Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell meet Sherlock Holmes!

 This book is a collection of short stories (and a novel) written by Randall Garrett. I read his Gandalara Cycle (which he wrote with Vicki Ann Heydron) as a teenager (which I have fond memories of, a sort of sword and sandals adventure series, about a man from the real world who wakes up another man’s body. And where the heroes are bonded to ridable, giant telepathic cats. Fun stuff, but that’s for another review.

What’s The Complete Lord Darcy about? They’re detective stories, set around the 1960s (although the timeline progresses into the future) in an alternate history. Technologically, it’s a bit like the Victorian era, where competent monarchies rule countries. Lord Darcy is an investigator for Duke Richard of Normandy, which is part of the Anglo-French Empire (and also includes ‘New England’ and ‘New France’).

Where’s the fantasy? Well, magic is real and follows several scientific principles. It’s not industrialised, but there are some hints of that happening in the edges of the stories. Sorcerers who work for the Catholic Church control magic. Darcy’s offsider is Master Sean, a registered sorcerer, who handles of Darcy’s crime scene forensics. The magic is based on the Hermetic magical tradition, such as the Law of Similarity, Sympathy and Contagion, which I recall from reading the Golden Bough years ago. Sean can do things like confirm that samples of blood taken from people are related. In one investigation, he turns a scrap of clothing is into a simulacrum of the original garment.

Magic isn’t used to directly commit crimes; there’s nothing like “the victim was killed by a magic missile upcast to the third level”. Instead, it’s all indirect. For example, foul play in one story was committed using the Law of Similarity, where a poor sap was brainwashed into thinking he was another individual, and things that affected the duplicate affected the actual victim. 

Most of the mysteries are typical locked-roomed mysteries, where a member of the upper class is found dead in strange circumstances, and Darcy has to work out what’s going, occasionally making moral judgements on how he deals with the villains. Compared to Master Sean, Darcy is a bit bland as a character; a version of Sherlock Holmes without many of the quirks. But this is a feature, rather than a bug. In the space of a short story (and novel), Garret expertly introduces a mystery, magic system, alternate history and a usual cast of suspects and weaves a satisfying tale. Garret’s writing is clear, but dense, like chocolate mudcake. And he’s got a fondness for allusions and puns. One wizard at a conference, for example, is Grand Master Sir Lyon Gandophus. And some stories are riffs on existing mysteries, such as famous Agathar Christie books (such as Murder on the Orient Express). Because of the density of the stories, I had to reread them to see how they all fitted together.

My favorites in the collection involved a bit of international intrigue and skullduggery against the wicked, expansionist Polish Empire (who in this timeline control most of eastern Europe), which were A Case of Identity, and Ipswich Phial, which introduces a rival for Darcy, Special Agent Olga Polovski.

 Having been fond of the Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell television series, which was largely a series of drawing room discussions, I was struck by how this book would be perfect for such an adaptation! You wouldn’t need a lot of special effects, just some Victorian-era outfits and drawing rooms.

 World-building wise, I wondered how the empire remained stable for six hundred years, as it’s been around since the Plantagenet dynasty. Some stories mention the ongoing colonization of America; Lord John Quetzal, a relative of Montezuma, is from the duchy of Mexico, and is a prominent character Too Many Magicians . Asia isn’t referred to, but one could assume they are still ruled by their competent monarchies, much as Europe is. (Where perhaps, Judge Dee analogs are involved in their own intrigue.) And perhaps Australia hasn’t even been discovered yet.

I highly recommended this collection, but I recommended reading one story at a time and savouring it rather than trying to devour it all at once. 

Another week, another RIB (Review of Interesting Books).

I found this book on my e-reader. I can’t tell you how or when I acquired it, but it was likely part of some promotion or special deal. Despite acquiring a small mountain of these books, I curate the books I decide to read. I don’t enjoy a book, or if it fails to grab me after the first few chapters, I move on.

But this book made the cut.

The DeChance Chronicles Omnibus is a set of four books by David Niall Wilson, who I’m not familiar with otherwise but has written many books, including Star Trek tie-ins, and who’s won the Bram Stoker Award for horror writing.

In the introduction, Wilson grabbed my attention with a reference to the old White Wolf roleplaying game company, whose urban fantasy roleplaying games like Vampire: The Masquerade, Mage: The Ascension, and Werewolf: The Apocalypse solidified my love of urban fantasy in the 1990s and 2000s. The DeChance Chronicles are about Donovan DeChance, a wizard in the fictional American city of San Valencez, and some books were initially proposed as World of Darkness tie-ins.

This volume contains the first four books and some short pieces. I really enjoyed these; I wouldn’t say that the books are especially ‘gamey’, but rather solid and well-written urban fantasy adventures. (In some old D&D tie-in novels, you could practically hear the click of dice as the characters did things!)

DeChance is a refined, gentlemanly, academic wizard. He’s not especially snarky or witty like Dresden, but enjoys fine dining and wine, and has a stable, healthy romance with his intriguing wizardly girlfriend, Amethyst. DeChance has a large sanctum filled with books and occult paraphernalia. He’s well connected with the local occult community and has a cat familiar, Cleo, an Egyptian Mau breed. Much to Cleo’s consternation, DeChance later picks up a scruffy raven familiar as well. (Cleo doesn’t talk but communicates with her wizard through mental impressions and cat-like mannerisms.)

The first book, Heart of the Dragon, is about some dragons possessing the members of a local gang. When artist Salvatore paints these dragons, he empowers the gang members and and fuels an occult feud between the different gangs. DeChance’s involvement here is a bit more peripheral than the later books, but he does get involved to stop a powerful summoning. I enjoyed DeChance’s visits to Club Chaos, the typical urban fantasy nightclub where deals are made and many creatures are encountered. (We had a lot of those special nightclubs in our old Vampire games!)

The Vintage Soul is centered on DeChance’s relationship with a group of vampires. In this world, vampires can flavour wine with blood and store it for a long time. At a vampire gathering, a powerful female vampire is kidnapped, and her partner, the city’s vampire ‘prince’, Johndrow, hires DeChance to get her back. This case intersects with the theft of a tome from DeChance’s library. The culprit is a wizard who plants to sacrifice the kidnapped vampire to fuel an immortality spell. Of the four books, this was the closest to the World of Darkness mythos (in fact, this was originally proposed as a World of Darkness novel).

My Soul to Keep explores DeChance’s origin story in the wild west, where as a boy he was apprenticed to the drunken hedge wizard, ‘Dr. Hugo Rathman, Healer, Mystic, and Clairvoyant’ (as painted on the side of his wagon). Rathman moves from town to town, trying to stay ahead of a demon after his soul. Donovan suffers abuse from his mentor, while trying to learn magic from books. One day, the demon finally catches up, and DeChance has a chance to escape. Wilson clearly enjoyed writing the old west setting, and there’s a particular vibrancy that shone through the descriptions.

The last book in the collection, Kali's Tale, is linked to characters from The Vintage Soul, about a vampire, Kali, who wants revenge on the man who made her a vampire. As requested by the vampire prince, DeChance chaperones Kali, and a group of her fellow young vampires on her journey. While the setting around the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina is quite evocative, one moment irked me: when DeChance saved his little vampire charges from the ghost of an old blues musician who was simply protecting his turf from the bloodsuckers!

Other stories are linked to Wilson’s Great Dismal Swamp setting, about a mad preacher, and the eccentric con man and occult investigator Cletus J Diggs, a fun and lively character.

What made these stories work are the evocative, well-detailed characters, and sense of place, especially around the North Carolina scenes, where Wilson lives. Wilson sometimes writes in the character’s head, and sometimes as though we’re behind a camera, watching the character. This is a style taken from some mystery novels, which gives a certain secrecy to the character’s actions; I didn’t find it limiting at all. Other things of interest are the snippets of lore as Wilson slowly builds the mythology of his world, such as that vampire banes are variable, and are based on what they feared when they were alive. For example, the mad alchemist vampire in the fourth book is repelled by dogwood rather than a crucifix.

I enjoyed my time in DeChance’s world and would recommend this volume.

Welcome to the first RIB for the new site, that is, the Review of Interesting Books.

Imagine if you could cram all of Stephen King's Dark Tower saga in one book. That's what Max Gladstone is attempting with Last Exit. I’m a huge Dark Tower fan, so anything inspired by that series gets a huge thumbs-up from me. And this book has a bunch of my favorite things in it: alternate realities, a defined contrast between the modern and the magical world (which I always argue makes the magical seem more real and wondrous), epic road trips, great characters, the sense of older versus younger selves, redemption arcs. Where do I start? 

A group of disaffected college students discover magic (‘spin’, and how to get to alternate realities (‘alts’). They leave on a road trip to save the real world. From what? Well, probably the slow, creeping despair that Millennials must feel with the sense of a slowly decaying world: global warming records high, authoritarianism. They’re trying to find a magical cure by exploring alternate worlds, something amazing that will save everything. And on this grail quest, they have adventures, and road trips, and fights against rob-gorillas, and Mad Max style villains. One companion is lost on a last adventure, and the adventurers return to the real world, give up on travelling, and go back to their mundane lives.

Okay, all that above? That’s the backstory. 

The actual book starts ten years later, with Zelda knocking on the door of Sal’s family home. Zelda and Sal were lovers, and Sal was the woman who was lost. Zelda has spent ten years driving around modern America, trying closing portals to stop the rot from infecting the world. And every year she goes back to apologise to Sal’s family for losing her. Most of the time, the family ignores her while she knocks endlessly on the door, but one day, the door opens. It’s June, Sal’s younger cousin, who’s ready to know what happened.

 After some badgering and running away, Zelda agrees to take June with her on the quest to find Sal. And things start gain, but this time Zelda is ten years old and wiser. She puts her adventuring band back together, and they continue to traverse alternate realities, trying to find the answer to the mystery behind the rot, and to find a holy grail, of sorts, that will solve the world’s problem.

The back story is parcelled out as the story progresses to the ultimate confrontation with the manifestation of the decay infesting the worlds.

Fun and epic, I quite enjoyed this. My only caveat is the POV switch away from Zelda midway through the book to one of her friends that I found less interesting. But Gladstone sticks the landing, tying everything together with a sense of resolution and hope for the future. Recommended.

Just a quick note to let you know that Fractured Night is out on all vendors. This took a bit longer to cook than previous books, with multiple points of view, twisting time lines and a few rewrites but it came out pretty well.  The original idea was to do a complex puzzle mystery, but that confused everyone, so it became more of a character focused, Stephen King style horror piece. I'm really happy with it.

Also, I've, uh, melted my website and had to put up a WIP version as I was rebuilding everything on a new CMS; let me know if you find anything weird with it. More blogs soon...

Once a woman told me a terrible story about how she lost everything. I was transfixed, and my heart hammered as she told me how she had to rebuild her life, get special medical care for her daughter, had to rebuild her precious vinyl record collections. I was hooked.

Then she tried to sell me insurance.

A good story can sell something, catch someone’s attention, by making it personal and real. Why do we need to do that?

Well, everything nowadays can be faked easily. Chatbots can churn out novels easily—even this year’s Nanowrimo, something which evokes long hours in cafes after work in me—has allowed writers to use them. So this pushes a load on authors to be more ‘real’ and ‘authentic’, which means being able to tell you stories that a chatbot wouldn’t. A lot of marketing and social media advice is ‘be yourself’. Be real, be authentic!

A new publishing article told me about story-based marketing. It goes: here’s my tragic or meaningful story told entertainingly + buy my thing! Is this the new hotness? Well, salespeople have been around for ages. When I thought back to when I was house hunting, I can’t remember individual realtors, but I remember their stories! See, one house was owned by an old man, who passed away and left to his heirs, who fought in courts for their father’s legacy but they went broke, and now it’s owned by a collection agency who just want to get rid of the thing which is why the price is so good!

How can you tell a story about you to sell your book?

Do you need to?