"CAN YOU STAY?" Disco Elysium fan comics

This game really touched my heart... and gave me so much inspiration... this is my tribute

I want to mention @thirdchildart , her work with visual metaphors was huge inspiration for this comics too, especially that stream where she was talking about visual storytelling in her tma animatic

Disclaimer: This is not an instruction on how to deal with amnesia or the effects of alcohol. I've never drank alcohol and have absolutely no idea what to do in alcohol situations. The situation in the comic is fiction, based on the game lore. If you see someone in similar circumstances, or you experiencing something like this, go to doctor

Reblog to let your followers know that despite your current obsession your previous obsessions still exist and are simply lying dormant until they awaken and strike again

Enter Sir John (and Lord Peter)

This is basically a Sayers blog alongside a Finnemore blog at this point- and this is going to be mostly a Sayers post but also a bit of a window into my other detective fiction reading, which I don't really post about here but kind of want to. A bit of an experiment. (Also, some spoilers to a very old and AFAIK out of print book that I don't particularly recommend below, as well as a Sayers novel.)

So I have been reading a LOT of random old timey detective fiction recently, and at one point made a reading list based on having read the fabulous The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards, which I highly recommend to basically anyone with even the faintest interest in the subject (and even more so to Christie and Sayers fans). ANYWAY, I made the list, then completely forgot where I got it from, ordered a bunch of books through the NYPL's interlibrary loan system, and somehow got all of them at once. So now I have a stack of books from five states on my dresser, many of which are first editions. One of those is my copy of Enter Sir John by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson, which isn't only a first edition but literally has the pencil inscription by the original owner from Christmas 1928, when he bought/received the book. Gah I love reading other people's old books.

Reading other people's old books in general is fun- reading this particular one was more of a mixed bag. The pacing was kind of weird, the mystery was kind of thin (and the motive was... PECULIAR for a 21st century reader, a mix of oddly progressive and deeply, deeply problematic depending on how you look at it), and the characterization of most of the characters was pretty thin. The atmosphere of the small-time theatrical setting was fun, and the detective, Sir John Saumarez, is reasonably entertaining. To go through, and mildly spoil (you'll see why shortly), the plot- someone is found dead who had been known to have previously quarrelled with a woman in the past, under circumstances which make it clear that this woman had both motive, means, and opportunity. The woman is arrested and her trial is attended by a man with a title who is struck by her and feels compelled to work on her behalf. He works hard to find the actual killer when the trial goes poorly for her, and realizes that he is in love with her and confesses his feelings to her.

Sound familiar?

For context, Enter Sir John was published two years before Dorothy L Sayers's Strong Poison, and to be transparent I fiddled a bit with the timing and phrasing to make the synopsis as CLEARLY correlated as it is (he doesn't confess his feelings to her until after he's gotten her off the murder charges, she's actually in the room when the murder victim is found, she actually is convicted and her conviction is overturned on appeal, among other changes). If the above plot sounds interesting and you HAVEN'T read Strong Poison, just skip and read Strong Poison because it does the whole thing SO much better. For one thing, the mystery is better- this was Dane and Simpson's first mystery, and while I largely enjoyed Dane's earlier novel Regiment of Women (which I may post my thoughts about sometime), this book just didn't really work for me. It's technically fair play, I guess, but there aren't a whole lot of actual suspects or clues (there aren't many suspects in Strong Poison either, but there are many more clues and there's a much more robust structure).

The other major difference, and this is pretty important because it's at exactly the point where the two books are so similar, is that the characterization of the romance in Enter Sir John is REALLY NOT GOOD. Sure, as Sayers noted in her 1929 introduction to her Omnibus of Crime anthology, love interests in detective novels are often shitty and this isn't necessarily significantly worse than certain others I have read. But while there do seem to be attempts to describe the suspect's personality in a way that makes her sound more honest, frank, straightforward, etc (the kinds of ways that Harriet Vane comes across later in Strong Poison), she also comes across really naive and dumb, and really doesn't have a whole lot to do in the book at all to counteract that impression. On the plus side... she isn't AS racist as some other people, I guess? (This plays into the motive, which I can describe in the comments for people- it's too annoying to get bogged down in.) But anyway, Sir John largely (apparently? it's not characterized super well) is compelled by her and falls in love with her because of her striking appearance and her good breeding and gentility or whatever, and it's all just super awkward. (Also, there's the same "oh no I didn't realize you were proposing" awkwardness in this book as in Regiment of Women, which does it MUCH better and for MUCH better characterization-related reasons. In this book it's just kind of skin-crawling to read.)

Anyway, why have I made you all read about why I didn't particularly like a not-super-easy-to-find book that you were unlikely to ever read anyway? Well, partly because it's an interesting curiosity- and because as I was reading I was like "what the hell, how did Sayers get away with this?" So I cracked open my copy of The Golden Age of Murder again and in its description of the book realized that it mentions that Sayers and Simpson were friends and that Enter Sir John is of interest as an inspiration to Strong Poison, which in retrospect is probably why I put it on my list in the first place.

But I'm still left with some lingering questions. While the actual murder plot and motive are entirely different, this particular throughline on the part of the detective is really STARTLINGLY similar, not least because Sir John Saumarez has some distinctive surface resemblances to Wimsey. For one thing, the method used to trap the killer (casually having them be part of a reenactment/discussion of the way the murder took place) is used by Sayers in Strong Poison as a ruse that Wimsey uses to try to catch Harriet Vane out, if there's anything to catch (when he "casually" brings up the murder-for-book-profits mystery plot idea he had). For another, like Wimsey later would in Strong Poison, Saumarez has a whole inner monologue about how he has only a month to solve the case (though in his case it's before the suspect is executed, and in Wimsey's case it's the IMO more plausible situation of being before the retrial occurs).

All that being considered, one major difference is, of course, that at the end of Strong Poison Wimsey and Harriet don't get engaged, and Saumarez and the suspect (whose name I don't even remember, if I'm being honest, she REALLY wasn't that memorable) do. But Sayers famously wrote that she wanted to use this book to marry Wimsey off! If she had followed through, and still used this same book as a way to do it, would she have literally lifted, if substantially improved, this plotline from her friend's book in order to do it? She was such an original writer- would she have borrowed so significantly from another writer to finish off a series that she had worked so hard on, even if it was one she was wearying of?!

It's interesting, because I wrote in a previous post about how it feels like after writing the Omnibus of Crime intro, including how bad mystery romance plots are, she dared herself to do it better. Reading this book makes me wonder if she read THIS PARTICULAR BOOK and decided she wanted to do it better. Which would be fascinating whether that was a decision that she made before she'd decided to continue the series after this book or afterward- before, in which case she'd be wholesale lifting the plot but at the same time elevating it lol I feel like I'm writing crossword clues) just by virtue of better writing and characterization in both that plot and the mystery that surrounded it, or after, in which case one of her ways of elevating it would de facto BE changing the ending to make it less corny and awkward, and writing a detective romance which is actually psychologically plausible and satisfying rather than just pairing pants and a skirt, so to speak.

Anyway- decidedly mediocre book that I don't particularly recommend, but one that made me ask some questions that I had a lot of fun pondering! I also had fun writing this, and am considering doing another one on Leo Bruce's The Case for Three Detectives, which was tremendously fun as a pastiche of Wimsey as well as Poirot and Father Brown.

harry absolutely has a collection of weird and oddly specific t-shirts he doesn't even remember having bought (designs stolen from shirts that go hard

I’m taking his boon every time

while i did a gifset to showcase an armour set, i was also intrigued by just how different the animation is for the wizard class vs gale's unique animation:

wizard class animation

gale's unique animation

it's amazing to see not only just how quickly gale performs the somatic component of the spell, but also his efficiency of movement compared to the standard wizard animation.

there's a world of difference here, the difference between a wizard vs a prodigy, an archwizard and chosen.

This really ought to top every “Best Opening Lines,” list. The 21st century reading public is sleeping on Dorothy L Sayers.

(Have His Carcase 1932)

Gale of Waterdeep

with your mighty kiss that might never, never end.

go long, joanna newsom.

early to bed and early to rise leaves a man so fucked up that he dies

tfw the space station you're on is about to blow up and kill everyone but you just have to flirt with the gay lizard one last time

Dorothy Sayers in 1932: "Church clocks and bodies in belfries are rather overdone lately."

Dorothy Sayers in 1934: lol jk I have a new special interest so strap in

Please don't do this to your friends.

everyone has their own opinion on the best way to plan a story, but when writing a farce or murder mystery I have to advocate for the classic notecard technique because it opens up the possibility that you will glance down while making lunch and see this

dalgliesh daemon au fic snippet

been noodling with a post-s2 dalgliesh daemon au that takes place when dalgliesh & miskin re-unite after the (mostly offscreen, so to speak) events of Unnatural Causes (no real spoilers in this snippet, you just need to know dalgliesh's hands get all fucked up at the end of that book, and i add ~something else~ mentioned in the snippet). hurt/comfort, eventually dalgiesh/miskin. excerpt below, miskin is driving dalgliesh back to his aunt's. dalgliesh's daemon is a song thrush named lizbie; miskin's daemon is a red fox named hardy. (...at least in this draft)

It was only once they'd left London behind that Dalgliesh recounted to Kate the strange and sad events that had befallen his aunt's village in the past week. Speaking to Kate about it made it almost seem like any other case they had handled together, replete with unforthcoming suspects, convenient alibis, and dashed hypotheses. It wasn't until the events of the flood that he found himself reluctant to speak.

Kate must have hard it in his voice -- she couldn't have seen his discomfort, as she only looked away from the road to check the mirrors. "We got the last of that storm in the city. Heard a few stations lost power overnight."

"My aunt said she'd never seen anything like it before, not on that part of the coast."

"How much damage?"

"My aunt's home held up finely," he said. He flexed his bandaged hands in his lap and considered the ache -- they were getting better, slowly. Could the same be said of the tether between him and Lizbie? He still had to look for her when she'd slipped from his view; he didn't know her presence as he used to. Now she was puffed up and settled on top of his weekend bag in the back. "But not everyone was so lucky," he said. "Only the one home was swept away -- which led, incidentally, to my current state."

Dalgliesh said no more for some miles, and Kate drove in silence. The air took on a certain cool clarity. Were he driving himself alone, and if he didn't think vaguely that it might upset Lizbie, this would be where to roll down the windows and breathe deep the ocean air.

He only broke the silence when they'd drawn close enough to Monksmere that that he had to direct Kate off the motorway, onto the slower and winding roads. Though recovery had begun, there were still signs of the storm: sandgrass swept inland, high watermarks not yet washed off buildings and walls, washed-out edges of the road.

Dalgliesh's aunt's home was nearly in view when Kate broke the silence herself. "Sorry, sir, but I've got to ask. It wasn't just your hands that were hurt, was it? You were separated from your daemon during the storm somehow. She was blown away, or trapped on a roof or something."

"You're not here on police business, Kate, you've not got to call me 'sir.'"

He caught her eye in the Jag's rearview mirror. Kate looked certain and steady. "This the place?" she asked.

"Yes," said Dalgliesh. There was a light on inside and his aunt's blurred silhouette against the curtain. He felt some relief, some dread to be back. Lizbie fluttered to his shoulder and nuzzled against his neck. "This is the place."