I think I’m warming up to Lord Peter Wimsey. According to Goodreads, I gave three stars to the first Lord Peter Wimsey book I read, four stars to the next, and I think this is either a four or five star read (it’d be 4.5 if Goodreads let me give half stars, but they don’t so we’ll just have to see what my mood is when my cursor is hovering over the rating).

The first book in the Lord Peter Wimsey series, Whose Body starts when a corpse wearing nothing but a pair of pince-nez is found in Mr. Thipp’s bathroom. Through a series of connections, Lord Peter Wimsey is called to investigate. What he finds is that this case seems to be connected to a wholly different one – the disappearance of a rich man named Levy (though the body is not of him) and with the help of faithful Bunter, starts to join the dots.

So this was pretty fun. I still don’t quite understand how a thirty-ish-year-old man (according to the biography in Wikipedia) can act so childishly at times but on the whole, he’s pretty amusing and charming. Bunter and Parker (a detective inspector) act as pretty good foils to him and the relationship dynamics work. I also appreciated the inclusion of Wimsey’s past, which was rather dark and helped to give the novel a little depth.

Mystery-wise, I thought it was pretty fun, although I confess to not understanding the deduction. How did Wimsey figure out who the murderer was? The confrontation scene was also so subtle that I didn’t know what was going on. I felt a lot like Parker at times – unable to keep up with the mind of Wimsey. But, chasing down different leads was pretty entertaining and the novel does let you know who the murderer is afterwards, so on the whole, I enjoyed it.

I’m glad that I borrowed this. I’ve been holding off on the remaining Agatha Christie books (mainly Miss Marple, which took me several years to enjoy) that I haven’t read because I want to prolong the reading experience as long as possible. But now that I’m getting into Sayers, I’ve got a lot more golden age mysteries that I can enjoy without worrying about running out.