{"id":264,"date":"2004-04-15T22:39:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-16T02:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=264"},"modified":"2004-04-15T22:39:00","modified_gmt":"2004-04-16T02:39:00","slug":"sayers_dorothy_6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2004\/04\/sayers_dorothy_6\/","title":{"rendered":"Sayers, Dorothy L.: (04) The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name=\"108208314002781763\"><\/a> <a name=\"link_108208314002781763\"><\/a> <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m almost pleased that I didn&#8217;t like <strong>Dorothy Sayers&#8217; <cite>The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club<\/cite><\/strong> much better on this re-read; I was starting to be afraid that I&#8217;d gone all uncritically fangirlish or something. It&#8217;s a clever mystery, and does some very nice riffs on veterans and wars, and continues to move Peter&#8217;s character forward as a character, and is generally pretty good. But I simply cannot believe that part of the ending is happy, and the narrative fairly clearly wants me to. [*] For some reason, I&#8217;m not willing to forgive this the way I&#8217;ve forgiven the plot holes and unpleasant social bits of prior books.<\/p>\n<p>[*] It&#8217;s only one sentence, so I&#8217;ll <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rot13.com\/\">rot-13<\/a> the spoiler: v fgebatyl qvfyvxr eboreg sragvzna naq pnaabg pbaprvir bs naa qbeynaq orvat unccl jvgu uvz.<\/p>\n<p>Random other comments:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I read by recognizing word shapes and beginnings\/endings, not phonetics, especially with names. As a result, I always think of this book as taking place at the Belladonna Club.<\/li>\n<li>One of the wills in this book is a really excellent example of a reasonable-seeming will with hidden defects. Consider <em>every<\/em> contingency when drafting your will, no matter how remote: every permutation of gains and losses of property, of births and deaths, marriages and divorces.<\/li>\n<li>Before this re-read, I hadn&#8217;t disliked any recurring character but the Duchess of Denver. I didn&#8217;t want to agree with some disparaging remarks about Parker that I&#8217;ve seen here and there, but his limitations are more apparent to me now, alas.<\/li>\n<li>I think I read this wildly out of order the first time, because somehow I hadn&#8217;t noticed that Ann Dorland is kind of a trial run for Harriet Vane. And Peter&#8217;s patronizing to her, too.<\/li>\n<li>I think Peter must have had a shell-shock attack after the end of the case, because of the line &#8220;He sent you all sorts of messages, by the way,&#8221; in the epilogue; at least, it seems the best explanation of why Peter would have been unavailable.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Obviously, I was mistaken when I thought that a short story collection came before this one; short stories next, and then <cite>Strong Poison<\/cite>&#8212;Harriet at last, and more Miss Climpson!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m almost pleased that I didn&#8217;t like Dorothy Sayers&#8217; The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club much better on this re-read; I was starting to be afraid that I&#8217;d gone all uncritically fangirlish or something. It&#8217;s a clever mystery, and does some very nice riffs on veterans and wars, and continues to move Peter&#8217;s character forward &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2004\/04\/sayers_dorothy_6\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Sayers, Dorothy L.: (04) The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,6,34],"tags":[372],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-mystery","category-wimseyvane","tag-sayers-dorothy-l"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}