Update

In a lull here (that's another story), but in this low-energy limbo the reading continues...

Latest is a novel As Husbands Go by Susan Isaacs, a mystery about the death of a Manhattan plastic surgeon.  This book, like many of Issac's, features a smart-alecky woman protagenist, so I enjoyed it.  My favorite of her books has to be Shining Through, where a smart-alecky and brave Brooklyn secretary out-spies the Nazis, with a side dish of cookery.  (But that story, alas, was made into a truly terrible movie; watch her Compromising Positions with Susan Sarandon and Raul Julia instead.)

Reading a good mystery has to be one of the kindest inventions ever for biding time - whether you're waiting on a dentist, a train journey, or healing.  Enough plot and puzzle to distract the surface of the mind happily, while not demanding serious concentration the situation does not allow.  A good a mystery provides amusement and charm and even, sometimes, enough human truth not to waste the time spent.  And a really well written mystery becomes comfort brain-food... You can revisit a favorite sleuth's adventures - Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple - even though you know how the puzzle will be solved.

That it will be solved satisfactorily is one of this genre's charms.

Sherlock Holmes public domain image messed with.

Favorites?

Josephine Tey's Bratt Farrar, Miss Pym Disposes, and The Franchise Affair (Earlier POST) (Squidoo page I found HERE)
Dorothy Sayer's Lord Peter Whimsey series, especially Murder Must Advertise and Busman's Honeymoon  (Earlier POST quoting her on writing)
Lindsey Davis' Falco series, starting with Silver Pigs

Authorial, um, Authority?

As all this blogging may have hinted (foreshadowing!) that I now and then write.  Non fiction, like Alice.  Now and then I even commit fiction.  But as any of you, Gentle readers, who have tried your hand at fiction know... authors are supposed to be authorities within their own books - all that "omniscient narration" - but still characters fight back.

My favorite steam-punk web-comic recently had a post about that: 2D Goggles OR The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.  (Based on real 19th C persons, mixing science, math, mayhem, and monkeys.)

image borrowed from 2D Goggles by Sydney Padua

The great detective novelist Dorothy Sayers also talks about the free-will of characters in her Mind of the Maker.  She believed in authorial authority.  "Too much attention should not be paid to those writers who say (holding one the while with a fixed and hypnotic gaze): 'I don't really invent the plot, you know - I just let the characters come into my mind and let them take charge of it.'  Writers who work this way do not, as a matter of brutal fact, usually produce very good books."  Read one of hers.  Murder Must Advertise is a great Golden Age mystery, starring her detective Lord Peter Wimsey.