Whose Body?

Lord Peter Wimsey

Lord Peter Wimsey is a younger son of the Duke of Denver, a collector of incunabula, and an amateur detective whose hobby his family politely pretends does not exist. His whimsical patter and foppish manner conceal a genuinely analytical mind; he can shift from fatuous nonsense to the sharpest observation without a pause, and he knows it. When a stranger's body turns up in a Battersea architect's bath, Peter's two hobbies collide, and he must decide which to sacrifice.

Mr. Parker

Parker is the professional policeman in the partnership, a man of patient method who takes statements, measures footprints, and reasons from evidence rather than intuition. He moves awkwardly among the great, conscious of the price of the carpet he is spilling ash on, yet he is the one who coolly reconstructs the murdered man's class and habits from a single bath. His steady, unglamorous labour gives the investigation its spine, and his friendship with Wimsey its friction.

Bunter

Bunter is the perfect servant of fiction made real: he attends auctions for Caxton folios, photographs crime scenes with arc-lamps and improvised backdrops, and extracts household gossip from cooks and butlers without ever seeming to ask. His loyalty to Wimsey is absolute, but so is his quiet professional pride, and he sacrifices his employer's reputation cheerfully when a good cause requires it. In a story full of gentlemen amateurs, Bunter is the one who actually gets things done.

Sir Julian Freke

Sir Julian Freke is the eminent physician whose reputation for scientific brilliance is matched by an unsettling, fanatical intensity; his eyes search one through rather than resting kindly on a patient. When Wimsey consults him about a nervous attack, the interrogation that follows is unnervingly precise, as though the doctor already knows more about the case than he should. His connection to the mystery is the kind that only becomes visible in retrospect, which is precisely what makes him dangerous.

Mr. Thipps

Mr. Thipps is a timid, respectable man of modest means whose one piece of bad luck is discovering a stranger's body in his own bathroom at eight in the morning. At the inquest he is bullied, cautioned, and nearly incriminated by a coroner more interested in procedure than in truth, and his helpless dignity under cross-examination is both comic and painful. His ordeal matters because it exposes how easily the machinery of justice can grind an innocent man, and because his Manchester alibi is the first thread Wimsey must pull.

Sir Reuben Levy

Sir Reuben Levy is a Jewish financier who has risen from nothing to a knighthood without ever becoming vulgar, married to a woman of county family and devoted to his daughter Rachel. His servants speak of him with genuine affection, noting his neat clothes and considerate habits, and insist he is incapable of the surreptitious errand rumour attributes to him. His unexplained absence shadows the investigation from the start, and the question of what a man like Levy was doing out of his house in the middle of the night is one the book will not let go.