If you are a regular visitor here you may remember me going on about Andrew Taylor, an astonishingly prolific and varied British crime writer. Though I've had reservations about a few of his novels, those have been far outweighed by the ones I've really loved -- especially the Roth Trilogy, probably his masterpiece, and the Lydmouth series. Earlier this year I discovered Caroline Miniscule, his first ever novel, which narrowly missed being in my top ten this year, and which I really appreciated for what one critic called its "shocking amorality". But though I got hold of a couple of others in this series back in June, they went onto the shelf to await their moment.
That moment finally came a few days ago, after I'd hit a patch of reader's block -- I must have started about half a dozen novels and abandoned them after a few pages because they just didn't hit the spot. Both An Old School Tie and Waiting for the End of the World feature the laid-back William Dougal, erstwhile PhD student turned amateur private investigator, and his charming, wicked nemesis James Hanbury. Though the plots are OK, it's really these two characters, and their relationship, that give the novels their interest -- William, who'd always rather stay on the sofa with a glass of whiskey and a cigarette, and James, his fingers constantly in some dubious pie or other, seem inextricably linked despite William's unwillingness to get involved in James's dodgy practices. All very entertaining stuff.
Meanwhile I have been listening to Taylor's most recent novel, The Anatomy of Ghosts, courtesy of Audible. This is a full-blooded eighteenth-century romp -- a pastiche, even -- set in a Cambridge college and featuring duplicitous dons, unbalanced undergraduates, fallen women, standoffish aristocrats, and a great range of secondary characters including Tom Turdman, the night-soil man, and, of course, a ghost. Taylor does a great job of invoking the world of 1780s Cambridge, complete with its vomitings, purgings, prostitutes and pox. Amazing, really, that anyone ever got any work done. Very skilful, great fun.