While standing in the mystery section of the Silver Spring Public Library on a recent summer day, I did a quick Google search on the best crime novelists of all time. Up popped the name of Dorothy L. Sayers, a pioneer in the genre, with the suggestion that I try the first of Sayers’ books to star the amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey. Thankfully, my library had a copy!

It was only when I returned home that I discovered that this classic of detective fiction tuned 100 years old in 2023, making it the perfect next addition in my “year of reading dangerously.”

Whose Body? (1923) by Dorothy L. Sayers is a delightful period puzzle that turns deadly serious for Lord Peter as he works to find the answer to two mysteries. As the book opens he receives a call from his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, asking for his assistance in helping clear her architect of suspicion of murder. It seems that overnight a body, clad only with a pair of fashionable pince-nez, has appeared in his bathtub. At the same time, a famous London financier vanishes from his bedroom across town, leaving no trace. The body in the bathtub is not that of the financier, so whose body is it? The police do not suspect that the two cases are connected, but Lord Peter has his doubts.

Lord Peter Wimsey is the first in a long line of British gentlemen amateur sleuths to appear in crime novels over the next 100 years. Independently wealthy he is nonetheless without the responsibilities of peerage which passed to his older brother, the Duke. Lord Peter (the title is a courtesy one only as he is not a peer and has no right to sit in the House of Lords) is intelligent and athletic, graduating from Oxford with a first-class degree in history and a reputation as an outstanding cricket player. From a 21st century perspective, it is fair to say that his Wikipedia entry is very impressive for a fictional character in a series of crime novels!

Whose Body? is definitely a period piece, and because the dialogue seeks to be faithful to the backgrounds of the various characters, not always as easy a read as an Agatha Christie novel of roughly the same vintage. However, Sayers constructs a delightful tale with memorable heroes and villains. Thanks to the help and insights of his valet, Bunter, a skilled amateur photographer, Lord Peter becomes convinced that the two cases are linked. He proceeds on that assumption despite the skepticism of the police, including Detective Parker of Scotland Yard who works with him to untangle the two cases.

What begins as something of a simple assignment for Lord Peter turns very serious as he experiences trauma from his service in World War I just before he has to confront the man he is convinced is the murderer. Sayers does us the favor of having the murderer write a rather lengthy confession to Lord Peter, just to make sure we have connected all the various dots.

As Sarah Weinman, who writes the monthly Crime & Mystery column for the New York Times Book Review said in an appreciation of Whose Body?, “the novel is pure pleasure to read, fulfilling a desire for escape — something readers want as much now as they did 100 years ago.” This was also Sayers’ first crime novel, and “(w)hat elevated Sayers’s debut to the upper ranks of the genre was the quality of her prose and the sense that her sleuth had more emotional heft than he displayed.”

At the time, Sayers was one of relatively few women writing detective fiction. Agatha Christie’s “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” which introduced Hercule Poirot, had appeared three years earlier. While Margery Allingham would go on to publish her debut, “Black’erchief Dick,” not long after “Whose Body?,” she wouldn’t create her own gentleman sleuth, Albert Campion, until 1929 — the same year that Josephine Tey’s first mystery, “The Man in the Queue,” came out. Ngaio Marsh didn’t publish her first novel, “A Man Lay Dead,” until 1934.

Whose Body? takes the reader back, in more ways than one, to so many of the elements of the crime novel that generations of readers have come to enjoy. If you’ve never read it, or if it has been a number of years, now may be a good time to be introduced, or reintroduced, to this classic.

More to come …

DJB

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To see reviews of the other books in my year of reading dangerously (i.e., mystery novels), click here for January, February, March, April, May, June, July, and August.

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Photo by Aleks Marinkovic on Unsplash