Whose Body?
Dorothy L. Sayers
191 pages
published in 1923
Back in 2001 when I started this booklog I’d just discovered Dorothy L. Sayers and her Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels, which explains the high porportion of them amongst the crime fiction I read in 2002/02. At the time I read whatever one I could get my hands on, without regards to publication order, which led to some unfortunate accidents, like reading Have his Carcass before Strong Poison. Once I’d finished the series I was a bit sated, which explains why I hadn’t read another Lord Peter novel in over four years. But when I was looking for a light, short detective novel to read in bed one dreary weekend, my eye fell on Whose Body? and I thought it high time to reread it.
Whose Body? is the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, originally published in 1923. We first meet Lord Peter in the back of a cab, on his way to a rare books action, when he realises he left his catalogue at home. One damn and a annoyed taxi driver later, he’s back just in time to hear his man Bunter answer the phone. Luckily he come home when he did, because it’s his mother, the Dowager Duchess, who asks him to help with a spot of bother for one her acquaintances, Tipps, who just found a body in his bathtub – a stark naked body, apart from a pair of eyeglasses.