I've not been around so much again, because I had to go out and have a filling amongst other things, and ME/CFS and anaesthetic do not play well together. The rest of the time, when I had energy, in fannish things, I have been mainly focused on making sure I get my yuletide fic typed up. Anyway, as of yesterday, I have a first draft and am not too far off a bus pass version even (\o/), so I shall try and be a bit less faily at keeping up around here again.

I had half a watching post done, and it was already quite long actually, so I will just post that here:


Some more summer watching! This isn't the order I watched them in, but I made my way through two more cosy crime series, and some of Jeremy Northam's remaining CV.

The two BBC cosies were Ludwig starring David Mitchell and Anna Maxwell Martin, which was very good although an odd mix of tone that is exactly encapsulated by the two leads. Some parts of Ludwig felt like the kind of tense, proper crime drama with bent coppers and the like in which you might expect to find AMM and others were more of an outright comedy than most, as seems only right with David Mitchell. It was a strong entry, though! David Mitchell is a reclusive puzzle-setter ("Ludwig"), John, whose identical twin brother James is a police detective who has vanished. His sister-in-law Lucy manages to prise John out of his house to come and help - by pretending to John. Cue John getting a) extremely stressed by all of this and b) distracted by the need to solve the murders that he's sent to deal with, all the while trying to find out why James has disappeared and help out Lucy and his nephew.

Anyway, there should be a s2, with hopefully less stress for John helping the police as a consultant now, rather than trying to pretend to be his twin brother and panicking a lot. I look forward to seeing how that goes.


Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders have been on my radar for a while because people kept mentioning them, so nearing the end of the summer of the cosies, I thought, why not go for broke, and watched it too. These were really great! They were one serialised mystery per series, rather than case of the week, but Lesley Manville is crime editor Susan Ryeland, whose star crime writer gets murdered. In the course of trying to find the missing chapter of his otherwise complete last manuscript, she inadvertantly winds up on the trail of his killer. The really fun/clever thing about this series is that as she reads the last novel, we follow the fictional detective Atticus Pünd in his investigations, which parallel hers and which are a pastiche of a golden age detective series. Occasionally, she imagines discussing the murder with him, so they meet in dreamlike sequences. Tim McMullan as Pünd is really great - I hadn't come across him before, and it's a lovely performance. Conleth Hill is also fun as the late Alan Conway. Moonflower Murders follows the same pattern, as someone else has noted Alan Conway's spiteful tendency to put real things he oughtn't into his books and pays Susan to investigate the parallels between an earlier book in the series and a death at their hotel.

There's supposed to be a third series to come, so I'll look forward to it, although I understand that it's supposed to have a different writer (as in not Alan Conway in-narrative, not irl - they're all adapted by Anthony Horowitz who wrote the original books), and we'll see how that goes. But it was really unusual and fun.


Creation (2009) Biopic about Charles Darwin, starring Paul Bettany. ( This got quite long )