6/24/2023 0 Comments Whose body lord peter wimsey![]() ![]() ![]() The actual mystery is brilliant: a man goes into his bathroom one morning to find a naked corpse in the tub, wearing nothing but a pair of golden pince-nez. (Curiously, this is only the first of no fewer than three completely random and incidental mentions in this volume of that particular cheese. There is so much that I love about this book, including the very first page its first two words, and indeed the first two words Wimsey ever utters to us, are "Oh, damn!" Just a few lines down is the sentence that encapsulates so much about Sayers's writing, the perfect litmus test for the Lord Peter series: "His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola." Either you find that quirkily poetic and want to read more, or you should be reading something else entirely. ![]() In rereading this, I found myself surprised at how solid the characters are at the very beginning of the series they are essentially the same fully-realized people they are ten books later, though we only see certain facets of them here. Actually, make that at least two (since Bunter is equally astounding), and maybe three (because the Dowager's quite engaging, too). The very first Lord Peter Wimsey novel, and thus the genesis of one of the most engaging characters I've ever encountered, literary or otherwise. ![]()
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