Remembering the Living…

Remembrance Day is here again, and I find myself thinking about my favourite novel on remembrance. Not dealing with war, but with its aftermath, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) by Dorothy L. Sayers, is from the golden age of detective fiction. Even the title transports us to a specific moment in time, when the inevitable murder can be euphemistically described as a bit of unpleasantness.

This is the third outing for Sayers’ aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, in which he investigates an unexplained death at his Gentleman's club. The world of the club is narrow, elitist and military. For some of the members, the Crimean War is still the War, recent events having passed them by. But for other members of the club, including Wimsey himself, the impacts of 1914-18 are very real indeed. Wimsey’s ‘shellshock’ took the form of a nervous breakdown immediately following the war, but manifests in nightmares throughout this series of novels, ensuring that remembrance has a particular significance for him. It also enables him to empathise with other veterans whatever their social class. But there are characters here for whom the PTSD of the First World War has a much more devastating effect on their daily lives ten years after the Armistice. Sayers asks us not only to remember the dead, but also the survivors.

The plot of the novel, which I’m not going to discuss in detail for obvious reasons, hinges around Armistice Day and the rituals of remembrance. Wimsey’s instinct persuades him that the death of an elderly member of the club is no accident, despite the moribund nature of many of the members. As one puts it, somewhat hysterically, in the first chapter, “He’s been dead for two days! So are you! So am I! We’re all dead and we never noticed it!” Despite the lightness of tone in much of the novel, these words resonate throughout.

For all that the dead haunt the novel, the focus is on the living. The reader is asked to engage with the way the post-war world has treated both veterans and civilians. Sayers addresses the problems of trying to get by in a society that no longer sympathises with former soldiers who are scarred both physically and mentally. She also invites us to think about the many ways in which women are impacted by this legacy. The first Remembrance Day, with its two minutes silence took place in Britain on 11th November 1919. The second also included the funeral of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. The culture of remembrance and its preoccupation with the dead rather than the living that has come to dominate narratives of the First World War had begun, and grew stronger with each passing year. In The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, Sayers reminds us that the story is a much bigger one, as well as keeping us guessing as to who did it, in the way of all good detective fiction.