Dorothy Sayers. Unnatural Death (1927)

     Dorothy Sayers. Unnatural Death (1927) Wimsey is attracted by what may have been a murder of an old lady. His investigations startle the murderer into more crimes, and eventually Wimsey and Charles Parker are able to arrest the woman responsible. She commits suicide in custody, and the book ends on a darker note than usual. Sayers is here playing with the motif of successful (undetected) versus unsuccessful (detected, and usually solved) murders. Wimsey isn’t quite as much of a Bertie Wooster type as in other books, except when he deliberately acts the part. Parker is a faithful sidekick; Sayers later develops his character and makes him Wimsey’s brother-in-law. This is a pre-Harriet Vane story, and so follows the formula and adopts the conventions more faithfully than the later books, but Sayers already shows her interest in character rather than event, and the acute moral and psychological observations that Christie, for example, could never quite equal. *** (2004)