Hard cheese
I'm a big fan of the Thursday Next series of books by Jasper Fforde. Set in an alternate Britain in which supernatural happenings and Heath Robinson technologies are commonplace, they feature Thursday, a "literary detective" who gains the ability to travel within books.It would all be rather twee if the "Book World" wasn't so imaginatively realised, and the stories so densely plotted. It's all quite grown up and clever, basically if you like Gaiman, Pratchett and Adams you'll probably like these.
In the England that Thursday Next inhabits, cheese is a prohibited substance, and highly desirable. Thursday has a side-line as a fencer of illegal cheese from Wales, which (in the books) is a separate and unfriendly country to England.
It therefore amused me yesterday when I discovered there's an actual drug called "cheese"! No doubt Jasper Fforde wasn't aware of this when he chose cheese as a drug-like contraband item in his books, but it seems a odd example of life imitating art.
Lara...sorry, you've lost me. :-)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/rippingyarns/index.shtml
Just wondering if they were the same kind of boys own adventures, set in an age of empire feeling.
Obviously not quite as silly though.
The odd thing about the last book is that it does stand up as a murder-mystery as well as having all those lovely Ffordisms.
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