A "Beastly, Blood-Sucking Woman": Invocations of a Gothic Monster in Dorothy L. Sayers' Unnatural Death (1927)

The authors have demonstrated that Sayers invokes the Gothic in Unnatural Death, giving her novel touches of delicious horror, suspense, and shock that elevate it beyond the ordinary puzzle-plot mystery of her day. But Sayers achieves more than this. In Mary Whittaker she creates a monster whose systematic transgressions of law and nature come with a five-generation pedigree and hearken even further back to the transgressions of Le Fanu's Carmilla. As revenants, vampires are powerful symbols of the impossibility of closure. Even after Carmilla has been staked, with her head struck off, her corpse burned, and her ashes consigned to a river, she continues to haunt her victim, who fancies that she can yet hear Carmilla's light footsteps at her door. Similarly, even after Mary Whittaker has committed suicide in jail and had her strangled body inspected by the detectives, her uncanny influence lingers: Peter Wimsey, emerging from the jail, is ready to mistake an eclipse for the end of the world.