Whose Body?

Dorothy L. Sayers published Whose Body? in 1923, and the book introduces Lord Peter Wimsey to readers who would follow him through eleven novels and several short story collections. Lord Peter is the younger brother of the Duke of Denver, a wealthy English aristocrat with too much time on his hands, a connoisseur’s library, occasional bouts of shell shock from the First World War, and an unsettling gift for amateur detection. The setup of the book is comic and grotesque. An architect named Mr. Thipps finds the body of a naked stranger in his bathtub, wearing only a pince-nez. Around the same time, a wealthy Jewish financier named Sir Reuben Levy disappears from his London bedroom in his pyjamas.

Lord Peter, his butler-batman Bunter, and his Scotland Yard friend Inspector Charles Parker investigate both cases, suspecting almost immediately that they are connected. The solution turns on the medical knowledge of a famous neurologist named Sir Julian Freke, who has used a rare professional opportunity to commit a crime nobody else could have solved. Sayers wrote the book quickly, partly for money, and the prose is sometimes uneven. The character of Wimsey is unmistakable from the first chapter.