Last night I reread two more

Georgette Heyer novels, Arabella and Frederica (it was Justine's post that made me go back to the well after what should certainly have already been indulgence enough).

Earlier in the day I had a funny moment--one of those ones where for about one minute you feel that you've discovered your ideal future writing project, the one you were meant to write, before seconds later realizing it's the most ridiculous idea in the world. I was reading an interesting TLS piece by Matthew Reynolds about an ehibition on Stubbs and the horse at the National Gallery--and here's the book linked to the show, which I think I must get although it is rather expensive--and it hit me with a blinding flash. I would combine my obsession with Heyer with my much more longstanding and more genuinely obsessive love for Dick Francis and write a series of crime novels set in the horseracing worlds of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. I have a very complicated set of feelings about historical mysteries, though--in short while they are sometimes very good I feel they are usually written in much less admirable prose than the best crime fiction, there's something kitschy about the whole idea--and also I know absolutely nothing about horses other than what I've read in novels over the years. So it doesn't really seem like a sensible idea. I wish someone else would do it, though...