Gosh, campanology. I just skim those sections and nod and say "Mystic art, not for the unitiated."

I like Nine Tailors slightly better than Advertise, but it's a microscopic difference. Having worked layout, the description in Advertise of a layout person being a beast of burden caught between the artists and copywriters resonated with me. But Nine Tailors has the whole land and water thing, which, as someone who grew up on land "reclaimed" from a swamp, also resonated with me. I think that Nine Tailors wins because I like the actual mystery best.

I tend to read Gaudy Night as a romance with mystery bits, rather than as a mystery. I believe that the whole idea of women in Oxford was barely a generation old at the time, and such men as had made it back from the war might have liked some of those higher education slots, so I can see where the female deans would have worried about any possible threat to their school's reputation.

I love Gaudy Night so much I can't be rational about it. I care about the mystery only so far as it weaves in with Harriet and Peter's story, and I think it does so beautifully.

Dana, I'm that way about Marsh's Final Curtain. It's really Troy's story - Rory's been off in New Zealand for most of the war, he's coming home, and she's wondering if they're still in love, after five years apart.

Plus, the mystery on that one is a real live genuine mystery. Well-plotted, really interesting characters.

edited for mistyping the title. Doh!

Troy rules.(Even if she does paint every berk in England)...I've not read them in years, but I found myself thinking "Couldn't she paint somebody who's not a dick?" I think my friend gave me an Annoying Sayers, because I never got into those people at all...even in my biggest English house mystery phase.Now, I like more grit than that.

I don't think I've ever read any Marsh.

I don't think I've ever read any Marsh.

Oh, dear heavens. You have been severely, severely deprived.

In this order: Start with Artists in Crime. Then Death in White Tie. Follow that with Overture to Death. After that comes Death and the Dancing Footman.

After that? Rock out. Order doesn't matter.

For the war years, I suggest Dyed in the Wool (one of her best) and Colour Scheme, because it gives you Rory Alleyn in New Zealand. I mentioned Final Curtain, which gets him home to Troy and Scotland Yard again.

There are too many wonderful Roderick Alleyn mysteries to list. Black as He's Painted, written in the sixties, has to do with dip corps and embassy stuff, and takes place in my old working 'hood in London.

t noting titles in Palm in the file I keep just for these things.

Thanks, deb! And whoot on teh background check thingie.

Hee! Oh, and Tied Up in Tinsel, racy and fun and country house over Christmas, written in the sixties, is fun.

The early ones, late twenties/early thirties, are very period, but unlike Ms. Sayers, Marsh wasn't an anti-semite or a racist. I never have to grind my teeth or swallow a desire to smack her. And a lot of hers have theatre-based themes; she received her Dame of the British Empire status from the Queen for singlehandedly reviving New Zealand's Shakespearean theatre.

OH! And one total favourite, written in the fifties, only one of hers to deal with a serial killer: Singing in the Shrouds.

Has anyone read Katharine Weber's The Little Women? I have her first novel (Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear), and while I thought it was too self-aware, I liked it.

The Little Women is her third (I somehow missed her second), and her writing still seems too self-aware, although she's at least using that self-awareness as part of the way this novel is structured.

It's a deliberate nod to Alcott, of course, with parallels between the two books that are lifted almost whole cloth from Alcott and just modernized. Including dropping in phrases the characters in the original used. (The characters are named Meg, Joanna, and Amy, in the same chronological order as the original; there is a character named Teddy as well.)

The novel is presented as though it's a "fictionalized memoir" written by the character of Joanna, with notes from Meg and Amy sprinkled liberally thoughout, as though they had read the manuscript and offered their opinions.

The "memoir" part is the most self-aware, though I think the reader is supposed to think that's deliberate, as we're always aware that this isn't really by "Joanna Green," but a construct set up by Katharine Weber, and that we're supposed to think it's "Joanna's" writing that's self-aware, rather than Katherine's. But I don't buy it, if for no other reason than I've read her first novel, and it's the same self-conscious writing trying to pass as sly.

In any case. The notes in the text from the characters of Meg and Amy are almost always rebutted by Joanna (and sometimes the rebuttals are responded to by Meg and Amy, etc.), and it's this interaction that, oddly, is the least self-aware, and what I'm enjoying the most.

I'm 100 pages in, and I'm a little irritated with it for lifting situations and dialogue from Alcott's book, because it's one of my absolute favorite books ever. But I'm not irritated enough to stop reading.