whee, book

[mrissa]

So: Reginald Hill! Why didn't any of you tell me? Did you think I already knew, or does he get weird (I mean bad-weird) early or late in the series? I'm halfway through Arms and the Women, which I selected more or less at random from the library's collection in this series, and it has a major character who is writing a novel, and it has bits of the novel in the book, and you know what? I don't even care. I hate novelist major characters, and even more than that I hate the books they write, hate them with the hatey hatefulness, and I am so loving the characters, and so wanting to pop up to my e-mail to send a quote to gaaldine or swan_tower or pameladean or anne_mommy every five minutes (but I am resisting because there is more book to read) that I don't even care about a) the novelist major character or b) the structure of this sentence.

And there are two dozen of them just in this series (which I will read first, and then try the others, as I did with Ruth Rendell, or am doing, rather, as I still have lots of not-Wexford to go), and the library has bunches and also doesn't have bunches, so I've gone and added a bunch of cheap mystery paperbacks to my Amazon list. I feel very virtuous about putting cheap paperbacks on my list before Christmas. "There," I think, "then if my dear little old auntie wants to buy me something from the list, she can have options. Mom can sort by cheapest on up to show her, and if she doesn't want to buy me Saffy's Angel--which she should because it's good--then she can buy me something with nice cheerful deathfulness in it." And the glow of virtue surrounds me like, lo, a nimbus, because of my virtuous potential receipt of presents. And then I putter off to stir spaghetti sauce while reading more of this book. The end. Good story, huh? I did not, at this juncture, find five bucks. But one never knows at an Aho premiere, really.

I was not in a good mood. But now I am. Moral of the story: Reginald Hill, you folks who are not wshaffer are falling down on your telling-me-good-books job, but I have the joy of having found him now , much rejoicing, and soon there will be brand new freakazoid Finnish symphonic music as written by a Finn who has apparently been listening to much North Indian drumming. Here is what about Kalevi Aho: not boring. Weird. But not boring.

So like the rest of my life then. So that's all right.

That was rather an incoherent moral, but a positive one. So again: like the rest of my life then.

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I am now full of squee and envy, in roughly equal parts. But you can envy me, too, because I have never even heard of Reginald Hill, so I get to read him for the first time!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Oh, whoops. I'm sorry. I've known Reg for twenty years, and, y'know. Just kind of assume that anyone who reads mysteries knows all about him already, because he is Big Star Fella. And a gentleman from his silver hair to his polished shoes, but that's by the bye. Perhaps he's just not so well known in the US? (There is a popular TV series over here, "Dalziel and Pascoe", based obviously on his characters; dunno if that made it over there, but it certainly helped to raise his profile here.)

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

They get worse and then get better. My daughter loved Arms and the Women, but I didn't like it much. I strongly disliked Death's Jest-Book and Dialogues of the Dead, but I enjoyed the more recent Death Comes for the Fat Man and Cure for All Diseases (I don't know why in Canada we had the UK title for one of these and the US title for the other ...)

Editing: It gets weird late in the series - about where you started, or maybe the few before that are of uneven quality. The early ones are great classic British police fiction. Like Wexford.

Do you know Robert Barnard?

[pmrabble.livejournal.com]

Just leaving WBL for Ahoness now. Sans kayak! Mmmmm, freaky Finnish music.

[anne-mommy.livejournal.com]

You can send me quotes anytime. ;-)

[talimena.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry! I guess I thought you already knew of him, because I think of him as fairly mainstream and you'd mentioned other mysteries I hadn't heard of. There are a few I've had no interest in re-reading, but I don't think he gets bad-weird. Enjoy!

[pameladean]

I couldn't tell you because I didn't know. Now I have to read them. Oh, the horror.

P.

[shark-hat.livejournal.com]

(Book recs from someone you don't know! Tempting!)
If you haven't read any of Dorothy Simpson's Inspector Thanet series, W. J. Burley's Wycliffe series, or Staynes and Storey's Inspector Bone books (published in the US as by Susannah Stacey, I believe), they're probably worth a try if the library has them. I prefer Thanet and Bone slightly to Wycliffe, but they're all decent people, and the crimes are interesting, and I find you get an interesting amount of the cops' personal life without getting overwhelmed.
Ian Rankin does good police procedurals but much grimmer, without being bloodporn.
And I love Sarah Caudwell's books but they're nothing like any of these- funnier, and first-person egotistical narrator.