Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The best part of this is that Lord Peter Wimsey’s monocle is a magnifying glass and his cane is a measuring rod and a secret sword-stick.
No, wait, the best part is Lord Peter’s mom, who rocks, and who speaks in bird-brained run-on sentences that make everybody think she’s slightly dumb, but actually she’s using those sentences to adroitly manage very delicate social situations. The humor in this is very dry, and I wouldn’t have understood it in my 20s.
I think the pleasure of the book is more from the humor of having a guy who is basically Bertie Wooster (and is touchy about it — there are several sly jabs at Wodehouse) as the detective, managing the contradiction between his upper-class life and his sleuthing life.
But then if you look a little deeper, behind that contradiction, behind the humor, you’ll see the massive Great War PTSD Lord Peter suffers from.
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