Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers (1927)

Warning: for those who have not yet read all the Wimsey books the text of the “Biographical Note” (purportedly written at Sayers request by Wimsey’s uncle) contains spoilers for books published later than this one.

Unnatural Death begins with a scene that situates Wimsey clearly within a particular social milieu. Wimsey is sharing a meal with Charles Parker (Scotland Yard detective and friend) in an upscale restaurant. The difference in class between the two men is established when conversation makes it clear that Parker is neither used to eating snails nor comfortable with the idea. The reader is given further cues to the appropriate social and cultural outlook by the descriptions of the other people in the room:

The fat man on their right was unctuously entertaining two ladies of the chorus; beyond him, two elderly habitués were showing their acquaintance with the fare at the “Au Bon Bourgeois” by consuming a Tripes à la Mode de Caen (which they do very excellently there) and a bottle of Chablis Moutonne 1916; on the other side of the room a provincial and his wife were stupidly clamouring for a cut off the joint with lemonade for the lady and whisky and soda for the gentleman.(14)[1]

The first two descriptions still “work” for the modern reader but the third bears further examination. How does the observer know that the couple is “provincial?” Is it their clothes? Can the listener detect a regional accent in their speech? Surely that is not enough to warrant their dining request to be characterized as “stupid.” Clearly they are unaware of the type of food (or food combinations) that one ordered in an expensive restaurant in Soho. If they had been richly dressed foreigners their confusion might have been considered charming but as “provincials” (read—moderately well-off non-gentry) any lack of prior knowledge of the minutia of local food etiquette will be characterized as stupidity. For the modern reader this is a sudden insight in the pernicious nature of the British class/social system of the time. There was even a set way to be a noncomformist and absent aristocratic relatives anyone who didn’t adhere to a narrow set of behaviours, tastes and interests was judged “not quite the thing” and excluded from much of social life.

Although this story is set almost a decade after the Great War passing comments make it clear how close “the old days” actually were in terms of gender expectations:

A dear old friend of mine used to say that I should have made a very good lawyer,” said Miss Climpson, complacently, “but of course, when I was young, girls didn’t have the education or the opportunities they get nowadays, Mr. Parker. I should have liked a good education, but my dear father didn’t believe in it for women. Very old-fashioned, you young people would think him.”(35)[1]

The reader will also notice casual verbal racism as in this description of the quality of the ham in a sandwich:

Observe the hard texture, the deep brownish tint of the lean; rich fat, yellow as a Chinaman’s cheek; (64)[1]

At one point in the book a rather remarkable letter is penned by the very proper Miss Climpson to Lord Peter (for whom she was sleuthing) about the judgmental and self-consciously proper behaviour of the former housekeeper of the woman Wimsey thinks may have been murdered when a dark-skinned man paid a call on the lady of the house:

In fact, it appears she refused to cook the lunch for the poor black man—(after all, even blacks are God’s creatures and we might all be black OURSELVES if He had not in His infinite kindness seen fit to favour us with white skins!!)—and walked straight out of the house!!!

So that unfortunately she cannot tell us anything further about this remarkable incident! She is certain, however, that the ‘nigger’ had a visiting-card, with the name ‘Rev. H. Dawson’ upon it, and an address in foreign parts. It does seem strange, does it not, but I believe many of these native preachers are called to do splendid work among their own people, and no doubt a MINISTER is entitled to have a visiting-card, even when black!!! (112-113)[1]

The casual and open racism of everyone is pervasive:

“Perhaps the long-toed gentleman was black,” suggested Parker. “Or possibly a Hindu or Parsee of sorts.”

“God bless my soul,” said Sir Charles, horrified, “an English girl in the hands of a black man. How abominable!”

“Well, we’ll hope it isn’t so. Shall we follow the road out or wait for the doctor to arrive?”(199)[1]

The idea of two English girls—the one brutally killed, the other carried off for some end unthinkably sinister, by a black man—aroused all the passion of horror and indignation of which the English temperament is capable.(203)[1]

Two other things stand out to this reader: first, the casual (if somewhat critical) attitude that people had towards a homosocial relationship between two women and second the meager amount of actual detection that Wimsey carries out over the course of the book.

Not everyone approved of the two woman/woman relationsips but this disapproval did not carry the taint of sin:

There was a many 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. There ain’t no arguin’ with females.”(122)[1]

It is clear that some characters (including Miss Climpson) see “weaker” member (generally the one who fulfills a domestic role) of these relationships as sometimes lacking in strength of character and prone to school girlish crushes and swoons but even from a woman who takes her religion really seriously there is nary at trace of moral condemnation

The reader who is taken aback at the overt racism and covert acceptance of female homosocial relationships may miss the fact that class is the ultimate weapon of power in this book. The book opens with a scene in which Wimsey demonstrates his class through his culinary choices and, in fact, the story could not have proceeded had not the doctor who shared his story with Wimsey and Parker not recognized Wimsey as “the right sort” and therefore felt comfortable returning to his flat.

For the rest of the story Wimsey does not detect so much as he delegates the grim, boring and tedious aspects of detection to others. Wimsey is interested in the doctor’s story and so he is able to hire people to look up the records, go to the scene of the possible crime, spend hours over tea tables in boarding houses, go door-to-door to canvas neighbourhoods and go through official records. Wimsey is able to go places (if he wishes) with ease because of his wealth and his status. Wimsey boasts at one point that he has a nose for detection. That he is one of those people who has a sense of when a crime was committed. Unfortunately what Sayers seems to have demonstrated in this book is that something more than flair, intelligence, and curiosity is required to solve crimes “the Wimsey way”–status, money and connections.

Rating: 3-1/2 stars

[1] Sayers, D. (1964). Unnatural death. New York: Avon.

In an article, Pop\’s gender war: Sexism dictates the media profile of female stars in Wednesday\’s web version of The Independent Gillian Orr complained about the semi-regular appearance of article about women \”having a moment\” in music or about women breaking through to dominate the field.

Orr points out that women have not become break-out stars to the exclusion of men achieving success:

Of course, many male artists have broken through over the last few years. But you would be hard pushed to find an article discussing the successes of Tinie Tempah, Example, James Blake, Tinchy Stryder, Plan B, Paulo Nutini and Bruno Mars as some kind of trend. And seeing as this is hardly the first time that a woman has had a hit record, what exactly is going on here?

and she further notes that:

it is not as if female solo success is anything new. If you were to look further back, to cover the period from 1981, you would find that the list of bestselling artists each year for the last 30 years includes 10 women, eight men and 12 groups. Female performers have always had success and will always have success.

Orr asks an important question–why do we not look at the number of female label heads and executives and celebrate the women who have triumphed in those fields.

I think the constant drumbeat of articles about women having a moment in particular fields tells us more about the failure of women to achieve true equality than it does about their success.

Almost anyone who has taken an introductory course in journalism has read/heard the old saw \”dog bites man isn\’t a news story; man bites dogs is.\” That is because dogs biting men isn\’t the norm. Thus if every day the biggest headline in the newspaper was dog bites we would suspect that the news editor of that newspaper was out of touch with reality. The editor\’s \”default normal\” is dissonant with reality.

When article after article discovers the same thing year after year the reader begins to suspect that the facts that those articles report simply cannot fit into the \”default normal\” of the editors.

Today while flicking from one channel (tennis coverage) to another (BBC coverage of the riots in the UK) I heard a voice declaim another blonde beauty missing from Aruba!
I opened a browser window and googled another blonde is missing in aruba and this what came back.

Another american blonde female missing in Aruba
Another american blonde female missing in Aruba (different sites, identical headlines)
Yet another Hot Blonde missing in Aruba (the link is to a message board)
Another blonde chick missing in Aruba (the link is to a message board)
Maryland woman missing in Aruba
Another Blonde American Missing in Aruba
Another American Beauty Missing in Aruba
Another missing Aruba gal

Let\’s deconstruct those headlines.

Including the information that the woman is either American or from Maryland answers the implicit question why should we care about some woman in Aruba? The headline explains why the disappearance of someone in another country is making news in the United States.

The inclusion of the word \”another\” is in itself interesting because someone who was not aware of the Natalee Holloway case might assume that American women were going missing from Aruba with some frequency. But since Holloway disappeared six years ago the word another must signify something else. What? Perhaps it encourages the reader to look for parallels between to the two cases. There are both women, both blonde, both Americans vacationing in Aruba.

Aha, as one reads further you realize that both cases allow for a certain degree of salaciousness. And salaciousness sells tabloids. It sells mainstream newspapers. It gives a bump in the ratings of the news shows.

But something else is there. It is the word blonde.

Why is the women\’s hair colour included in the headline? After all these are not APBs sent out to help people find the missing women.

Telling us that the women were blonde tells us that the women were white.

So this is the story the headlines actually tell us. Another white woman has gone missing under circumstances that are open to salacious interpretation while visiting a country full of not-white people.

I watched London burning on the BBC news last night.

To me London isn\’t just a place I have read about in books or seen on television or in movies. London is a city I feel homesick for though I have never truly lived there. I loved visiting London. I spent weeks venturing out every day from our small tent to forage through bookstores for used (or remaindered) treasures. I spent weeks walking each day from our tiny room at the B&B to the tube station and heading off museums, art galleries and, of course, bookstores. I have sat for hours in London\’s parks reading books and feeding pigeons.

I know London well enough that I could follow the reports of riots, fires and looting and think, \”now they are near that lovely little shop,\” \”I remember walking along that road,\” and \”oh, no they are near where [a friend] lives.\”

The experience of watching London burn was not only coloured by the fact that I knew the city well enough to worry about, to mourn for and to empathize with the people who lived there. Watching disasters in \”real time\” is quite different from hearing about them even a few minutes after the fact. Once something is over you can be sorry, you can try to understand and you can feel angry. Watching something unfold before you on the television or computer screen is much more like watching a tragedy unfold outside your front window. You may not be personally in danger but you do feel that you should do something. You feel that if you don\’t you are either condoning it–or you are a coward.

So I watched London burning and I felt impelled to do something and yet there was nothing I could do except meditate on the exact nature of the social contract that kept every city, town and village from burning along with London.

When I was a child my mother would recite poetry to entertain me or to pass the time. One of her favourite poems was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow\’s The Song of Hiawatha[1]
Whenever my mother got to these verses:

a chill would run up my spine. Imagine, I would think, not knowing which grave was that of your grandmother? Imagine knowing only that you grandfather was somewhere in that field.

As I grew older and read about archeology I loved to read about tomb excavations and the recovery of mummies. It was years before I connected archeology to that passage of Longfellow\’s poem. I can\’t remember whose lament it was that moved me to understand that one culture\’s science was another culture\’s grave robbing. Now instead of imagining that I didn\’t know which headstone marked the grave of my grandfather or grandmother I imagined if I didn\’t even know where their bodies were. Worse, I imagined that I knew that their bodies had been dug up and examined by strangers without my permission. I imagined that pictures of their corpses were published in journals for all to read. I imagine that tourists in some far off country were paying to walk by the bodies of my grandparents.

Which is, of course, what happened. People from western, industrialized countries, swept down on the peoples of the countries they had colonized or invaded and stole from them the bodies of their ancestors just as they stole from them their other treasures.

In time (although it took far longer than it should have) the practice of scientifically sanctioned grave robbing came to a halt. Now the institutions that held the stolen remains were left with a conundrum. What should they do with the bones and corpses they had plundered from around the world? The task was relatively easy if there was a solid record about where the remains had been taken from. But there were many remains for which there were no paper trail. What should be done with those?

Today I found out that the Government of Saskatchewan had been, for some years, been providing a way for the remains of First Nations individuals to be, in a sense, repatriated:

The government set aside the four-hectare parcel of Crown land in 1998 to re-inter remains that had no where else to go — bones lying on museum and university shelves, unearthed during construction or discovered due to land erosion.

They find their final resting place at the sacred site if there\’s no way to determine if the dead belonged to a certain tribe or there\’s no way to return them to the places where they were found. . . . \”elders representing eight different linguistic groups hold burial ceremonies and pray for the bodies to rest in peace.\” [Saskatchewan Government Running Sacred First Nations Burial Ground]

Why am I, an atheist, so moved by this story? Not because I think that the souls of the dead demand decent burial–after all I don\’t think that such a thing as \’a soul\’ exists. I am moved because I agree with Immanuel Kant that we should:

Act so that you treat humanity, both in your own person and in that of another, always as an end and never merely as a means.[The Categorical Imperative]

By the very act of treating these remains as we believe those people (and their descendents) would wish them to be treated we ceasing to treat them as means.
I buried my mother according to her wishes because she was not a means for me to demonstrate my atheism to the world but rather someone who had her own desired ends.

Of course, it is easier to treat ones family as ends in themselves and the rest of the world as means. Yet every person who ever lived is a relative of mine. Every person alive today is a relative of mine. I might have to go far back in my family tree but if we but had the records to do so we could construct a family tree that connected each one of us to everyone else. To paraphrase Longfellow:

[1] Each of my parents had different favourite portions of the poem and thus when I read it to myself the voice in my head is sometimes my mother\’s and sometimes my father\’s.&#8617

[2] I tell myself to understand \”our fathers\” as \”our forebears\” just as I tell myself that mankind means humanity and manpower means staff.&#8617

My \”blog plan\” for today was to trim and update the list on my \”to read\” page. Trimming isn\’t much of an issue since I merely needed to go through and check that I had removed from me \”to read\” those books that I had recently reviewed.

What rattled me was the fact that in the time since I first posted my \”to read\” list my meatworld \”to read\” list has at least doubled in size despite the fact that I have been steadily working away on it every day.

How could that happen?

Some of the reasons are obvious:

1. People who respond to my reviews give me wonderful suggestions of other books that I might find interesting.
2. People who respond to my reviews ask me questions about the book/author in relationship to another book/author which fuel my interest in those books/authors.
3. Authors I follow publish new books (yeah!!!!)
4. I find out that authors I already liked had written books I hadn\’t known of (sometimes writing under another name.)
5. I read book reviews which lead me to read the book reviewed, works discussed/referenced in the reviews and sometimes books written by the reviewer.
6. I read the LibraryThing recommendations (which based on the books in my library.)
7. I read books that are rated highly by LibraryThing friends
8. I read books that are rated highly by LibraryThing reviewers whose past reviews led me to books are ( now value

People to blame for the fact that my \”to read\” list just keeps getting longer:

1. John Scalzi, who not only writes books and stories I have enjoyed, he uses his own website, Whatever, as a platform to allow writers to introduce Scalzi\’s community to one of their books. The Big Idea posts are written by these authors (not Scalzi himself) and usually include a description of the book, an explanation of \”why the book was written\”/\”how the author got the idea\” and a link to a free-sample of several chapters of the book in question.
2. Jo Walton (directly) has introduced me to many wonderful books through her reviews at Tor.com.
3. Jo Walton (indirectly) has added to my \”to read\” list by changing the way in which I read and the way I write reviews of the books I read. I can\’t claim to write as well as Walton nor to have as much insight as zie does–but I do try to make the effort to do both. Therefore I can\’t always simply sit down and quickly type a review of a book I read years ago without any conscious intention of reviewing it.

   I may have well remember a book that I first read several decades ago, however, in the intervening years I have read many books as well as many book reviews. I have had life experiences and academic training. To do the book justice and to do the book review justice I have to sit and read the book again. So many books on my \”to read\” list are actually on my \”to reread\” list. Indeed many of the books on my \”to read\” list move immediately, once read, onto the \”to reread\” list because I feel they need repeated readings before I can write a good review.

I have already reached the point of realizing that even were I to live as long as my parents (mom to her mid-nineties and dad working on his late nineties) and even if I, like my father, never go a week without reading at least four books I will never finish the \”to read\” list.

And that is a thing of joy for it means that reading a book (and crossing it off my list) does not diminish the number of books left to read. I need never fear that the day will come that I will run out of things I want to read.

[Trigger Warning: child starvation, suffering, and death]

Most of us have seen the picture–children crowded around the back of a relief truck as aid workers spoon out gruel into cups, bowls and outstretched hands. Today I read something that made me realize that if I had been ever been one of those children it would be unlikely that I would have lived to write this blog. If my father had been one of the starving people in the refugee camp he would probably not have survived.

Celiac/coeliac (both spellings are common) disease is, to quote the article The Global Burden of Childhood Coeliac Disease: A Neglected Component of Diarrhoeal Mortality?:

a systemic autoimmune syndrome involving a gluten-induced chronic inflammation of the small bowel mucosa, with extensive short- and long term negative health consequences if untreated. Symptomatology can vary for an individual over time, and often mimics other diseases, which, combined with low global awareness of the disease, results in many cases remaining undiagnosed or being ineffectively treated. Examples of signs and symptoms are malabsorption with diarrhoea and consequent under-nutrition, short stature, anaemia, stomach pain, and increased incidence of many infectious diseases.

For someone like me (middle class, educated in the appropriate diet and living in an area where gluten-free foods are affordable and available) celiac disease can be, for the most part[1] controlled through diet. It is sometimes challenging (and occassionally dangerous) to eat at restaurants and at the homes of friends but you can stay healthy as long as one buys, cooks and eats only food that is gluten-free.

The symptoms of celiac disease are sufficiently like those of a number of other conditions that it is often misdiagnosed and someone living where most food is relatively gluten-free might be a celiac and not even realize why they never felt quite well. Now imagine a famine hits that area and aid organizations fly in food from around the world. Much of that food has gluten in it. Now the adults and children who were \”never quite well\” become very, very ill as the amount of gluten (in proportion to their overall diet) becomes greater and greater. Soon they are having violent, painful and unending diarrhoea. The normal medical interventions do not work to alleviate the problem and indeed some of them make it worse.

Now that picture of the children has become personal nightmare fuel for me. I imagine I am one of those hungry children desperate for food. I imagine I fight to the front of the pack and hold my hands out for a handful of gruel. I imagine burying my face in my hands almost inhaling the first food I have had in days.

Then I imagine myself lying on the ground having lost everything that I ate and more curled in agony surrounded by pools of my own vomit and diarrhoea.

Somewhere today that happened to a child we thought we were helping.

[1] I don\’t know of anyone who has been a celiac for years who does not have \”mysterious\” attacks of violent symptoms when they know of nothing they have ingested that could have caused the problem. People who don\’t live with you always assume that you have simply \”forgotten\” about that off-diet item one ate. People who live with you and see everything you eat soon come to realize that it is indeed true. You ate nothing that should have made you ill and yet there you are curled up 0n the floor of the bathroom…..well, I won\’t detail all the symptoms.

 

You come across them in books written in the 1900s and the first half of the last century. People who were not, perhaps, technically rich and yet, in some ways, were rich beyond the wildest imaginings of most people in the western/industrialized world today.

In book after book we meet characters who \”live off a modest competence,\” who \”inherited a tidy sum\” from a maiden aunt or bachelor uncle, men who retired in the prime of life from some branch of the services and live comfortably on their pension plus the money left them by an elderly relative and the women who can just manage to sustain appearances if they pool the dividends from the money they inherited from their father\’s small estate together with their mother (who has a life-interest in her deceased husband\’s pension.)

Seldom would any of them do what would be recognized today as work. The women might work as a secretary to a \”great man\” of letters or even as a companion but to work in shop or as a secretary to a businessman was out of the question. The men might work as agents on the estate of a monied landowner. All of them resented the idea of jobs and all seemed to fear (quite justifiably) that by working for a living they might lose some of their class status.

They would be invited to dine with those who were truly wealthy for although they belonged to a different monetary class they were members of the same social class. The conversation around the table would often turn to the ruinous effect of taxation, the frightening drop in dividends and the almost extortionate insistence of members of the working class of being paid wages that reflected both their work and the cost of living.

Almost inevitably at some point in the conversation one of the characters would state that these changes were going to destroy their way of life.

They were right.

We certainly have millionaires today. Indeed we have billionaires. But we do not have a substantially large class of people who maintain what we would consider a middle class lifestyle without holding down a job. Changes in the economic system wiped them out.

For the last half a century we have continued to have a middle class but this group of people depended on income generated from jobs rather than from dividends. These were people who worked all their life, saved assiduously and if they were lucky could look forward to living in retirement much the way that vanished long ago middle class did.

I wonder if in another fifty years the literate public will look back on our job dependent middle class much as we do on the rentier middle class of England before and between the World Wars. Perhaps in fifty years there will simply be the rich and poor and very little in between.

Viewing in my household breaks down into four categories: sports, entertainment, news and guilty pleasures. The entertainment category is the thinnest. We watch TV series and movies on DVD or streaming. The hours spent watching sports can be light or heavy depending on the year and the time of the year. News can expand to fill hours of time if there is a major event or ongoing crisis.

And then there are the guilty pleasures. The shows that rivet my attention for reasons I don\’t always wish to explore. The shows that make me feel good about my life by showing me the way other people live. I always feel vaguely uncomfortable as I watch (I am, after all using these people instrumentally) and yet I find myself continuing to do so.

One of those shows has very much been on my mind in recent days is Til Debt Do Us Part a Canadian show which features Gail Vaz-Oxlade, a financial planner, who responds to the pleas of couples who are drowning in debt by putting them on a strict budget and subjecting them through a series of challenges that are designed to help them to understand better how they got so badly in debt, how to get out of debt and how to stay out of debt. The (usually) couples can earn up to five thousand dollars in cash from Gail if over a four week period they stay on the budget she gives them and successfully complete the challenges while having what Gail refers to as \”the right attitude.\” Over the many years of the show I have seen participants receive as little as a thousand dollars for their efforts.

I was thinking a lot of Gail as I watched American political figures argue about how to deal with the debt. What, I wondered, would she say to them if they were on her show.

First, she would tell them to stop with the attitude and quit making excuses. It may be emotionally enjoyable to assign blame but placing blame doesn\’t help to solve the problem.

Second, she would tell them to stop playing games and start communicating honestly.

Third, and most important, she would assign them one of her \”budget booster\” challenges. In many an episode she sits down and tells the people who are in debt that she simply cannot make their budget balance. Their challenge will be figuring out how to bring in more money on a sustainable basis. The people to whom she directs this challenge often protest that it is impossible. A surprisingly large percentage of them do find a way to increase their income. She will not let people use funds that should be set aside for long-term savings and ongoing maintenance to pay for current expenses.

I find this relevant right now because of the continued reiteration in Washington of statements to the effect \”the national budget should be run the way the household budget is run.\” At least one household budget specialist would, if looking at the national budget/debt demand that the adults in the household get off their duffs and bring in more money.

If they want to have an argument down the line about whether the fixed costs could be lowered by selling the house and downsizing they are welcome to do so–but only after raising enough money to pay the debts they currently owe without taking any funds out of the children\’s milk money.

For some of the couples Gail counsels making more money means working a second job, working overtime or even delivering papers. The politicians in Washington have it much easier since they don\’t have to go out and pound the pavement to chase down possible jobs.

They just have to raise taxes.