Whose Body?

 Whose Body was Dorothy Sayers' first novel.. which she referred to as Lord Peter.  It is shorter than most of her other works, and a little clumsy, but her main characters do not change that much, as the series goes on.

It starts with Peter going to a book sale and we learn that he is the second son of a duke, very wealthy, who lives in a flat in Piccadilly with his manservant, Bunter.   One of his hobbies is collecting old books and manuscripts and he likes art and music, unlike his older brother the Duke who is happy to live the country and farm his land, and whose amusements are hunting and shooting. 

We learn that Peter prefers London and claims to hate the country but does enjoy an occasional visit where he can shoot and ride and hunt. He is thirtyish, and has served in World War One, and is now a gentleman of leisure who also has a hobby of helping the police with detective inquiries. 

He has to go back to the flat to collect something, and finds that his mother, Honoria, the Dowager Duchess is on the phone and that she has some information for him.  The architect who was working on the church on the family estate has had a bad shock. He found a naked body in his bath, in his London flat, and the police have come involved. 

Peter agrees to go to Battersea, where Mr Thipps, the architect lives with his aged deaf mother, and to try and advise him. 

When he gets to the more modest block of flats, he finds that Inspector Sugg is there; they know each other of old.  Sugg is a very stupid policemen who resents Peter getting involved in detection.  He beleives that the body is that of Sir Reuben Levy, a Jewish financier, who has disappeared from his house and cannot be found. Parker who knows about both cases, says that he's reasonably sure that the body is not Levy, but Suggs is an idiot and Thipps has been behaving strangely, so the case needs investigating.  Peter inspects the body and can see that it is not circumcised so it seems unlikely to be Levy.