Written by Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957), this was first published in 1923, and is available on Internet Archive. It's a fairly early example of detective fiction by women writers. Agatha Christie had introduced Hercule Poirot three years earlier. Margery Allingham didn't bring out Albert Campion until 1929 (also the year that Josephine Tey started her mysteries). Ngaio Marsh's first wasn't until 1934.


Dorothy L. Sayers

Whose Body? is the very first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery. At the end of 2022, I decided to fill in some of the gaps in a series that I'd loved in my twenties, but the one I started with, The Five Red Herrings, didn't really live up to the ardour of my memories.

This one -- another I'd not read -- comes much closer to that goal. Admittedly, it's a little weird. The body of an unknown man, wearing nothing but a gold pince-nez, turns up in Mr Alfred Thipps's bathtub... Meanwhile, a wealthy Jewish financier, Sir Reuben Levy, disappears. The body in the bath (though there are certain resemblances) is not that of the financier. So who is the one, and where is the other, and are the cases connected?

I wouldn't say the plot is particularly credible. But when are they ever? The circumstance of the pince-nez is the weirdest red herring... And although the culprit, in a farewell letter, explains that two mischances brought the scheme down, actually it would have been a sheer impossibility for all the joints in the killer's plot to work smoothly...

No matter... The plot, with Sayers, is only part of the point.


Surely the most tone-deaf cover ever...

The first thing that's interesting is that we're in at the beginning of Wimsey, whose creation helped Sayers deal with two major life challenges. On the one hand, 1922 saw her starting a new job as copywriter for an advertising agency; that same year, her relationship with writer John Cournos fizzled out. What to do then? WRITE.

In an article entitled How I Came to Invent the Character of Lord Peter Wimsey (published in 1936), Sayers says of her character, "I do not as a matter of fact remember inventing Lord Peter Wimsey... He walked in complete with spats and applied in an airy don’t-care-if-I-don’t-get-it way for the job of hero." He has carried on charming people. In 1985, The Times of London included on its Society page the announcement of Wimsey's Golden Wedding anniversary (he eventually marries writer Harriet Vane). And in 1990, a portrait of Wimsey, as he would have looked at 21, was presented to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was supposed to have studied. You don't do these things with characters that haven't resonated...

The Oxford connection is quite significant. Sayers was born in Oxford (Old Choir House, Brewer Street); her father was chaplain of Christ Church; and she began her studies at Somerville College in 1912. She graduated in 1915, but women couldn't actually be awarded degrees until the rule change of 1920, at which point she was among the first women to receive a degree from Oxford.

Wimsey, the second son of a duke, lives a life of ease. In that 1936 article, Sayers describes how she compensated for her own penury by endowing him with everything her heart desired: "Lord Peter's large income... I deliberately gave him... After all it cost me nothing and at the time I was particularly hard up and it gave me pleasure to spend his fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered him an Aubuson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it. I can heartily recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to all who are discontented with their incomes. It relieves the mind and does no harm to anybody."

Interestingly, though, he's not reckoned to be particularly good-looking. In fact, the introductory description of him must rank among the most extraordinary in crime literature: "His long, amiable face looked as if it had been generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola." What??! We're told he has rather hard grey eyes, but his face becomes softer when he's playing music (which he does very well, of course): "At no other time had he any pretensions to good looks, and at all times he was spoilt by a long, narrow chin, and a long, receding forehead."

He still suffers from panic attacks and hallucinations, as a result of shell shock from World War I. As his mother says: "I suppose we can't expect to forget all about a great war in a year or two." This must have resonated with many at the time of publication.


Ian Carmichael (1920-2010), the face of Lord Peter Wimsey for British TV viewers in the early 1970s

His manner, initially at least, is Woosterish. One character in the book says: "He talked the most fatuous nonsense, certainly, but in a disconcerting way. He didn't dig into a joke and get all the fun out of it; he made it in passing, so to speak, and skipped away to something else before your retort was ready." This chattering habit enables him both to stay disengaged, and to disarm others so that they underestimate him, and become indiscreet.

Of course, the reader knows how bright he is. But the vocabulary of movement that Sayers applies to him ably projects the languorous, detached qualities that are also part of his modus operandi. We see him "ambling genially in", for example, and watch as he "roamed in, moist and verbena-scented" after a bath. "Beast of a day, ain't it?" he might say, "Very good of you to trundle out in it." But he's a man after my own heart: "Hate anything tiresome happenin' before breakfast."

Wimsey is also already fretting about the ethics of his activities as a solver of criminal cases (a concern that grows over the series, if memory serves). The goal of these activities, logically, is to get the right person hanged, or "quodded". Given that reality, he feels he oughtn't to find the pursuit amusing, and yet there is that element to it, which makes him feel guilty. And somehow his status as an amateur -- he doesn't HAVE to do this -- makes things worse: "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."

Then there's Bunter. Mervyn Bunter, actually, although we rarely hear his first name. Bunter was Wimsey's batman during their army days, and he now occupies a position as butler, valet, and sleuth's assistant. His language is respectful to the nth degree ("Her Grace has just called up from Denver, my lord. I was just saying your lordship had gone to the sale when I heard your lordship's latchkey"), and he is the ultimate creator of comfort (when Detective Parker arrives for breakfast, we're told: "Mr Bunter served him with glorious food, incomparable coffee, and the Daily Mail before a blazing fire of wood and coal"). Given what we know of Sayers's sources of inspiration, this probably means she subsisted on tinned beans, Camp coffee, and a meagrely pop-popping gas stove...

Bunter is fastidious, refusing to let Lord Peter go out "in those trousers", and saying of another servant from whom he's wheedling information: "His views on women and the stage were such as I should have expected from a man who would smoke with your lordship's port."

But Bunter is so much more than a domestic genius. Because he can strike up matey relationships with others in the servant class, he can winkle the truth out of a fellow-dogsbody like nobody's business. He's also a whizz with a camera; he's very observant; he can handle a rare books auction with aplomb; and Wimsey trusts him to pick out his newspaper reading priorities for him.

We're told Wimsey pays him GBP 200 a year. Which, a little research tells us, is not a bad sum. A "butler-valet" would have earned about GBP 60 in 1910, although wages rose after the war. A live-in housekeeper in a large house, for example, would have earned about GBP 25 back in the 1840s, rising to GBP 65 post-war. And a butler would earn more than a housekeeper (maybe 30 per cent more). So Bunter is doing well, and is obviously valued.


The joys of "service"

Of course, all this stratification is redolent of Britain's never-ending bugbear, the class system. And Sayers, like so many others of her time, is never above sending up the lower classes.

Everything is relative, though. I'm not sure whether Lord Peter is being disingenuous when he tells US industrialist John P. Milligan that the incomes of all the toffs back in the country seat where he originated wouldn't even cover the railway king's telephone calls -- but maybe he was correct.

Egalitarianism has definitely not made inroads. Lord Peter's mother, who is generally unflappable and reliable, and an all-round good sort, doesn't see any advantages in socialism, which she sees as "a mistake": "Of course it works with all those nice people, so good and happy in art linen and the weather always perfect -- Morris, I mean, you know -- but so difficult in real life."

So all this is good value. And there are also some great set pieces. The inquest scene -- if you can bring yourself to look past the classism (and the Duchess is on fire here, remarking that the lower-middle-class jury have "unfinished-looking faces... rather like sheep") -- is hilarious, with its hypochondriac, lozenge-swallowing, faintly misanthropic Coroner. There's also a gripping exhumation scene, made very tense by the use of the second person and incomplete sentences.

***

Detective stories often have a kind of meta-element, in that they reference their own genre. This one does too. There are a couple of nods to Leon Kestrel, the Master Mummer, and several to Sherlock Holmes.

There are also some humorous little asides about the detection process. For example:

Wimsey: "'You see, Lady Swaffham, if ever you want to commit a murder, the thing you've got to do is to prevent people from associatin' their ideas. Most people don't associate anythin' -- their ideas just roll about like so many dry peas on a tray, makin' a lot of noise an' goin' nowhere, but once you begin lettin' 'em string their peas into a necklace, it's goin' to be strong enough to hang you, what?'

"'Dear me!' said Mrs Tommy Frayle, with a little scream, 'what a blessing it is none of my friends have any ideas at all!'"


"The Wimsey Arms: sable, three mice courant argent; Crest: a domestic cat crouched as to spring, proper, etc"

***

Sayers is frequently accused of anti-Semitism, and Amy E. Schwartz notes that this is the book that most often comes under attack on this count, even during Sayers's lifetime.

It is true, as Schwartz says, that the characters "live in a world soaked in anti-Semitic attitudes". And yet Sir Reuben Levy is portrayed very positively: His diary reveals him to be "kindly, domestic, innocently proud of himself and his belongings, confiding, generous and a little dull". The Honourable Freddy Arbuthnot, a friend of Wimsey's, gives his aristocratic approval: "The old man's nothing to be ashamed of nowadays. He's self-made, of course, but he don't pretend to be anything else. No side." The Duchess's opinion of Sir Reuben, though generally approbatory, is filtered, as always, through her class-consciousness and general conservatism. Nor can she be deemed to represent the authorial voice. Equally, the perp (emphatically Gentile) turns out to be a bit of a crazed proto-Nazi, clearly inferior in every way to the kind and frugal Sir Reuben.

Still, it remains true that other Sayers writings are more ambiguous. And Schwartz's article -- very illuminating on the whole topic, and well worth reading -- argues that Whose Body? holds the key to her attitudes: "You could write [the Duchess's disquisition on the habits of Jews] off in exasperation as a pitch-perfect expression of aristocratic anti-Semitism in its purest form; or you could conclude that the story is partly ABOUT anti-Semitism and that the author, sympathetic to Sir Reuben and his ghastly end, is merely capturing it with her customary virtuosity". But even that interpretation would leave us missing something, she maintains, "for surely what is coming through here is anxiety -- anxiety about the changing and not-changing status of Jews in society; anxiety about intermarriage and whether it can turn out well. And the anxiety is coming not from the aging duchess -- why would she care? -- but from the author."

And why might that be? Where might that anxiety be stemming from? Well, Cournos (remember that broken relationship?) was a Russian-born Jew. For Sayers, these questions were very personal. Schwartz again: "Taken together, Sayers’s novels tell a broader story, worrying away obsessively (and more sharply as the years pass) at the question of Jews’ social acceptance, their marriages to Christians and what it is like to live in their families. By the end of Strong Poison, Sayers is still toying with the possibility that Freddy and Rachel [Sir Reuben's daughter] can be happy; by Busman’s Honeymoon, she is more bitter but still curious how 'Christian family life' looks from the outside. More than her actual portraits of Jews, what comes through most clearly is the confused urgency of her emotions about them -- and this, in light of her biography, is utterly understandable."

That her attitudes appeared to harden, once she had finished writing fiction, is very sad, perhaps reflecting "a gradual coarsening of views as the live emotions of her youth hardened into resentment at a life of romantic disappointment".

I'm impressed by the nuance of Schwartz's argument: "Call me a soft touch, but all I can feel for this arc is sympathy. How much weight to give to the unknowable dark aspects of an author’s life is a personal decision every reader must make; but what’s written in that author’s works at least lends itself to careful analysis and to the use of the good old traditional skill of close reading. Sayers herself, in the voice of Harriet Vane, is the first to acknowledge that what she writes is not great literature of lasting worth; that’s why in her later years she gave it up for Dante. But less 'serious' work still reflects life, not least in its portrayal of wit and wisdom and wrongheadedness all mingled. A continuing affection for such work -- for Sayers and the world she’s created -- provides a good incentive for a reader to push back a little against the present moment’s tendency to take instant and maximum offense at any questionable reference to anybody. Continuing to read and savor Dorothy L. Sayers offers us a chance to hone our ability to sort out which kinds of questionable comments about Jews are seriously bad, which are bad but forgivable, which are dangerous and in need of denunciation and which are essentially trivial and best ignored. And this is a life skill that will not lose its value any time soon."

All in all, then, a light little book, but a good read, and a mine of things to ponder.


Sir John Soane's Museum, 2023. I imagine Lord Peter's place looking a bit like this