Also also wik

T and I have been reading together, and we just finished The Nine Tailors, one of Dorothy L. Sayer's best mystery novels. All of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels are good, but The Nine Tailors is--h'm. Probably second-best. (Gaudy Night is best, and Busman's Honeymoon is a great favorite of mine too.) There are a handful of really great things about the book that are unique. For one, the evocation of the Fen Country as a place, and its inhabitants as a people, are really, really strong. Other LPW novels are situated in very distinctive settings (Five Red Herrings in Scotland, for example), but Sayers is from East Anglia and her attention to the place as a physical setting--its flatness, emptiness, bleakness, the constant attention to the management of water and the constant risk of flooding--really give the book a vivid physical setting.

Also very interesting is her use of campanology--the study of bells, or in her words, the "peculiarly English art of change-ringing"<--possibly paraphrased. The great church bells of Fenchurch St. Paul, where the story takes place, are characters in their own right. Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Taylor Paul--especially the last two--are important characters throughout, and play a central role (and in surprising ways) in the plot.

The book is short on Lord Peter's characteristic humor, which isn't particularly a drawback but does make it rather non-characteristic. Overall, it's a great favorite, and highly recommended to anyone in the market for a mystery.

Books of the Week

This House of Sky, Ivan Doig: For the Sibling Book Group. It reminds me a little of All the Strange Hours, tho' much more conventional in structure. Well-written. I enjoyed it.

Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, Lu Xun: 400 pages of short stories from an early modern (written 1905-1925) Chinese author. Pretty interesting. More allusive and less plot-driven than most Western stories, which I gather is a feature of Eastern storytelling (at least Chinese and Japanese). Ah Q, the Real Story was the best, I thought, largely because the deliberately folksy tone came through so well. The translator's notes make it abundantly clear that translating even modern vernacular Chinese into English must be mind-bendingly difficult. Working with ideograms must just be a whole different ball of wax.