There are some books that, when you finish them, you just want to sit and let resonate through you like a really good yoga class, a fine meal, or the final notes of a beautiful symphony or Heart playing Stairway to Heaven at the Kennedy Center.

Whose Body? is for me one of these books.

Is it a perfect mystery? No. But it is finely plotted, with Peter Whimsey at his least annoying¹ and all the hallmarks of a great episode of CSI.

It starts with an unknown naked dead man in a bath. The bath belongs to an architect – not a Frank Lloyd Wright superstar architect, but a bourgeoise architect, the sort of fellow who might be – and, in fact, has been – invited down to the county seat of the Whimsey family to supervise the repair of the local church tower. Mr. Thripp is very disturbed to find a body wearing nothing but a pair of fine pince-nez in his bath. He blames his maid’s habit of forgetting to shut the bathroom window. Inspector Sugg, an old school Scotland Yard detective, is sure that Mr. Thripp, with the assistance of his maid and possibly the maid’s boyfriend (who is a glazier and so access to ladders) – and possibly even Mr. Thripp’s elderly and very deaf mother – is responsible for the body.

And so Peter Whimsey becomes involved. It’s just the kind of curious case that Peter adores. Mr. Thripp lives adjacent to a medical school, where students practice anatomy, could one of them have perhaps with the levity used by students to blow off steam, purloined a cadaver and placed it in Mr. Thripp’s bath? But no, Sugg has already checked with the esteemed Sir Julian Freke, famed neurologist who leads the anatomy department, who has assured him, hardly without looking up from the head he is dissecting, that their corpses are rigorously accounted for and none are missing.

Peter, examining the corpse, determines that it’s face was shaved after death (whisker stubs in the mouth), that the manicure and coiffed hair do not align with the lack of pedicure and poor dental hygiene. Whimsey finds signs that the corpse was lowered into the bath through the window from the roof, and signs on the townhouse roofs that the corpse may have been carried across them from somewhere else.

And, much to the disappointment of Mr. Parker, one of the new school of Scotland Yard detectives², the body, while apparently of a Jewish man, is not the body of Sir Reuben Levy, a financier who has mysteriously gone missing the same night that the naked body showed up in the bath. Sir Reuben dined with friends, who he told he had an appointment, disappeared into the rainy night, later reappeared at his home, where his servants have already gone to bed and so are only ear-witnesses to his return, changed into pajamas, washed and brushed his teeth, and apparently slept in his bed. But when the servants went to wake him the next day, Sir Reuben had disappeared.

Peter accompanies Parker to view the scene and finds an impression in the bedding of a man shorter than Sir Reuben, a red hair on the pillow (not salt and pepper like Sir Reuben’s hair), and a bare footprint on the mat in front of the sink that is smaller than Sir Reuben’s shoe size.

So far, the two cases have little to do with each other. But then a lady of the night, awaiting customers on the corner in Thipp’s neighborhood, states that she saw and spoke to Sir Reuben that evening; and Sir Julian admits that Sir Reuben had consulted him that evening on a medical issue of such great discretion which Sir Julian did not want to even reveal his visit, given that Sir Reuben was only missing not found dead, and could return to complain about what we would call a violation of HIPPA these days.

The answer, which is truly worthy of a CSI episode, is amazing and leads to the murderer attempting with great subtlety to take out Parker and later Peter, and finally writing a letter to Peter confessing all – only to be arrested before he can administer the poison shot that the had been planning to use to end his life.

And when I finished reading it this morning, I remained quietly, letting the memory of what I had read resonate through my mind like waves on a shore.

1. There are books where he flits about like that guy in Airplane! who folds the maps into a Pterodactyl. Very annoying. ↩︎
2. As indicated by the fact that Sayers refers to him as “Mr.” instead of “Inspector” Parker, and has him discuss his college studies with Peter, and even shows him relaxing after work by reading philosophy. Sayers sets him up perfectly for the role he will assume in a future book, of the suitor and then husband of Peter’s sister, Mary. ↩︎