Old Maids: Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers
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Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers (Avon Books, 1964)
“I know who you are now,” said Nurse Philliter, slowly. “You — you gave evidence against Sir Julian Freke. In fact, you traced the murder to him, didn’t you?”
In Unnatural Death, the third Wimsey novel, Sayers again makes medical issues vital to the plot and the mystery. In this case, Wimsey learns of his case entirely by accident: He and his close friend Charles Parker are talking about crime over dinner, and Wimsey tells Parker that, unlike police officers, who have a public duty to voice their suspicions, doctors have no such duty and can get in trouble by doing so.
This is overheard by a doctor seated at a nearby table, who tells them a story of his own experience with doing so: A rich old woman in his care died unexpectedly — she was suffering from a terminal cancer, but that was not the cause — and he found the death puzzling and asked to do a post-mortem, which found no cause of death, followed by a chemical analysis, which revealed nothing either.
