Whose Body? has a lean mystery story to tell and was a promising first novel.

Although it is lighthearted by today's standards despite its completely amoral villain, it almost failed to get published in its day because of objections to "coarseness." The original publisher, in fact, made Sayers omit a passage in which Lord Peter proved that the nude body found in the bathtub could not be the missing Jewish financier Sir Reuben Levy because it was uncircumcised. In the published novel he has to confine his evidence to such things as bad teeth and flea bites. This novel is almost a procedural, since there is little suspense about identifying the guilty party.

Unnatural Death (1927, U.S. title The Dawson Pedigree) pursues the literary direction adopted in Clouds of Witness of elaborating complications; here they concern an ingenious method of murder. Some elements of the lesbianism...