UNCOMMON MYSTERIES: Dorothy Sayers, Whose Body (1923) and The Documents in the Case (1930)

             Dorothy Sayers, in addition to being one of the most popular writers of the Golden Age of Mystery between the wars, was also a scholar of classical and modern languages, a teacher, a playwright, and a translator of Dante. She invented her detective hero, Lord Peter Wimsey (a courtesy title; his older brother is a duke), in a 1923 novel, Whose Body, which had mixed reviews but began a very successful writing career in which Wimsey was featured in eleven novels and dozens of short stories. In Whose Body, a macabre crime involves switching the body of a murder victim with that of a pauper brought from the workhouse where he died to a teaching hospital, with the idea that the murder victim’s body will be dissected in the anatomy classes. The murderer transports the pauper’s body to the bathtub of an architect whose apartment shares a rooftop with his own. The murdered man is then dissected in the lab and an attempt made to remove all traces of his identity. But some distinctive scars remain.

            Lord Peter Wimsey alternately charms witnesses or stuns them with elaborate stories and persiflage. His friendship with Parker, a Scotland Yard chief inspector, gives him access there. Lord Peter’s valet/butler Bunter was his sergeant during the war and treats his occasional episodes of shell-shock. Bunter is also Wimsey’s crime photographer and research assistant. The Dowager Duchess of Denver is one of the characters, almost as bloviating as Lord Peter, but equally sharp of observation. The older brother, the current Duke, is little more than a caricature of the aristocracy.

            Sayers also wrote a non-Wimsey mystery, The Documents in the Case with Robert Eustace, whose real name was Eustace Robert Barton, the doctor who collaborated with L. T. Meade [Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith] on several mystery story collections around the turn of the century. He may merely have made the initial suggestion about how a poisoning might be discovered, as well as giving other technical advice. The discovery turns on the fact that for certain compounds, including the poison in one variety of mushroom, the natural compound is composed of one enantiomorph, while the synthetic, laboratory-produced compound is racemic, mixed equally of the two enantiomorphs and thus not rotating light left or right in a polarimeter.

            Sayers elected to tell the story in letters or transcripts of statements by different characters, adopting an approach that was popular in 18^th and 19^th century fiction (Clarissa, the original draft of Pride and Prejudice and The Moonstone) but somewhat passé in 1930. Her only epistolary mystery novel is also her only collaboration and her only mystery without Lord Peter Wimsey.

            Novelist John Munting, sharing rooms with the artist Harwood Lathom, becomes entangled with Lathom first by being mistaken for him one night when Lathom is visiting his mistress and landlady Margaret Harrison, and later when he accompanies Lathom to a remote cabin belonging to Harrison’s husband George, whom the two men find dead, apparently having mistakenly cooked and eaten poisonous mushrooms. Harrison’s son Paul investigates knowing his father would not have made such a mistake. A crazy servant in the Harrison’s household and later a venal one in Lathom’s help complicate and then elucidate the mystery, respectively.