Unnatural Death
Early paperback edition cover
Author(s)	Dorothy L. Sayers
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Series	Lord Peter Wimsey
Genre(s)	Mystery Novel
Publisher	Benn
Publication date	1927
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN	NA
Preceded by	Clouds of Witness
Followed by	The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

Unnatural Death is a 1927 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, her third featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. It has also been published in the United States as The Dawson Pedigree.

  Plot introduction

The plot concerns Lord Peter's investigation into the death, three years earlier, of an elderly lady in the last stages of cancer. The lady's death has aroused no suspicion, despite her doctor's dismay at her end coming so quickly, but Wimsey suspects that it may, after all, have been 'unnatural'. The difficulty of discovering the method is compounded by the difficulty of discovering someone with the motive and opportunity to kill.

  Plot summary

Overhearing a conversation in a restaurant between Wimsey and his friend Parker, a doctor tells the two of a death that affected his career. A terminal cancer patient, old and wealthy, died unexpectedly early; the doctor provoked outrage when he queried the cause, and local opinion forced him eventually to move away. Wimsey is moved to investigate.

Wimsey discovers that the patient's great-niece - popular locally - had nursed her through her illness and was the intended heiress. The patient had a horror of contemplating death, however, and refused to listen to entreaties that she must make a will to be sure that her fortune would pass to her great-niece as she wished. A change in the law was imminent and meant that a great-niece would no longer inherit automatically and the estate would probably pass to the Crown. Killing her great-aunt before the legislation came in allowed the niece to secure the fortune intended for her.

When Wimsey begins investigating, using the recurring character Miss Climpson as his intelligence agent, the great-niece is provoked into covering her trail. She kills a former servant, fakes a kidnap-murder and tries to frame a distant relative with an interest in the Dawson estate, and almost kills Miss Climpson. Lord Peter exposes the great-niece's motive and methods, including the false identity she has established in London, and she is eventually arrested and imprisoned on remand, where she commits suicide. The doctor from whom Lord Peter originally heard the anecdote has moved on and is not grateful to be vindicated.

  Characters in "Unnatural Death"

• Lord Peter Wimsey – protagonist, an aristocratic amateur detective
• Detective-Inspector Charles Parker – Wimsey's friend
• Mervyn Bunter – Wimsey's manservant
• Miss Alexandra Katherine Climpson – a gossipy, harmless-seeming spinster employed by Wimsey to make clandestine enquiries
• Miss Agatha Dawson (deceased) – a rich elderly cancer patient who died suddenly 3 years prior to the novel's action
• Miss Mary Whittaker – Miss Dawson's great-niece and heiress
• Dr Carr – Miss Dawson's doctor
• Miss Vera Findlater – a friend and admirer of Miss Whittaker
• Bertha and Evelyn Gotobed – former servants of Miss Dawson
• Rev Hallelujah Dawson – impoverished West Indian clergyman and distant cousin of Miss Dawson
• Mr Murbles – a solicitor and friend of Wimsey
• Mrs Muriel Forrest – an "expensive irregular and mysterious" lady

  Literary significance and criticism

"The tale is perhaps a little forced in conception and remote in tone. That is the trouble with all the great masters -- they accustom us to such dazzling performances that when they give us what would seem wonderful coming from other hands, we sniff and act choosy. The mode of compassing death has been carped at, but no one could do anything but rejoice at Miss Climpson and her subterfuges."^[1]

"In Unnatural Death, she had invented a murder method that is appropriately dramatic and cunningly ingenious, the injection of an air-bubble with a hypodermic, but not only, in fact, would it require the use of an instrument so large as to be farcical, but Miss Sayers has her bubble put into an artery not a vein. No wonder afterwards she pledged herself 'strictly in future to seeing I never write a book which I know to be careless'."^[2]

  Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

In 1975, an adaptation starring Ian Carmichael as Lord Peter Wimsey and with Peter Jones as Bunter, was made for BBC Radio 4.

  References

  See Also

• Law of Property Act 1925