You see, my marking is beautifully spaced out this semester, with three weeks between the two main pieces. So I have a little time in the afternoons for some leisure activities.

So I thought I might drag out Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords.

I played it through last year as a Druid, so I thought I’d try another character class, maybe a Knight.

That was yesterday.

I’m Level 17, now, and this time around I defeated the two-headed ogre in significantly less time.

Puzzle Quest has no significant storyline: you’re a knight (or druid, or one of two other character classes that I haven’t played yet, because I can’t bring myself to delete my lovely Level 50 Druid), who’s trying to defeat the incursions of Lord Bane and his army of the Undead into your peaceful kingdom.

Nothing new there.

As you work through individual sets of quests, you move further and further through the map—you don’t need to go back into the early areas unless you have a specific purpose in mind.

(I, for example, am trying to defeat a Griffin three times, because then I can capture the next one and use it as a mount. I currently only have a Giant Rat, which has the power of Rabid Bite, sure, but is also really slow and annoying. The Griffin, on the other hand, has a Power Swoop, which . . . but, you know what? That’s not important right now.)

But the story is not the main point, here.

The point is that for the first time I actually understand why Nick frequently says “I’m just going to game for a little while” and then disappears off the radar for six or seven hours.

I thought, this afternoon, that I’d just try and learn the Charm spell from a captured Harpy. It’s a “very hard” spell to learn—they are ranked from “very easy,” like the Skeleton’s Chill Touch, to “very hard”—but I thought I’d spend a little time on it.

(It occurred to me halfway through that, since I have this Harpy in the Mage Tower in my Citadel and I’m trying to encourage her to reveal her secrets, there’s probably some torture involved. But then I decided to stop thinking about it.)

So, the Charm spell should have given me a short period of relaxation.

Next thing I knew it was 2.30 in the afternoon, and both my legs were asleep.

I think it was about noon when I sat down.

I have no real idea what it is about this game that compells such long periods of focus. It might be the ease of the combat engine—even I can range coloured gems in lines of three or more.

But I do know that now that Bones has finished, I’m going to see about uniting those warring Orc clans.

I was perhaps a little hard on CSI: New York when I said they were pushing the grotesquery angle too far this season.

Because now I’m watching Bones.

Just in case, and it’s possible, you’re not actually watching Bones, this is an episode in which they find a woman’s body, in a trunk, with the bones removed.

Which is a little odd, the lack of bones, given that the show is called Bones, but I think that’s designed to allow Bones to work out the personal relationship she’s been exploring for the past three or four episodes . . . or something.

I forget.

I get bored with that angle.

But, be that as it may, the body stripped of bones and then stitched back up was bad enough.

Then they said that the body had been boiled first.

Bear in mind that we’d seen the body from at least four or five different angles at this point.

ME: Boiled? Did they actually say boiled?
NICK: Boiled?
SEELEY BOOTH: Boiled?

Yep, we were all pretty much uncomfortable with that, even the character paid to read the lines.

Then, it got worse.

They tried to recreate the dead woman’s face by . . . you know, I don’t want to go into details.

(A football bladder was involved.)

But we had to watch it: in fact, we had to watch it inflate and then deflate.

I honestly don’t think I’ve seen anything more revolting.

You know, Bones, I will keep watching you. I have enough residual affection for David Boreanaz, thanks to Angel, to watch almost anything except Valentine or . . . well, any movie he might make, actually.

But I would really, really appreciate it if you would avoid boiled bodies with their bones removed and, especially, anything to do with footballs.

Especially the footballs.

Does anyone else have a partner who regularly snores like a water buffalo with sinus problems?

Every winter—even these balmy Brisbane winters, where it rarely drops below 10 degrees, if it gets that cold—Nick starts snoring. He doesn’t snore in summer, but it’s become a winter ritual.

And it drives me insane.

Literally.

I don’t really like to think about some of the things I’ve probably said at 3 a. m., when I’ve been woken for the sixth time by enthusiastic snoring. And I know my poking gets more and more vicious as the night goes on.

But, honestly, it’s nerve-wracking knowing that there’s not much point even trying to fall asleep, because you’re only going to be woken in fifteen minutes by what sounds like a jack-hammer.

Or dealing in the small hours of the morning with a partner who’s bewildered and a bit hurt because, after all, they’re asleep, and don’t really know how much confusion and distress they’re causing.

Or eventually snapping and kicking them out, when you haven’t slept in three hours because the snoring episodes are coming one on the tail of another, only to have your partner stumble out of the room, dragging their blanket behind them like Linus, mumbling that they don’t know what they were doing, they were only sleeping, they weren’t doing anything, really—so you relent, and then spend the next three hours with every nerve and sinew in your body screwed up in anticipation of the next snore.

And then!

Then, sometimes, you get the snoring episodes with the pauses. The pauses are the worst.

Because the pauses make you think that the snoring has actually stopped. That this time there won’t be another snore. So you lie there, counting under your breath, and feeling your mind expand with a new sense of hope and freedom . . . and then the snoring starts again.

That’s usually when the nasty comments come out.

I don’t think there’s any answer to the problems, really.

We’ve tried those strange nasal strips that I think athletes wear to enhance their breathing; I’m convinced that those just give the snores more room to move.

We’ve tried sprays to open the nasal passages: same problem, really.

I’ve heard that a small, round object sewn into the pajamas will work, since it stops the snorer sleeping on their back—but Nick doesn’t need to sleep on his back to snore. According to his frequent response to poking—“But I’m awake!”—he doesn’t even need to sleep.

I think the end result can only be the winter ritual we’ve slipped into over the past few years: three or fours days of midnight rib-cage poking and nasty comments, followed by a night where I sleep like the dead out of sheer exhaustion.

At least I’m not teaching again until the end of July.

I can always sleep in a little.

I’ve literally just finished reading Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams’s Tunnels and, far from proclaiming this the new Harry Potter, I find myself rather frustrated by the experience.

That’s not to say it’s a bad novel; it’s not. Oh, there are some clanky moments, such as the following image of an underground cavern:

It dwarfed any of the Colony’s caverns with its scale, and brought to Will’s mind the image of a gargantuan heart, its chambers criss-crossed by huge, heartstring-like columns. (352)

This isn’t great writing; though it’s not necessarily representative of the book as a whole, I wasn’t convinced by the fairly awkward combination of the metaphor and simile (and perhaps another metaphorical term: is “chambers” referring to the chambers of the heart or literally to the chambers within an underground cavern?). Nor is this the only instance where the prose clanked a little for me.

Nevertheless, I can see small boys responding eagerly to the book, the sequel that it seems to be leading towards, and the movie that is apparently slated for release in 2010.

But that’s part of my problem; the book is intensely . . . boy-focused, for want of a better term.

I’ve heard the arguments that young girls will read books with male protagonists, but that young boys won’t read books about girls.

I don’t buy it for a minute.

Oh, certainly I imagine that the number of young men who bought and read Meg Cabot’s rather funny—in the early stages, anyway—series The Princess Diaries would be significantly outweighed by their female counterparts: those books were clearly marketed for a prepubescent female readership, whoever else read them.

But I don’t believe that Garth Nix’s lovely Abhorsen series, or Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, or many of Terry Pratchett’s recent books, including the Tiffany Aching series, weren’t read by boys because they had girl protagonists—or, going further back, that the same fate met fully half of Diana Wynne Jones’s oeuvre, or C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which Lucy Pevensie is the stand-out character.

So I don’t accept that as a reason.

It may be that Gordon and Williams deliberately aimed this at a specifically male readership, as I’ve suggested that Cabot did with young girls. There’s nothing wrong with that approach.

But the focus is unmistakeable.

The novel has three significant female characters: there are other women—two of whom are given names but are entirely ineffectual from a plot perspective and another who is named but never actually present in the text—but the three primary ones are the only ones given any significant space within the text.

Of these, one is psychopathic. Literally.

Another is drugged into a stupor by an addiction to television that is maintained by two constantly active video recorders: although she nominally occupies the positions of wife and mother, she abandons these with no argument and no justification. When she does break away from the television stupor, it is only to enter an alternative stupor created by pharmaceuticals.

The third does rise to a moment of pathos but is also stupefied; in her case, it’s a combination of cigarettes, cheap vodka, and council housing. I can certainly believe that the conditions of council-housing life in a rough suburb of London would generate a desire to slide into forgetfulness, but I’m less sympathetic towards this character when she’s part of a pattern of ineffectual female characters.

But, just in case this seems nothing more than the futile protestations of a feminist reader, it’s not the only concern that the book raised.

In Tunnels, there are two worlds: one above ground and one below. I’m not giving much away with this information: a cursory glance at the cover and the blurb in conjunction will tell you that.

The above-ground world is ours, not an alternative Earth, so little needs to be said about that.

My other concern, then, is with the evocation of the below-ground world, which seems uneven.

I should perhaps state here that, as a reader, I’m rapidly turned off by a book if the world-building is inconsistent, implausible, or just plain silly.

None of those are the case here, but it is the case that the world-building is uneven.

We are given, for example, a great deal of information about the day-to-day life of the underground world, but no information at all on how it can operate as an economy, how such an authoritarian social structure can maintain itself—about, essentially, how this community can possibly be self-sustaining. In fact, we get hints that it’s not self-sustaining, which only add to the confusion.

The book also drops hints about how this community came about: once again, none of these points are addressed in the text, so the reader is left to wonder if the 260-year time frame we’re given is sufficient to create what we see.

I’m sure that some of these questions will be answered if the book runs to a sequel, or more than one sequel.

But they’re not presented in such a way in the text as to invite further thoughts about what the sequels might reveal. The questions that Tunnels raises are closed off; the reader simply isn’t encouraged to speculate, when the information presented is so scanty.

Since this novel has been talked about as “the new Harry Potter“, I feel justified in making the following point: even when Rowling withheld information, she made it quite clear that information was being withheld.

Whatever can be said about the quality of Rowling’s writing at the sentence level or about the tautness of her narratives—and I’m saying nothing about either point—she cleverly managed the blocking of future plot points, whether it was by the Agatha Christie method of “Hey, look what my other hand’s doing!” or by having a powerful character simply stop potential enquiries.

Tunnels doesn’t have the same feel of through-plotted development. It feels, rather, as though the authors themselves are slowly working their way forward.

It may be that the putative sequels, should they emerge, will make me rethink this position.

But for now, I’m sticking with my original point: this, ultimately, is a rather frustrating book.

I don’t know why I’m compelled to write this: it may be the mention of Kibbutznik in the last post but one, or a conversation I just had with my Mam.

(I’m also not sure why I’m compelled to post three times tonight, but that may be the fact that I haven’t done much else today, and I’m onto my second glass of wine.)

When we took the trip to Israel, we also visited a number of other countries, taking advantage of the fact that we were overseas anyway—which is a big advantage when you live on a giant island continent.

One place we stopped was Paris.

I can’t remember how long we stayed there: I was only nine years old.

I can’t remember much of Paris at all, actually, except for the following three things.

We used to breakfast on croissants in street cafes in the morning. The croissants were fresh from the oven, and every croissant I’ve ever had since has been a vague disappointment—but I eat them anyway, in some kind of futile quest. The cafes also had sugar in individually packaged cubes instead of granules. When you’re nine, that’s about as exotic as it gets.

We went to the Louvre one day, to see the Mona Lisa—among other things. But my parents hadn’t checked whether the Louvre was open on Tuesdays, and it wasn’t. We were flying out the next day, so I still haven’t seen the Mona Lisa: despite having read Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” I’m still not sure whether seeing it on tea towels counts.

On the last day that we were there, we came across an Algerian street trader—the fact that he was Algerian isn’t relevant in any way, just additional information.

He was selling six-foot-tall, cylindrical balloons patterned with pictures of The Smurfs.

To a nine-year-old girl, these were entirely irresistible.

(Now, of course, I can’t abide The Smurfs: smug little isolationists, with their improbable language—making one word work as a noun, and a verb, and an adjective, and an adverb, and a proper noun. I wasn’t particularly distressed when Unicef bombed their village and I wasn’t alone, if I remember the reaction to that advertisement correctly. But that’s beside the point.)

So he had these balloons, and I was enraptured. He knew it, too. He kept saying, “You want one of these?”

I’d say “Yes” just as my parents said, “No.”

We were flying out that night, and the balloon was six-feet tall.

Then a gendarme arrived.

Street trading was illegal, so the gendarme told the man to move along. But there I was, a blonde, blue-eyed, nine-year-old girl, with starry, Smurf-inspired eyes.

So the gendarme gallantly presented me with the one balloon that the man had inflated for display, while running the man off.

My parents resisted, but I accepted with alacrity.

So there we were, walking along a street in Paris: my parents thoroughly bewildered, me quite satisfied in my possession of the balloon.

Behind us ran the street trader, shouting “You owe me ten francs!”

Behind him ran the gendarme, shouting “You! Move along!”

I have no idea what the pedestrians—or should that be flaneurs, perhaps?—thought.

Of course, we came to the Metro eventually, and we couldn’t fit the balloon through the doors. So my father put a hole in it with a pair of nail scissors, deflated it, and folded it into a pocket.

My parents swore we could re-inflate it when we got home.

But we never could.

Is that shallow, for one’s best memory of Paris?

Recently, Nick—the Grand Master of extracting all available details about Doctor Who from the Internet or, in fact, any other available media—brought this to my attention: a blog post from James Moran, writer for Doctor Who and Torchwood.

Now, I was already predisposed to like James Moran, since he wrote “The Fires of Pompeii” for Doctor Who—which was the episode where I really warmed to Catherine Tate as Donna; I’d liked her before, but I really liked her here—and “Sleeper” for Torchwood, which was a gut-wrencher in a series that ended with me weeping uncontrollably in front of my television.

(Seriously, if you are a reader who doesn’t happen to know me, that really isn’t like me.)

(An aside:

NICK: He also wrote a movie called Severance, which is apparently really good if you like your horror bloody and British.
ME: Which I don’t.

I haven’t recovered yet from 28 Days Later, and still have a tendency to shout “They’re running from the infected!” at moments of high tension.

Ahem.)

Anyway, this particular blog post is about Moran’s contact with Harlan Ellison, whom he’d named as the living writer he’d most like to share a pint with in a magazine interview.

The article itself is a lovely invocation of the pleasures and pains of fandom. I’m not familiar with Ellison’s work myself—except in the Pierre Bayard sense that I know where it fits in the cultural library—but I did once, back in the M/C Reviews days, publish a fan’s response to Ellison that reminds me of Moran’s piece.

But then you read down to the comments thread, where one commentator has simply written “Ellison’s always struck me as a bit of an asshole, but this seemed very cool of him.”

If I were the blogger in this case, I think my response would be, “Oh no, no, no no no no no no.”

Except with more words that should probably be spelled out with asterisks in this time slot.

And then Harlan Ellison responds.

Actually, his response is rather marvellous, and the blogger deals with the situation with panache, but the whole situation does illustrate a point that I made before, in my piece on Steven Moffat.

You don’t know who might be reading on the Internet, so why insult them?

Today, I decided that I wasn’t going to start my marking, but instead give myself a long weekend after what has been an exhausting if thoroughly enjoyable semester.

I’m not even entirely sure what I did do today, except that it was very little: if you don’t count chatting to friends via Facebook, drinking coffee, listening to Elvis Costello, reading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and enjoying the rain—and I don’t count those things.

But some time during the afternoon, I decided to play a spontaneously invented game called “Let’s see what interesting photographs I can take in my living room.” This is no doubt connected to my new passion for putting photographs on the blog. (And, really, who doesn’t like looking at photographs on the Internet?)

But then it turned out that the most interesting pictures were all the little inanimate faces that watch me every day from various perches around the room.

Most of these objects are connected to my childhood: old toys and so forth, now relegated (or elevated, depending on your attitude towards toys) to the status of ornaments. Not all of them are very ornamental, but I like having them around.

Take my Puggles, for instance:

(They’re very difficult to take a clear photograph of, the velvety little things. And yes, that is a Star Trek-branded magazine file behind them.)

Do people still remember Puggles? (People who visited back in the days when I used to store them on the back of the sofa probably remember them, since they’ve almost certainly been beaned in the head with them while blamelessly watching television—I know I have. Although they aren’t, strictly speaking, beanbags at all; they’re filled with crushed walnut shells, which is a fact that used to fascinate me as a child.)

Puggles were all the rage back when I was, I suppose, seven or eight? Maybe younger?

But they were toys that came with their own particular brand of nightmare.

Puggles arrived in little, velvet, drawstring bags; in fact, the bags were made out of the same material as the Puggles themselves, but I have never considered—until now—whether that meant that the bags were made out of the skins of other, less-fortunate Puggles.

That’s not the nightmarish part.

The bags had brass-encircled holes in the centre, for you to poke the Puggles’ noses out of. And you were sternly exhorted, in an accompanying pamphlet, to make sure you put the Puggles in the bag at night—otherwise, hunters would come along and grab them, to make them into Puggle pies.

And people think we’re destroying the current generation’s innocence.

I wonder sometimes how many hunters crept into my room at night, while I had the Puggles hanging off the posts of my bed, only to be foiled by the fact that the Puggles were in bags.

It boggles the mind.

Or what about Strawberry Shortcake?

Neither of these is Strawberry Shortcake, of course. The one on the left is Almond Tea. She normally wears overalls, but this particular doll was part of the “Party Pleaser” line; apparently, even tomboys have to wear skirts when they go to a party. More frightening still is the fact that these dolls were scented and, even though this one is well over twenty years old, she still smells.

(I would give the actual date, but I’ve forgotten. And, as a public service announcement, don’t try Googling “Strawberry Shortcake” and “Party Pleaser” unless you’ve got plans to bake a dessert.)

I’ve only just discovered from Wikipedia that Almond Tea is supposed to be Asian; well, Asian in a Strawberry Shortcake kind of way. Apparently, she’s from the country of “China Cup.” (Well, it was 1983 when she first appeared.)

I suppose that explains her pet, Marza Panda—alas, missing from my set, along with the doll’s plastic Mary Janes. Why are shoes always the first thing to go missing?

The other doll is Lemon Meringue; her pet, Frappe Frog, is also missing, but at least she never had shoes. She’s originally from a slumber-party range, which explains her terrifying eyes; they’re supposed to slide closed when she’s horizontal.

Now, one of them closes and the other sort of flickers for a while before settling half open. And we’re back to nightmares again.

But Mandy’s not nightmarish:

Mandy’s from a Fisher Price range called “My Friends,” from 1977. I think I must have been given her around about that time, because she was a gift from neighbours while we were still living in Scotland.

(She is a first-generation Mandy, because the cloth part of her body is pink-rosebud fabric, not the later yellow-rosebud fabric. See, wasn’t that an interesting fact?)

What I’ve always found interesting about Mandy is that I always assumed she’d come with that kicky little late-‘60s bob, but apparently she is supposed to have below-the-shoulder hair; I suppose her previous owner brought her up to date with contemporary fashions.

Mandy now lives next to Paddington Bear in the living room, which explains the “Please look after this bear” sign in the corner of the picture.

In the interests of parity, we have one of Nick’s childhood toys on Mandy’s other side:

Being as this robot is not mine, I have no fascinating information to impart and no anecdotes to tell. But he really does illustrate the title to this post: doesn’t he have the cutest face?

This doll, on the other hand, has a story:

(This isn’t a great photo—there are better ones—but I like the slight leaning to one side: she looks so nonchalant.)

This is a Kibbutznik, so-called because she was made and sold as a fund-raising exercise for one of the Israeli kibbutzes: Kibbutz Tzora, in this case.

(Interestingly, neither “kibbutz” or “kibbutznik” trigger off the spelling filter: the first I can understand; the second is stranger. I must do some more research on how broadly that term is applied now.)

The Kibbutznik was bought in Israel in 1986, when we were over there for a conference that my father was attending. I named her “Delilah,” because I was nine years old and it seemed like an appropriately biblical name.

She’s getting slightly shopworn, these days, but she’s still perhaps the most exotic doll on the shelf, even if she is being used as a book-end.

The final image isn’t a childhood toy but, given the title of the post, I couldn’t leave him out:

I love this dog’s little face beyond reason.

As best as I can tell, this is a modern Chinese or—more likely—Japanese knock-off of a well-known English model, probably a Staffordshire dog. (Staffordshire the potters, that is—not a Staffordshire bull terrier. I would link to a picture, but the only ones that I can find are from antiques dealers and will probably expire, causing irritating dead links.)

But what I love most is the fact that, at some point, someone stood back and thought, “You know what this dog needs? Eyebrows!”

Now it has a wickedly sardonic look that, combined with the slight backward tilt to the head, makes it seem as though it’s looking down on everything else in the living room.

This was a Christmas present from my parents, which meant it met two criteria: it was bought at auction well before Christmas and my mother displayed it in her living room for about six months, getting more and more attached to it in the process.

The end result was this conversation:

MUM: Mind, he looks good sitting next to the fireplace.
ME: No.
MUM: Oh, no, I know he’s yours.
ME: Damn skippy!
MUM: Oh, is that what you’re going to call him?

So Damn Skippy he is, the supercilious little hound.

I’ve already written a piece on my love of Agatha Christie novels, so I felt that this might make an appropriate companion piece.

I’ve been breaking my heart this weekend—again, fool that I am—over Busman’s Honeymoon, which never ceases to strike me as a tragedy, even with the later short stories about Lord Peter and Harriet’s married life, collected in Striding Folly.

It always seems a shame to me, after the events of Strong Poison, the underlying tension of Have His Carcase, and the partly frustrated yet oddly celebratory mood of Gaudy Night, that we should come to this: a honeymoon couple uncertain about whether the marriage can survive the exigencies of the very interests that brought the two of them together.

But then, I say that as a Sayers fan. I’ve always felt that the quality of her writing—but then, you have to stop there, don’t you? Because to say that “the quality of her writing is far higher than that of the average crime novel” leads into a morass of assumptions about what popular fiction is, where it fits on an entirely arbitrary scale of perceived literary value, and whether we can judge it against “proper novels.”

Take Julian Symons, for example. I understand him to be a leading exponent of British crime writing—according to the Wikipedia article to which I’ve just linked—but I’ve never read any of his books.

But, to go back to the Wikipedia article again, take this quote on Symons, which is apparently from the introduction to The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:

He turned to crime writing in a light–hearted way before the war and soon afterwards established himself as a leading exponent of it, though his use of irony to show the violence behind the respectable masks of society place many of his books on the level of the orthodox novel.

Many of his books are on a level with the “orthodox novel,” eh? Because they’re ironic?

Fair enough.

But why that entirely arbitrary dichotomy between “crime fiction” and “orthodox fiction”? Yes, I know I used the term “popular” to describe Conan Doyle as a writer in this post, but I stand by it. Compared to say, Thomas Hardy, he was a “popular writer”; I’ve never heard that people in their thousands were in a state of hysteria and high distress when Hardy killed off Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

But then, why bring Julian Symons into this debate at all?

Because Symons didn’t like Sayers.

When he published Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel—A History (Penguin, 1974), he made a point of emphasising that “[it] is from a point of view very short of idolatry that they [Sayers’s novels] are discussed here” (112). And by “very short” he doesn’t mean that he’s close to the idolatry end of the scale.

But why? What on earth does Symons have against Sayers?

He starts by outlining the ways in which she is to be lauded:

• she has a “clear and incisive” intellect and was widely read in crime fiction (112).
• she was the first writer to include five Poe stories in the canon of early crime fiction, rather than the usual three (113).
• similarly, she recognised Sheridan Le Fanu’s contribution to the development of the genre (113).
• “it is impossible not to admire the careful craftsmanship with which they [her stories] have been made” (113).
• she took great pains over the accuracy of her stories (113).

So why doesn’t he like her? Apparently—and there’s no padding here, no attempt to soften the verbiage—because “she was pompous and boring” (113).

Well, all right then. There’s not much I can say to that, is there? Especially since Symons emphasises that this is “the same evidence that admirers would cite in her favour” (113)—the style of her writing, as opposed the craftsmanship of her plotting.

And, oddly, it’s often the craftsmanship of her plots with which I take exception. I mentioned in a previous post that I tend not to re-read Have His Carcase, because it’s blatantly obvious to me that one of the primary characters was a haemophiliac, which knowledge spoils the slow development of the plot for me, and has since the first time I read the novel.

Similarly, the novel that Symons singles out, The Nine Tailors, is something of a dull murder mystery, because the nature of the victim, the cause of his death, and the identity of the perpetrator are quite obvious from relatively early on.

But, really, does one read The Nine Tailors solely for the murder mystery? Doesn’t much, perhaps the majority, of the joy that one obtains from that novel come from the evocation of a curiously English form of campanology: change ringing.

Consider, for example, the nine deep tolls that mark the passing of a man of the parish. Consider the twelve tolls at New Year’s midnight for the dead year.

And consider this:

The bells gave tongue: Gaude, Sabaoth, John, Jericho, Jubilee, Dimity, Batty Thomas and Tailor Paul, rioting and exulting high up in the dark tower, wide mouths rising and falling, brazen tongues clamouring, huge wheels turning to the dance of the leaping ropes. [. . .] Out over the flat, white wastes of fen, over the spear-straight, steel-dark dykes and the wind-bent, groaning poplar trees, bursting from the snow-choked louvres of the belfry, whirled away southward and westward in gusty blasts of clamour to the sleeping counties went the music of the bells — little Gaude, silver Sabaoth, strong John and Jericho, glad Jubilee, sweet Dimity, with great Tailor Paul bawling and striding like a giant in the midst of them. (34)

Really, what does the ready identity of the murderer mean, compared to that passage?

Or, on a smaller note, consider Harriet Vane’s memories of her undergraduate days in Oxford in Gaudy Night, when she recalls climbing Magdalen Tower with a friend and feeling “it swing beneath them with the swing of the reeling bells” (3).

What does it matter if, as Symons says, Lord Peter Wimsey is unbearably affected—I myself struggle at times with both his and Harriet’s automatic assumption that servants, excluding Bunter, need to be treated in a certain way—when the author can produce lines that read like something out of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem?

But, then, I am a fan, so according to Symons I have no choice but to eulogise Sayers’s writing style. From Symons’s approach to her novels, it seems that an appreciation for her prose prefigures an inability to critically appraise her work.

Perhaps that’s so—but I don’t think so.

I think, rather, that some of us don’t necessarily see “detective fiction” and “orthodox novels” as sharply divided categories in a “never the twain shall meet” sense.

Some of us just enjoy the prose, even while muttering “haemophiliac” under our breath.

I’ve said it before, but I’m going to say it again and again until people start parroting it in the streets. If they aren’t already.

I’ve always been a little cautious about what I say about real people on here—especially real people that I don’t actually know—because even though this little corner of the Internet is largely unexplored, I don’t want it to contain anything potentially offensive or derogatory (except where it concerns the movie adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen).

But I don’t think there’s anything too offensive in this, so I’ll say it again: Steven Moffat is a god.

I’ve just seen “Silence in the Library”—and I’ll say no more.

Except I’m still shaking and exhilarated.

There’s nothing quite like seeing beautifully directed, cleverly written, absolutely terrifying real science fiction on your television.

But I’ll say no more.

Apparently, some parts of the fandom—if I can conceive of fandom as being, in this case, a corporeal state, like a kingdom—claim that Steven Moffat sacrifices emotional depth and development to a desire for clever narrative structures.

I don’t see that.

And, anyway, I’m a fan of clever narrative structures.

But I’ll say no more about it.

I mean it this time.

Most of you can wait for the next Doctor Who night, or perhaps the one after.

It’ll be worth the wait, I can promise that.