Documents in the Case by Sayers And Eustace

Sayers wrote only one detective story which was not a Lord Peter work. She produced a work called Documents in the Case, which was based on the murder case of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywater, in the 1920's. Quite a few detective writers of the time wrote fictionalised versions of the story, but Sayers chose to write a more complicated work which involved a lot of scientific input for the murder method. She worked in collaboration with a doctor, Dr Eustace who supplied her with information on mushrooms and poisons. The story is set in Bayswater, in a suburban maisonette, where a Mr Harrison and his young second wife Margaret live. Harrison is an engineer, rather a bore, but a decent enough man, but he nags his wife, who is getting fed up with him. Two young men move into the flat in the top of the house, a writer and a painter, (Munting and Harwood Lathom). Margaret Harrison is increasingly bored with her husband, and she starts an affair with Lathom. Munting disapproves of his friend seducing a married woman whose husband has been friendly to Lathom. A row erupts when Harrison thinks that Munting is trying to seduce his wife. He decides to get out. He leaves the flat and gets married. Some time later, he meets Lathom again, who has picked up his friendship with Harrison. Margaret thinks she is pregnant and is scared. Lathom resolves to free her from her marriage. He goes off on a painting holiday with Mr Harrison, in a cottage in the West country. Then he has to go up to London on business. He meets Munting and invites him to come down for a couple of days. When they get there, they find Harrison has died horribly from poisoning, apparently from cooking and eating some poisonous mushrooms that he has foraged locally. Paul, Harrison's son by his first marriage, does not believe that his father would make a mistake like that over food, and thinks that he has committed suicide to free his wife from their marriage, as he knows of the affair. He reads up the letters he has had from his father and other documents and finds that it is not suicide or accident, but murder. Lathom used artificially made poison to kill Harrison, while providing himself with an alibi. He was in London when Harrison died. Paul gets hold of the love letters written by Margaret to Lathom, by bribing Lathom's charlady. He finds that she thought she was pregnant and was urging her lover to "do something" to help her. He puts together a case, and the police investigate it. Margaret (unlike Edith Thompson) is considered innocent, in spite of her compromising letters but Lathom is found guilty of murder and hanged. The book is not one of Sayers' best. It starts with a fairly sympathetic portrayal of Margaret, as a lonely wife whose husband nags at her, is suspicious of her and is not a sympathetic character. Then the sympathy switches abruptly to Harrison. There is another story about the Edith Thompson case, written by another writer of that era... F Tennyson Jesse. It's called "A Pin to see the Peepshow" and the sympathy is very much on the side of the wife and lover.