>>>>After reading almost nothing but SF and Fantasy for too many years to remember, I finally shifted over to the mystery genre. Lots of good stuff, but I still drift back to the SF section in the book store now and then to see if Richard Morgan, David Weber or Elizabeth Moon have anything new to offer. I recently read Weber's Born in Fury, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's really space opera stuff, but he writes it very well.
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>>>I've recently read "Gun, with occasional music" (or vice versa?), which is a perfect mix of SF and detective genre.
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>>If you want a real hoot, pick up a copy of The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fford (not a typo). And then read the rest of the series. This guy is right up there with Douglas Adams and Tom Holt.
>
>Actually "ff" is a typical Welsh spelling (not saying this applies here though. In Welsh, "f" is pronounced as "v", whereas "ff" is pronounced as, well, "f".
>Hence we get the Welsh girls' name Ffion (Fiona).

To the best of my knowledge, Jasper Fforde (however it's pronounced) is a countryman of yours. For some reason, the most imaginatively 'off the wall' sort of writers seem to come from your neck of the woods. Adams, Holt, Fforde, Pratchett.

In case you're not familiar with Holt, here is the synopsis from the Wiki of his first book "Expecting Someone Taller"

The story involves Malcolm Fisher, a hapless auction clerk in modern-day England, who runs over a badger one night. The badger turns out to be the giant Ingolf, brother of Fafnir, and Fisher becomes the new owner of the Ring of the Nibelung and the Tarnhelm, and, thereby, ruler of the world. However, Wotan, king of the gods, still wants the ring, as do others, and Fisher finds himself pursued by numerous characters from Wagner's opera, and romantically entangled, first, with one of the Rhinemaidens, and later, with one of the Valkyries.


Here's part of the synopsis from Amazon on Fforde's "The Eyre Affair"

Pirouetting on the boundaries between sci-fi, the crime thriller and intertextual whimsy, Jasper Fforde's outrageous The Eyre Affair puts you on the wrong footing even on its dedication page, which proudly announces that the book conforms to Crimean War economy standard.

[ snip... ]

Fforde is endlessly inventive: his heroine's utter unconcern about the strangeness of the world she inhabits keeps the reader perpetually double-taking as minor certainties of history, literature and cuisine go soggy in the corner of our eye. The audacity of the premise and its working out provides sudden leaps of understanding, many of them accompanied by wild fits of the giggles. This is a peculiarly promising first novel. --Roz Kaveney