the foreground, it becomes such an important part of his books, I can’t believe I’d never noticed before that he essentially receives a proposal of marriage before he even meets Harriet Vane.
Helen: Did you buy it? What do you think Madri’s motivation was? Was she like: “Well, it’s hard being a single woman in this society”?
Caroline: I think so. I don’t think she has any kind of grand passion for him. I think she’s partly looking for a patron and I then think she’s also like, “Hey, you’re nice. We get on. This could work.” I think that’s as far as it goes, because it never comes up again, and she is in other books.
Helen: Yeah. Well, I’m glad that their friendship managed to survive this awkward moment.
It does come across as very awkward. I did enjoy those scenes. I mean, I want Marjorie to ultimately succeed in whatever she wants, but I thought that Peter was probably right.
Caroline: Yes, that it’s not the one. That’s right near the very end of the book. And then the very end of the book, we’re back in the club again and all’s back to normal.
Helen: Yes, except the mysterious stains on the wall of the library.
Caroline: The mysterious stains. But you know, the members are complaining about the state of the wine again. And saying, you know, I don’t know what’s happened to this club. It’s all gone to the dogs, which seems to be their preferred state of existence. And I think that ties back into what you were saying about liking the word “unpleasantness” in the title. I think the ending brings us back to the fact that in the overall life of the club, this has just been a little blip.
Helen: Yes. And also just they’re playing coy about these things because you don’t want to have to talk about why the doctor died there and in that way.
Caroline: Yes. So just to wrap us up then: do you think this book plays fair by the reader? Do you think you could have pointed to the murderer?
Helen: I think that there were a few points where I was very aware that information was being deliberately withheld from us because there are times where Peter explains something to someone and then it says ‘and he also told them some other things’ or ‘he also gave them some instructions.’
So I knew that machinations were happening deliberately and we’re not allowed to know what they are. And I didn’t like that.
Caroline: Yes. I think that’s one of the really underappreciated skills of the detective novelist, is that you do have to obscure things from the reader, but you can’t be caught in the act of doing it.
Helen: Right. Yes. Don’t tell us that you’re withholding things. That’s cheating!
Caroline: Sayers does it absolutely appallingly in her book by Five Red Herrings, where there’s a really key clue that if you knew it at the point when it’s revealed to Wimsey and other people in the book, you would just be able to know what the answer is.
And so she actually blanks out the word in the book.
Helen: No! Do better. That’s not right.
Caroline: Yeah. So you know all along that there is this thing that they know that you don’t know.
Helen: Yes, I disapprove. As for the choice of Penberthy, not very interesting one for me, but I think also the identity of this murderer isn’t of such great plot importance in this particular book as it might be in others.
There’s so many things going on. I thought the conceit of establishing time of death, particularly at a time when scientifically that wasn’t, I think it’s still an inexact science, but it’s more developed now than it was nearly a hundred years ago. But to choose that as this pivot that changes the stakes so radically and creates all these different motives for people, depending on when it was, I thought that was nice, that was pretty cool. But then it becomes evident, I thought pretty quickly that he must have died earlier than his sister. So that takes out that part of the mystery.
Caroline: Yes, that removes that question quite quickly. You’re right, yes.
Helen: Oh, I also thought it was very funny that they have mentioned a character who’s Scottish and they have given him the name Dougal MacStewart!
Lest forget that character’s Scottish.
Caroline: Yes, exactly. How did this book make you feel about Sayers’s detective fiction? Will you read others now, do you think?
Helen: Oh yeah, I think so. I enjoyed it a lot. I really enjoyed reading it. I did read it when it was very cold and it certainly happened. helped with that. I liked that it was funny.
I thought it was quite funny a lot. I really liked the part where Peter, there’s a lot of detail about Peter Wimsey’s suit and all this kind of minutiae of this suit and I really enjoyed that even though it’s not particularly plot relevant, but I thought it was a nice bit of characterization. So yeah, it definitely made me interested to read more. Like I said earlier, I felt that people had needs and fears that were a lot more pressing than they are in some of the Golden Age books.
Caroline: I don’t think she’d fully got onto this yet, but around this time, Sayers was starting to develop this project that really dominated her work in the 1930s, where she wanted to try and make the detective novel more than just a detective novel, as it were. She was interested in trying to, like she, for instance, got into this big fight with the literary critic Queenie Leavis about this, who thought that there was no such thing as literary detective fiction, that it was that, that was a contradictory phrase.
Whereas Sayers thought, why can’t a detective novel have all of the emotional depth and resonance and breadth that a literary novel can have but also have a mystery plot?
So I do think that’s the direction she was moving in. She didn’t want her characters to seem like these paper cutouts that she was moving around a Cluedo board or whatever. She wanted them to feel real and difficult.
Helen: Yeah, I think I did feel that. I didn’t feel her hand too heavily in a lot of the plot machinations overall, but I think it’s because it is a very talky book. Like she could almost write no description at all and just have it all in dialogue and monologue.
Caroline: For the people who don’t like Dorothy L Sayers, I think that’s one of their big criticisms that it’s very wordy, basically, that she doesn’t leave anything to chance.
She makes sure that you know at all times what it is she wants you to know.
Helen: Yeah, but at least it was pretty fun while she was doing that.
Caroline: So the most important question, how many green penguins out of five are we awarding this book?
Helen: I’ll give it 3 .8 green penguins out of 5, because I think in a lot of respects, it’s a four or more, but I did find the choice of perpetrator a little unsatisfying and I could have done without all of the Ann bashing.
Caroline: I was stuck between three and four as well, so I agree with you there. I think we’ll go with 3.8 Green Penguins out of five for The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L Sayers.
Well, thank you very much for reading and talking with me, Helen.
Helen: It was a pleasure.
Caroline: It was a pleasure to have you.
Helen: It was really enjoyable. Thank you very much.
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Thanks for listening to the first ever Green Penguin Book Club! In future editions, this is where I’d like to include a mailbag selection from listeners giving your thoughts and opinions about the project and the books we’ve read so far, so if you have anything you’d like to share please send an email or a voice note to caroline@shedunnitshow.com and mark it for inclusion in the show. The next book we read will be Penguin 6A, The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie. And, yes I know the original Penguin number 6 was The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and I will be going into more detail next time about why there is a 6 and a 6A, but for now I’ll just say: since Styles was quickly replaced and then comes around again as Penguin 61, this way we get to do both books eventually. I’m going to be doing Green Penguin Book Club about every other month, so listen out for The Murder on the Links episode in April. And make sure you’re following the show in Instagram @shedunnitshow for green penguin updates and guest announcments before then.
Music
This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. My guest was Helen Zaltzman, and you can find their podcast The Allusionist at theallusionist.org or wherever you usually listen to podcasts.
You can find a full list of the books we mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/theunpleasantnessatthebellonaclub. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
Don’t forget that my new book, A Body Made of Glass, is out in April and currently available for pre-order everywhere books are sold or borrowed. And there’s an exclusive ebook and online launch event just for those who pre-order — check the description of this episode or head to carolinecrampton.com to take part.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from Connor McLoughlin.
Thanks for listening.
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