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Whose Body?

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Whose Body?

By: Dorothy L. Sayers
Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
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There’s a corpse in the bathtub, wearing nothing but a pair of pince-nez spectacles. Enter Lord Peter Wimsey, the original gentleman sleuth. Urged to investigate by his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, Lord Peter quickly ascertains that the sudden disappearance of a well-known financier is in some way connected to the body in the bathroom. But discovering exactly which way they’re related leads the amateur detective on a merry chase.

Written by a master of the detective story, this atmospheric tale abounds in the cozy delights of an English murder mystery. Dorothy L. Sayers ranks with Agatha Christie as a defining author of the genre. A novelist, essayist, and medieval scholar, Sayers was among the first women to receive an Oxford degree, and her translations of Dante remain in wide circulation. This novel marks the debut of her most popular creation, Lord Peter Wimsey, whose continuing adventures unfold amid the lively world of upper-crust British society in the 1920s.

(P)1997 AudioGO Historical Mystery Traditional Detectives
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Critic reviews

“Sayers should be up there with Agatha Christie. Her characters, Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, are well written; the mysteries well conceived. There’s a lot to love. Also, she’s writing about the 1910s+ so she’s dealing with revolutionary issues at the time, like PTSD and WWI.”

(BookRiot)

“The first of Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries is a witty and accomplished page-turner of the gentleman detective school.”

(AudioFile)
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This isn't the strongest of Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey novels, but it's nonetheless a good place to start as it introduces all the main characters and has an inventive and interesting plot. The narrator does a good job with the upper-class accents, though his take on Wimsey is rather too effete for me - going through life with a permanently raised eyebrow and languid manner. This would have been acceptable if the descriptive portions of the novel had been tackled in a more normal voice, but these too are read with a cut-glass languor which drags the action down and becomes a little tiresome.

Despite these criticisms, I'm hoping this AudioGo title will be the first of a new set of recordings of the whole Wimsey canon. The superb Ian Carmichael recordings (both unabridged and dramatised) seem sadly to have disappeared from Audible, so if you have to pick another narrator for Sayers' clever and amusing tales then David Case just about passes muster.

Narration rather too languid

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