The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

A well-plotted novel that offers a glimpse of life after the First World War

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona
Club is the fourth Wimsey novel

The fourth Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, begins with Wimsey chatting with an acquaintance, Captain George Fentiman, in the bar of the Bellona Club on the evening of Armistice Day. 

They joke about the club being like a morgue or funeral parlour, recalling a cartoon in the humorous magazine, Punch, in which an elderly member of a gentleman’s club summons a waiter to remove a fellow member from his chair on the grounds that he had been “dead for two days”.

Fentiman points out that his grandfather, General Fentiman, comes in every morning at 10 am, collects the Morning Post, settles into the armchair by the fire and becomes part of the furniture until the evening.

When Wimsey’s dinner companion, Colonel Marchbanks, arrives he goes to speak to General Fentiman who is still in his chair by the fire. He comes back to Wimsey and tells him something ‘rather unpleasant’ has happened.

It transpires that while they have been joking at the bar, old General Fentiman really was dead in his chair. A doctor is called and says rigor mortis is already well established.

Most of the action in the novel, first published in London in 1928, takes place in the fictional club for war veterans that Sayers has invented.

Doctor Penberthy, General Fentiman’s personal physician, certifies death by natural causes but is unable to give the exact time of his passing. This turns out to be rather crucial.  As it happens, his wealthy sister had died on the morning of Armistice Day. If she had passed away first, the General would have inherited her fortune, which would then be left to his grandsons, Captain George and Major Robert Fentiman, who could both do with the money.

The brothers ask Wimsey to investigate, because unless they can prove that the General died after his sister, the entire fortune would go to her young, female companion.

Sayers was short of money
until her novels took off

The novel paints an interesting picture of life in Britain after the First World War. Captain George Fentiman is still suffering from post-traumatic stress and his physical injuries have left him unable to work. He is dependent on his wife keeping them both on her earnings from a low-paid job and they are having to live in uncomfortable lodgings.

He is bitter that all he has been given by his country is the privilege of marching past the Cenotaph on Armistice Day, and yet serving in the war has cost him his job, his income and his good health.

Sayers herself knew what it was like to live on a low income in London between the wars and did not become prosperous until her Lord Peter Wimsey novels became a success. 

There was a time when she was so hard up and short of money for food she considered taking a job as a teacher. Finally, in her 30th year, she sold the detective novel she had been working on in her spare time, Whose Body? which introduces Lord Peter Wimsey.

Sayers herself said of her creation of Wimsey: ’At the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room, I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly… I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes.’

Once Wimsey has started his investigation on behalf of the brothers, he finds establishing the time of the General’s death difficult. Unusually, no one saw the old man arrive at the Club on the morning of Armistice Day and can swear to him having been alive at that point. Eventually, Wimsey has to have the body exhumed and re-examined.

After discovering that the General had been poisoned, Wimsey tracks down the murderer, who then shoots himself in the Bellona Club library.

More unpleasantness for the members of the club to complain about!

This fourth Lord Peter Wimsey novel from Dorothy L Sayers, who was, in her day, judged to be one of the Queens of Crime, is definitely worth reading.

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The Man in the Brown Suit

A fast-moving thriller that keeps the reader guessing until the end

The latest paperback edition of
The Man in the Brown Suit

Reading Agatha Christie’s novels again in order of publication is proving to be good fun because there is so much variety in the early stories as Agatha tries out new characters and different slants on the detective mystery format.

Agatha’s fourth novel, The Man in the Brown Suit, published in 1924, is very different from The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Murder on the Links, the first two Poirot novels and also nothing like The Secret Adversary, her first Tommy and Tuppence novel.

The novel has a pretty young heroine, Anne Beddingfield, who has long yearned for adventures, love and romance. When her professor father dies, leaving her alone in the world with a very small sum of money, she heads to London, where she witnesses the death of a man who falls from the platform at an underground station and is electrocuted on the rails.

The police decide it is an accidental death but Anne wonders about a man in a brown suit who she saw examine the body before running away. She has picked up a piece of paper that had been dropped nearby and armed with just one cryptic clue she vows to track down the man in the brown suit and achieve justice for the dead man. The message on the paper eventually leads to her boarding a ship bound for South Africa.

According to the official Agatha Christie website, the novel was partly inspired by a tour Agatha had made of the British Commonwealth with her first husband. Afterwards, Agatha wrote the story sitting in her Earl’s Court flat, finding inspiration for her descriptions of African landscapes by evoking her memories of them.

The Man in the Brown Suit is the first of her novels to feature an appearance by Secret Service agent Colonel Race, who assists Anne in her search for the truth. Colonel Race reappears in three later novels, Cards on the Table, Death on the Nile and Sparkling Cyanide.

Agatha Christie used her first payment from her
fourth novel to buy a Morris Cowley like this one

Towards the end of the story, Agatha describes Anne’s feelings as she falls in love very convincingly and in a complete departure from the style of her writing in her previous three novels.

However, she keeps the reader guessing  as to the identity of the villain right until the end of the book in true Agatha Christie style.

The Man in the Brown Suit is less a novel of detection and more of a fast-moving thriller that is typical of its period. It had mixed reviews when it was first published because some reviewers were disappointed that it was not a Poirot novel. This seems rather unfair. Surely, they would have realised that authors like to experiment?

It was not all bad news for Agatha though, as the £500 she received for the first publication of this story paid for her first car, a grey, bullnose Morris Cowley.

Even though the novel is nearly 100 years old, I would definitely recommend giving The Man in the Brown Suit a try. 

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An Oxford Tragedy

A classic detective story by a writer of multiple talents

An Oxford Tragedy is available
as a Kindle ebook

John Cecil Masterman was probably the first writer to set a murder mystery in a fictional Oxford College with his novel,  An Oxford Tragedy, published in 1933. This was two years before Gaudy Night by Dorothy L Sayers appeared and three years before the publication of Death at the President’s Lodgings by Michael Innes, although there have been plenty of crime writers who have set their stories in Oxford since.

Masterman, who was born on 12 January 1891 - 131 years ago today - was a distinguished historian and rose to become Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, eventually receiving a knighthood for his services to education in 1959.

His amateur sleuth in An Oxford Tragedy was Ernst Brendel, a Viennese lawyer who has come to St Thomas’s College Oxford to deliver a series of law lectures. Masterman did not publish a follow-up to the novel until 1957 when The Case of the Four Friends appeared, again featuring Ernst Brendel.

Masterman was kept busy during World War Two in the Intelligence Corps. He was deputy head of MI5, where he was given the job of chairing the Twenty Committee, running the Double-Cross system for controlling double agents in Britain. His book about his experiences, The Double Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945, was published privately in 1945, but was only officially allowed publication by the British Government in 1972, five years before his death in 1977.

The events in An Oxford Tragedy are narrated by the college’s Senior Tutor, Francis Wheatley Winn, who during the story serves as a Watson to the novel’s Sherlock Holmes, Ernst Brendel.

A portrait of J C Masterman, whose
writing was one of many talents

All is fellowship and conviviality in the Common Room at the college where the dons are enjoying after dinner port and cigars and the company of the visiting lecturer, Brendel. But the calm is soon shattered when one of the dons rushes in to say that a brilliant but unpopular tutor has been found shot and killed in the Dean’s lodgings.

Inspector Cotter of Scotland Yard is called in, but can make little headway in establishing the identity of the murderer. The Senior Tutor begs Brendel to try to solve the crime for the sake of the college and the charming Viennese lawyer soon uncovers the thwarted ambition, unconsummated passion, hatred and jealousy that lie beneath the surface of the seemingly comfortable, pleasant lives of the dons at the college.

The novel was a pleasure to read because it cleverly reveals the psychology of murder, the motives and feelings that can push a civilized human being to commit the ultimate crime, while faithfully recreating the setting, customs and atmospheres of an Oxford College in the early 1930s.

Masterman wrote several other books and a play, Marshall Ney, a Play in Five Acts. He was fluent in German, having spent his four years interred during World War One in the Ruhleben internment camp in Germany perfecting the language.

As if the man did not have enough talents, he was also an excellent tennis, cricket and hockey player and won a Blue for athletics.  He reached the fourth round at Wimbledon in the men’s singles in 1923 and the quarter finals of the men’s doubles in 1923 and 1924. In 1931 he toured Canada with the Marylebone Cricket Club and for 31 years was on the committee of the Free Foresters, the nomadic amateur gentlemen's club that prospered in the first half of the 20th century.

Some second-hand copies and a Kindle edition of An Oxford Tragedy are available from Amazon.

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The Longer Bodies

How an athletics competition for an inheritance ends in murder

The Longer Bodies was the third
of 66 Mrs Bradley mysteries

Mrs Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, an unusual psychoanalyst with a flair for sleuthing, manages to appear at exactly the right time and in the right place to be in on the murder investigation in this third novel by Gladys Mitchell.

She is staying as a house guest in the village of Little Longer, where two mysterious deaths have occurred. When she is told about what has happened, she seamlessly becomes part of the investigation.

A wealthy old lady, known to her family as Great Aunt Puddequet, has invited her grand nephews to stay at her country house, accompanied by their sisters, so that the males can take part in a sporting contest to enable her to decide who will inherit her fortune.

She spares no expense by having an athletics track laid in her grounds, complete with long jump pit and practice areas for the high jump and pole vault, and she employs a German athletics coach.

But when the dead body of a man is found in the lake in the grounds, the police launch a murder  investigation. Mrs Bradley, who is staying with friends and neighbours of Great Aunt Puddequet, wastes no time in visiting the house to view the place where the man died and can’t resist dropping helpful little hints to the investigating officer, Inspector Bloxham.

This third Mrs Bradley mystery by Gladys Mitchell was first published in 1930 by Victor Gollanz. Gladys was a school teacher and athletics coach for many years and so she is able to describe in detail the highly unusual setting for the story.

Mitchell combined writing with
a career in teaching

The book is populated with a wonderful array of bizarre characters , such as the ancient, screeching Great Aunt Puddequet in her bath chair and her gentile lady companion, Miss Caddick, who takes a liking to the young German athletics coach.

There are strange clues, such as javelins dipped in blood suddenly appearing, although no one is actually training for the javelin, and Great Aunt Puddequet’s beloved pet rabbits occasionally disappear and then reappear.

After another murder happens in the grounds of the country house, the Inspector jumps from one suspect to another, while Mrs Bradley patiently tries to lead him to the correct solution, keeping a surprise up her sleeve until the very end.

Gladys Mitchell was a teacher of History, English and Games at St Paul’s School, Brentford, and later taught at St Ann’s Senior Girls School in Hanwell. Her first novel, Speedy Death, was published in 1929 and she continued to write while teaching, completing at least one book a year. She taught at Brentford School for Girls and Matthew Arnold School, Staines, where she coached hurdling and wrote the school play each year.

She retired in 1961 and went to live in Dorset, where she continued to write until her death at the age of 82. Gladys Mitchell wrote a total of 66 Mrs Bradley novels and published other novels under various pseudonyms.

The Longer Bodies is currently available from Waterstones as a paperback and as an e-book from Amazon.

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Enduring appeal of the festive mystery

Why Christmas is a good time for a crime story

This collection brings together
some top crime writers

The dark days leading up to the festive season, when people face the prospect of meeting up with distant relatives and staying in cold and uncomfortable houses, has inspired many a good Christmas crime story.

There is always the prospect of the house being cut off because of severe weather and of ancient grudges resurfacing as the wine flows.

Most of the Golden Age detective novelists have had a crack at a Christmas crime story either in the form of a full-length novel or a short story.

Many of these have recently been reprinted  and given new front covers and are now entertaining a brand-new audience.

Some have been made into films that provide perfect entertainment for people replete with Christmas dinner as they snuggle down in front of the fire and watch other  people’s Christmas parties ending with a murder.

The four Queens of Crime all turned out their fair share of Christmas murder mysteries, many of them going on to become popular films.

Their short Christmas stories were originally written for magazines, but we are now able to enjoy them again as they come out in anthologies.

I can recommend a short story by Margery Allingham, The Case Is Altered, which has been included in Murder Under the Christmas Tree – Ten Classic Crime Stories for the Festive Season.

Margery Allingham's short story
is well worth reading

Mr Albert Campion is going to spend Christmas at Sir Phillip Cookham’s country home in Norfolk. Cookham is a kindly, mild-mannered Cabinet minister, but his wife Florence, a distant relative of Campion’s, loves to host big Christmas parties, with all the festive trimmings, several Christmas trees and an odd assortment of guests.

Campion finds himself sharing a railway carriage with some of his fellow guests and even before the train reaches its destination, a station near a country house called Underhill, he is aware of tensions between some of the people who have been invited.

A note pushed under the door of the neighbouring guest room adds to his feeling of unease and even though the recipient thinks he is being invited to a romantic tryst, Campion has the feeling something more sinister is going on.

In less than 25 pages, Margery provides us with an intriguing mystery, that is full of Christmas atmosphere and shows her detective, Campion, at his best as he solves the case in his usual self -effacing way.

Murder Under the Christmas Tree, published by Profile Books, also has stories by Dorothy L Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edmund Crispin and G K Chesterton.

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The Nursing Home Murder

Alleyn investigates the killing of a Home Secretary

New Zealand-born crime writer Ngaio Marsh displays an impressive wealth of knowledge about English life and the inside workings of the British Government in The Nursing Home Murder, her third novel to feature the gentlemanly Detective Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn.

The book begins with a Cabinet meeting at No 10 Downing Street, where the Home Secretary and other ministers are discussing a controversial Bill they are planning to introduce to deal with anarchists. The Home Secretary begins to feel ill during the meeting, alarming the other members of the Cabinet, and decides to go home early.

After being examined by a doctor, it is decided the Home Secretary will go into a nursing home, which was the equivalent of a private hospital at the time, for an operation on his appendix. The operation is a success, yet the patient soon dies. His widow later becomes suspicious and calls the police and eventually the investigation is assigned to Roderick Alleyn.

The Nursing Home Murder was published in 1935, just seven years after Ngaio had first visited England. It was her third detective novel and it appeared only a year after the publication of her first novel, A Man Lay Dead, and second novel, Enter a Murderer.

Alleyn eventually discovers that among the staff in the operating theatre at the time of the operation there were at least three people who might have wanted the Home Secretary dead. This might seem rather far-fetched, but Ngaio explains the circumstances convincingly.

Alleyn is assisted in his investigation by his colleague, Inspector Fox, and his friend, the journalist Nigel Bathgate.

Patrick Malahide, who portrayed 
Inspector Alleyn in a TV series

Ngaio was well known for doing thorough research for her novels and her descriptions of London in the 1930s are very interesting and evocative.

Her 32 novels featuring Roderick Alleyn later became so popular she was often referred to as a Queen of Crime along with her contemporaries, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham.

In the preface to my copy of an omnibus edition of her first three novels - A Man Lay Dead, Enter a Murderer and The Nursing Home Murder - Ngaio describes how she first came up with the character of Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn.

It was a wet Saturday afternoon and she had been reading a detective story borrowed from a library, although she says she can’t remember whether it was a Christie or a Sayers. By four o’clock, as the afternoon became darker and the rain was still coming down relentlessly, she had finished it.

She wondered whether she could write something similar and braved the rain to go to a stationer’s shop across the street where she bought six exercise books, a pencil and a pencil sharpener. When she got home, she sat down to write what was to be the first of a series of crime novels featuring the gentleman detective Roderick Alleyn.

After The Nursing Home Murder was published in 1935, the reviewer for The Times claimed the novel had transformed the detective story from just a puzzle to a full blown and fascinating novel.

One of Ngaio’s fellow Queens of Crime, Agatha Christie, paid her the compliment of having one of her characters in Murder in Mesopotamia being seen reading The Nursing Home Murder.

I found The Nursing Home Murder very readable and enjoyed the way Ngaio keeps the reader guessing about who murdered the Home Secretary right to the end.

Book One of the Ngaio Marsh Collection, published by Harper, comprises her first three novels including The Nursing Home Murder and is available from:

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The Cornish Coast Murder

Bude’s talent for detective fiction is now entertaining new readers

The British Library Crime Classics
edition of The Cornish Coast Murders

The Cornish Coast Murder, in which the setting plays an important part and is very well described, was the first in a series of 30 detective novels by John Bude, whose real name was Ernest Carpenter Elmore.

Bude (Elmore) died on 8 November 1957, 64 years ago today, having celebrated his 56th birthday four days previously.

Fifty-seven years later, The Cornish Coast Murder, was reprinted by the British Library in their Crime Classics series.

In his introduction to the revived novel, which came out in 2014, author Martin Edwards writes that the original print run of the novel in 1935 was very small and there was no paperback edition. Skeffington, the original publisher, sold mainly to libraries, so a first edition of the novel would be extremely valuable, if such a book were still in existence. ‘This is partly due to the sheer scarcity of the novel, but also to the fact that in recent years Bude’s work has been increasingly admired, and correspondingly more sought after by collectors,’ Edwards says.

Bude’s writing style is relaxed and easy to read, and his characters and settings are perhaps more realistic than those of his contemporaries. This could be because he had already written three fantasy novels in his own name of Ernest Elmore, so The Cornish Coast Murder was not a debut novel.

When the novel was first published it was not nearly so common for writers to put their detective stories in recognisable settings that they described in detail and the fact that the crime scene takes place on the coast facing the Atlantic is important to the story. The sea and the cliffs are very well described throughout the novel.

The Cornish Coast Murder was
originally published in 1935

The detective work is done by a real policeman, Inspector Bigswell, who is dedicated and hard-working and not in the least bit bungling, and he is assisted by other officers. The local vicar, the Reverend Dodd, Vicar of St Michael’s-on-the Cliff, helps him to solve the crime by using his intuition and local knowledge.

The book begins with the Vicar and the local doctor, Dr Pendrill, relaxing after their weekly dinner and going through a box of books that has just been delivered to them. They are both avid readers of detective fiction and take it in turn to choose books that they will both read and then discuss.

The box contains an Edgar Wallace, the new J.S. Fletcher, a Farjeon, a Dorothy L. Sayers and a Freeman Wills Croft. Also, in the words of the Vicar: ‘And my old friend, my very dear old friend, Mrs Agatha Christie. New adventures of that illimitable chap, Poirot, I hope. I must congratulate you Pendrill, you’ve run the whole gamut of crime, mystery, thrills and detection in six volumes.’

When one of his parishioners is shot dead through the window of his sitting room, the Vicar is keen to be involved in the investigation.

At one point he sits with Inspector Bigswell discussing the crime and is thrilled that his theories are being considered by the detective. ‘Never, even in his most optimistic moments had he visualised a scene of this nature, himself in one arm chair, a police officer in another, and between them…a mystery.'

But when the Vicar and the Inspector finally track the culprit down and solve the mystery, the clergyman is saddened by the experience and tells his friend, the doctor, that he cannot stomach any more detective fiction at the moment.

Bude was a games master, before becoming a theatre stage manager. He used to write in his spare time, while waiting about in dressing rooms. He was also a founder member of the Norfolk-based British Crime Writers’ Association.

He died in Hastings, in Sussex.

The Cornish Coast Murder is available from or

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