Whose Body? (1923)
N.E.L. blurb:
The body was that of a tall stout man...on the dead face a handsome pair of gold pince-nez mocked death with grotesque elegance.
The body wore nothing else.
Lord Peter Wimsey knew immediately what the corpse was supposed to be. His problem was to find out the truth about whose body had found its way into Mr. Alfred Thipps' Battersea bathroom.
My review:
The first Wimsey novel, and one of the most consistently entertaining. Although Wimsey is too bright and breezy, he is an entertaining companion to crime, although suffers too much from conscience. (Dr. Priestley's amoral attitude is preferable!) He enjoys the detection, "but if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don't seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin' in, since I don't have to make my livin' by it. And I feel as if I oughtn't ever to find it amusin'. But I do." The reader, who has no conscience to worry him, enjoys the whole thing without a single moral qualm, for the story is bright and amusing. Despite the humour, the serious business of detection is not neglected. Opening with the fine and striking idea of the body in the bathtub, rightly described as an "uncommon good incident for a detective story," the plot is complicated by the disappearance of Sir Reuben Levy. The murderer's identity is revealed half-way through, and the pleasure of the second half is in seeing an elaborate, ingenious and gory plot unfold, and Wimsey's attempts to gather evidence.