Leading the official investigation is Inspector Sugg, who suggests that the body may be that of the famous financier Sir Reuben Levy, who disappeared from his bedroom in mysterious circumstances the night before.

A prostitute's chance encounter with Levy on the night of his disappearance, on the road leading to the hospital and to Sir Julian Freke's house next door, provides Wimsey with the clue that allows him to link the two cases.

He then visited Sir Reuben's home to stage his disappearance, returned, carried the pauper's body over the flat roofs of the nearby houses and placed it in Thipps' bath, entering via a bathroom window that had been left open.

When it becomes clear that his actions have been discovered, he prepares a written confession of his long-held desire for revenge: many years earlier, he had hoped to marry the woman who later became Lady Levy, but she had chosen Sir Reuben in preference to him.

[4] A. N. Wilson, writing in 1993, noted that "The publisher made [Sayers] tone the story down, but the plot depends on Lord Peter being clever enough to spot that the body, uncircumcised, is not that of a Jew".

[6] In her introduction to Hodder & Stoughton's 2016 reprint, Laura Wilson argued that Wimsey, conceived as a caricature of the gifted amateur sleuth, owes something to P. G. Wodehouse, whose Bertie Wooster had made his first appearance some years earlier.

[7] In his 2017 overview of the classic crime genre, Martin Edwards said that Lord Peter Wimsey began his life as a fantasy figure, created "as a conscious act of escapism by young writer who was short of money and experiencing one unsatisfactory love affair after another".

[8] In an article in The New York Times commemorating the novel's centenary in 2024, Sarah Weinman wrote that “What elevated Sayers’s debut to the upper ranks of the genre was the quality of her prose and the sense that her sleuth had more emotional heft than he displayed.” She considered that even after 100 years the story remains a pure pleasure to read.