Sometimes I hit a romance in media and I'm like well. I don't know that I'd say that I ship this. I wouldn't be sad if these people broke up. But unfortunately I do actually believe that they are in love and find it compelling to watch what happens about it ....

anyway that's how I felt about the central relationship in The Legend of ShenLi, which is a xianxia cdrama about ✨ The Greatest General Of The Demon Realm ✨ and her epic romance with -- well. For the first five or six episodes ShenLi, the Greatest General of the Demon Realm, is trapped on Earth in the form of an angry CGI chicken, in the care of a sickly human scholar who has discovered that his angry CGI chicken is in fact some sort of supernatural entity and thinks the whole situation is very funny.

Here, for the record, is angry chicken ShenLi:



and here is ShenLi and her love interest when nobody is a chicken:



This whole introductory arc is really charming. Incredibly happy for that sickly scholar and his angry bird wife. But alas! all things must end, the lovers are parted, and ShenLi The Greatest General of the Demon Realm grimly returns home to confront her upcoming political marriage to a playboy from the Divine Realm, in the full assumption that she will never see her sickly scholar again because even aside from the political pressures one day in the Demon Realm equals a year in the human realm so the time difference is not workable.

However! then some monster nonsense starts happening in the Demon Realm, and so the Divine Realm sends its last surviving actual factual god to help out -- who bears a Mysterious Resemblance to ShenLi's sickly human boyfriend .... ( spoilers )

But enough about the leads! ( Here's a short list of my other favorite people in the drama, cut for some images as well )

Last time I got the chance to hang out with raven, about a year ago -- there would have been another time recently but, alas!, airline crimes interfered -- I ended up with two books shoved into my hands: Mavis Doriel Hay's Murder Underground and Death on the Cherwell.

I was not particularly familiar with Hay's game before this; she falls squarely in the Golden Age but only ever published three novels before focusing all her attention on Rural British Handicrafts. raven is right however that these books are both very fun and worthy of attention for their structure: neither of them have a kind of traditional primary detective figure, and both of them instead focus on a group of people in the murder victim's broader community who sort of collectively solve the crime by bouncing against each other in various directions until the right information comes to light.

In Murder Underground, the unloved landlady of a boarding house is found murdered on the subway, and her Bertie Wooster of a nephew promptly bumbles his way all over the crime scene and makes himself prime suspect number one (Dorothy Sayers, in her review, called this man one of the most feckless, exasperating and lifelike literary men that ever confused a trail and I couldn't put it better! god bless!) We spend a good chunk of the book following the Feckless Nephew and another good chunk just hanging out with the people who live in the boarding house, all of whom have Opinions, Mostly Incorrect.

Death on the Cherwell has some returning characters from Murder Underground but mostly focuses on a group of Young Lady Students who have been having an inaugural meeting for their we-hate-and-curse-our-bursar club when they happen to see said bursar floating down the river in a boat, presumably pre-cursed because she's very obviously dead. The police detective on the case has more to do in this one but the charm of the book is all in the Young Lady Students bopping around trying to investigate on their own, annoying various of their friends and relations in the process.

Hay has also written a third book that I've not yet read and I'm curious to see if it leans as much as these two into the ensemble and the way that a whole community can become stakeholders in A Murder Problem. In the meantime, raven has encouraged me to pass these along to another good home if anyone else would like them! ETA and they are CLAIMED

(As always when reading Golden Age mysteries one is inevitably going to run into some classic Golden Age racism, and in this case it would be remiss of me not to mention that Death on the Cherwell has some opinions about Eastern Europe ... ah, those excitable Yugoslavians! A Yugoslavian Young Lady Student MIGHT declare blood feud against one of her admins. Who Could Say. We Just Don't Know.)