Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers

26Jun. Kindle.

Okay, THIS is the first of the Lord Peter books - and a complex and gruesome crime it is. The opening event is the appearance of an unidentified body in a bath. The bath happens to belong to the architect hired by the dowager duchess to manage repairs on the church at Denver, the ancestral home of the Wimseys. She naturally calls Lord Peter to counsel and console the poor fellow and to see what he can do for him.

He arrives to find Sayers' caricature cop, Inspector Suggs, hauling the architect and his housemaid off to jail, an utter absurdity, of course. If the architect had done the murder, would he have left the body in his own bath? and called the constabulary?

At about the same time, an important financier has simply disappeared (a Jewish financier, we are frequently reminded). One might guess -- but no, nothing so simple or obvious. In spite of a superficial physical resemblance, the body is definitely not that of the missing businessman.

I reread these first three back to back to back - without commentary - so incidents extraneous to the actual stories have slipped a bit. It may have been in this first one that Sayers fills us in on some important back story. The inimitable Bunter is far, far more than even Bertie Wooster's Jeeves, and Lord Peter is a far deeper character than Bertie Wooster. Bunter was Lt. Wimsey's sergeant - he is sometimes referred to as his batman - during the war (WWI, of course) and led the team that dug him out when he was buried by the collapsing wall of a trench. In which ever of these books it is, Lord Peter has a flashback - easily recognizable to us today as a symptom of PTSD, which hadn't been "invented" yet. They called it shell-shock. Bunter nurses him through it. Lord Peter's vulnerability to Bunter is totally different from the relationship between Jeeves and Wooster. Jeeves quite blatantly manipulates Bertie while rescuing him from his various stupidities. Maybe I should start taking notes on "Master/Man relationships in British detective fiction" or some such thing.

I'm thinking this is the story which includes the flashback (I remember it well from the TV series) because of the particularly hideous nature of this crime.