"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.
Great introduction to Sayers' masterful mysteries.
ReplyDeleteThanks! It was a fun read.
DeleteThis is the only one of Sayers' books that I've read, but I enjoyed it, and want to read a few more of her Lord Peter Whimsy mysteries. :D
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed it. I think it was the first time I'd read it. One or two of the later ones I thought too long, but this was great.
DeleteI *think* I've only read some of her short stories. I need to get back into Classic crime...
ReplyDeleteThere's some good stuff, and this turns out to be one of them.
DeleteI don't want to start any flame wars, but when I was young and immature I used to argue with cousin about Professor Vane. My stance was Hattie was full of pride and snobbery and ingratitude for Pete's saving her from the hangman and her stance was being a chauvinist pig I had no idea how some women fear losing their identity in marriage, thus her refusing to marry Pete over the course of a half-dozen books.
ReplyDeleteInteresting! I'm not about to start a flame war myself. Honestly though I've read several of the ones with Harriet Vane, she made almost no impression on me the first reading. But I did read them all out of order. I wonder what I'll think if I do read/reread them all in order, which right now I think is likely to happen. I need to go the library tomorrow to pick up the second.
DeleteDid you know that to truly read the series in order, there are short stories betwen? There is a thick collection of the stories called Lord Peter and IIRC the publication dates are listed with the stories so that you can insert them easily enough between volumes. (There are prolly other ways to read the stories online just by following the dates too.) Ironically, I started the whole thing to read Gaudy Night in order, but I think that's actually where everything halted for me, with the most famous Harriet Vane novel. hehe
ReplyDelete-Marcie
That's a good thought about the stories. I would have probably just gotten to them at the end.
DeleteI had mixed results with some of the later ones, but that's been years, and I found this one pretty entertaining. We'll see about this project... ;-) But I do have Clouds of Witness in my hands at the moment.