Classic Book of the Month - Whose Body?

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, June 7th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Classic Book of the Month.

You may be heading out on vacation soon and might want to settle into a beach chair with something a bit lighter to read than normal. If so, Emily Whitten has you covered today.

REICHARD: To start us off, she offers a clue from the first few pages of the mystery novel she’s recommending. It’s a phone conversation between a young British gentleman and his mother.

CLIP: ‘Mr. Thipps rang them up this morning. It was his day to come down, you know.’ ‘Yes.’ ‘He rang them up to say he couldn’t. He was so upset, poor little man. He’d found a dead body in his bath.’ ‘Sorry, mother. I can’t hear. Found what? Where?’ ‘A dead body, dear, in his bath.’ ‘What?’ [fade out]

EMILY WHITTEN, REVIEWER: If you guessed that bit of dialog featured Lord Peter Wimsey, well done. That was B.J. Harrison reading Dorothy Sayers’ first major crime novel, Whose Body? It’s from 1923, and as you heard, Sayers sets up her case with a bit of humor.

The rest of the plot goes something like this: hours before a Mr. Phipps finds a dead body in his bath, financier Sir Reuben Levy goes missing across town. Bumbling Inspector Sugg thinks the unknown body in the bath must be Levy. But in this clip, Wimsey’s detective partner, Inspector Parker, points out the folly of Sugg’s logic.

CLIP: As a matter of fact, the man in the bath is no more Sir Rueben Levy than Adolf Beck, poor devil, was John Smith. Oddly enough though, he would be really extraordinarily like Sir Rueben if he had a beard. And as Lady Levy is abroad with the family, somebody may say it’s him. And Sugg will build up a lovely theory like the tower of Babel, and destined so to perish.

Lord Peter Wimsey isn’t officially a detective. He’s just a young, aristocratic gentleman who enjoys solving puzzles—and who has nothing better to do than traipse around England poking into people’s alibis and hidden connections. Like Sherlock before him, he stays several steps ahead of everyone else, though the fact that he’s a novice means he sometimes blindly walks into life-threatening situations. But for Sayers, who loved creating those masterful puzzles, it’s all in good fun.

Gina Dalfonzo is the author of Dorothy and Jack, a book about Sayers’ friendship with C. S. Lewis. She recently listened to Whose Body? read aloud on an instagram livestream.

DALFONZO: And I was just struck all over again by what a good book this is. And it was her first novel, and she was just 30. And she writes like a full blown novelist, not like a debut novelist. There's nothing tentative or awkward or stiff about it. She dives right into these characters, right into this plot. You feel like you've known these people forever.

Dalfonzo also sees themes in Whose Body? that resonate throughout Sayers’ work, including the high value she places on truth and personal integrity.

DALFONZO: Lord Peter has to make some rather weighty decisions about what he's going to do once he's figured out what's going on and who done it. And so, [cut a few words] that takes the kind of integrity that we're talking about… [Fade out.]

Of course, Sayers and her characters do change and grow over the course of her 11 Lord Peter Wimsey books. At times early on, Wimsey comes across as somewhat shallow, sort of like P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.

CLIP: Parker, I hope you’re full of crime. Nothing less than arson or murder will do for us tonight.

Here’s Dalfonzo again.

DALFONZO: The biggest development people notice over the course of the series is Lord Peter himself. Even in Whose Body? you see glimpses of the more serious person that's inside him that will come out more. So I mean, it's just like all there in this first novel just waiting to sort of be developed and carried out.

Sayers wrote as a Christian, but she didn’t write Christian novels, per se. So, her main characters don’t engage much with religion or Christian worldview. But you can see Sayers’ beliefs at work in the background. For instance, one of the corrupt characters in Whose Body? sees life as materialistic, with a matra like this one.

CLIP:  …the knowledge of good and evil is an observed phenomenon attendant upon a certain condition of the brain cells which is removable…[fade out]

Whose Body? does include some objectionable material. The characters occasionally curse and drink alcohol to excess. In later novels, they joke about past sexual sins. Some today criticize Sayers’ portrayal of Sir Rueben Levy, a Jewish character. But I think overall, the book holds up well—and modern readers will find it remarkably clean and thoughtful.

Sayers is also relevant in one other way. After becoming pregnant out of wedlock, Sayers hid her child from friends and family for many years. Dalfonzo says though painful, the experience seemed to lead to more mature faith.

DALFONZO: As I say in the book, the pregnancy sort of brought her up short, made her, you know, obviously, take a hard look at her life and figure out, okay I need to figure things out, I need to get it together. Her biographer Barbara Reynolds, who knew her very well said that as a high church Anglican, she would have gone to Confession probably and then tried to get things sorted out. [fade out and under my words]

In her novels over the years, Sayers deepened her themes of the value of reality over appearance, with characters like Peter’s love interest, Harriet Vane. In our truth-deprived culture, Dalfonzo says this may be Sayers’ greatest appeal today.

DALFONZO: She just has this, this talent for seeing the truth, and, and speaking the truth, and I love that about her. And I love that about Sayers. I feel sometimes, I think she's the writer or a writer that we need right now because… As we've been saying she was a flawed person, she would never say that she was perfect. She made her own mistakes. But she believed in, like, looking at a thing, seeing it for what it was, and calling it what it was.

Whose Body? is an imperfect but well-written, humorous introduction to Sayers’ classic novels. I suspect Lord Peter Wimsey would agree.

CLIP: You don’t believe me. In fact, You’re still not certain I’m on the right track. Go in peace, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’m Emily Whitten.

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