The Documents in the Case

The Documents in the Case is a 1930 novel by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace. It is the only one of Sayers's twelve major crime novels not to feature Lord Peter Wimsey, her most famous detective character. However, the forensic analyst Sir James Lubbock, who appears or is mentioned in several of the Wimsey novels, also appears in The Documents in the Case. Plot This is an epistolary novel, told primarily in the form of letters between some of the characters, using the multiple narrative technique associated with Modernist novelists of the period. This collection of documents—hence the novel's title—is explained as a dossier of evidence collected by the victim's son as part of his campaign to obtain justice for his father. Novelist John Munting shares, with former public school contemporary and talented painter Harwood Lathom, a rented top floor flat in respectably suburban Bayswater, London. The landlord and downstairs neighbour, Harrison, is a staid, middle-aged widower who has remarried. His new wife Margaret is younger, attractive, passionate and self-absorbed. Lathom and Mrs Harrison begin an affair, the husband suspecting nothing, and Lathom paints a remarkable portrait of her. Creeping downstairs to meet his mistress one night, Lathom encounters the Harrisons' neurotic live-in spinster companion, Agatha Milsom, who mistakes him for Munting in the dark and makes accusations of assault. Faced with Harrison's furious reaction and glad of an excuse to leave a distasteful situation, Munting moves out and marries his fiancée. Lathom departs for Paris and his portrait of Mrs Harrison, exhibited at the Royal Academy, makes his reputation on the London art scene. Meeting Lathom by chance some time later, Munting is persuaded to accompany Lathom to a remote Devonshire cottage where he is holidaying with Harrison, who is pursuing his hobby of cooking with ingredients available in the wild, and is an expert on edible mushrooms. On arrival they find Harrison hideously dead, apparently having cooked and eaten poisonous fungi by mistake. Returning from Africa, Harrison's engineer son Paul suspects that Lathom and his stepmother have conspired to murder Harrison, and Munting is drawn unwillingly into the investigation. He learns that muscarine – the poison that killed Harrison – in its natural state, differs from synthetic muscarine: all molecules of muscarine are asymmetrical, and differ from their mirror image.