It's been kind of a difficult week for various reasons, and I've been self-medicating with Golden Age murder mysteries (and other period fiction; Biggles of course is a staple).
This started when![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sovay recommended the Albert Campion books to me, or more accurately, mentioned that one of them has a trope I particularly like and then suggested some others to start with. I found that I really like them, and this made me decide to give Dorothy Sayers another chance (my previous exposure to her books mostly led to me wanting to drown Peter Wimsey in a bucket - I find that I'm liking them better on this go-around).
Period Typical Everything is definitely very much a thing here, including slurs flung around like confetti.
Albert Campion - Margery Allingham
The Crime at Black Dudley - I started with this one because it's the first in the series, a country-house murder mystery with a large cast. It is actually really interesting to see how she introduced Campion as a side character and then he sort of slid into main-character-hood later. It also has a lot of ambiance, action, secret rooms, and everything else you would expect from a bunch of people trapped with killers in a big house the middle of nowhere. The plot is kind of a sprawling mess with an anticlimactic ending including a really bizarre deus ex machina, but it's entertaining.
I started an intermediate one, but found myself still not that enthralled by Campion and decided to move on to the two-book set thatsovay had told me has the Thing I Like. And this was a good decision!
The Fashion in Shrouds - I found this one a bit of a slog early on (lots of characters, most of them unlikable, and a fashion designer milieu that I didn't particularly care about). But things improve 1000% when Campion's love interest Amanda turns up and the two embark on a fake engagement for mystery-clue-gathering purposes. Amanda is AMAZING, and I honestly can't think of another character like her from this genre and era: an airplane-designing engineer with a bluntly practical and unsentimental core and a delightful sense of humor. I found myself shipping her with Campion so hard that I ended up skipping ahead a couple of books to make sure they stay together because anything else would make me sad. Also, while a lot of the early plot is pretty draggy, the ending of this book is a masterclass Golden Age murder mystery denouement.
Traitor's Purse - This is the one with The Trope (character with amnesia has to pretend they know what's going on) and it was absolutely fantastic. Aside from a lone quibble with the ending, I loved all of it: characters and plot and Campion spending the entire book stumbling around with a head injury on the verge of passing out all the time.
I will next be finding all the books with Amanda and reading those (which I think is one earlier one and then the subsequent part of the series). I also find Campion adorable once he dropped a lot of the affected manner from the early books.
So then I decided to see if I still find Peter Wimsey insufferable and I think the answer is, not nearly as much as I used to.
Peter Wimsey - Dorothy Sayers
Murder Must Advertise - Currently reading this one, which I picked entirely for the ad agency setting (my day job for a number of years was working in a newspaper advertising department) and I absolutely LOVE that aspect of it; it's great. There was a note that Sayers herself worked in advertising, and it definitely resonates with my own experiences despite the 80-year time gap. (There is a hilarious sequence involving the different departments' loathing for each other, culminating in "All departments alike united in hatred of the client, who persisted in spoiling good lay-outs by cluttering them up with coupons, free-gift offers, lists of local agents and realistic portraits of hideous and uninteresting cartons." The entire thing is pitch-perfect accurate regardless of what decade it's set in.) The workplace environment is also a fascinating mix of dated and modern; there are female copywriters as well as male, and a very relatable, casual workplace milieu that doesn't feel too different from offices I've worked in (minus the murder). Also, Wimsey undercover as an ad copywriter is a Wimsey I'm enjoying. Really liking it so far; will continue!
Have His Carcase - Concurrently reading this one becausesophia_sol happened to write a review of it and I decided to also read this one so that I could read the whole review. (I usually have several books on the go at once, so this isn't unusual for me.) I'm enjoying it, particularly the sense of humor - in both of these, actually - and Harriet trying to solve the mystery by channeling her fictional detective and using her mystery writing research is adorable.
But it's really interesting to read this back to back with the Campion books that are focused on the Campion/Amanda romance, because of how utterly sold I was on them, and how I sort of go back and forth on how I feel about Harriet and Peter as a couple; they have their charming moments and their moments that make me back off. (It is also interesting that the roles are reversed between the two couples - Peter is actively pursuing Harriet, but it's Amanda who is gone on Campion and he's the one who has to be talked around to it.) I don't mean to set up the two couples against each other - they're very different! - but it's just very interesting for me to examine my different reactions to their respective courtships.
Actually, talking about Amanda and Campion ... what is really interesting to me about The Fashion in Shrouds is that the entire book is absolutely full of bizarre gendered bullshit that appears to have the authorial stamp of approval - except that Amanda and Campion's relationship is very much not like that; while the other couples are flirting coyly and cheating on each other and their narration is filled with authorial editorializing about Women Being Feminine and so forth, Campion and Amanda are sincere and sweet and absolutely devoid of game-playing or coy, combative flirtation. Even their fake engagement is absolutely straightforward, and the one actual gender-coded fight they have (she slaps him; he picks her up and pitches her into the river) turns out to be faked as part of a mutually agreed-upon con. I genuinely can't tell if the author actually believes all of the book's gendered editorializing and backed accidentally into the more low-key Amanda and Campion relationship, or if they are supposed to be intentionally contrasted against the toxicity of the other couples (even the happy ones!) by being genuinely supportive and sweet with each other. Whereas Peter and Harriet in Have His Carcase have some truly delightful, sparkling banter but also often feel at odds in a "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" kind of way that the other book absolutely does do with most of its couples but not the central one. It's just intriguing to be reading these back to back.
Will definitely continue reading both series, in any case. (Since I haven't finished either of the Sayers, I don't have a verdict on the mysteries yet.)
And naturally I'm still reading Biggles.
Biggles - W.E. Johns
Biggles Flies North - Biggles goes to Canada, where he ends up in hand to hand combat with a polar bear because of course he does. This book has some absolutely amazing aerial fight scenes. Outside of a wartime context, the author has to improvise and so do the characters; at one point they end up in a sort of dogfight with another plane shooting at them and no weapons, which they make up for by first of all using a flare gun as a weapon and then chucking boxes of canned goods out of the plane at them. I think one of the things I like best about these books is how wildly creative the author is at finding brand new things to do with airplanes.
I'm almost done with this one, and next I think there will probably be pirates and U-boats in some order. :D Regrettably I've already read the "Biggles solves a murder mystery" one, because it would match my current reading theme nicely. (Biggles as an amateur murder mystery sleuth is hilarious because he aggressively does not care about most of it but keeps stumbling into clues anyway. The actual canon version is very much what I would imagine a fanfic version of Biggles Solves a Murder Mystery would be like, except it would probably have more h/c.)
This started when
sovay recommended the Albert Campion books to me, or more accurately, mentioned that one of them has a trope I particularly like and then suggested some others to start with. I found that I really like them, and this made me decide to give Dorothy Sayers another chance (my previous exposure to her books mostly led to me wanting to drown Peter Wimsey in a bucket - I find that I'm liking them better on this go-around).Period Typical Everything is definitely very much a thing here, including slurs flung around like confetti.
Albert Campion - Margery Allingham
The Crime at Black Dudley - I started with this one because it's the first in the series, a country-house murder mystery with a large cast. It is actually really interesting to see how she introduced Campion as a side character and then he sort of slid into main-character-hood later. It also has a lot of ambiance, action, secret rooms, and everything else you would expect from a bunch of people trapped with killers in a big house the middle of nowhere. The plot is kind of a sprawling mess with an anticlimactic ending including a really bizarre deus ex machina, but it's entertaining.
I started an intermediate one, but found myself still not that enthralled by Campion and decided to move on to the two-book set that
sovay had told me has the Thing I Like. And this was a good decision!The Fashion in Shrouds - I found this one a bit of a slog early on (lots of characters, most of them unlikable, and a fashion designer milieu that I didn't particularly care about). But things improve 1000% when Campion's love interest Amanda turns up and the two embark on a fake engagement for mystery-clue-gathering purposes. Amanda is AMAZING, and I honestly can't think of another character like her from this genre and era: an airplane-designing engineer with a bluntly practical and unsentimental core and a delightful sense of humor. I found myself shipping her with Campion so hard that I ended up skipping ahead a couple of books to make sure they stay together because anything else would make me sad. Also, while a lot of the early plot is pretty draggy, the ending of this book is a masterclass Golden Age murder mystery denouement.
Traitor's Purse - This is the one with The Trope (character with amnesia has to pretend they know what's going on) and it was absolutely fantastic. Aside from a lone quibble with the ending, I loved all of it: characters and plot and Campion spending the entire book stumbling around with a head injury on the verge of passing out all the time.
I will next be finding all the books with Amanda and reading those (which I think is one earlier one and then the subsequent part of the series). I also find Campion adorable once he dropped a lot of the affected manner from the early books.
So then I decided to see if I still find Peter Wimsey insufferable and I think the answer is, not nearly as much as I used to.
Peter Wimsey - Dorothy Sayers
Murder Must Advertise - Currently reading this one, which I picked entirely for the ad agency setting (my day job for a number of years was working in a newspaper advertising department) and I absolutely LOVE that aspect of it; it's great. There was a note that Sayers herself worked in advertising, and it definitely resonates with my own experiences despite the 80-year time gap. (There is a hilarious sequence involving the different departments' loathing for each other, culminating in "All departments alike united in hatred of the client, who persisted in spoiling good lay-outs by cluttering them up with coupons, free-gift offers, lists of local agents and realistic portraits of hideous and uninteresting cartons." The entire thing is pitch-perfect accurate regardless of what decade it's set in.) The workplace environment is also a fascinating mix of dated and modern; there are female copywriters as well as male, and a very relatable, casual workplace milieu that doesn't feel too different from offices I've worked in (minus the murder). Also, Wimsey undercover as an ad copywriter is a Wimsey I'm enjoying. Really liking it so far; will continue!
Have His Carcase - Concurrently reading this one because
sophia_sol happened to write a review of it and I decided to also read this one so that I could read the whole review. (I usually have several books on the go at once, so this isn't unusual for me.) I'm enjoying it, particularly the sense of humor - in both of these, actually - and Harriet trying to solve the mystery by channeling her fictional detective and using her mystery writing research is adorable. But it's really interesting to read this back to back with the Campion books that are focused on the Campion/Amanda romance, because of how utterly sold I was on them, and how I sort of go back and forth on how I feel about Harriet and Peter as a couple; they have their charming moments and their moments that make me back off. (It is also interesting that the roles are reversed between the two couples - Peter is actively pursuing Harriet, but it's Amanda who is gone on Campion and he's the one who has to be talked around to it.) I don't mean to set up the two couples against each other - they're very different! - but it's just very interesting for me to examine my different reactions to their respective courtships.
Actually, talking about Amanda and Campion ... what is really interesting to me about The Fashion in Shrouds is that the entire book is absolutely full of bizarre gendered bullshit that appears to have the authorial stamp of approval - except that Amanda and Campion's relationship is very much not like that; while the other couples are flirting coyly and cheating on each other and their narration is filled with authorial editorializing about Women Being Feminine and so forth, Campion and Amanda are sincere and sweet and absolutely devoid of game-playing or coy, combative flirtation. Even their fake engagement is absolutely straightforward, and the one actual gender-coded fight they have (she slaps him; he picks her up and pitches her into the river) turns out to be faked as part of a mutually agreed-upon con. I genuinely can't tell if the author actually believes all of the book's gendered editorializing and backed accidentally into the more low-key Amanda and Campion relationship, or if they are supposed to be intentionally contrasted against the toxicity of the other couples (even the happy ones!) by being genuinely supportive and sweet with each other. Whereas Peter and Harriet in Have His Carcase have some truly delightful, sparkling banter but also often feel at odds in a "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" kind of way that the other book absolutely does do with most of its couples but not the central one. It's just intriguing to be reading these back to back.
Will definitely continue reading both series, in any case. (Since I haven't finished either of the Sayers, I don't have a verdict on the mysteries yet.)
And naturally I'm still reading Biggles.
Biggles - W.E. Johns
Biggles Flies North - Biggles goes to Canada, where he ends up in hand to hand combat with a polar bear because of course he does. This book has some absolutely amazing aerial fight scenes. Outside of a wartime context, the author has to improvise and so do the characters; at one point they end up in a sort of dogfight with another plane shooting at them and no weapons, which they make up for by first of all using a flare gun as a weapon and then chucking boxes of canned goods out of the plane at them. I think one of the things I like best about these books is how wildly creative the author is at finding brand new things to do with airplanes.
I'm almost done with this one, and next I think there will probably be pirates and U-boats in some order. :D Regrettably I've already read the "Biggles solves a murder mystery" one, because it would match my current reading theme nicely. (Biggles as an amateur murder mystery sleuth is hilarious because he aggressively does not care about most of it but keeps stumbling into clues anyway. The actual canon version is very much what I would imagine a fanfic version of Biggles Solves a Murder Mystery would be like, except it would probably have more h/c.)