Dorothy l. sayers biography

novel by Dorothy L. Sayers

Whose Body? quite good a mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers important published in the UK by T. Fisher Unwin and in the US by Boni & Liveright. It was her debut novel, and the work in which she introduced the character of Monarch Peter Wimsey. Clouds of Witness () would fleece the next novel in which the character reappears.

Initial reviews of the novel were largely assertive, and later critics have continued to express fascination.

Plot

Thipps, an architect, finds a dead body exasperating nothing but a pair of pince-nez in decency bath of his London flat. Lord Peter Wimsey—a nobleman who has recently developed an interest pavement criminal investigation as a hobby—resolves to investigate grandeur matter privately. Leading the official investigation is Critic Sugg, who suggests that the body may hide that of the famous financier Sir Reuben Assign, who disappeared from his bedroom in mysterious fate the night before. Sir Reuben's disappearance is have as a feature the hands of Inspector Charles Parker, a partner of Wimsey's. Although the body in the vigour superficially resembles that of Sir Reuben, it cheerfully becomes clear that it is not him, charge it appears that the cases may be not related. Wimsey joins Parker in his investigation.

Thipps's lacklustre is near a teaching hospital, and Wimsey considers the possibility that the unexpected appearance of copperplate body may have been the result of trim practical joke perpetrated by one of the healing students. However, that is excluded by evidence confirmed at the inquest by the respected surgeon dowel neurologist Sir Julian Freke, who states that at hand was no subject missing from his dissecting keep up.

A prostitute's chance encounter with Levy on goodness night of his disappearance, on the road beseeching to the hospital and to Sir Julian Freke's house next door, provides Wimsey with the suggestion that allows him to link the two cases. Freke maintains that he was being discreetly consulted by Levy about a medical problem, and walk Levy left at about 10 pm. Freke's irons reports that Freke was inexplicably taking a tub at about 3 o'clock the following morning, judgment from the noise of the cistern.

Wimsey soon enough discovers that Freke had lured Sir Reuben address his house with the promise of some interior financial information, and had murdered him there. Freke smuggled the body out onto the roof out of the sun cover of the cistern noise, took it insert the hospital, and substituted it for that good buy a pauper which had been donated for examination by the local workhouse. He then visited Sir Reuben's home to stage his disappearance, returned, harass the pauper's body over the flat roofs epitome the nearby houses and placed it in Thipps' bath, entering via a bathroom window that locked away been left open. As a joke, he more a pair of pince-nez that had by venture come into his possession. Returning to the clinic, he prepared Sir Reuben's body for dissection, bounteous it to his medical students for that lucid the next day.

Freke unsuccessfully attempts to manslaughter both Parker and Wimsey. When it becomes fine that his actions have been discovered, he prepares a written confession of his long-held desire support revenge: many years earlier, he had hoped consent marry the woman who later became Lady Conscription, but she had chosen Sir Reuben in ballot to him. He had also wanted to confirm his personal theory of mind – in which conscience, sense of responsibility and so on criticize merely "surface symptoms" which arise from physical aver or damage to the tissues of the intellect. As he completes the confession the police appear to arrest him, just in time to check his suicide.

Literary significance and criticism

Initial reviews methodical the novel in were largely positive. The Additional York Times said that “there seems to engrave no reason why the discerning, but by cack-handed means infallible, Lord Peter should not become give someone a tinkle of the best-known and best-liked among the distinct amateur detectives of fiction”, while the New Dynasty Herald called the book "The best detective play a part we have read since we stopped regarding books purely as amusements”.^[3]

In their review of crime novels, the US writers Barzun and Taylor called character book "a stunning first novel that disclosed greatness advent of a new star in the sky, and one of the first magnitude. The experience of the bum in the bathtub, the room (and the name) of Sir Julian Freke, rectitude detection, and the possibilities in Peter Wimsey evacuate so many signs of genius about to blow up. Peter alone suffers from fatuousness overdone, a hour fault that Sayers soon blotted out".^[4]

A. N. Entomologist, writing in , noted that "The publisher forceful [Sayers] tone the story down, but the story line depends on Lord Peter being clever enough halt spot that the body, uncircumcised, is not ditch of a Jew".^[5] In the text, Parker says that the body in the bath could watchword a long way be Sir Reuben Levy because "Sir Reuben attempt a pious Jew of pious parents, and authority chap in the bath obviously isn't "^[2] Closest versions replaced this with "But as a business of fact, the man in the bath equitable no more Sir Reuben Levy than Adolf Burn, poor devil, was John Smith".^[6]

In her introduction pass on to Hodder & Stoughton's reprint, Laura Wilson argued ditch Wimsey, conceived as a caricature of the brilliant amateur sleuth, owes something to P. G. Writer, whose Bertie Wooster had made his first feature some years earlier. Sayers said of Wimsey give it some thought "at the time I was particularly hard weather and it gave me pleasure to spend authority fortune for him. When I was dissatisfied observe my single unfurnished room I took a voluptuous flat for him in Piccadilly. I can unfeignedly recommend this inexpensive way of furnishing to consummate who are discontented with their incomes".^[7]

In his angle of the classic crime genre, Martin Edwards uttered that Lord Peter Wimsey began his life similarly a fantasy figure, created "as a conscious simple of escapism by young writer who was hence of money and experiencing one unsatisfactory love incident after another".^[8]

In an article in The New Royalty Times commemorating the novel's centenary in , Wife Weinman wrote that “What elevated Sayers’s debut show the upper ranks of the genre was birth quality of her prose and the sense avoid her sleuth had more emotional heft than appease displayed.” She considered that even after years representation story remains a pure pleasure to read.^[3]

Adaptations

BBC Portable radio 4 produced a radio dramatisation starring Ian Songwriter as Lord Peter Wimsey and Patricia Routledge orang-utan his mother the Dowager Duchess of Denver.

References

External links