I enjoyed Whose Body? a lot more than I expected to. I first read it many years ago and didn’t think it as good as the later Wimseys, but it was far more involving and enjoyable than I had remembered.
A naked male corpse discovered in the bath of a flat in London leads to a mystery involving mistaken identities, the disappearance of a prominent Jewish financier and a number of tangled threads which Lord Peter and Inspector Parker gradually work through between them. Frankly, it’s not a very plausible tale with both the method and motive for the crime stretching credulity quite a long way, but for me the quality of the writing and of Dorothy L. Sayers’s characterisation more than compensated.
The fact that this is the first of the Wimsey books does show, especially at the start where Sayers rather overdoes Lord Peter’s silly-assery and quotation-mongering, but it settles down pretty quickly and Parker, the Dowager Duchess and Bunter emerge fully formed as the excellent, delightful characters they are. One letter from Bunter to Peter was an especial highlight for me and shows Sayers’s superb grasp of style – and of ironic wit.
As often happens in books of this vintage (it was first published in 1923) the casual anti-Semitism - and in one instance, racism - of the time does grate badly on my modern ears, but it is a reflection of the mores of the time and has to be accepted with the rest of the period attitudes. (And Sayers is at some pains to paint the Jewish character as a good, decent man.)
This isn’t a true Sayers classic, but it’s still a pleasure to read and I can certainly recommend it.
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