Unnatural Death (Lord Peter Wimsey, #3)

by Dorothy L. Sayers

I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don’t you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an’ suicide.

It is a well-established psychological fact that criminals cannot let well alone. They—” “Revisit the place of the crime?” “Don’t interrupt, blast you. They take unnecessary steps to cover the traces which they haven’t left, and so invite, seriatim, Suspicion, Inquiry, Proof, Conviction and the Gallows.

Happy murderers, like happy wives, keep quiet tongues. And they probably bear just about the same proportion to the failures as the divorced couples do to the happily mated.”

If you murder someone in a brutal, messy way, or poison someone who has previously enjoyed rollicking health, or choose the very day after a will’s been made in your favour to extinguish the testator, or go on killing everyone you meet till people begin to think you’re first cousin to a upas tree, naturally you’re found out in the end. But choose somebody old and ill, in circumstances where the benefit to yourself isn’t too apparent, and use a sensible method that looks like natural death or accident, and don’t repeat your effects too often, and you’re safe.

The Rev. Hallelujah Dawson was undoubtedly a man of colour.

“Certainly—a breath of country air would do me good, I fancy. Blow away the cobwebs, don’t you know. It might even inspire me to invent a good way of murderin’ people.

Sin is in the intention, not the deed. That is the difference between divine law and human law.

Set between the two World Wars, the Wimsey novels are more than typical manor-house mysteries.