When I decided to branch out into reading other members of the Inklings (the casual literary circle comprised of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and others), Dorothy L. Sayers was the obvious first choice as the only female of the group. I started out reading Mind of the Maker, Sayers’ book on the creative process; it’s still sitting next to my bed, and I turn to it when I want to give my grey matter a workout. C.S. Lewis wasn’t kidding when he famously said he liked “the extraordinary zest and edge of her conversation—as I like a high wind.” Her writing in Mind of the Maker is brisk, brilliant, and forces you to engage intensely with the text as she carries you from point to point with razor-sharp acuity.
That acuity is the bedrock of Whose Body?, the first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, in spite of Lord Peter’s languid speech and flippant manner; with shades of The Scarlet Pimpernel, he seems an unlikely detective at first, speaking in an aristocratic drawl, carefully selecting the appropriate dress in which to view a body discovered in a bathtub, and employing his valet as an assistant in surveying crime scenes. He’s the epitome of the younger son of the British aristocracy, but as the story goes on you see that this is, if not exactly a front, not the full depth of Wimsey’s character.
Wimsey is all enthusiasm when he receives a call from his mother who knows some gossip she thinks might interest him: a body has been discovered in the bathtub of an unsuspecting church architect, Mr. Thipps, wearing only a golden pince-nez. Wimsey calls on his friend, Detective Parker, who’d thought at first that the corpse might be that of a missing person he’s searching for, Sir Reuben Levy, a successful Jewish businessman who apparently disappeared from his house stark naked. It turns out not to be Levy, but still Wimsey and Parker can’t shake the suspicion that the two cases are somehow connected.
This is not tough reading like Mind of the Maker, but it’s no potboiler either. The story keeps you guessing, and even though my suspicions about the identity of the murderer were confirmed, I couldn’t have dreamed up the way in which it was done, and that’s really the focus of the whole story: how do the two crimes connect, and how was it accomplished? And why? Meantime, the character of Lord Peter is compelling as you watch his complexities emerge from behind that easy-going façade—ever so subtly—bit by bit; archetypally English, no fuss is made about his past, and ultimately, little is revealed, but you just know there is more to Wimsey than the bored aristocrat looking for his fun solving crimes and collecting antique folios.
The other characters are equally interesting, and what seem to be caricatures turn out to be something more. Wimsey’s over-talkative mother is actually sharp as a tack, and by her prattling she uncovers important details and imparts them to Wimsey in the guise of gossip. It’s no accident, either—Lord Peter’s carefully cultivated appearance of superficiality would seem to be inherited.
Detective Parker plays Watson to Wimsey’s Holmes, and there appears to be a true, if reserved, comradeship between them. In fact, Sayers isn’t afraid to mention Sherlock Holmes a number of times during the story; she makes it clear that Wimsey was personally influenced by reading the stories, and so she carries the real world (Doyle’s influence on her work) into the world of the story (the influence of the Holmes stories on Lord Peter). This and other literary references (for instance, to Dante, whom Sayers translated) give the sense that these characters live in the same world we do (albeit in the 1920s), and as in Sherlock Holmes, we come into the characters’ lives in media res; though this is the first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, this is not his first investigation, nor his first crime solved.
There’s no point denying the influence of Sherlock Holmes since Sayers doesn’t bother. Wimsey never pretends to have Holmes’s genius, but along with the fact that he too plays a musical instrument (in Wimsey’s case, the piano) there is something about his manner, his intuition, the way he puts two-and-two together in a sudden, inspired way, that gives a feeling of similarity between the two. Perhaps there’s also a similarity in the emotional walls they both put up to hide their weaknesses and sensitivities, Holmes’s wall of cold, unfeeling intellect, and Wimsey’s barrier of devil-may-care flippancy.
Whose Body? is a short, fun and very smart novel, in which Dorothy Sayers has crafted a detective compelling enough that she returned to him in 13 novels and a number of short story collections. Lord Peter Wimsey may be inspired by Sherlock Holmes, but he has a style that is all his own.
This review is part of The Golden Age of Detective Fiction at the Classics Circuit.
