The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is a 1928 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. It's the fourth book in the Lord Peter Wimsey series.
Two elderly siblings die within hours of each other. The sister's will left almost everything to her brother if he outlived her. If he predeceased her, however, her fortune goes to her friend Ann instead. The problem is, no one knows which sibling died first. The brother's grandsons desperately want their great-aunt's money. They offer to split it with Ann. She refuses. Lord Peter Wimsey is called in to clear up the mess.
The book was adapted into a miniseries in 1973.
Contains examples of:
- Absence of Evidence: Lord Peter receives a list of the effects found on the deceased, along with a comment from the manservant that there's nothing but the same things he always had on him, and remarks that that's possibly the strangest aspect of the incident. General Fentiman is supposed to have died on Remembrance Day, but it's unthinkable that he would have been out and about on Remembrance Day and not wearing The Poppy. This is one of the signs that General Fentiman actually died the previous day.
- Anonymous Public Phone Call: A mysterious phone call is made to the victim's apartment by a man using a fake name, and the police trace it to a public phone in a train station. A sign of how new the trope was at the time is that Lord Peter's first response to this news is to ask if the operator can identify the caller, with Parker having to clarify that it's one of the new type of automatic pay phone with no operator.
- The Butler Did It: Discussed when Peter and Parker are compiling a list of suspects, Peter points out that the victim's manservant had opportunity if no motive and remarks that in fiction it's so often the butler or the servant. In this case, of course, it isn't.
- Catch Your Death of Cold: Lady Dormer's death, which sets off the plot — she insisted on going to a firework display, and caught a cold which turned to pneumonia and killed her.
- Don't You Dare Pity Me!: George Fentiman and his wife are in serious financial straits, made more stressful by the fact that they're having to live off Mrs. Fentiman's income because George is too ill to hold down a job. At the beginning of the novel, Peter offers George a loan to tide them over, but George says that since there's no prospect of being able to pay the money back it would amount to taking charity from a friend, and the situation isn't bad enough yet that his pride will let him accept that.
- Driven to Suicide: The murderer at the end. It was seen as the only honourable way out of the situation—which was not unusual in those days, at least in certain realms of fiction.
- Gold Digger: The murderer, for most of the novel, obviously had means and opportunity to do the crime, but no apparent motive. This changes when Lord Peter learns that he had been romancing Ann Dorland with the aim of getting a share of her inheritance.
- Have a Gay Old Time: Peter declares, "I am not gay." He's quoting a catchphrase from Maurice Maeterlinck's Pelleas And Melisande: "Je suis pas heureuse", which today would certainly be translated as "I am not happy."
- Inheritance Murder: This seems to be the obvious motive, complicated by the fact that the will had some intricate conditions and not everybody involved had a clear idea what it stipulated. So the solution involves not only who stood to benefit from the death but who believed, rightly or wrongly, that they stood to benefit. All the direct legatees turn out to be innocent; the murderer is one legatee's gold-digging fiancé.
- Insult Friendly Fire: Peter and Parker are discussing the case when Peter makes a complaining comment about the police always taking the most suspicious view of things, having forgotten for the moment that the category of "the police" includes his friend.
- Knight Templar: Lord Peter talks the murderer into shooting himself.
- Leave Behind a Pistol: Lord Peter and one of his allies allow Dr. Penberthy to take this way out to spare his innocent ex-fiancée the disgrace of a wrongful trial.
- Line-of-Sight Alias: Mr. Oliver, from a copy of Oliver Twist.
- Loan Shark: George Fentiman's financial troubles are exacerbated by a loan taken in the past from one of these, which has left him facing an imminent repayment of £1500. Neither the loan shark nor any of his agents appear in person, but the situation makes George a suspect for a spot of Inheritance Murder.
- Of Corpse He's Alive: An attempt is made to obscure the time of death by propping the deceased up in a phone booth and then establishing him in his usual armchair at the club, apparently asleep behind a newspaper — where, since that's his usual daily routine, he remains undisturbed for nearly three hours.
- Passed-Over Inheritance: Lord Peter is brought in to determine who it is. One of the two wills leaves a generous sum of money to two brothers, but leaves far more to the younger. Peter wonders if the elder brother might have felt passed over, but it's ultimately subverted: the elder brother knew and approved of this, as he he had a steady job and no family to support, whereas his younger brother had a wife, and a difficult time finding work due to PTSD.
- Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: Ann Dorland's ex tries to portray her this way. Wimsey recognises in her the same trauma he experienced after the war, and is able to gain her trust enough to determine that she's entirely innocent, while her ex is not only a cad but a murderer.
- Shaped Like Itself: A stranger is described as looking like an attorney's clerk. He turns out to be an attorney's clerk.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Peter himself. His friend George Fentiman has an even worse case, suffering frequent psychotic episodes. Sayers's own husband was a shell-shocked ex-soldier, so she knew whereof she wrote.
- Smart People Play Chess: Lord Peter says that he's no good at chess himself because he doesn't have the right kind of mind for it; he keeps thinking of the pieces as people instead of as objects to be used and discarded.
- Smoky Gentlemen's Club: The Bellona Club has a membership of men with military backgrounds — Bellona
was the Roman goddess of war. - Spousal Privilege: Inspector Parker learns that one of the suspects is about to marry his fiancée in a hurry, and hastens to intervene, surmising that the fiancée knows something that her husband-to-be doesn't want her testifying about in court. It turns out that the fiancée doesn't know anything relevant; the real reason for the hasty marriage is so that nobody will connect the man with his previous fiancée and thus realise what his motive was.
- Tasty Gold: Lord Peter digresses on the subject, suggesting that you could kill a taxi driver by giving him a coin that poisons him when he bites it.
- There Are No Coincidences: Lord Peter explains that he suspected murder because while it was certainly possible for the timing of General Fentiman's death to be coincidental, it was more believable if it had been deliberate.Aristotle... says, you know, that one should always prefer the probable impossible to the improbable possible.
- Tuneless Song of Madness: One of George Fentiman's PTSD episodes found him dancing naked in a field and singing to the sheep "like a hoarse and rumbling wind in a chimney".
- Unable to Support a Wife: George. Unusually, the condition arises after he marries.
- Wishful Projection: Dr Penberthy accuses a number of women around him of having an obsession with sex, until it becomes clear that he's got one himself.
