Whose Body?

Dorothy L. Sayers’s work—of the recognized master of the detective genre—is distinguished by a combination of the intellectual quality traditional to the English and a dark grotesqueness that sometimes turns into light entertainment. The main hero of her novels, the amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey, could certainly lay claim to being the most intellectual aristocrat and the most aristocratic intellectual in the history of detective fiction. Like his famous predecessors, Lord Peter investigates crimes not out of necessity to earn a living, but rather out of love for solving riddles and puzzles—and, as is known, the most entertaining of them are the ones that life itself creates.