The Documents in the Case (Mass Market Paperback)

~ Dorothy L. Sayers (Author) "My dear Olive, Thank you very much for your letter and kind inquiries after my health..." (more)
Key Phrases: synthetic muscarine, muscarine poisoning, racemic form, Miss Milsom, Sir James, Margaret Harrison (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

'She brought to the detective novel originality, intelligence, energy and wit.' -- P. D. James 'I admire her novels ... she has great fertility of invention, ingenuity and a wonderful eye for detail' -- Ruth Rendell 'D. L. Sayers is one of the best detective story writers.' -- E. C. Bentley, Daily Telegraph --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

The grotesquely grinning corpse in the Devonshire shack was a man who died horribly -- with a dish of mushrooms at his side.His body contained enough death-dealing muscarine to kill 30 people. Why would an expert on fungi feast on a large quantity of this particularly poisonous species. A clue to the brilliant murderer, who had baffled the best minds in London, was hidden in a series of letters and documents that no one seemed to care about, except the dead man's son.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: HarperTorch (June 21, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061043605
• ISBN-13: 978-0061043604
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 4.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #239,724 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One of Sayers Best, July 15, 2002

By	Katherine Woodbury "kwoodbury3" (Portland, ME) - See all my reviews

Documents in the Case is unlike Sayers' other mysteries. It is in the form, first of all, of documents: letters, newspaper clippings, etc. Secondly, it does not feature Lord Peter Wimsey.

It is, however, an intensely interesting book. The characters, with the exception of the femme fatale (who is convincing but entirely unlikable), are portrayed sympathetically and the reader comes away with a sense of the complexity of human nature in general and of the novel's characters specifically. No one is all good or all bad or all anything. The victim--a fussy, middle-class, conservative husband--is drawn with great insight and compassion. Equally so, the murderer, for all the cruelty of the murder, is not unlikable and even pitiable.

The main narrator has many of the same personality quirks as Lord Peter Wimsey--a reluctance to get involved, oversensitivity and feelings of self-doubt--but his motives are, I think, more convincing. His quirks are less mannerisms and more part and parcel of his character (as eventually happens with Wimsey). Like all the other characters, he is flawed but comprehensible.

In fact, the book is a most unpretentious novel. I enjoy Sayers very much and consider myself a Wimsey fan, but Documents in the Case is, to my mind, a far more realistic and thoughtful mystery than some of Sayers' better known works. The mileau is middle-class. The victim's son (who is collecting the documents) is noble-minded but imperfect: hard to like even when you want him to "win". And the characters are truly impacted by the murder.

The murder itself is interesting enough but much more interesting is the theme that runs alongside the murder: the "lop-sidedness" of life in general, the idea that living things can never achieve the cookie-cutter perfection of synthetic creations.

Recommendation: Give it a try if you are interested in Sayers' work beyond Wimsey (and if you don't mind reading books in letter or document form).

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Bad Reading Habits, February 25, 2007

By	StdPudel (Somerville, MA United States) - See all my reviews

I hope I am not holding a grudge against The Documents in the Case for not having Lord Peter Wimsey in it. As in many classic mysteries, the jacket reveals the identity of the victim and his cause of death, in this case a wild mushroom enthusiast who dies from consuming deadly Amanita mushrooms. The murder doesn't take place until more than halfway through, leaving plenty of time to set the scene. Perhaps inspired by Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, the main part of the story is told by letters written by the different characters who are proximate to the murder. Unfortunately all the characters are very self-absorbed and long-winded in a way that I did not find engaging. For social historians, The Documents in the Case highlights 1929 attitudes toward class, feminism, and the new ideas of chemistry, biology, physics, and psychology that were beginning to gain popular currency.

Loyal Dorothy Sayers fans who find this less well-known novel after reading her other books will recognize a proto-Miss Climpson and echoes of the feckless "artistic" set that Harriet Vane ran with before her murder trial.

Hard core Sayers fans will get some pleasure from this book even without His Lordship but its main value is as a period piece and exhibit in the history of detective fiction.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars No Wimsey, but plenty of good old-fashioned murder, May 26, 2006

By	Kimberly Taylor "Mad Scientist" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"The Documents in the Case" is a departure from Dorothy Sayers' excellent Lord Peter Wimsey series. In the first half ("Synthesis"), the reader is introduced to the characters (married couple George and Margaret Harrison, roommates Lathom and Munting, and the disturbed Miss Milsom) through a series of letters from and to the characters. The basis for the crime is laid out early in the book, and the murder is solved in the second section ("Analysis").

(This book should be a must-read for organic chemistry students, who will appreciate the solution to the mystery.)

Besides furnishing the method of the murder, then-contemporary science plays a huge part in this book, with characters discussing the works of Einstein, Eddington and others. To the modern reader, this seems quaint and rather naive. "Glands" are discussed multiple times, with the implication that all human behavior would be explained in the near future as a result of "heredity and encrocine secretions, economics and aesthetics and so on." Another character comments that "Nature's only a rather clumsy kind of chemist . . . rather a careless and inaccurate one." This over-confidence was hardly justifies by future developments--1930s scientists could hardly have predicted the immense complication of the interactions of "heredity and endocrine secretions", and their effects on human behavior, nor the immense difficulty in organic sythesis, or the DNA revolution.

There a couple of real scientific howlers here, notably where one character describes light as a vibration in the aether, a theory that has been completely de-bunked (the "lumineferous aether" was supposed to be the propagation medium for light). Still, keeping in mind that this book was written in 1930, it's an interesting look into contemporary mindset and theories, and an absorbing mystery.