Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers
I have been quite busy this month, mostly because my partner has been overtaxed with his consulting and our free time was more limited. I have managed to read some books, but they’ve mostly been of the interlibrary loan, must-return-in-two-days, nonfiction variety that were therefore reviewed at my other blog.
I couldn’t let an entire month go by without offering a review for you to ponder, though, so I pulled out a book I haven’t read in quite a while, and gave it a whirl.
Whose Body? is the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey books by Dorothy L. Sayers. In introducing this intriguing character – a younger son of an aristocratic family, a seeming dilettante, collector of rare books, yet also a shellshocked survivor of World War One and a pretty egalitarian guy given his socioeconomic class – Sayers skillfully builds a traditional whodunit. The alert reader who pays attention to detail will make note of the subtle information that eventually leads to the killer, and the reader who enjoys simply reading without attempting to presolve the mystery will find plenty of good dialogue and narrative to entertain them.
I went on to read the entire Wimsey series and enjoyed them all very much; in fact, this was probably my least favorite. That had very little to do with Sayers’s skill or the mystery itself; both are quite good. However, the suspected victim in this book is a rich, self-made Jewish financier who convinced an ‘otherwise well-bred’ English lady of the upper class to marry him (by the expedient of them being in love). I do not know whether it represents Sayers’s personal prejudice, or more generally that of the era she was writing in and about, but there is a lot of anti-Semitism in this book. I suspect it is the latter, as there is no continuation of this effect in the other books. Still, it made this first book a bit uncomfortable to read, and I remember experiencing trepidation as I was preparing to read the second Wimsey book. Since there was no recurring anti-Semitic theme, I read as I said the entire series, and I don’t hesitate to recommend them to others.
