bad writing: sempiternal drabble

When she turned away from the closed door, P was already at the windows. The light filtering in made a pretty silhouette of him and he stood still enough for a few minutes that he was almost a statue carved delicately out of marble. T scrunched her hands into fists and hated him even more.

"So," she said, and he turned around. "How long has it been going on?"

"T," he began beseechingly, "just-"

"Answer me!"

He pressed his lips flat and shrugged. "Ask J."

"I'm asking you!"

"Look, what do you want me to say? Sorry?"

"How - I mean - how could you, with J -"

His shoulders moved again. For a moment he looked just like J had, closed and distant, sneering down at the intruder. He knew why she had come to him after J had locked the door and his wards flared red in her face. And so, an instant later, he softened and dragged his hands through his hair.

"Sorry," he said to the ceiling. "It wasn't supposed to happen."

She had cried all night and into the sink by the window in the first floor bathroom. She scrubbed at her swollen eyes as more tears squeezed themselves out and wiggled through the powder she had packed over her crimson cheeks. She turned away from P to spare him from her wet emotions.

Book review: Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers

TERRIBLE.

I'm tempted to leave it at that, but hell, I got time. I'll try to explain.

There's no murder in this novel! What the hell, Sayers? And the main crime is pathetic. The criminal is ridiculous, the motive stupid.

This isn't a detective novel; it's ten thousand pages of Sayers' self-insert gallivanting around with younger men who fall all over her. There's no conversation, just blocks and blocks of "dialog" where the characters are just verbose mouth-pieces for Sayers to loudly proclaim how smart she is.

If this had been the first Sayers' novel I'd read, it would have put me off her permanently. As it is, I'm going to take a break and return to the comforting and bloody arms of Agatha Christie.