I was very excited when I found out about The Documents in the Case, published in 1930. I have read and enjoyed several of Dorothy L Sayers’ other books, but I did not realise she had written this, the only one not to feature Lord Peter Wimsey. It is a crime novel written in epistolary form, based to a certain extent on the real-life Edith Thompson case. I was hoping it would be another Trent’s Last Case or Malice Aforethought but despite being a compelling read, I was left with a slight feeling of disappointment at the end.
The beginning is the most interesting part, where we gradually learn about the slightly odd Harrison household. It’s rather reminiscent of Patrick Hamilton’s boarding house tales. Margaret Harrison is the much younger second wife of George Harrison, who has a grown-up son, Paul, working abroad. John Munting, a writer, and Harwood Lathom, a painter, rent the flat upstairs and since the hallways adjoin, come into contact with the Harrisons. Agatha Milsom is a sort of paid companion to Mrs Harrison. Mr Harrison is keen on his hobbies of painting and the study of wild mushrooms. It is his sudden death, supposedly from eating the wrong kind of mushroom, that is the case of the title.
One picture of the Harrisons’ marriage emerges through Agatha Milsom’s letters to her sister. Another view comes from Munting’s letters to his fiancé. Mr Harrison seems quite a different character in his own letters to his son Paul. Miss Milsom thinks that Harrison is an unfeeling brute and his wife is a victim, but she inadvertently reveals that Margaret Harrison is a rather self-dramatising character, perhaps as much the cause of the rows as Mr Harrison. Munting has quite a low opinion of Mrs Harrison and is sure that the marital discord is her fault. Is Harrison the bullying husband that Agatha Milsom takes him to be, or simply older and rather set in his ways with fixed ideas of how a wife should behave? If Margaret Harrison is based to a certain extent on Edith Thompson, I got the feeling that Sayers did not altogether approve of her.
Agatha Milsom, the spinster companion who is mentally troubled and obsessed with sex is the most interesting character, but she disappears from the narrative too early on, after having played a crucial role in how events unfold. The later part of the book features the statements of John Munting and Paul Harrison. These are much longer than the letters and it begins to feel more like a conventional novel.
Munting’s letters to his fiancé, Elizabeth Drake, who is also a writer, convey something of the intellectual climate of the late 1920s, when old certainties had been shattered by the first world war and the ideas of Freud and Einstein were becoming known. His obsession with how life came into being is rather irritating, though. How are we supposed to take all this? It does rather neatly set up the discussion among the scientists at the end that leads to the solution. This chapter is very irritating, but more of that later.
Paul Harrison does not believe his father’s death was an accident and becomes the main investigator into what really happened. It’s very well worked out how he has gathered all the documents together. He also says that Munting’s letters to his wife were the work of a writer with one eye on future publication, giving us a clue as to how to read them. Some of Munting’s comments about publishers probably come from Sayers’ own experience, rather like the advertising agency background she used in Murder Must Advertise.
I was slightly irritated by Sir Gilbert Pugh only being named as the Director of Public Prosecutions right at the end of the book. Since it begins with Paul Harrison sending the bundle of documents to him, it would make the whole story much clearer if Pugh’s role was identified at the beginning.
It’s also slightly frustrating that once the poison is proved to be artificial, that is the rather abrupt end of the novel. Yet Paul Harrison spent a great deal of time trying and failing to work out exactly how the poison was administered and we never learn that.
The book was written as a collaboration between Dorothy L Sayers and Robert Eustace. He was a doctor who had worked with other crime writers before, so I assume the science came from him. I suspect that the science versus religion debate might have appealed to the religious Sayers and her desire to write something that would be seen as more than a detective story. The penultimate chapter, in which the scientists discuss the method of proving whether a substance occurred naturally or was artificially synthesised is far too long and tedious in the extreme.
The novel as a whole reads like a cross between a golden-age detective story and a “highbrow” novel of the 1920s, by an author such as Aldous Huxley, whose Point Counter Point gets a mention. It is full of references to writers of the time. John Munting is rather dismissive about A High Wind in Jamaica, and Agatha Milsom is a bit puzzled by the work of D H Lawrence.
Sayers even refers to one of her own novels, because the pathologist Sir James Lubbock says he is working on an arsenic case, presumably that of Harriet Vane in Strong Poison, published around the same time as The Documents in the Case.
The Good Reader 