Whose Body?

Set in 1920s London, the novel follows an aristocratic amateur detective as he unravels two seemingly unrelated puzzles: the appearance of an unidentified corpse and the disappearance of a wealthy financier.

Lord Peter Wimsey, an eccentric aristocrat, lives in a Piccadilly flat with his manservant, Bunter. One morning, his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, calls to tell him that Mr. Thipps, a nervous architect, has found a dead body in his bathtub. The nude corpse of a man of about 50 wears nothing but a pair of gold pince-nez, or clip-on eyeglasses, on a fine chain. Lord Peter heads to Thipps's flat in Battersea to examine the scene, noting the body's perfumed, manicured appearance and covertly inspecting its mouth before slipping away just ahead of Inspector Sugg of Scotland Yard. Sugg, a blundering officer, has frightened Thipps's maid, Gladys Horrocks, into believing she is a suspect, and Lord Peter later learns Sugg has arrested her.

That evening, Lord Peter's friend Charles Parker, a Scotland Yard detective, reveals a parallel mystery. Sir Reuben Levy, a prominent Jewish financier, has vanished from his Park Lane home the previous night. Levy goes to bed at midnight, yet by morning he is gone. Both pairs of his spectacles, without which he is nearly blind, remain behind along with his watch and purse. Parker checks whether the Battersea corpse might be Levy but confirms it is not, despite a superficial resemblance.

The dead man's appearance is riddled with contradictions: expensive pince-nez but badly decayed teeth; manicured hands but unwashed ears, flea-bites, and filthy toenails. Most critically, dried soap and beard hairs inside the man's mouth prove he was shaved after death. Lord Peter and Parker conclude the victim was not a gentleman but a laboring man, likely from a workhouse, killed with a blow to the neck, then washed, shaved, scented, and deposited in Thipps's bath by a cunning criminal.

When Sugg arrests Thipps as well, Lord Peter pulls strings through his mother's connections to gain access to the flat. At the Duchess's home, she provides crucial background: Lady Levy was formerly Christine Ford, whose family wanted her to marry Julian Freke, now a famous surgeon and nerve specialist. Christine instead eloped with the then-penniless Levy. Freke never married and lives next to both St. Luke's Hospital and Thipps's building in Battersea.

Parker finds shreds of coarse cotton material on the rooftop above Thipps's flat, suggesting the body was transported across the roof. At Levy's house, Lord Peter discovers that the depression in the bed corresponds to someone shorter than the six-foot-two Levy. An auburn hair on the pillow and both black and auburn hairs in Levy's top hat confirm his deduction: An impostor entered the house wearing Levy's clothes and latchkey, slept in his bed wearing rubber gloves, then slipped out before dawn.

Lord Peter investigates John P. Milligan, an American businessman who stands to benefit from Levy's absence, but finds no evidence against him. A newspaper advertisement about the pince-nez chain brings a response from Thomas Crimplesham, a solicitor in Salisbury who claims the glasses are his, lost on a train. Lord Peter confirms Crimplesham is genuine and incapable of the crime.

At the adjourned inquest, Thipps clears himself by confessing that on the night in question, he visited an illegal nightclub that was raided by police. Gladys admits she slipped out to a dance, meaning neither was home to hear anything suspicious. Sir Julian Freke testifies that death resulted from a blow to the neck. Dr. Grimbold, the police doctor, disagrees on timing, believing the man survived several days after the blow. The jury returns an open verdict. Afterward, Freke privately tells Parker that Levy visited him Monday night for a confidential medical consultation.

Parker discovers that someone has been manipulating shares in a nearly defunct Peruvian Oil company under Freke's name. Late one night, Lord Peter reads Freke's book, The Physiological Bases of the Conscience, which argues that conscience is merely a physical brain phenomenon, removable like a disease. All the scattered clues crystallize: Levy's visit to Freke, the auburn hair, Freke's proximity to both the hospital and Thipps's flat, the stock transactions, the Battersea body's resemblance to Levy despite being a workhouse laborer, and Freke's philosophy that conscience can be discarded. Lord Peter realizes Freke killed Levy, substituted a vagrant's body for Levy's in the hospital dissecting room, and deposited the disguised vagrant in Thipps's bath. The revelation triggers a severe episode of shell shock, a condition from Lord Peter's wartime service. Bunter finds him shaking and hallucinating sounds of war and gently talks him through the flashback, addressing him as "Major," as he did in the trenches.

Lord Peter instructs Parker to circulate a description of the unshaved Battersea corpse to workhouses across London. Parker's investigation confirms the match: A vagrant who died at the Chelsea Workhouse on Monday was delivered to St. Luke's Hospital that evening by order of Sir Julian Freke. Bunter, who has cultivated Freke's manservant over drinks, reports that Freke was active throughout his house that Monday night and took a bath at three in the morning.

Back in London, Parker introduces Lord Peter to Mr. Piggott, a medical student at St. Luke's. Through careful questioning, Lord Peter elicits Piggott's recollection of the body he dissected the previous Tuesday: a well-nourished Jewish man who died from spinal hemorrhage shortly after eating a full meal. Freke had claimed the head for research. These details match Levy precisely. Lord Peter then visits Freke at his consulting rooms, ostensibly seeking treatment for shell shock. Freke offers a hypodermic injection. As the needle approaches, Lord Peter seizes Freke's wrist and refuses. Both men understand the injection was intended as poison. Lord Peter departs, and Freke begins writing his confession.

In thick fog, the pauper's coffin is exhumed from the workhouse burial ground. Lady Levy, supported by the Dowager Duchess, identifies the body as her husband's by distinctive scars and a mole. Dr. Grimbold confirms Freke's surgical handiwork in the dissected head.

Inspector Sugg arrives at Freke's house with a warrant and finds him writing a confession. Freke reaches for his hypodermic, presumably to kill himself, but the officers restrain him. The confession reveals that Freke's motive was not jealousy over Christine Ford but lasting humiliation at having been bested by a man he considered beneath him. When a vagrant resembling Levy arrived at the workhouse with a fatal spinal injury, Freke kept him alive while manipulating shares to lure Levy to his Battersea home. He killed Levy with a blow from a poker, went to Levy's house in Levy's clothes to stage his return, then swapped the bodies. He placed Levy in the dissecting room and carried the vagrant across the rooftops to Thipps's bathroom, adding Crimplesham's pince-nez, which he had found at Victoria Station, as a mocking flourish. A postscript reveals the refused injection contained a virtually undetectable poison.

Lord Peter reflects that Freke's intellectual vanity, his compulsion to prove his cleverness through the confession, was precisely the criminal flaw his own writings had identified. He announces a celebratory dinner for all the innocent parties wrongly suspected and calls for the Napoleon brandy.