Whose Body? by Dorothy L. SayersMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I'm on a bit of a run of reading century-old crime novels at the moment, largely for lack of anything good that's come out recently. I'd heard that the Wimsey novels had a bit more depth than most, and could easily believe it, having read some of the author's dramatic work years ago.
I'd also heard that the Wimsey of the first book isn't as developed as he later became: more of an upper-class twit (or a very intelligent man pretending convincingly to be an upper-class twit), less complex psychologically. But we do get references to his backstory: shell-shocked in World War I (there's a heartrending scene where the stress of the case gets to him and throws him into flashbacks of the trenches, and his manservant Bunter comforts him), and returned from the war to be rejected by his fiancée - I'm guessing because of the shell-shock, though it's not made explicit. And as well as effortlessly capable writing, we get at least two scenes that I found moving, the one I've already referred to and the closing scene, where Wimsey reflects on the case and its tragedy.
For it is a tragedy; the victim is well-loved and a kind, generous man, though also a canny businessman. He's Jewish, which is the occasion for antisemitic remarks and slurs from various characters, but not from Wimsey or the author; it's a book that reflects the antisemitism of the time without (in my view) participating in it.
It's also a fascinating mystery. A middle-aged Jewish man has disappeared, apparently from his house in the middle of the night; the corpse of a middle-aged Jewish man has appeared in the bath of a hapless architect, also in the middle of the same night. Are they the same man? If they're not, are the two connected other than by coincidence? Lord Peter, who has an indirect connection to the architect, who in turn has been accused of the crime by an incompetent police officer, lends his skills as a private detective, working closely with a competent police officer who's his friend.
There are a couple of moments where context could have been given earlier: it's not clear until well into the first scene with Wimsey and Parker that Parker is a police inspector, and there's an inadequately signalled scene shift where Wimsey has been talking to a witness and then, at the start of the next paragraph, is talking about that witness, and then we learn (after a few sentences of dialog) that it's several minutes later, he's somewhere else, and the person he's talking to is now Bunter. But these are minor glitches in an excellently written book. It does bristle rather with allusions to contemporary brands and phenomena, London landmarks and English and classical literature, which, having grown up a century later and on the other side of the world and received a very different education from Lord Peter (or Dorothy Sayers), I didn't get; but since they're decoration rather than being essential to the plot, that didn't matter much.
The plot itself held my attention; I did work out the murderer earlier than Lord Peter did, though he has the excuse that it's difficult to believe such a person as a murderer - until he looks more closely, and then it becomes believable. (view spoiler)
Largely because of the effortlessly excellent prose and the two scenes that moved me emotionally, this gets into the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list. It has its imperfections, keeping it out of Platinum, but it's a promising start to a series I intend to keep reading. And, because it's a popular series, I will be able to get hold of all of the books, either from Project Gutenberg for the early ones or from the library for the later ones; I also have several on my bookshelves, inherited from (I think) my grandmother. Some of the other old series I've started exploring are hard to get hold of after the first few, because they're neither out of copyright (and hence on Gutenberg) nor still popular enough to be in my local library system.
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