Mary Russell series

[peroxidepirate]

Have I talked about this yet? Laurie R. King's Marry Russell series is my new favorite; I read The Pirate King first because it's about the 1920s, pirates, The Pirates of Penzance, and a brilliant lady sleuth. It's book eleven in the series, though, so now I'm going through the rest of the series in order.

Russell (as she's often referred to in the books) ends up married to Sherlock Holmes at some point and I totally ship it, even though there's a substantial age difference and he was initially her mentor/teacher/semi-parental figure (Tamora Pierce fans, think Daine/Numair). But I'm not to that point in the series yet.

I'm like 20% of the way through book 2, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, and Russell and I have just fallen in love with feminist leader Margery Childe. Well, I'm disappointingly certain that Mary Russell/Margery Childe will remain subtext only, but come on. Russell (who narrates the books) even compares how she feels about Childe to how she feels about Holmes. The tension and mutual fascination in their first private conversation is a glorious thing and obviously I'm not through the book yet but seriously how do people not ship this!? 

I'm about to scrap the Pepper Potts thing and write a Mary Russell AU in which she ends up with Childe instead of Holmes, so there. I never do anything with my NaNo novels after I write the first draft anyway, so it doesn't matter if no one but me cares about the story I'm telling.

Anyway. Fans of smart resourceful ladies and early 20th-century settings, I recommend you check out this series. Every book I've read so far is a Bechdel-pass too, with fully realized supporting characters both female and male. 

Comments

[seekingferret]

My inability to ship Russell/Holmes ultimately doomed me to give up on the series, though I made an exception for O Jerusalem for reasons roughly equivalent to your reasons for starting with The Pirate King. That was a lovely little novel.