Very Dubious

There are a lot of coincidences in Unnatural Death, starting with Wimsey and Parker happening to be dining out and talking shop next to a table occupied by a doctor who recently caused himself all kinds of trouble by refusing to certify a patient's death without an autopsy. The patient was Agatha Dawson. In addition to being elderly, she was also a terminal cancer patient, with maybe a few months left to live when she was found dead one morning. There were no obvious signs of foul play, but from some details the doctor learned from Agatha's nurse and her remaning servants, the doctor who'd been treating her had misgivings. Her great-niece, a young single woman named Mary Whittaker, had been living with and caring for Agatha for years, on the understanding that the unmarried and childless Agatha would leave Mary her fortune. True, Agatha refused to make a will because of her terror of death; but Mary was her closest living relative. Agatha didn't see the point of making out a will when her estate would automatically go to Mary anyway. The autopsy identifies the cause of death as heart failure, but there's no evidence of what might have caused her heart to fail. Still with misgivings, the doctor eventually signs Agatha Dawson's death certificate--though not before Mary Whittaker has turned the whole town against the doctor for causing her and her poor old great aunt Agatha all this trouble. Mary Whittaker does in fact inherit Agatha's fortune, and everyone appears to have moved on.

But as soon as Wimsey hears the doctor's story, he HAS to investigate--despite the fact that the doctor himself doesn't want more attention drawn to his professional disaster. Parker, at one point, asks Wimsey what is it about this case that gets to him so. Wimsey replies that he's long been haunted by the idea that most murderers do in fact get away with it. We detectives, he says, only see the failures. As soon as you NOTICE that a murder is a murder, that murderer has failed. For each of these failures, Wimsey posits, there must be a hundred murders that are never solved because they are never recognized as murders. His absolute conviction that murder was done is something he has a hard time getting people to share. But he seems to understand, as Miss Climpson also does, that he's living in a providential universe. Wimsey and Climpson are both very observant Anglicans, and one of the big breaks in this case comes as a result of Miss Climpson regularly attending the local church even while she's on a case. The Detective Club and the Detective Club Oath are still in the future at this point; and while Sayers does eschew mumbo-jumbo and jiggery-pokery, she's not above bringing in the occasional Act of God.

So as Wimsey, Climpson, and Parker start digging their own excavations, we get more and more circumstantial evidence that in fact something was fishy about Agatha Dawson's death. Wimsey's convinced that the will, or lack thereof, is at the core of all this, and that means digging into the family history. And that's where it gets interesting.

Down at the local pub in the town where Agatha lived for most of her adult life, Wimsey and Parker find out that Agatha, while unmarried, was not exactly single. She was obviously--to me, and I think to most of the characters who talk about her--the lover and life partner of Clara Whittaker, Mary's other grand-aunt. (Mary's grandfather, Clara's brother, married Agatha's sister, so Mary is the grand-niece of both Agatha and Clara.) Here's what Mrs. Piggin, the landlady at the Fox and Hounds, has to say about the young Clara Whittaker:

"But there, we can't be all alike, can we, sir? --and Miss Whittaker was altogether out of the way. They don't make them like that nowadays. Not but what these modern girls are good goers, many of them, and does a lot of things as would have been thought very fast in the old days, but Miss Whittaker had the knowledge as well. Bought her own horses and physicked 'em and bred 'em, and needed no advice from anybody."

Clara, after leaving school, started her own horse breeding/trading business, was cut off by her family, and moved in with her school friend Agatha Dawson. Here's Sayers's description of an old photograph of the two of them taken during one of the hunts Clara Whittaker used to organize:

"Lord Peter and Parker looked with considerable interest at the rather grim old woman sitting so uncompromisingly upright with the reins in her hand. A dour, weather-beaten old face, but certainly handsome still, with its large nose and straight, heavy eyebrows. And beside her, smaller, plumper, and more feminine, was the Agatha Dawson whose curious death had led them to this quiet country place. She had a sweet, smiling face--less dominating than that of her redoubtable friend, but full of spirit and character. Without doubt they had been a remarkable pair of old ladies."

Without doubt. And if you think Sayers is being overly coy by substituting "remarkable" for "queer" or "ladies" for "lesbians," well, consider what Ben Cobling, the 87-year-old former stable master who managed Clara's horses, has to say about her:

"A rare young lady she was in them days. Deary me. Straight as a switch, with a fine, high colour in her cheeks and shiny black hair--just like a beautiful two-year filly she was. And very sperrited. Wonnerful sperrited. There was a many a gentlemen as would have been glad to hitch up with her, but she was never broke to harness. Like dirt, she treated 'em. Wouldn't look at 'em, except it might be the grooms and stable-hands in a matter of 'osses. And in the way of business, of course. Well, there is some creatures like that. I 'ad a terrier-bitch that way. Great ratter she was. But a business woman--nothin' else. I tried 'er with all the dogs I could lay 'and to, but it weren't no good. Bloodshed there was an' sich a row--you never 'eard. The Lord makes a few on 'em that way to suit 'Is own purposes, I suppose."

So, not to harp on the whole Marie Benedict thing, but...if you are afraid to let your characters use an unnecessary word, you don't get this kind of complexity. Cobling obviously has tremendous affection and admiration for Clara Whittaker as someone who cared deeply and knew much about the thing he cares about most, which is horses. In commenting on her antipathy toward men, he analogizes her to a "terrier-bitch" of his acquaintance, which on the face of it seems pretty insulting. But animals are as important to Cobling as people, if not more so--he's told Wimsey that he feels like the horses his father handled were more or less his family--and he brings the dog in as a way of getting to what was obviously his final opinion on the matter of his boss's sexuality: some "females" are just made that way, to serve one of God's inscrutable purposes. You can still hear the lesbian-as-man-hater BS underneath this paragraph, but you can also hear appreciation for a woman who was "never broke to harness." This conversation, by the way, is happening in a chapter titled "A Tale of Two Spinsters."

This is what I mean about the ambivalence. Dorothy Sayers's contemporaries and biographers often comment on her masculine clothes and her general discomfort with normative femininity. When it came to sexuality, Sayers followed her own rules. Having refused to have sex with her lover John Cournos without marriage, she got pregnant after he left her, by a man who by all accounts she cared much less about, and then gave the baby to her cousin Iris to raise. (This is the background out of which Harriet Vane and her case arise in Strong Poison, the next novel in the series.) It's striking that all these Ordinary English People are staunch admirers of Clara and approve of Agatha's devotion to her. It's also striking that Sayers leaves their love story coded...but really just barely. Is this just Sayers anticipating the firestorm that Radclyffe Hall will set off with a story about another genderqueer daughter of the aristocracy in The Well of Loneliness, and providing herself with a veneer of deniability? Maybe. I'm not an intentionalist.

I will say that I'm very interested by the contrast between how the novel represents the queer women of two generations ago and the way it represents the queer women of the (at the time) here and now. Miss Climpson, on her first meeting with Mary Whittaker, notes a lot of the same features that set Clara apart, but sees them in a more sinister light:

"The first impression which Miss Climpson got of Mary Whittaker was that she was totally out of place among the tea-tables of S. Onesimus. With her handsome, strongly-marked features and quiet air of authority, she was of the type that 'does well' in City offices. She had a pleasant and self-possessed manner, and was beautifully tailored--not mannishly, and yet with a severe fineness of outline that negatived the appeal of a beautiful figure."

Something about Mary Whittaker reminds Miss Climpson of something she's observed in "her long and melancholy experience of frustrated womanhood, observed in a dreary succession of cheap boarding-houses," but she can't put her finger on it until she sees Mary with her friend Vera Findlater, who is "fair and bobbed and rather coltish"...and completely besotted with Mary. Climpson realizes both that Mary and Vera are lovers and that the relationship is uneven. She imagines Mary being contemptuous of Vera's devotion and referring to it as "schwarmerei"--a German word that I have encountered only one other novel in English: Kate O'Brien's tragically underrated novel The Land of Spices, where the nuns use it to refer to the crushes their girl students have on each other. Somewhere along the "woman-ridden" life Miss Climpson has led, she learned to recgonize lesbian desire.

She's absolutely right; Vera's devotion to Mary will become more and more important to the plot--and more and more tragically misguided, because Mary Whittaker is a really nasty piece of work. To go into details would really be too much of a spoiler, but let me just say two things: she is absolutely ruthless about protecting herself, and she is very, very dangerous to the women who cross her path. Hallelujiah Dawson may have been introduced partly for comic relief or for the sake of filling out the legal plot or, what the hell, gratuitously referencing the Tichbourne Claimant; but once Mary finds out about him she makes things deadly serious. More than once, Mary tries to frame Black men for her own crimes; and this is one of the ways we know that she is Bad News.

So what do we make of this tale of three spinsters? Whatever it is, it's complicated. It leaves a lot of room for interpretation. And this is why I've spent all this time writing about it. I might point out that the entire plot hinges on the fact that Mary feels entitled to inherit, without lifting a finger, everything that her pioneering great aunt Clara earned. Is this plot partly about resenting the "surplus women" of the 1920s for parasitically benefiting from the struggles of their New Women foremothers without actually contributing to the struggle? Maybe, maybe not. I will tell you one thing, though: we are learning a lot more about life for women in the 1920s from Unnatural Death than we learn from The Queens of Crime.

All right. I said I was over it. I resume.