I confess -- I needed a short break from Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel as I wanted something a bit lighter to read for a few days. Don't get me wrong -- that very long novel is very, very good, but something of a popcorn nature was in line. Per my request last week, the good folks at Time Warner Books sent along Murder by Magic, a trade paper anthology of twenty tales that blend -- some very well, some horribly -- the twin genres of murder/detective tales with another popular genre loosely defined as the supernatural. Perhaps the best known example of this genre would be Randall Garrett's Lord D'arcy series, in which the title character is a detective and sorcerer in an alternate universe where Richard the Lion Hearted did not die young, and his Plantangent descendants rule over an Anglo-French empire. Another good example of this blending is Simon Green's Nightside series, which takes place in a sort of shadow London where the lead character doesn't really use magic to solve his bizarre cases, but is magical himself. Or at least it appears so. Green also wrote the Hawk & Fisher series about two city Guards in a Universe where the Gods are very real.
These are all short pieces, and as Edghill notes in her Introduction:
It is a truism of publishing that sooner or later every author wants to commit murder, and I have proof: a new take on the mean streets from Laura Resnick, a charmingly chilling story from Carole Nelson Douglas, alternate police procedurals from Josepha Sherman and Keith DeCandido -- detectives amateur, private, and decidedly outside the law, in settings ranging from the haunted galleries of Elizabethan England to the worlds of the Eraasian Hegemony. And, from Jennifer Roberson, perhaps the strangest detective of all.She goes on to further say 'I hope you'll enjoy these twenty stories.' Now I must warn you, my dear reader, that I have never encountered an anthology in which I enjoyed every tale, as it's not possible I'll find the writing style of every author therein to my liking. Even the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror sees me reading only about a third of the stories. There are but two anthologies of recent memory which I read completely, both edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling -- The Green Man and The Faery Reel. Both were that good!
So I settled into my favorite spot on the couch in my office -- don't you have a couch in your office? -- late in the afternoon last week. Read the intro first -- it's brief and worth reading, as Edghill tries, more or less successfully, to explain how this anthology was assembled. After that, I started reading the tales here. Some I skipped, because I'm not fond of the author's writing style, but you of course may find them very enjoyable.
'Doppelgangster', by Laura Resnick, combines the Mafia and voodoo: who is whacking mobsters all over town including Skinny Vinny Vitelli and Johnny Gambone? Now if they're dead and decidedly so, why are they still being seen about town? Zombies? Or something even worse? A silly tale well told. 'Mixed Marriages Can Be Murder', the Will Graham story, was cute, but was it really necessary that those two species be the ones involved? Somehow it comes across as terribly trite. Much better is Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's 'A Night at the Opera', which is just as good as, and similar to in many ways, Randall Garrett's Lord D'arcy stories. It was good enough that I wouldn't mind reading a novel set in the same universe.
If I had to single out one story here as my favorite, it would be Josepha Sherman's 'The Case of the Headless Corpse'. Josepha, our next Winter Queen at Green Man, has written a lovely look at what the Magical Bureau of Investigation -- yes, MBI! -- does, and what lengths agents Raven and Coyote will go to solve a case. Josepha combines a bit of humor with a straight forward telling of how magic makes solving a case almost impossible at times. Again, like the previous tale, it's good enough that I think I'd enjoy a novel in the same setting.
There's enough good reading herein that I'll be keeping Murder by Magic in our library to dip into from time to time. Warner Aspect gets praise for a very nice design job on this unusually attractive trade edition. And Edghill gets my compliments for (mostly) making the case that all of these stories fit together.
