Czardas

Zine
Title:	Czardas
Publisher:	The Nut Hatch
Editor:
Author(s):	Jane of Australia
Cover Artist(s):
Illustrator(s):
Date(s):	1994
Medium:	print
Size:
Genre:
Fandom:	Professionals/Ladder of Swords
Language:	English
External Links:
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front cover

sample page

a flyer, printed in Hostage to Peace

Czardas is a 166-page slash and het Professionals novel by Jane of Australia.

See List of Professionals Fanworks by Jane of Australia.

Originally to Be Published in a Different Fashion

In 1991 from the editorial of Perfect Gentlemen: "Finally, 'stop-press', 'stop me before I print this' news is that Jane's Bodie and Don Demarco novel, 'Czardas' is very probably going to be published in the USA, not by us, and illustrated by Suzan Lovett. More details about this project as they come to hand, but a tentative release-date would be late in 1992. If best-laid-plans work out we will bring in a stack of copies for Aussie and Kiwi subscribers, so you won't be missing out."

Note from Media Monitor: "Czardas has been in the works for a long time, but Nut Hatch will be publishing rather than UZI Press, due to personal, (and entirely amicable), reasons."

Summaries

from The Hatstand:

CI5 agent Bodie, partnerless since Doyle recently married and stopped being a field agent, accepts a dangerous one-man assignment in Eastern Europe, where he meets and becomes involved with Don DeMarco, a member of an itinerant travelling circus. Don DeMarco was a role played by the actor Martin Shaw in the British TV movie Ladder of Swords.

From On the Double:

In the early 1980's, with the Cold War at its height, CI5 is asked to work with MI6. An agent has gone missing in Eastern Europe, and he must be found, swiftly. The matter is of the utmost importance. The last man was seen was at a small circus in Hungary; and the last man known to have seen him is the performer, Don Demarco. (A Bodie/Don Demarco story).

From the Nut Hatch flyer:

In the early 1980s, with the Cold War at its height, CI5 is asked to work in conjunction with MI6. An agent has gone missing in Eastern Europe, and he must be found, swiftly. The matter is of the utmost importance. The last place the man was seen was at a small circus in Hungary; and the last man known to have seen him is the performer, Don Demarco. Complicating affairs, CI5 and the KGB are in conflict. Each is holding an agent belonging to the other, and the solution to this predicament is not as simple as just arranging a prisoner exchange. Working without a partner since Ray Doyle left the department some time before, and on the last few months of his own CI5 contract, Bodie is teamed -- reluctantly -- with an operative from MI6. Together, they fly into Hungary, under cover and under orders to find Demarco, use him to get the missing agent, and bring out the man who is wanted by CI5, MI6 -- and the KGB. Bodie’s mission into Eastern Europe has been planned to the utmost, with the security departments of both England and Russia combining, clandestinely, to make it work quickly and efficiently... And then, everything conceivable goes wrong and when Bodie finds himself in desperate trouble, he has one spark of hope to turn to.

Don Demarco.

165pp. Photocopy, A4, coil bound

Author's Foreword

I want to thank Kathy Keegan, who started the snowball rolling with an idea she had, back in early '92. That got me thinking, but there were phenomenal problems to be overcome before the novel could take shape. First, just as Kath had to contend with when she wrote The Cassidy Legacy, I had the problem of timing to solve. Bodie and Doyle belong to the late l970s, early '80s, and Ladder Of Swords postdates that show by almost a decade. After a lot of soul searching I decided to set Czardas 'somewhere in the middle.' That is, I brought The Professionals forward by a few years, took Ladder Of Swords back a few years ... and then I prayed that the join would be invisible. I think it worked out okay. Next huge problem: Ray Doyle. If you want to write a Bodie/Don DeMarco story, you have to answer a tremendous question. Where's Ray? Well, my solution to this was the only one I could see, short of saying Ray was deceased (something I wouldn't dream of doing to Bodie. Or readers). Judy D. did say to me, two years ago, 'why not make the story about Don and a Bodie surrogate, or perhaps even make it Peter Skellen, from Who Dares Wins. I tried that, every which-way I could think of. The story didn't work without Cowley and CI5 ... and that meant, I had to either 'write Doyle out,' and pretend he never existed, or else think of something. I developed what I believe is the most likely scenario for these men, given all the factors and parameters. The result is bitter-sweet, admittedly. But the tinge of regret at the outset makes the ending much, much sweeter.

Reviews and Reactions

Haven't read it, don't want to. I, personally, don't care for anything that puts Bodie with any Shaw characters. He belongs with Doyle. Period :-)

I recently acquired Czardas from ebay and have really enjoyed that. Like Harlequin Airs, it is circus based but is actually Don de Marco/Bodie. I never thought I'd enjoy books about the circus!

I like Czardas, which may be a surprise to people who remember my thoughts on most Nut Hatch zines. I've seen Ladder of Swords, and you need to also..... It's a wonderful romantic movie. I think I like this zine because it is Bodie and Don Demarco, not Doyle. I never think Jane gets Bodie or Doyle right, but especially Doyle, and since he's not in this story I am not constantly struck by 'out of character' moments and language. Czardas has a strong story and interesting background. Jane is usually excellent at plotting and background details that feel right.

I began this zine with my OTP heart in my mouth, because Doyle and Bodie are not together and never were. Of course this is a Bodie/Don DeMarco crossover, so the author had to do something with Doyle, I just wish it hadn't been that! Still, with my hackles raised and a growl in the back of my throat I read on, and I'm incredibly glad I did, because I adored this story. Don DeMarco is as sexy as Martin Shaw made him in Ladder of Swords, and Bodie is himself all through. Together they've a kind of magic, and it unfolds against the wilderness background of Eastern Europe - Hungary and Romania - deep forests, swathes of wildflowers (and if they weren't actually described you knew they were there) and broken down tractors on blocks. Plenty of mission action and adventure, the lure of the circus and our heroes realising that they can't live without each other. What's not to like? Additionally this is very well written - there's tenderness, but not in a sappy way, the relationship is between two men and more so, one of them is, as I said our Bodie, culled from the episodes, not from wishful-thinking-gone-mad. I wouldn't always recommend Jane, but I recommend her Czardas with no hesitation whatsoever.

I recently acquired a bunch of Nut Hatch Press zines, and started reading them. The first one I read was Czardas, by Jane (of Australia), which I'd heard moderately strong recommendations for.

Warning: Spoilers ahead. Also opinions.

Short take: Probably worth reading once, don't pay a lot for it.

Longer version: I must admit that I was originally a bit put off by the introduction. Jane stated that she wanted to pair Bodie off with Don DeMarco, but couldn't possibly kill off Doyle, and she didn't want to make him nonexistent, so she had come up a likely but bitterweet scenario. Okay. I'd rather not have known that, but so be it. Then she goes on to defend a line that Emily Ross wanted to remove as unbelievable, about one out of three men in prison being innocent. She can't possibly remove that, she says. Why not? Because it's fact -- she can't remember where she heard it, but Kath (one of her alter egos) swears to it too, so it must be true. So with that dubious beginning, I went on to the story.

The first thing that happens is that learn that Bodie and Doyle can't possibly get together in this novel, because Doyle is terminally straight. Boy, do you learn that. At great length. With many repetitions. Okay, already, I got the picture.

So then Bodie goes haring after Don DeMarco, and teams up with a M9 (a James Bond sort of outfit) agent. Jane goes to great lengths to show how the glamorous life of a secret agent really isn't, but this section is actually pretty interesting. They go traveling through various country, until the other guy is killed while Bodie is relieving himself in the woods. More interesting stuff while Bodie finds DeMarco.

Then there's a two-week stint where the two of them are hiding out alone in the woods. This section is both boring and inevitable. There's the wooing, and they become lovers, with the predictable angst on DeMarco's side about whether Bodie is using him as a Doyle-substitute. I will say that there (thankfully) does not appear to be any feminizing of DeMarco; maybe Jane saves that for the real Doyle. Instead, DeMarco angsts over the possibility of going back to prison (and about his dead lover) almost as much as Bodie moons over the unobtainable Doyle.

There's one very telling bit near the middle of the book, where Bodie is posing as a novelist. There are no new plots, he says; the only thing you can do is set the same old plots against exotic locales to make them interesting. This isn't really true, but I think it _is_ true of Jane's writing. That's why so much of it has a certain predictability to it. That, plus the fact that I often want to quote Stoppard's Rosencranz (or maybe Guildenstern) -- "Foul! No repitition."

Eventually, of course, love triumphs, the spy plot is wrapped up with unseemly haste, and Bodie decides to leave CI5 and join the circus. And they presumably live happily ever after, with the circus and the new bear.

It's not awful, and there are in fact some very nice bits. The scene where DeMarco susses out that Bodie is in love with Doyle is right to my taste. There are a couple of decent sex scenes, too. But there was a great deal of "now I'm going to lecture you about this exotic locale" that got tedious quickly. At a panel on expository lumps at this year's Minicon, I made the analogy that some expository lumps are currants, and some are uncooked oatmeal. This novel had too much uncooked oatmeal.

Production values: Mostly quite good. Two-column format, readable font, comb binding, appropriate margins. It's quite clear that this was spell-checked but not proofed completely, despite a note in the preface thanking Emily Ross for her proofing and stating that it's probably better than most Nut Hatch zines. There are no non-word typos that I caught, but there averaged two to three places per page where the wrong word crept in - "revelry" instead of "reverie," that sort of thing. I would have appreciated the hyphenation setting being fixed so that you don't get things like pass-ed or open-ed breaking at the end of a line. But that's a minor quibble.

CZARDAS is a novel by Jane published by the Nut Hatch Collective in 1994. It has 166 pages of text in double columns. The type is clear and dark, not overly large, and there's no wasted white space. The cover is a plain but attractive design printed on red paper with a plastic protective overlay and comb binding.

The novel is a crossover of Pros with the British tv-movie, Ladder of Swords, starring Martin Shaw as Don DeMarco (aka Eugene Sullivan). The pairing is Bodie/Don.

I've owned this zine for a couple of years and have tried several times to read it, but was never able to get past the first few pages. That wasn't the novel's fault, but my bias. A story set in the CI5 world that includes Doyle but slashes Bodie with someone else is very difficult for me to buy into. I can't get over my feeling that it's impossible for these two characters to be with anyone other than each other if they're both present and work together as per the show. That's how I see them onscreen. It's like a towering hurdle to try to vault over for me to accept--even if only for the duration of a single story--that they wouldn't gravitate to each other and no one else. I have an easier time with crossovers involving an alt CI5 universe where Doyle simply doesn't exist.

Jane recognises this problem in the foreword to Czardas where she discusses the dilemma she faced in dealing with Doyle while wanting to tell a story set in the canon world but slashing Bodie with Don DeMarco. The solution she decided on was to make Doyle totally straight and marry him off, making him happy with a wife and child and out of CI5, doing a less dangerous job since becoming a family man. That leaves Bodie with his unrequited love for Doyle, working alone in CI5 and pretty much unhappy. I think this was the only thing she could have done other than making an alt world where Doyle never existed, but agreeing with her decision didn't help me manage to read this novel for the longest time! But I finally got over the hurdle of the first few pages of set-up and got into the meat of the story. I skimmed rather than properly read all the bits to do with this peculiarly and unbelievably heterosexual Doyle, but skimming them worked to keep me from abandoning the novel again, so that's cool. Once Bodie leaves England, trailing Don, the Doyle bits fade to almost nothing so there weren't many perception disconnects to deal with after the initial set-up.

Jane isn't a writer who works for me most of the time, especially in her longer stories, but I'm glad I read this novel at last. The circus setting is super, laden with details about rigging and the acts and tricks and how they work. I enjoyed watching through Bodie's eyes as Don prepares himself for his fire-eating act and later a fire-juggling act, and Bodie's own direct experiences as a newcomer, from a roustabout's work, getting blisters on his hands from unaccustomed heavy labour, to directing traffic in the car park before a show to having a chance to put on a leotard and work up an act with Don. Jane notes that much of her information came from her father, who toured with a small British circus for a few years, and the feel of a travelling circus as it is beyond the lights and sparkly glamour and illusions is compellingly realistic.

Equally engrossing is the Eastern European setting. I haven't any first-hand knowledge of Romania and adjacent countries, so it all came across to me as exotic but without, again, any false glamour. Bodie is the outsider through whose eyes we see everything, and we discover with him the beauty of the country contrasted with the seediness and fear and poverty many of the people live with contrasted again with incidences of individual generosity and basic human warmth, but also meanness and intolerance. The gypsies are equally unromanticised, their lifestyle presented as both free and a travelling prison of sorts as they lose young people to a settled life in cities and suffer the prejudice, large and small, of both the authorities and some citizens of the countries their people have roamed through for centuries.

The structure of the novel is another strength. It nicely balances action interspersed with periods of quiet. Don and Bodie spend two weeks alone when they're first getting to know each other before they have to leave their haven in the Romanian wilderness and deal with their fraught and dangerous situations in the greater world again. This kind of happy event that allows characters the chance to fall in love away from stress or prying eyes is one of those slash cliches that is great when it works well, and it works fine here. Jane is always good at plotting and action, and that strength is showcased with the unfolding of events and the shift between peaceful and hectic interludes.

The love story itself between Bodie and Don is pleasant if not much individualised beyond their situations. It's the story of two men heading to middle-age who have loved and lost and unexpectedly get a chance at everything they need with each other. As with having to deal with Doyle, Jane had to do something with Don's lover, Alice, from the movie. Jane chose to have Alice die a couple of years before. As I'm not in the least emotionally invested in Alice, or the Don/Alice relationship, I didn't mind this convenient massacre of a hapless character. Don has had time to grieve for Alice and is ready to accept a new love when Bodie arrives. Jane's strength is in event rather than characterisation. With that in mind, Don struck me as being quite like the character in the movie, not merely a variation of Doyle.

The novel does have its weaknesses, predictable in a Jane novel. It falls down for me in the execution as Jane's work usually does. She has a few stylistic quirks that drive me up the wall, and that was the same here even though I enjoyed the setting and action. The way the characters constantly say things "drily" sets my teeth on edge. There's also a lot of padding, another Jane characteristic: editing with hedge shears would not go amiss. And then there's the endless sex, which wouldn't be bad if only the sex were in the least interesting. As with all of Jane's sex scenes, however, these ones did nothing for me and I ended up skimming them.

The quirk of hers that bothers me the most, though, is the way she tells us things multiple times when once would be quite enough. For instance, in the space of a handful of paragraphs, Bodie tells Don four times to go to a doctor to get a tetanus shot--and that's after Don agrees with him the first time. We continually get one of them saying things like, "I'm on the run, remember," when the entire preceding fifty pages have been about them being on the run so, yes, we do actually remember this crucial little fact, thanks. It takes "tell, not show" to the extreme and I find that way of storytelling highly irritating.

But, all in all, skating over the bumps, I enjoyed reading this novel, am glad I finally got over my bias so I could read it, and will keep it to reread.

I wasn't sure what to expect of this one when I picked it up. I'm really still a newbie in Pros, at least in terms of the relative length of time I've been involved with the fandom, but I've crammed as much as possible into that time and I've seen enough to discover that Jane of Australia is a somewhat ... controversial figure. I think maybe it's really that she's become the lodestone for a purported division in the fandom - there are people who like "Jane-type" fic and people who don't, and the people who don't tend to heap scorn upon her relentlessly. It's hard for me to better define the schism - sometimes it seems like it's sappy vs. gritty, other times it seems like it's the quality of writing that's the issue rather than the content or tone. But for whatever reason, there's an element of Pros fandom that likes to hold Jane up as some sort of poster child for Bad Writing, or Bad Fanfic.

I've got to admit I have little patience with this. Sure her writing's not perfect, and I have no problem with the fact that some people simply dislike her style. I think it's the pretentiousness (and occasional hypocrisy) of some of those who do, the way they almost demonize her, that so puts me off. The categorical, overwrought proclamations that her stories are "bad" by "objective" standards of writing generally make me want to laugh, or throw up, as do the dolorous expressions of regret about the "waste" of talent ... how sad it is, ::big sigh, crocodile tears::, that she doesn't take more time, find a better editor; she could be so good if only she took more care, proofread more, whatever .... I mean, get over it already! Sure, her writing has flaws, but then again, so does most fanfic; Jane's is far, far, far from the worst. Maybe it's a personal issue with Jane rather than truly a writing issue - I don't know Jane from Adam, so I have no idea - but I just don't see what it is about her fic that should evoke such an extreme reaction - though longer-term Pros fan friends have suggested that it might be jealousy over her prolific-ness, popularity, and amazing imagination (I have no opinion either way about this; just don't have enough context). Also, I think the "schism" is something of a red herring; sure there are people who just don't like Jane's fic, don't like her style under any circumstances, but it is certainly possible for a fan (read: me!) to enjoy both Jane and, say, Sebastian or M. Fae Glasgow, even if in different ways, and to appreciate the different things each has to offer.

Whew. Rant over for now! Clearly this has been bugging me. *g*

Anyway, all this being said, I do admit that I have mixed feelings about Jane's writing. On the one hand I think she's an absolutely wonderful storyteller. Her imagination and creativity are just amazing, and I love many of her AUs, particularly the Flesh and Steel trilogy and also the first book of The Hunting. These tend to remind me of the fantasy novels I read in my youth, with the two male characters joined by mythic bonds stronger than brotherhood etc. etc. - only with sex! I always wanted more, more, more "relationship" when I read those books - the pages on which, for example, Hal and Alan declared their love for each other in Nancy Springer's Silver Sun were dogeared and memorized (and I cringe to admit that the only piece of "fanfic" I've ever written - and as an adult, no less! - was an unbearably sappy epilogue to The Sable Moon, reuniting Hal and Alan in Elwestrand) - and more is exactly what Jane gives me. I get the fantasy plus lots of relationship plus - yay! - sex! I love that, and it's no difficulty at all for me to overlook the undeniable fact that many of her stories really could benefit from a bit of tightening up and a freer use of the red pen. I don't love all the ones I've read (and I haven't read them all) - for example, I've never been able to make it through the entire Hunting; I lose interest rapidly after the first book - but I find a number of her AUs are wonderful, the characters are often interesting and engaging, I love the relationship focus, and her writing is basically solid. It seems churlish of me to demand more from my fanfic, or at least from all my fanfic.

Those are the AUs - it's Jane's CI5-universe fic that I more often have real issues with, specifically her characterizations of Bodie and Doyle. I haven't read nearly all her CI5 fics, but in many of those I have read Bodie and Doyle strike me as too ... talky or something, too in touch with themselves and their feelings, too reasonable about it all. There's not quite enough of the communication issues, the ... well, dysfunctionality, I guess, that you expect of men in general, particularly hard men, fighting men, like these two. Not quite enough "passion" - and by this I don't mean sexual passion, I mean anger and confusion and intensity. And often it's a bit too sappy and happily domestic for me. There's more to it than this; I haven't quite managed to put my finger on why, but though I don't really dislike her Bodie/Doyle fic, it never quite "does it" for me, either. It's one thing for characterization to be "off" in an AU - if the story is good I can enjoy it anyway, the fact that it's not "really" Bodie and Doyle doesn't get in the way so much. But characterization that feels "wrong" is far more difficult for me to ignore in canon-based fic, no matter how exciting or interesting the story is. I can live with loose editing more easily than I can live with bad characterization, at least in CI5-universe fic.

So I felt a little trepidation when I began Czardas, which is a CI5-universe fic, though it's also a crossover. Perhaps somewhat to my surprise, though, I really loved it, enough to re-read and to want to buy the zine for myself! It was a long meaty story, interesting and engaging with a plot that I actually found quite engrossing, yet still primarily a relationship development story, which is key for me. The Bodie/Doyle characterization issues that often bother me in Jane's fic either weren't there or, for whatever reason, I wasn't bothered by them in this context.

The story is mostly about Bodie, and I found him incredibly appealing and well-drawn here - I liked this Bodie, I felt for him, I liked his toughness and loneliness and thankfully well-hidden vulnerability (I simply can't stomach stories in which Bodie or Doyle let it all hang out for the world to see) and his sexual experience with men (in Pros in particular it's hard for me to buy a Bodie who's never had sex with men before, unless it's a coming-to-terms-with-gayness fic - Bodie just strikes me as so gay, and so sexual); I liked the way he thought and acted and talked. It's a Bodie/Don story, but Ray appears for a little while too, and I found Jane's portrayal of him solid and realistic as well. The way she deals with the issue of why Bodie's not with Ray made me choke up repeatedly - very rare for me! It hurt, and like Bodie I wanted it to be different, but that just shows how effective it was and how well done - it was supposed to hurt, damn her eyes! *g* I've never seen Ladder of Swords, but I liked Don deMarco, too, and I desperately wanted their relationship to work.

The story's not perfect, of course. It suffers from a bit of wordiness and repetitiveness, which as I said before, I think Jane's fics often do - it could have benefited from a good edit so, for example, there weren't three separate paragraphs scattered throughout the story in which Don tells Bodie in almost identical terms the trading value of condoms in the Soviet bloc countries. And I felt at times like the author was on an anti-violence soapbox; the occasional feeling of being lectured got a little tiresome. But overall I found this a great, solid read. There was angst, but not overwhelming angst - I wasn't paralyzed with anxiety. There was hot sex - Jane always has lots of explicit smut, which I love, but sometimes it doesn't read to me as "sexy"; as a rule it did in this fic (I especially loved Don's response the first time Bodie fucked him - "Oh ... that was fine, that was" - I could just hear the Irish accent). There was good relationship development, with some uncertainty and miscommunication (though I wouldn't have minded even a bit more of this) and real tenderness. There were hot guys in spandex (it is the circus, after all!). There were interesting characters (I'd say original characters, but I have no idea if they are, having never seen Ladder of Swords) and an interesting storyline. There was a wonderfully satisfying conclusion, poignant but happy. The story just made me feel good, and I as soon as I finished I wanted to start over - the sign of a definite keeper!

Czardas, by Jane, a complete zine novel. I borrowed this from a friend - thank you, C! First thing is that it's really long. I did a quick word count and there's about a thousand words to a page and about 160 pages, so perhaps 160,000 words? It's set in a mid-point between the shows: it's in the late eighties, but the events of Ladder of Swords have already happened. Unlike in many of the above, Doyle is in this, although a minor character: he is straight, married, and no longer in CI5. Bodie, suffering from his unrequited love for Doyle, must get behind the Iron Curtain and locate Don De Marco for CI5, as Don may have been a witness to something CI5 needs to know more about. They meet, there is instant attraction, and the bulk of the novel is their adventures, set against the background of travelling circuses in communist Hungary and Romania, with the KGB hunting for them as they try to get close enough to the border to get back across.

As well as reading the CD contents, I've borrowed and bought a few Jane novels, and this contains a lot of what I am coming to consider her hallmarks. Length, for a start - honestly, the zine novels are huge - way longer than what's on the CD. There's copious plot and intrigue, involving the intelligence services of multiple countries. And then the ability to tell a story set in vividly-drawn surroundings. I must confess that while I can appreciate Jane's storytelling and talent for describing worlds, she doesn't always hit the mark for me. A lot of this is personal taste, and some - like my dislike of "a bi" as a singular noun - is frankly petty on my part, and I know that. I am also a complete ignoramus about the musical references that Jane includes on almost every page. (This may be an Aussie thing, as there are other Nuthatch authors who do the same.) I expect if you know what these tunes are and where they are from, they add a lot, but they just get in the way for me. And -- and I gather I am far from the first to say this -- Jane and I do not see Doyle in the same way at all. I see him as more self-sufficient, more aggressive, more confident, more casually violent, and far far less dependent. This "needing to lean on Bodie" portrayal of Doyle normally irks me.

But not so with Czardas. Despite Bodie's constant reminders to himself about how different the two men are, I think Jane portrays de Marco almost exactly the same way she portrays Doyle. And however I regard Doyle, I thought that de Marco in Ladder of Swords was a bit of a wuss who spent all his time lamenting his woes and who only ever seemed to do anything when one of the various women kicked him into it (go them). So actually, I was quite happy with this portrayal of de Marco in Czardas, and accepted it much more willingly than I do her Doyle.

I found it dragged towards the end, but that was partly because it's set in a circus and asserts a "magic of the circus" which I just don't get, because I'm not actually a circus fan. There are pages and pages of circus background and anecdotes of circus life. According to the preface, much of this came from family connections. And in building these descriptions up, the layering can become repetitive. Examples include constant explanations of why condoms are only available on the black market in Eastern Europe, references to the magic of the circus (see above!), descriptions of the landscape and of the ancestral wanderings of the gypsies, and claims that the decline of the circus in England is due to eighties youth only being interested in video games and (variously) rock or punk - a claim with which, as a member of eighties youth, I take issue!

But if you like circuses and a nurturing Bodie - and playing hunt the zine, because you have to find it second-hand - you will definitely like this. And you will probably like it an awful lot, and you will want to keep an eye out for it.

There is probably some fun to be had comparing Harlequin Airs and Czardas, now I think of it: both so circus-based, both with heaps of circus characters, and yet I think of them as entirely different.

I read Czardas..., years ago, and loved it. It was before I'd been lectured by Jane just once too often, and she came crashing down from my readable-author list, and so I've been a bit nervous of re-reading this one, because I rather like having the memory of having enjoyed it. That said, I didn't like that she separated our Pros lads - it really is Bodie/Doyle I want together, and when they're in a cross-over/AU I see them as kind of reincarnated souls of the same characters, which totally works for me. Having Doyle still alive and not wanting Bodie is just so wrong and uncomfortable to me...