Story Girls

This is a book about love, sex, healing, family, food, and home. Its gorgeous prose and vivid characters make it one to revisit again and again. Join us as we try to decide who is the true bolter here.

A romp through 1920s Mexico with the Mayan god of death. Spoilers abound!

Our bolter this week is Laura "Lolly" Willowes, in a wondrously witchy book about female desire and agency.

In which Circe bolts from godhood, and we get into the nitty gritty of Greek mythology.

Our theme for S3 is...Bolters! So, naturally we are kicking things off with Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, featuring a character known only as "the Bolter."

An in-depth look at the final book in the Peter-Harriet quartet, Busman's Honeymoon.

S2 Ep 7: Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

Have His Carcase by Dorothy L. Sayers

We commence our DLS quartet!

More Work for the Undertaker by Margery Allingham is our book this fortnight, and so we take a highly enjoyable trip through an eccentric, absurd, and Dickensian London with amateur detective Albert Campion and his companions.

It's a complex, slightly fantastical mystery, but as usual with the Golden Age writers, evoked with deep insight and acute observation. Margery Allingham wrote a plethora of Campion books, so if you loved this one, good news! There are plenty more.

As always, spoiler alert! We're gonna tell you whodunnit.

Show Notes:

A link to the Margery Allingham society's biographical page.

A link to the same website's page about Philip Youngman Carter, who was Allingham's husband. He not only finished her partially-completed final book after her death, but he went on to write further about Campion.

The Urban Dictionary entry for murderinos. It's a thing!

Here is one of Philip Youngman Carter's original book cover designs for Allingham's Police at the Funeral. We're feeling it. Today's book designers should take note.