Whose Body?
Ratings78
Average rating3.5
I so enjoy Lord Peter. I love his fool act, and how Dorothy L. Sayers plays with the words and manages to make this very like Wodehouse. Agatha Christie's early novels have some of that same humor and lightness.
I had forgotten his shell shock. Being reminded of the “Sams” of the world was good. Bunter takes care of his lord, but who takes care of Bunter? Do the common soldiers and footmen not suffer from shell shock, because they don't “carry the responsibility”? Did people really think of PTSD as officers' problem?
I also enjoyed the injection scene.
Clever plot, but tedious detail causes the plot to move at a glacial pace. And the humour was no doubt funny in 1923, but isn't 98 years later. Wimsey's mode of speech is ludicrous, losing ending “g”'s like an Irishman and sprinkling “don't you know” and “what?” at the end of half his sentences. This is in addition to the casual racism of “a bit of Tar-baby in his background” and a “decent enough Jew”. Very very dated and not for me. No Lord Peter Wimsey in my future.
Somehow I had managed to go through life without reading any Dorothy L. Sayers. Now in the process of rectifying that.
This, her first Lord Peter Wimsey story, is quite a good whodunit. An unidentified body is discovered in strange circumstances, a rich industrialist disappears, and somebody is speculating in seemingly worthless stocks. These apparently unrelated things grab Lord Wimsey's interest. After that he is like a hound on the scent.
A nice cozy – somewhat whimsical, well plotted, intricate, and loaded with oddball characters. Solid 4 stars.
(You can get a high quality ebook of this book at Standard Ebooks.)
I have a hard time to put away a book I don't like, to stop reading it feels like admitting defeat. I know that I won't finish it but I won't admit it and I try to read, for months, and then I give it up.
We were watching a quiz show my dad and I and he got the question “Who wrote the books about Lord Peter Wimsey?” right and I was pretty impressed by that. Dad said he knew because grandma used to read them. So I wanted to read these books, but I won't because the first one was putting me to sleep. I would love to have a cup of tea with my grandma and ask her what it is about the books that she likes, maybe she could convince me to give it another try? I wish I had known my grandma better, I wish she was still around. I think I would have appreciated her more now when I'm older.
3.5 stars
An interesting mystery...Sayers has not made my favorites list in one swoop, but I will probably continue reading the series. There was quite a bit of talking out loud and reasoning aloud, and quite a bit of gory detail, which did get old after awhile, but the mystery was well plotted and reasoned.
“Whose Body?” is a solid little first mystery in the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series. While the novel could have used a bit of tuning up to shift it to the 3.5 or 4.0 level, it is still enjoyable, especially for those who like the old pip-pip cheerio of the British upper class often found in escapist lit between the world wars. I shall take a crack at the next one in the series at some point, although I'm trying not to gorge on an entire series at once, so as not to get author/character fatigue.
“Whose Body” shines in characterization, many of whom practically leap off of the page, particularly Lord Wimsey's family. I particularly liked Merwyn Bunting, Lord Peter Wimsey's servant; he writes an engaging letter to Lord Peter about 3/4 of the way into the story that cracked me up. Also, Ms. Sayers hints at a backstory for Lord Peter by referring to the early case of Lord Attenbury's emeralds, which gives the reader a hint at what the younger son of the family was up to and why he might be approached to help solve a crime. Lord Peter himself has bits of Bertie Wooster (my favorite landed dingbat) and Sherlock Holmes.
Another element of the book, and, perhaps, the series, are parodies of Sir Arthur's Holmes and his methods, as well other typical Golden Age whodunnits. While the novel generally follows many of the “official” rules of the genre, it also breaks away from time to time, which is what piques an interest in continuing the series.
Is this solution to the mystery particularly surprising? No, not from my perspective. The villain's motive was a bit ho-hum and the confession a bit too detailed. But, I still enjoyed the book for its Wodehouseian nonsense.
Book Review: Whose Body? by Dorothy Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries #1) - a young British Lord assists a Scotland Yard Detective in solving a murder (Dorothy Sayers was a well know Christian author, crime novelist and playwright that was from the same era, and friends with CS Lewis). This novel is in the public domain and so free or very cheap for ebooks (several copies are $0.99 in the kindle store.)
My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/whose-body/
On the first page of her first book about him, Sayers describes Lord Peter Wimsey: ‰ЫПHis long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.‰Ыќ