Two posts ago, you may recall, I discussed the matter of whether the bathtub corpse in Dorothy L. Sayers' debut mystery, Whose Body?, had a circumcised or uncircumcised member. I concluded that it obviously was circumcised, though a certain, um, body of opinion over the decades has pronounced--errantly, it seems to me--otherwise. Where did this idea that the bathtub body was uncircumcised originate? I've been on the prowl on this mystery, my dear readers, busily detecting; and here's what I found out.
Like a Ross Macdonald baffler, the answer to this outré riddle seems to lie decades in the past. Old sins have long shadows, don't you know. In the late Leroy Lad Panek's Edgar nominated Watteau's Shepherds: The Detective Novel in Britain 1914-1940 (1979), Panek in his chapter on Dorothy L. Sayers writes:
in her original version of [Whose Body?], [Lord Peter] Wimsey deduces that the body in the bath is not Sir Reuben Levy's because it is uncircumcised. Her publisher demurred at this and forced a change in the physical evidence.
Panek having been an academic, he happily left us a footnote for this claim, though sadly it's to another secondary source, the erratic first biography of Sayers, Janet Hitchman's Such a Strange Lady, published four years earlier than Panek's critical study in 1975.
Hitchman writes:
After many stops and starts [Whose Body?] was finished in 1921 and offered to several publishers who turned it down on the grounds of "coarseness." An American publisher took a chance on it, provided certain matters were cut out. The story concerned the disappearance of a Jewish financier, Sir Reuben Levy. A naked, dead, Semitic-featured gentleman has turned up in a bath and the bumbling Inspector Sugg was anxious to identify him as Levy. Peter Wimsey, however, knew "it to be no go by the evidence of my own eyes." The evidence was, originally, that the body was uncircumcised, which definitely ruled out Sir Reuben Levy, and ruled out the book for acceptance. [Sayers], no doubt, made a fight for her clue....
Hitchman not being an academic, there is no source cited for this account. So we have a inquisitorial dead end, seemingly!
Whence did Hitchman derive this claim? Is there an original Whose Body? manuscript somewhere in existence, in which the bathtub corpse is uncircumcised? This certainly doesn't comport with the evidence in my (American) edition, from which I concluded that the corpse was obviously circumcised. Was the British edition different? My British paperback edition from the Eighties appears the same as the American edition from the 1980s.
In the years since the Seventies accounts from some people have evidently garbled things and claimed that the corpse in the published edition is uncircumcised, which seems clearly wrong, whatever may or may not have once existed. But I would love to see the evidence for Janet Hitchman's uncorroborated account. Hitchman, a freelance writer, died at the age of 63 in 1980, just five years after the publication of Such a Strange Lady, so, she, alas, cannot tell us.
Note: In this and the previous Sayers article, I noticed I kept misspelling the word circumcised/uncircumcised, so that it's more like supersized! I admit I never before used the word so much (if ever) in writing. But I stand...corrected.