Whose Body? is a 1923 mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. It's the first in the Lord Peter Wimsey series.
Mr. Thipps is horrified to wake up one morning and find a dead body in his bathtub. At the same time, the household of Sir Reuben Levy are baffled by Sir Reuben's disappearance. Lord Peter Wimsey and his friend Inspector Charles Parker investigate both cases, and discover both of them lead back to the same criminal.
Contains examples of:
- Above Good and Evil: Sir Julian Freke believes that morality is a neurological reflex, redundant in a modern, individualist society, and that one who can commit immoral acts without guilt or shame is therefore a more enlightened human being. This is part of his motivation for committing at least one murder.
- Afraid of Needles: Lord Peter claims to be afraid of injections. Although it may just be a ruse to avoid that specific injection, which he correctly suspects has been poisoned to get him out of the way.
- Amateur Sleuth: Lord Peter Wimsey is an independently wealthy aristocrat whose hobby is detection. He's never held any job — he's too rich to actually need one.
- And Some Other Stuff: Freke attempts to do away with Lord Peter using "an almost unknown poison, for which there is at present no recognised test, a concentrated solution of sn—" — but he's interrupted while delivering this explanation, so what exactly it's a concentrated solution of is never revealed.
- Battle Butler: Bunter is quite a competent detective in his own right, and, like Peter, he's an ex-soldier.
- Beardness Protection Program: Inverted. Sir Reuben has a very thick beard. The body in the bath shows signs of having been recently shaved. The obvious conclusion is that someone shaved Sir Reuben to prevent his corpse being identified, right? No; the murderer chose a man who bore a passing resemblance to Sir Reuben, including the beard. The murderer shaved the substitute, correctly guessing that as no one knew what Sir Reuben looked like without the beard, anyone who did notice the body didn't look quite like him would assume it was just because of the missing beard.
- Better to Die than Be Killed: Freke, on discovering that his arrest is imminent, opts for suicide (though in the event the police get to him before he carries out the decision). Interestingly, he had enough time to have made a run for it, but chooses not to; he sees it as just delaying the inevitable, and in any case it would mean he would have to abandon his medical research.
- Big Secret: Thipps becomes a suspect in part because he gives a confused account of his whereabouts during the time the corpse was deposited in his apartment. He eventually admits that he had been persuaded to go to a nightclub, and narrowly avoided getting arrested when it was raided by the police.
- Blue Blood: Peter and his family are some of the highest nobility in the realm, as are a great many of their friends.
- Body in a Breadbox: The body in question is found lying, naked except for a pair of pince-nez, in the bath of a man who had no previous connection to the living person it had been.
- Bowdlerise: In the first edition, Parker knows at once that the body can't be Sir Reuben's because he, being Jewish, was circumcised and the body isn't. The publishers thought this was too crude and made Sayers change it. In later editions, Parker instead references the Adolf Beck case - a real legal scandal involving mistaken identity between two similar-looking gentlemen.
- Broken Hero: Peter always appears to be a cheerful Upper-Class Twit and a Motor Mouth, but he suffers from shell shock from his time in the War. Part-way through the case, he has flashbacks and believes he's back in the trenches.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Peter himself. A motor-mouthed British nobleman who drops literary quotations almost continuously, plays word games with everyone he meets, and has a hobby as an amateur detective. He's a very good amateur detective.
- Caught Monologuing: Freke intends to deprive the law of its target by committing suicide, and has time to do it, but can't resist the temptation to write an extensive and detailed suicide note explaining just how clever he was. The police bust in and catch him while he's in the middle of adding a second postscript.
- Clueless Detective: Inspector Sugg tries the "Accuse Everybody" method, even at one point genuinely considering a mostly-deaf octogenarian of being in on the crime (a crime which she only found out about days after her son was arrested by Sugg). It's noted that the only reason Sugg didn't try to arrest her is just how obviously unaware of the discovery of the body — let alone anything else related — she so obviously is. As it is, Sugg gets publicly reprimanded for his arrests of Mr Thipps and Gladys on theories which are essentially mere suspicion.
- In at least one adaption, the octogenarian in question is barely able to sit up, yet Sugg accuses her of carrying a dead body while climbing up a drainpipe to a second story window, and is ready to make an arrest on that suspicion.
- Cultured Badass: Lord Peter Wimsey, the second son of a duke, speaks multiple languages (including French and Latin), is a book collector, a well-known cricket player, very careful of his clothes, and is famed across Europe for his taste in wines. Takes up detective work as a hobby, which he claims to be either out of boredom or to distract himself from his memories of World War I (probably both), and the result of inexhaustible curiosity which he has been in the habit of acting on nearly his entire life.note
- Deadly Doctor: Freke kills his victim, and then dissects the body as part of a lecture to his students. And then there's his attempt to murder Wimsey.
- Dead Man Writing: Subverted. When he knows the police are close to catching him, the murderer plans to take poison and writes a gloating note to the police and Lord Peter to be found near his body. Unfortunately for him, the police burst in mid-sentence, and he's presumably tried and hanged as a common criminal.
- Defective Detective: Lord Peter Wimsey has a lot of advantages, being a rich aristocrat, but he also has a less-than-mild case of shell-shock.
- Disposing of a Body: The entire mystery hangs on the villain's creative solution to this problem.
- Dramatic Irony: In his long missive, Freke claims that "In twenty minutes his own wife could not have recognized him." The murderer evidently was much too caught up on the human head: just the previous chapter, Lady Levy had no difficulties whatever identifying her husband's dissected and decaying remains by means of the rest of him.
- Evil Counterpart: Sir Julian Freke, a genius who kills without remorse, motivated by humiliation of being rejected in favour of a Jewish nobody, as well as his own medical theories, is contrasted with Lord Peter, an intelligent man who catches criminals as a fun diversion and feels deep guilt.
- Flashback-Montage Realization: The literary equivalent occurs when Lord Peter has his "Eureka!" Moment and figures out who did it and how.A bump on the roof of the end house—Levy in a welter of cold rain talking to a prostitute in the Battersea Park Road—a single ruddy hair—lint bandages—Inspector Sugg calling the great surgeon from the dissecting-room of the hospital—Lady Levy with a nervous attack—the smell of carbolic soap—the Duchess' voice—"not really an engagement, only a sort of understanding with her father"—shares in Peruvian Oil—the dark skin and curved, fleshy profile of the man in the bath—Dr Grimbold giving evidence, "In my opinion, death did not occur for several days after the blow"—india-rubber gloves—even, faintly, the voice of Mr Appledore, "He called on me, sir, with an anti-vivisectionist pamphlet"—all these things and many others rang together and made one sound, they swung together like bells in a steeple, with the deep tenor booming through the clamour:
"The knowledge of good and evil is a phenomenon of the brain, and is removable, removable, removable. The knowledge of good and evil is removable." - Genius Ditz: Freddy Arbuthnot has a deep understanding of the stock market, but in all other matters is a blithering Upper-Class Twit.
- The Girl Who Fits This Slipper: The pince-nez found on the body turn out to be of a very unusual prescription, very high with a significant difference between eyes. When the owner tries to get them back, he is in turn made a suspect; interestingly, the pince-nez were picked up by the criminal coincidentally, and the owner had no relation whatsoever to any of the people the crime actually involved.
- Greedy Jew: Averted. Sir Reuben is a Jewish financier, and several characters express anti-Semitic attitudes towards him (though notably, only the characters intended to be unsympathetic; by contrast, the Dowager Duchess merely is puzzled at how anyone could live without bacon with their breakfast). He himself displays none of the trope's traits. Even his supposed stinginess — going by bus instead of getting a taxi — is indicated to not be done out of greed; it's a way of reminding himself he's a Self-Made Man who was once unable to afford taxis. It's also noted that Levy was very generous to those he cared about, especially his wife and daughter.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Sir Julian Freke and Sir Reuben Levy fell in love with Christine. She married Sir Reuben. Sir Julian nursed his grudge for years before finally murdering Sir Reuben.
- Honor Before Reason: Peter feels compelled to visit the murderer shortly before they are arrested, and this warning very nearly allows them to escape justice.
- Identifying the Body: After Peter figures out the secret of the second body, Lady Levy is brought in to make a positive identification. It's shown to be emotionally difficult for her, particularly because of the condition of the corpse: it has been dissected; the head has been so mutilated as to be unrecognizable, so the identification relies on her knowledge of the rest of his body; and it has been decomposing in a flimsy pauper's coffin for several days.
- I'm Standing Right Here: During the inquest the Dowager Duchess's (highly audible) comments to Parker conclude with, "What an awful little man the coroner is, isn't he? He's looking daggers at me. Do you think he'll dare to clear me out of the court or commit me for what-you-may-call-it?" Seeing that she is the Dowager Duchess, the coroner can only glare.
- Inspector Lestrade: Inspector Sugg is the kind who spends the entire novel being territorial and barking up wrong trees. Lampshaded, with Lord Peter remarking that he's "like a detective in a novel."
- I Remember Because...: Averted. Investigators and witnesses spend several pages painstakingly reconstructing memories with reference to physical records, and where I Remember Because... explanations are specifically referred to as inadmissible in court.
- There is also chapter ten, wherein Wimsey spends the bulk explaining that the statement form seen in stories isn't really how information is obtained, and uses the man's activities the day after the crime as a demonstration, simultaneously stealthily extracting the necessary information for the case.
- Long Game: Julian Freke pretended to be friends with Reuben and Christine Levy for decades, all the while waiting for the perfect opportunity to murder Reuben for "stealing" Christine from him.
- Matter of Life and Death: Sir Julian's attempt to get into Parker's cab and there murder him has Wimsey urging this.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Who would trust a guy named Sir Julian Freke?
- Also qualifies as a Shout-Out name: "Freke" is an actual Scandinavian surname referring to Geri and Freki, Odin's wolf servants.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The Adolf Beck case
gets mentioned, among others. - Non-Idle Rich: Lord Peter Wimsey.
- The Perfect Crime: Part of the murderer's motive is the desire to demonstrate that it's possible to commit the perfect crime when unhampered by irrational considerations like sentiment and conscience; he claims that if he hadn't been caught he would have written up the whole experiment and arranged for it to be published after his death for the edification of posterity.
- Refuge in Audacity: The murderer's plot: replace the victim's body with the body of someone who died of an injury and looks slightly like the victim. Which is, at that, less audacious than their original plan — to make it look like Sir Reuben disappeared into thin air, leaving behind a pile of empty clothes.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Discussed when Peter considers ceasing investigating the railway baron Milligan because he made a generous donation to the Duke's Denver church. Parker reminds him that he has a duty to catch criminals even if they're rich, or charitable, or likeable.
- Second-Person Narration: Ther narrative switches to second-person twice — once with 'you' as a medical student Peter and Parker are interviewing, and again with 'you' as Lord Peter during the exhumation sequence.
- Shout-Out: It's Lord Peter Wimsey, so shout outs abound; it comes part and parcel with the literary quotations he seasons his speech with. The Bible and Shakespeare aside, examples include:
- Joseph Bagstock from Dickens' Dombey and Son.
- Harold Skimpole from Bleak House, also by Dickens.
- The Mourning Bride by William Congreve.
- Smart People Play Chess: Sir Julian Freke mentions near the end that he's been an accomplished chess player since his youth, and uses a chess metaphor to explain why he's not going to try and escape the consequences of Lord Peter uncovering his murder plot.
- That Came Out Wrong: The jurors at the inquest are taken to see the injuries on the deceased (who was found naked); watching them as they return to the courtroom, Peter's mother observes that one of the female jurors is looking shocked while another is trying to look "as if she sat on undraped gentlemen every day," then immediately adds that she didn't mean that the way it came out.
- Theory Tunnelvision: The murderer boasts that he planned out his murder on very logical lines, avoiding all the irrational impulses that usually trip up murderers, and was only caught due to a piece of bad luck that he couldn't have predicted. He goes on to relate, without apparently recognizing the significance, the only reason Mr Thipps got caught up in events (and thus the only reason Peter was on the case so quickly) was that the murderer changed part of his plan at the last moment due to a sudden vindictive impulse.
- The Tooth Hurts: The body in the bathtub had broken a tooth some time before death — long enough before it, in fact, for the broken part of the tooth to make a sore on his tongue. This proves he isn't Sir Reuben, who would have gone to a dentist long before things got that bad.
- Working the Same Case: Wimsey and Parker question whether a missing man and the title body are even related at all, leaning to the negative. Turns out they are the same case.
- Year X: Peter receives a letter dated "17 November, 192-".note
