A Bluestocking Knits

So yesterday set a record Los Angeles temperature for the hottest 27th ever — 113° F (45° C).

And just a little over a week ago, I was contemplating putting the comforter back on the bed.  I had a number of autumnal meals planned for this week — baked ziti tonight.  I don't think so.

Here's my knitting —

Yeah, it's all theoretical.  I don't even want to touch wool just now.

I finished reading Brat Farrar the other day, and started on A Shilling for Candles.

Josephine Tey (Elizabeth Mackintosh), 1896-1952

Brat Farrar is the story of an imposter — we know from the very beginning that he is not who he says he is, and so the "mystery" comes from how Brat fits in, or not, with the family of the presumed-dead Patrick, how he deals with his own feelings about his deception, and whether or not the truth will come out.  I can't really say more about the plot for fear of giving something away.  It is a very complex story that doesn't seem so — I mean that Tey makes it look easy — and it is interesting to read it again knowing how it will end, to see just how Tey works everything in.  Her wonderful ability to create different characters is very much in evidence here, and the way that her humor comes not through some authorial voice but through the characters themselves.

I remember reading somewhere very long ago a rather magisterial list that Dorothy L. Sayers once drew up, of the transgressions that a mystery writer must not make, and one was that a crime must never be solved by intuition.  As much as I like both Sayers and Tey, I had to laugh when hunches popped up more than once in Tey's books.  I wonder what Sayers thought of them.