Dorothy Sayers' Whose Body

"He was so upset, poor little man. He'd found a dead body in his bath."

Mr. Thipps, "the little architect man who's doing the church roof", goes to take a bath in the morning, but there's a dead man in the tub, naked except for a pair of pince-nez. Nobody he knows, he swears. "Uncommonly awkward for him."

That same evening, Sir Reuben Levy disappears. He's a successful financier, with plenty of business enemies in the course of things, though he's considered a sweetheart by his family and domestic staff.

Are the two cases connected? Well...

Parker of Scotland Yard is assigned the Levy case, suspects they might be, and wonders if this unknown corpse is his man. But the dead man was not Sir Reuben Levy.

And Lord Peter Wimsey offers himself to help with the case of the dead man in the bath.

This is the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries and comes out in 1923, though we learn he's been involved in an earlier case. that of the Attenbury Emeralds. He took to crime-solving to help with his shell shock after World War I, and turns out to be good at it.

And are the two cases connected? Of course they are.

I've read a bunch of the Lord Peter Wimsey stories before, but not all of them and not this one, I think, all out of order. It is a series that benefits from reading in order, and I might go through the series. It certainly starts off well.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Golden Age (1923). Piece of Furniture: Bathtub.