THE UNPLEASANTNESS AT THE BELLONA CLUB: Heh, I turned to this for comfort reading. It’s a very strange book–one of the earliest Lord Peter mysteries. (I can’t remember if it came before Whose Body? or not.) Confirmed my basic suspicions about Dorothy Sayers.

The book starts out strong and raw. It starts like a book about shell-shock, about the aftermath of World War I on England–soldiers returning to a home that hadn’t seen the war and couldn’t comprehend it. The stakes feel very high and the emotions are real and (…obviously) relevant. There are these weird chapter titles taken from chess and card games, but they feel completely out of place, imported from more standard whodunnits.

By the end, though, the chapter titles have taken over. The plot mechanics don’t quite work, and certainly don’t add anything to the themes of shell-shock and postwar life. The novel ends all tidy, threads tucked in. This is pretty much the opposite of how a murder mystery should end, I think: The plot algebra should work better, and yet the reader should be left more unsettled, more convinced that tragedy and evil still roamed in the streets outside.

In both respects, Christie was a superior writer of mysteries. Unpleasantness is one of Sayers’s best, and it can’t hold a candle to Christie tales like Murder in Retrospect or The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, let alone her more famous novels.