Continuing to plow my way through Nero Wolfe novels wildly out of order: Fer-de-Lance, A Family Affair, Too Many Clients, Might As Well Be Dead, The Final Deduction, Murder by the Book, Three Witnesses. I don't understand how they decided what to put in the omnibus editions--Fer-de-Lance (1934) was in the same volume as novels from the 1950s, why?--but I'm grateful because it's helping me complete the set.

Incredible how Rex Stout just pantses his way through every time; it makes it tremendously difficult to guess the answer in advance when not even the author has a clue at the beginning (although it's significantly easier in the shorter works due to space constraints). Why do I even bother researching how to construct mysteries from scratch for casefic when I could just be making it up as I go along??

The other fun thing about Stout's corpus (apt choice of words for Nero Wolfe) is that you can see how technology and culture marches on, yet the core elements constant throughout. I jumped from the Depression to Nixon (you can tell Stout loathed Nixon) and yet somehow Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe are still detecting in real time over a 40 year period. The same thing happened with Sherlock Holmes, going from gaslamps to the eve of World War I, but it's still fascinating. Fer-de-Lance has a lot of Early Installment Weirdness, though, which makes sense, since it was the first book and Stout was still figuring out the formula; once he did, he churned them out with remarkable alacrity.

But lest you think I have done nothing but follow hard-boiled New York detectives for the last month, I've also branched out to Seishi Yokomizo, a 20th century Japanese writer who specialized in period mysteries, since I was able to find some of his stuff in English. Suffice to say it's a very different vibe but some things are still the same.

(I am probably going to end up writing a casefic soon, and so all of this is grist for the mill. But also, as I think I've mentioned before, I'm weirdly fascinated by mysteries as a genre, not so much for their contents, but their structure and characters.)

Also reading Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, which is non-fiction, but a) extremely funny, and b) explains so much about why the Terra Ignota series is Like That, actually. Highly recommended.

(it almost makes me want to re-read the Terra Ignota books again, but I'm not sure I can handle that right now - I have such a love/hate relationship with the series because on the one hand the premise is right up my ally but it also means dealing with the most unreliable narrator of all time (who I loathe) and a cast where it is extremely difficult by design to decide who to root for. Which is also true of history, and Palmer's approach to it, but I handle it better when we're talking about the Borgias or Machiavelli and not fiction for some reason.)

Volume 4 of Dinosaur Sanctuary is... okay, I guess? Still frustrated by the ongoing tension between what I want this manga to be and what it actually is. Also The Summer Hikaru Died V5 ended its latest arc and it feels like we didn't accomplish much, but damn if the volume didn't have another great ending, so I guess we'll see what happens--this is a manga that nails "atmosphere" but I'm not sure about "plot". TBD.

Also reading [REDACTED] for [REDACTED] which is a big project I can't talk about for a while, if ever, but has been filling me with so many feels and revelations, so there's that.

In other news, Crunchyroll dropped the final Thunderbolt Fantasy movie with NO ANNOUNCEMENT WHATSOEVER aside from a post on its newsblog, so, uh, way to promote your own shows there. I've already written about my feelings on tumblr, and it turns out I like the movie more than I expected based on the summaries from people who saw it in theaters, BUT I still posted the fix-it fic anyway. Anyway, I have watched it about 4 times all the way through and certain individual scenes way more than that.