#whose body

[hailingsweetpotatoes]

this sucks so bad I need to [remembers suicide jokes only worsen my mental health] investigate a naked corpse that was found in the bathtub of an architect my mother met one time

[o-uncle-newt]

I just got a bit more time in my schedule and I'm hoping to get started on a Sayers-and-Jews reading list, if anyone has any suggestions! I just really feel like I've never seen anyone talk about how WEIRD the apparent received wisdom is of "Sayers was in a relationship with a completely secular Jew who tried to convince her to have premarital sex she was religiously uncomfortable with, which NATURALLY made her start writing about Jews, but a totally different kind of basically fetishized ultra-conservative type than Cournos was." There are clearly missing links there- not an obvious or intuitive connection at all- and I have my own ideas of what they are and am so curious if it's already been written about.

[larissa-the-scribe]

Started reading Whose Body by Dorothy L. Sayers, and was startled by an appearance from an English relative of my skateboarding cousin Throckmorton

I know it's spelled differently but that was all I could think of lol

[thesarahshay]

Ugh. How many times have I read Whose Body, and Lady Levy sobbing her husband's name can still make me cry if I'm in the wrong mood.

[fromthedeskofcripslock]

@tragicfantasy-girl This! Oh my word, exactly this.

I started them out on a whim (no pun intended) and out of curiosity because a post here said that the detective Benoit Blanc (of Knives Out/Glass Onion) most resembles is really Lord Peter Wimsey and not Poirot or Holmes. [Edit: It was this post. Thank you, @mywingsareonwheels for literally changing my life.]

Whose Body Chapter II's description of 110A Piccadilly's library and the presence of the debate between a physiological intellectual basis for mental health (nerves in the canon terminology) in the guise of Sir Julian Freke caught my brain; the scene between Lord Peter and "Sergeant" Bunter—that closing line!—in Chapter XVIII caught my whole heart.

The heart was cinched in Clouds of Witness with Lord Peter's actions in Peter's Pit, and his understanding of what faced Mrs. Grimethorpe within the context of the inequality of society's treatment and husbands and wives. That understanding, incidentally, is one that I view as both plausibly in-character, and a wonderful moment of the author(ess)'s voice shining through.

By the time I'd made it to The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, the glorious prose, the human characters and the treatment of inter-generational relations, along with her continued engagement with how society coped (or failed to cope) in the wake of WWI and PTSD (The War and shell shock, to use Sayers' terms) meant that D.L. Sayers had (and has) my soul .

All of the above is to say nothing of the impact Sayers's writing has had on me because she writes a respectful treatment (in the sense that it is nuanced and fully-formed) of characters like Ann Dorland and Lady Mary and Annie and

Miss Twitterton; she creates Miss Climpson and her agency of women, and Harriet Vane and her own agency—in the other sense of the word! —and the plethora of more minor female characters who populate the later books. It is an absolute joy and privilege to read women characters of that time written by THAT women author at that time.

On that note, I hope that @kindredspiritsandgoodomens won't mind if I share here their tags on a post by @itspileofgoodthings about Ann Dorland.

This really ought to top every “Best Opening Lines,” list. The 21st century reading public is sleeping on Dorothy L Sayers.

(Have His Carcase 1932)

[foxandcatlibrary]

13th Book I Read in 2024

Title: Whose Body?

Author: Dorothy L. Sayers

Notes: Didn't really like this one. Maybe I wasn't in the right mood when I read it, but I found it difficult to focus on.

[hiveswap]

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Ghouls night out

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[sanguinarysanguinity]

“Oh, damn!” said Lord Peter Wimsey at Piccadilly Circus. “Hi, driver!” The taxi man, irritated at receiving this appeal while negotiating the intricacies of turning into Lower Regent Street across the route of a 19 'bus, a 38-b and a bicycle, bent an unwilling ear. “I've left the catalogue behind,” said Lord Peter deprecatingly, “uncommonly careless of me. D'you mind puttin' back to where we came from?” “To the Savile Club, sir?” “No—110a Piccadilly—just beyond—thank you.” “Thought you was in a hurry,” said the man, overcome with a sense of injury. “I'm afraid it's an awkward place to turn in,” said Lord Peter, answering the thought rather than the words. His long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.

^ How Dorothy L. Sayers chose to introduce Lord Peter Wimsey to the world.

i wish cs forester was real so i could ask him why he started a book like this and how precisely am i meant to interpret it

[hailingsweetpotatoes]

If I had a nickel for every time Dorothy Sayers wrote a book where a woman who owns a sweet shop is on a jury, I'd only have 10 cents, but it's still weird that it happened twice.

[bobbinalong]

matching cuts courtesy of steph (tim's not allowed to cut his own hair anymore)

[o-uncle-newt]

OK, doing this as a reblog rather than comment as I have THOUGHTS on this and they may as well be immortalized-

I started with the first book because I'd heard that the Peter/Harriet storyline was great but I believe in reading the whole thing of a thing for context. So I took Whose Body and Clouds of Witness out of the library, and HATED* Whose Body enough that I almost returned Clouds of Witness to the library unread. But I never ever do that, and I was genuinely intrigued enough by Clouds of Witness when I read it- in some ways the most classic manor house murder mystery Sayers ever did, but also far more interesting character-wise given WImsey's connections to all the people involved and Sayers's general great character work- that I decided to keep going. My recent trip to London included walking tours of both Oxford and Bloomsbury to see the places where Sayers/Harriet Vane lived and worked, so you can tell that keeping on going paid off lol.

But anyway, if you disliked Whose Body as a mystery then you'll like pretty much all of her other books better- she got much better at deciding when she was writing a whodunnit and when she was writing a howcatchem. Whose Body is the worst of both- you know immediately who must have done it, why, and like 80% of how, and so the book feels a bit like it was written solely to have the opportunity for that weird weird way of writing (about) Jews. If you thought that the pacing was off, in later books the MYSTERY pacing isn't always perfect, but she gets much better at character-driven, novelistic pacing so it doesn't always matter. In general, she develops a lot as a mystery writer but far more as a novelist.

Clouds of Witness is, again, much more classic manor house mystery, and it is a whodunnit, though the ending is... a bit controversial. But even if you hate it, the rest of the book is more than solid, and a good intro to the greater Wimsey family. The next novel is Unnatural Death, and while it's definitely better than Whose Body it has a lot of the same deep weirdnesses- it's a better mystery in that it's decided to be a howcatchem rather than a whodunnit and commits to that, and in some ways it's a better novel (though the pacing is off- it's way too slow at the beginning and way too jam-packed at the end) and it introduces at least one excellent character (Miss Climpson), but it is also EXTREMELY racist in the ways that Whose Body was antisemitic- as in, intending in some ways deliberately not to be but emphatically being so anyway.

The novel after THAT, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, is fabulous, probably her best integration of mystery plot and novel plot, fascinating themes and character work, just really really solid and one of my favorite things Sayers ever wrote. It also has themes that I think are very important to read, and characters who I think are important to be introduced to, before getting to Strong Poison. I highly, highly recommend it, and it's for that reason that I will STRONGLY disagree with everyone who recommends skipping straight to Strong Poison because Bellona Club is Important.

So long story short, my recommendation is- go to Clouds of Witness (oh, and if nothing else, it introduces a plotline that gets resolved in Strong Poison). If you love it and want to see Peter develop chronologically, as a person, and are willing to read something that is deeply interesting while also being deeply flawed, go in chronological order to Unnatural Death (and while you're at it read the first short story collection- it's VERY uneven but there's some interesting Peter development there too). If you are meh on Clouds of Witness, try Bellona Club. I honestly think that Strong Poison is best when you've experienced and liked Peter as a person before reading it, because he makes some... interesting choices in it and it's helpful to know what he's like/his baseline. Clouds of Witness is one of the best early books for giving info about how Peter relates to family and ancestry and people who have been in his life a long time, and Bellona Club, while not Peter-focused, is one of the best at kind of giving us his general approach to the world on a baseline level. Both of those, I think, are important before seeing his world get tipped on its axis in Strong Poison.

Question for anyone who's read the Peter Whimsey books by Dorothy Sayers: where's the best place to start with the series? I read Book 1 ages ago and was not impressed, but I have heard that the first book isn't actually the best introduction, so I'm thinking of giving the series another shot. Any suggestions?

[captain-astors]

The Crown Prince

[thesarahshay]

Hey, Sayers Hivemind: Which story/book has Peter discussing Shakespeare with a woman who points out that the Bard overused the "woman dressed as a man" plot element, and says something like, "If I were a hero in Shakespeare and saw some slim-legged young page boy, I'd say 'Odds bodkins, it's that girl again!'" I can't remember for the life of me, and I haven't been able to google it either.

[u3pxx]

[gavin parents] and i hope you die, i hope we both die

[daily-sifloop]

Day 87: Helltaker AU