Dorothy L. Sayers began writing Whose Body?, her first Lord Peter Wimsey detective novel, in London in January 1921, when she was was 27 years old. A letter that month from Sayers to her mother reveals that the novel rather changed in the writing. In the novel as published the naked body discovered in the bath belongs to a "semitic-looking stranger" who is at first thought might possibly be the vanished Jewish financier Sir Reuben Levy; but in fact the corpse turns out to be that of some other, stubbornly anonymous individual. But here's how Sayers conceived this plot in her 1921 letter:
My detective story begins brightly with a fat lady found dead in her bath with nothing on but her pince-nez. [Sayers herself wore pince-nez at this time.] Now, why did she wear pince-nez in her bath? If you can guess, you will be in a position to lay hands on the murderer....
By October, when Sayers had finished the novel, the dead body in the bath had altered from a fat woman wearing a pince-nez to a middle-aged Jewish man wearing a pince nez. I have read, however, that Sayers originally made sufficiently clear that Lord Peter perceived that the corpse had an uncircumsized penis, so that it cannot be Jewish and thus is not Sir Reuben Levy, but that her publishers demanded that she censor this detail and she complied. In her 1993 biography of Sayers, Barbara Reynolds thinks there is still left in the text evidence, circumspectly presented, of this circumcision plot and states flatly: "the body in the bath is uncircumsized." In his Secrets of Crime Fiction Classics (2014), Stephen Knight suggests the plot of Whose Body? turns on this supposed circumcision plot.
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| Lord Peter suavely examining the body in the bath (this seems an amazingly good likeness) |
Reynolds writes that in Whose Body? Lord Peter knows at once that the corpse is not Sir Reuben Levy because he espies that the corpse's own peter is uncut, as it were, a detail that Scotland Yard inspectors Sugg and Parker somehow failed to perceive. However, having read, for the third time, Whose Body?, I just don't see how this account makes sense, at least going by the edition I have.
In Chapter One Lord Peter learns from his mother, the Dowager Duchess of Denver, that Mr. Thipps, the London architect who is "doing the church roof" at the village of Denver, had been put on the spot back in London by the titular body turning up in his bath. Whose body is it? Peter goes to investigate and is soon inspecting Mr. Thipps' bathroom, complete with its naked corpse in the tub.
At this point there has been no mention made of Sir Reuben Levy. His name does not come up until page 28 of my edition of the novel, when Sir Peter encounters at his flat Inspector Parker, who tells Peter that he too went to investigate the matter of the corpse in the Thipps tub, even though it is Inpector Suggs' case, because he wanted to see if the "Semitic-looking stranger in Mr. Thipps' bath was by any extraodinary chance Sir Reuben Levy." Inspector Parker is tasked with looking into the Levy case, you see.
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| Gladys the maid gets in a good look. Maybe she could answer my question. |
Parker sees immediately that the corpse is not Sir Reuben Levy and it's not because of the intactness of the corpse's penis, but because the corpse has a head and a face and they simply are not Levy's, though Parker allows that the corpse "would really be extraodinarily like Sir Reuben if he had a beard." Peter agrees: "I've seen the body, and I should say the idea was preposterous upon the face of it."
But again this has nothing to do with the corpse's penis. Peter's deductions seem to have been based on his having determined that the corpse came of working class origins, not that his member had been snipped. Apparently both Sir Reuben Levy and the corpse are Jewish and hence circumsized.
Parker tells Peter that Inspector Sugg told him the body in the bath is that "of a well-to-do Hebrew of around fifty," adding contemptuously of Sugg: "Anybody could have told him that." Someone presumably struck dead this "tall and sturdy Semite." So surely, contra the asseverations of Reynolds and Knight, the body in the bath was circumsized?
Even the Dowager Duchess of Denver blurts out the obvious (as she will). When burbling away about Judaism she says: "of course it must be very inconvenient [being Jewish], what with not working on saturdays and circumsizing the poor little babies...." Had the corpse been uncirsumsized, surely even dim Inspectopr Sugg would have noticed?
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