Books like “Whose Body?”

What to read after “Whose Body?” by Dorothy L. Sayers: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Agatha Christie · 1926
Same genre: “Detective fiction” and “Golden Age mystery”
- Eccentric Detective
In the village of King's Abbot, the wealthy Roger Ackroyd is stabbed hours after learning a secret. Hercule Poirot, retired nearby to grow marrows, is drawn into the case, where everyone, including the narrator, seems to be telling less than the whole truth.
2
The Three Coffins
John Dickson Carr · 1935
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Mistaken Identity
- Eccentric Detective
On a foggy London evening a professor is shot dead inside a room locked from within, with fresh snow outside showing no footprints. Dr. Gideon Fell investigates the impossible killing and, along the way, explains how a locked-room murder can be done.
3
Murder on the Orient Express
Agatha Christie · 1934
Same genre: “Detective fiction” and “Golden Age mystery”
- Eccentric Detective
A snowdrift halts the Orient Express, and by morning an American passenger is found stabbed in his locked compartment. With the train stranded, Hercule Poirot questions thirteen passengers whose accounts do not add up, and uncovers the threads of an old crime.
4
Too Many Cooks
Rex Stout · 1938
Same genre: “Detective fiction” and “Golden Age mystery”
- Eccentric Detective
Nero Wolfe is lured out of his brownstone to a gathering of the world's great chefs, and one of them is poisoned. When the killer turns toward Wolfe himself, he and Archie Goodwin must sort through the guests of a secretive culinary society to name the murderer.
5
The Nine Tailors
Dorothy L. Sayers · 1934
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
Lord Peter Wimsey is stranded by floods in the fenland village of Fenchurch St Paul over New Year. Months later a battered body is found in a newly opened grave, and Wimsey must read the village's bell-ringing lore and an old jewel theft to give the dead man a name.
6
The Poisoned Chocolates Case
Anthony Berkeley · 1929
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
A box of poisoned chocolates kills a man at his club, and the police can find no culprit. Six members of the Crimes Circle, an armchair detective society, each offer a different solution to the same murder, until amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham tests their theories against the facts.
7
The Moving Toyshop
Edmund Crispin · 1946
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
Poet Richard Cadogan arrives in Oxford, finds a woman's body in a toyshop and is knocked out. When he returns with the police the shop has become a grocer's. With his friend, eccentric professor Gervase Fen, he hunts for the vanished corpse and the trick behind the impossible scene.
8
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins · 1868
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
A priceless yellow diamond looted from an Indian temple is left to Rachel Verinder on her birthday, and vanishes the same night. Family, servants, doctors and a famous detective each tell their part of the story as suspicion moves from one person to another.
9
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe · 1841
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
In a locked Paris apartment, a woman and her daughter are found brutally murdered with no sign of how the killer entered or left. The reclusive, eccentric C. Auguste Dupin takes up the case and solves it by pure reasoning, in the story often called the first detective tale.
10
The House of Silk
Anthony Horowitz · 2011
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
Sherlock Holmes is asked to guard a London art dealer who is being followed, and the case opens onto two mysteries: a gang known as the House of Silk, and a crime so dangerous that Watson can only set it down years later, in a final untold adventure.
11
The Red House Mystery
A. A. Milne · 1922
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Missing Person
At a country house party, the host's brother is found shot in a locked room and the host has vanished. Antony Gillingham, a guest with a taste for detective stories, and his friend Bill play at being Holmes and Watson, poking into the household's secrets before the police arrive.
12
The Innocence of Father Brown
G. K. Chesterton · 1911
Same genre: “Detective fiction”
- Eccentric Detective
A quiet Catholic priest with a mild manner and an eye for human nature solves impossible crimes that baffle the police. Across twelve stories he uncovers murderers, thieves and impostors, often relying on ordinary details that everyone else has overlooked.