“…You want to look dignified and consistent—what’s that got to do with it? You want to hunt down a murderer for the sport of the thing and then shake hands with him and say, ‘Well played—hard luck—you shall have your revenge tomorrow!’ Well, you can’t do it like that. Life’s not a football match. You want to be a sportsman. You can’t be a sportsman. You’re a responsible person.”

“I don’t think you ought to read so much theology,” said Lord Peter. “It has a brutalizing influence.”

It had been a while since I’d read any of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey books. Two collections showed up at bargain prices on Amazon recently, so I snapped them up. Then I settled down with the first novel, Whose Body? The author was still finding her voice as a mystery writer here, but it’s a very enjoyable read.

Lord Peter Wimsey, if you’re not familiar with him, is an English nobleman, the younger brother of a duke. He suffered “combat fatigue” in World War I, and immediately after was jilted by his fiancée. He took up detecting crime as a sort of therapy hobby, and is good at it. His success is aided by the fact that he looks and acts very much like Bertie Wooster (Ian Carmichael played both roles creditably), so people underestimate him. (His valet Bunter, by the way, is hard to distinguish from Jeeves.)

When the man who is repairing the church roof at the Wimsey ducal estate is detained by the police, the dowager duchess turns to her son Peter to figure out what’s really going on. The poor workman walked into his bathroom one morning and found a dead man in his tub, naked except for a pair of pince nez glasses. Inspector Sugg of Scotland Yard (a stereotypical character whom the author wisely faded out of succeeding books) loses no time arresting the poor man and his housemaid.

Meanwhile, a well-known Jewish financier, Sir Reuben Levy, seems to have disappeared from the face of the earth. He bore a superficial resemblance to the mysterious body in the bath, but is not the same man.

Lord Peter, assisted by his good friend Inspector Parker, takes advantage of the considerable license the police authorities allow the nobility, and starts his own investigation. It will lead to a horrible discovery and a terrible revelation.

Whose Body? is an enjoyable introduction to a stellar (and groundbreaking) detective series. I was particularly intrigued, on this reading, by certain instances of what today we’d call “cultural stereotypes.” Sir Reuben Levy’s description sounds like a standard, slightly antisemitic trope. But the author is delving deeper. We learn from those who knew him that the man was in fact a capital fellow, and much loved. The same goes for an American character who talks in the kind of broad American accent one sees so often (painfully) in old English books. But again, on getting to know him, we learn he’s an admirable guy. I’ve heard Sayers criticized for “snobbery,” but I think it’s deeper than that. She uses the stereotypes in order to transcend them, and makes a subtextual statement in doing so (Hey! I used subtextual in a sentence!)

I highly recommend Whose Body? Not only is it an intriguing, well-plotted mystery, but there are few literary pleasures that compare with listening to Lord Peter talk piffle.