Whose Body?, by Dorothy L. Sayers

This wonderfully complicated (yet, at its heart, quite straightforward) mystery is the first of the incomparable Lord Peter Wimsey’s novels¹ by Dorothy L. Sayers. Since this novel was first published back in the early 1920s² there have been a number of editions released, with back cover blurbs ranging from awful to adequate. This one, from amazon.com, is much better than most:

The stark naked body was lying in the tub. Not unusual for a proper bath, but highly irregular for murder—especially with a pair of gold pince-nez deliberately perched before the sightless eyes. What’s more, the face appeared to have been shaved after death. The police assumed that the victim was a prominent financier, but Lord Peter Wimsey, who dabbled in mystery detection as a hobby, knew better. In this, his first murder case, Lord Peter untangles the ghastly mystery of the corpse in the bath.

Indeed, there is a body in the tub, and there is a prominent citizen missing. Wouldn’t it be wonderfully neat if these two were one and the same? Alas, in this case, adding one and one comes up to something in the neighborhood of minus three, and it’s up to Lord Peter to show the police the error of their ways. (more…)