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The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

The iconic British detective series from one of our greatest ever mystery writers

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The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club

By: Dorothy L Sayers
Narrated by: Robert Bathurst
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THE MULTIMILLION-COPY BESTSELLING QUEEN OF CLASSIC CRIME, DOROTHY L SAYERS
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'An all-time classic whodunnit' Reader Review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'The best detective story writer of her generation' Reader Review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'Dorothy L. Sayers is my favourite crime writer' Reader Review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'One of the "Queens of Crime" alongside Agatha Christie' Reader Review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
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'Dorothy L. Sayers is one of our best detective story writers' Daily Telegraph

'One of crime fiction's most memorable detectives' The New York Times

'She brought to the detective novel originality, intelligence, energy and wit' P. D. James
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A compelling Lord Peter Wimsey mystery from Dorothy L Sayers.

The body of ninety-year-old General Fentiman is discovered in an armchair at London's Bellona Club on Armistice Day.

At first, his death appears entirely natural. But when the timing of his death could determine the fate of a substantial inheritance, troubling questions begin to emerge.

As conflicting accounts and hidden motives come to light, it becomes clear that somebody has a great deal to gain from concealing the truth.

Amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey, with the aid of his great friend, Inspector Charles Parker, soon discovers that beneath the Bellona Club's quiet respectability lies a far darker truth.
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'She has great fertility of invention, ingenuity and a wonderful eye for detail' Ruth Rendell

'A truly great storyteller' Minette Walters

'Part of the Golden Age of mystery writers working between the wars, Sayers is often credited as the most intelligent of them all' Guardian

'What elevated Sayers's debut to the upper ranks of the genre was the quality of her prose and the sense that her sleuth had more emotional heft than he displayed' The New York Times

'Lord Peter should become one of the best known and best loved among the many amateur detectives of fiction' The New York Herald
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Readers adore the legendary Lord Peter Wimsey series

'Dorothy L Sayers surely wrote some of the most intelligent and enjoyable detective stories of the Golden Age of Crime' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'If you haven't read this canonical mystery, you are in for a real treat' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'What tremendous fun!' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'Exceptionally clever, amusing and well written' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'Vintage mystery, a classic!' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'One of the very best' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐©1928 The Trustees of Anthony Fleming (deceased) (P)2026 Headline Publishing Group Limited 20th Century Amateur Sleuths Crime Thrillers Historical Historical Fiction Mystery Thriller & Suspense Fiction Detective
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I love these performances by Robert Bathhurst. Please do the whole series! I didn't think anyone but Edward Petherbridge could really do LPW voice but RB is perfect

perfect storytelling

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Great to have the right narrator for these at last. Hopefully we’ll get the whole series!

At last!

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I love listening to Robert Bathurst reading these. I am new to Lord Peter, but he is jolly alive to me now!

Robert Bathurst

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It is not often that a performer proves himself so entirely equal to his material that one forgets, for whole stretches together, that one is listening rather than eavesdropping; but Mr. Robert Bathurst achieves precisely this feat in his reading of Dorothy L. Sayers's The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, that most deceptively somnolent of her mysteries, in which murder arrives not with a bang but with the soft closing of a club door.

The novel itself is a study in dilatoriness deliberately employed; Sayers, never a writer to hurry her effects, allows suspicion to accumulate as dust accumulates upon a forgotten armchair, until the reader — or in this case the listener — discovers too late that he has been sitting all the while upon the scene of the crime. Her London of the between-wars years is rendered with the precision of a woman who knew its clubs, its drawing-rooms, and its silences intimately; and nowhere is this more evident than in her anatomy of the Bellona Club itself, that mausoleum of old soldiers and older grievances, presided over — if presided is the word for so passive a tyranny — by the insufferable Wetheridge, a bore so exactly observed that any man who has ever been cornered in a London club smoking-room will recognise him with a shudder of fellow-feeling.

Into this world Mr. Bathurst enters with the ease of a man for whom the part might have been bespoke. His Wimsey wants nothing: the languid drawl is there, and beneath the drawl the quality that gives it meaning — the sang-froid that is not indifference but discipline, the charm that is not vanity but armour. It is a difficult trick, to play a man who is forever playing himself, and Mr. Bathurst manages it without once letting the seams show. His command of the club's lesser inhabitants, moreover — each fussy colonel and each murmuring waiter given his own particular music — argues an actor of real and considerable range, and the whole makes for a performance not merely accomplished but, in the fullest sense, inhabited.

He follows, and does not merely imitate, two distinguished predecessors — Mr. Ian Carmichael, who found the gaiety in Wimsey, and Mr. Edward Petherbridge, who found the melancholy beneath it — and does both of them the considerable honour of being worthy of comparison at all.

A Monocle Well Filled: Bathurst Resurrects Wimsey

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Robert Bathurst is now in my top 5 narrators. The crème de la crème! Sayers created some great characters in this episode and he brought them to life with gusto. There were lots of surprising twists in the plot but Lord Peter Wimsey’s tenaciousness won out in the end!

Terrific narration. Story of twists and turns.

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