This is one of my favourite Dorothy L Sayers' novels.... It is set in London, a few years after the war. Sayers knew Bloomsbury well, and in this book, she gives us a picture of soldiers who have been traumatised by their War experiences, and the Bohemian artistic society of London at that time. Women writers, painters and other artists lived there as it was central but inexpensive, and the new freedoms for women meant that they could leave home and lead more independent lives. She lived in flats in the area for many years, keeping up a flat there even when she had bought a home in Essex.
Living away from home also gave women a chance to be more sexually free, and there was fairly reliable contraception.. which also added to their liberties.
However the book starts in the Bellona Club, a club largely patronised by military officers, on Armistice Night, when the country still had a 2 minute silence to remember the War dead. Wimsey is there as he is meeting the father of one of his friends who was killed in the War.. and he meets another friend, George Fentiman, who was badly shell shocked and is now unable to hold down a job. George's elderly grandfather goes to the Club most days, he is a General, very frail, and he lives alone... so he spends most of his time dozing and reading at the club. George and Wimsey talk, and George reflects that the old man was in the Crimean war and has no idea of the horrors of modern warfare...and that his own older brother Robert, a career military man, is also unimaginative and "had a good War"... Then, one of the members goes to speak to the General, and finds that he is dead....
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