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.

Ah, you found The Little Women.

I know Katharine quite well - we started out as enemies, and she's very prickly and not everyone's cuppa. But when she's on? She's on. And yes, she can be very self-conscious in her work.

Basically, she did this one in part because she discovered, while hosting guest writers at her Yale class, that a really astonishing percentage of readers seemed to want to see or identify themselves in a given work. So she decided to play with the structure to allow for that, by kicking down the fourth wall in an update of a classic that so many girls like to identify with. I'm told she did it quite well, but it isn't my thing at all. I'm a storyteller, and I expect to be told stories. I care about structure only one tiny iota less than I care about crit.

Her next book, though, is one I'm looking forward to, because she has a personal stake in it. Her grandmother was a worker at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in NY, and left a week before the fire that killed 150-plus women workers (and changed the face of American unions).

Well, like I said, she folds the self-consciousness into the "gimmick" of the novel, so to speak, but it's still enough to keep me from just being immersed in it. It reminds me a little of the self-consciousness that John Irving can't keep out of his writing, no matter how much he tries.

Plus, like I said, I have an unnatural fondness for the original, so this was bound to suffer a little.

I'd only ever read Alcott's Little Women in the abridged version. I found an unabridged version and realized why the abridged it. I liked the version that's been shorn of all the preaching, and, yes, I even cried when Beth(?) died.

For those who've read both, do you prefer the unabridged or the abridged?

For what it's worth, the unabridged Count of Monte Cristo is the only true version.