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shantastic 's review for:
Whose Body?
by Dorothy L. Sayers
When I told a friend I was starting at the beginning of Sayers and planning to work through her backlist in publication order, she hastened to assure me that things do get better. I can see what she means, but this was still, as the characters might say, a ripping good yarn.
My tastes in mysteries tend to be picky. I am not drawn to the books about little old ladies who solve crime out of their sweet shops with the help of their super-intelligent animal friends. But I don't really like books that seem to linger lovingly over violence. Lord Peter seems to fit the bill of things I look for quite nicely. This book certainly had violence, but it was offstage and we never got to see it in action.
As for the characters, mostly they were stock characters, but I was pleasantly surprised by some of them. Lord peter himself is so great. I couldn't help but bring up comparisons in my head to Batman. After all, by day Batman is silly, foppish billionaire Bruce Wayne, but he secretly fights crime. Lord Peter tends to put on an affected air of aristocratic silliness, but he also fights crime in his own way and there's a keen mind beneath all that foppishness. Also he seems to have a troubled past, and there was a short scene that illustrated that which nearly broke my heart.
I loved some of the other characters. Bunter may be a stock English butler, but he definitely brought the snark. And Lord Peter's mother was an absolute delight as well.
As to the mystery, I had it figured out a few minutes before Lord Peter did, which is OK. At least I wasn't listening to the book thinking, "Come on, you idiot! It's obvious."
For the most part I enjoyed the writing. I liked that Sayers wasn't afraid to poke fun at herself or the genre she was writing in. The humor is desert-dry, but it is there, and it worked for me.
I have to take off points for minor quibbles, though. I found the dialogue to be quite hard to follow at times, and since there's so much good banter, that was a shame. But aside from that, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Overall, I found that I liked this book more in hindsight, so I'll give it a 4 out of 5.