Whose Body?

A quiet London suburb is the scene of an odd discovery. An architect returns home to find a stranger's body in his bath, naked except for a pair of pince-nez. Nobody knows who the man is or how he came to be there.

Across town, a wealthy financier has disappeared from his bedroom. The police suspect the two cases are connected, yet every piece of evidence they gather points in a different direction.

Lord Peter Wimsey takes on both puzzles. He is an aristocrat who treats crime as a pastime and covers a sharp mind with an air of idle charm. His manservant Bunter and his friend Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard work beside him.

Their search takes them into society drawing rooms and a teaching hospital, and into the offices of the official investigators, who do not welcome his help. The setting is London in the 1920s, and the tone is witty.

This is the first novel Dorothy L. Sayers wrote, published in 1923, and the first appearance of Wimsey, who later headed a long series of Golden Age detective stories. The question is whether a body in a bath and a missing banker can be made to fit together at all.