Whose Body? is the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, and the first Dorothy L. Sayers book I’ve read: I suspect I will read more. Lord Peter Wimsey is an aristocrat/amateur detective who collects rare books: when this novel opens he’s on his way to a book sale but gets sidetracked when he hears about a mystery to investigate. The mystery is a murder: an architect in Battersea has discovered a dead man in his bathtub, naked except for a pair of gold pince-nez. Who is the dead man, and how did he end up in a stranger’s apartment?
Meanwhile, Wimsey learns from his friend Parker, who’s on the police force, that a “famous financier”—Sir Reuben Levy—has disappeared, under strange circumstances (28). Levy seems to have gone out to dinner with friends, left for an appointment, returned home, slept in his bed, then vanished. None of his clothes are missing; he’s even left his glasses behind, despite being very near-sighted. Another inspector from Scotland Yard is convinced the body in the bath is Levy: it quickly becomes clear that it isn’t, but are the two cases connected?
I was pretty charmed by this book, particularly by Wimsey’s interactions with some of the supporting characters, and also by Sayers’s style, which is smart and often funny and sometimes earnestly concerned with the business of being a person in a world of other people. I love that our first description of Wimsey’s appearance is this, which is ridiculous and funny and great: “His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola” (9). I love Wimsey’s valet, Bunter, who makes sure Wimsey is dressed appropriately and is passionate about photography and assists with gathering evidence. I love how Wimsey, when given a reason to stay involved with the investigation of the Battersea case, says “I feel so happy, I shall explode” (47). And I like Wimsey’s interactions with Parker, in passages like this:
“Well, it’s no good jumping at conclusions.”
“Jump? You don’t even crawl distantly within sight of a conclusion. I believe if you caught the cat with her head in the cream-jug you’d say it was conceivable that the jug was empty when she got there.”
“Well, it would be conceivable, wouldn’t it?”
“Curse you,” said Lord Peter. (67)
Or this:
“That’s what I’m ashamed of, really,” said Lord Peter. It is a game to me, to begin with, and I go on cheerfully, and then I suddenly see that somebody is going to be hurt, and I want to get out of it.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” said the detective, “but that’s because you’re thinking about your attitude. You want to be consistent, you want to look pretty, you want to swagger debonairly through a comedy of puppets or else to stalk magnificently through a tragedy of human sorrows and things. But that’s childish. If you’ve any duty to society in the way of finding out the truth about murders, you must do it in any attitude that comes handy. You want to be elegant and detached? That’s all right, if you find the truth out that way, but it hasn’t any value in itself, you know. You want to look dignified and consistent—what’s that got to do with it? You want to hunt down a murderer for the sport of the thing and then shake hands with him and say, “Well played—hard luck—you shall have your revenge tomorrow!’ Well, you can’t do it like that. Life’s not a football match. You want to be a sportsman. You can’t be a sportsman. You’re a responsible person.”
“I don’t think you ought to read so much theology,” said Lord Peter. “It has a brutalizing influence.” (158-159)
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