Life is too short to be too grim (Rumpole of the Bailey books)

Recently I  read two mysteries with a revive-somebody-old theme.  One of them was a recent Sherlock Holmes novel (Grandpa Squirrel lent it to us), not bad reading but with really a nasty crime at the bottom of it.  The other was a novel set in 1934 and starring the real-life mystery writer Josephine Tey as one of the main characters.  I finished it dutifully, but I really disliked it, for several reasons.  I never did figure out that blackmail subplot. And Josephine Tey didn't even get all that much to do in solving the mystery.  Besides, as someone else pointed out, Josephine Tey was just one of her pen names anyway, so it's not very believable that her closest friends would have called her that.

It wasn't until I got partway through Rumpole and the Golden Thread this week that I realized what was missing in those other books.  Humour.

I know the Rumpole books aren't strictly mysteries, they're lawyer stories that sometimes have a bit of a mystery attached, so maybe it's not fair to compare them.  But honestly, I would rather have a few 1980's laughs courtesy of John Mortimer than read any more of those grim and gritty newer novels, at least for awhile.  Rumpole doesn't forget that we need to laugh sometimes, even when life is less than perfect.  It's kind of the same reason we still like watching The Rockford Files.

And besides the frequent quotes and misquotes from The Oxford Book of English Verse, they enrich my vocabulary immensely with words like plonk.

P.S.  Grandpa Squirrel says he likes them just for the cover art.

Welcome to 2007

We don't usually go out to parties or church services on New Year's Eve; we usually have a just-us party here. Often it's a theme; last year we had a Narnia party. This year there was no real theme, but we did have a fun menu of things that we usually walk right by at the grocery store. Frozen fried rice and eggrolls, frozen chicken wings, pretzels, fishie crackers, carrot sticks, banana chips, sparkly cranberry juice in wine glasses, and Vachon Jos. Louis cakes. Then we lit our Christmas candle, finished reading Henry Van Dyke's story The Other Wiseman (it took us four nights), and read the last chapter of Revelation and the 150th Psalm. Grandpa Squirrel arrived for ping pong (we are lucky enough to have a table in the garage), and the younger Squirrelings and I watched some of It's a Wonderful Life before they want off to bed. Mr. Fixit, the Apprentice and I stayed up till midnight talking about budgets (Mr. Fixit always does a family accounting at year's end) and watching The Musgrave Ritual, and then a few minutes of Happy New Year's, pouring rain and fireworks from Niagara Falls.