In keeping with my idle weekend of rest which has seen me move from bed to sofa to kitchen for purposes of tea making, back to sofa, sleep on sofa, go to bed, get up, get paper and take it back to sofa, have lovely wallowy oily bath and back to sofa, I have been looking at books which fit the description of 'light reading'.
I am working my way through Ngaio Marsh for the umpteenth time and yesterday read Light Thickens, her last book with the murder set during a performance of Macbeth and bringing back characters she used in Death at the Dolphin some 20 years earlier which makes for interest. This book is rather self indulgent with over half of it given over to endless descriptions of the production and rehearsals of this play and I feel rather glad that Dame Ngaio did not get round to producing this as it all sounded a tad precious to me. Still, a slightly under the weather Ngaio is still streets ahead of a lot of other detective novels so I still enjoyed it. I then turned to another of hers, Off with his Head which I have not read for over 10 years and had forgotten all about which made it interesting. Set in a bleak village in the Winter Solstice with a version of an old folk dance and a death that takes place during its performance, it strikes me as being 
well researched and very reminiscent in its somewhat esoteric pages of information, as a DL Sayers, particularly Nine Tailors with all the stuff about bell ringing and the different variations given in that book. Even if I cannot understand it, quite fascinating.
Then I read something totally silly and light, Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen which I stumbled across on Amazon and decided to buy simply because I liked the cover and it sounded fun.
"My ridiculously long name is Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie, daughter to the Duke of Glen Carry and Rannock and I am as they say, flat broke. A girl of my standing, that is thirty-fourth in line to the throne, is good for only a few things: perfecting my curtsy, hosting fetes and, oh, marrying into a noble family for the ever so romantic reason of securing allies"
Set in the 1930's, Georgina is determined to make her way in the world and stand up for herself and after her brother, wonderfully named Binky and who calls her Old Girl, decides he cannot afford her allowance any more, she takes herself off to London. After an abortive attempt to be a sales girl in Harrods, which lasts all of five hours, she then sets up a cleaning agency, with herself as the only member of staff, totally undaunted by the fact that she has never lit a fire in her life, cooked a meal or wielded a duster.
She is staying all alone in the family town house where Binky comes down to meet with a Frenchman who is trying to lay claim to the family estate, stating that their long departed gambling father lost his fortune to him in a card game. Later, on returning home after a cleaning job, she finds his dead body in the bath and her brother vanished back up to Scotland. What is she to do?
Being an indomitable kind of girl with good connection ons (she takes tea with Queen Mary and also goes to parties with the Prince of Wales and meets Mrs Simpson) she decides to set to and solve the mystery herself after her brother is arrested. It is very clear that somebody is also trying to murder her as a series of near misses with a falling stone off a roof, being pushed under a Tube train and being hauled overboard on a boat trip, all fail through sheer luck. Of course, as this is the first in what appears to be a future series, our plucky heroine will survive the first book, and it goes without saying that she triumphs and beats Scotland Yard in finding the culprit who I had rumbled almost mediately.
Great fun, very silly, and I look forward to the next one.
Fitted my mood beautifully this weekend.
