Lost worlds and ports of call
Centipede Press continues it’s superb series of Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books, with volume 3, Swords in the Mist. There are a half dozen stories in this book, illustrations, and some additional texts at the end, and an introduction by Tim Powers, another of my favorite authors. The wrap-around cover is again beyond amazing.
Michael Shea (1946-2014) remains one of my top five fantasy writers, along with Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber, and James P. Blaylock. I’d include Tim Powers there, and maybe shift Blaylock out of the mix in favor or a more traditional fantasy writer like Lord Dunsany or possibly Charles de Lint, but Powers, Blaylock, and de Lint stand slightly off to the side in terms of traditional fantasy. Powers is more science-fantasy, and de Lint’s urban fantasy doesn’t venture as much into the realm of the weird as the others listed. Blaylock lately has written a fair amount of Steampunk, but his other tales are infused with a subtle fantasy similar to Powers.
Shea, however, with his novels and short stories, is firmly in the fantasy camp, with a dash or horror in some of his short stories. His death came all-too-soon, with several novels still in the pipeline and his genius far from fully recognized.
I first encountered Michael Shea’s writings in 1986 or 1987 when I bought his unofficial sequel to Jack Vance’s Eyes of the Underworld. Although A Quest for Simbilis first appeared in 1974 under the DAW imprint, my first copy was the Grafton paperback edition published in 1985, which I bought in Oslo or Bergen at a book store or bus station; it was a long time ago and I don’t remember the exact details . At some point later in the US I found the DAW first edition from 1974 in a used book store. I think I laughed out loud with glee as this copy is in near pristine shape, and I own both these two editions and have read them both multiple times.
I already was a huge fan of Jack Vance by the time I read Shea’s novel, and the fact that I started looking for any Shea book after reading this one meant that he had that certain unique quality about fantasy writers that I enjoy—imagination and language, or style and panache. I bought every paperback I could find, and also the Arkham House collection, Polyphemus, which I have read multiple times. The titles roll off my tongue: In Yana, the Touch of Undying ; The Color Out of Time ; Nifft the Lean—all DAW books and each one its own treasure in my small library. Then many years with nothing aside from occasional novellas or slim collections published by small press publishers, until Baen Books published two Nifft sequels: The Mines of Behemoth and The A’rak. Whenever I could find his original short stories I bought the magazines, and at some point I lacked only two stories, to my great despair. Along came Centipede Press in 2008 and published a near complete and massive edition of Shea stories, The Autopsy and Others. Alas, the two stories I had been unable to locate were not included in this massive, 500+ page oversized edition.
I reviewed a couple of Shea books for Lawrence Person’s Nova Express, planned on writing more until that magazine silently vanished amid the Great Shift to the Internet in the early 2000s. Tor Books published The Extra, expanded from a short stories that originally appeared in the Arkham House collection. This was the first of a trilogy, but only the sequel appeared prior to Shea’s death, Assault on Sunrise. A third novel may or may exist. I don’t know. Other novels were hinted at in various publications.
In 2016 Hippocampus Press published a tribute to Shea, And Death Shall Have No Dominion. The cover reprints Michael Whelan’s brilliant painting for the DAW edition of Nifft the Lean. Four short stories are included, only one of them a reprint. A trove of poems fill the middle section, along with tributes from the people lucky enough to have met and known Shea. Although I admired his work and wrote about it in various places, I never met him, never had his sign any of my books. Once, I received an appreciative email from Shea via Person, publisher of Nova Express, regarding one of my reviews, but I never communicated with Shea. I figured maybe one day I’d go to a World Fantasy convention, where I’d meet Shea, and learn than reality isn’t the same as fiction. It’s weird to read all the tributes to the man, the writer, and realize that he’d probably have been better in person.
Why does Michael Shea’s fiction matter? I glanced through the opening pages of Nifft the Lean recently. This is a dangerous act, as one inevitably gets sucked right into the story. Consisting of four loosely connected novellas, episodes in Nifft’s life, these tales are narrated or written down by a third party. In the first story Nifft relates a tale to a companion as they are camped for the night amid the branches of a vast tree. In that sense, it’s a story within a story within a story. The prose is vivid yet spare, with humor infused in the strangest places, such as when Nifft fights a lizard guide to the Taker of Souls and attempt a “kick in the fork,” as Terry Pratchett’s characters in Discworld would say. Nifft’s advice to his companion regarding this technique? Don’t even think about it.
Shea’s fiction often has dwelled in that intersection of fantasy and horror. Although he started out in 1974 with a semi-authorized sequel to a Jack Vance novel, Shea’s fiction already was a shade darker. His Nifft stories owes as much to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories as it does Vance, as Nifft rarely works alone, although his companions are not always the same. Yet both Leiber and Vance wrote mainly lighthearted tales, though some humor came across as mordant. Not so in Shea’s fiction, where the heroes venture into various pockets and sections of hell. Even his modern stories, such as “The Angel of Death” or “The Extra” (expanded into a novel), or “I, Said the Fly” contain more than a touch of dark weirdness.
I’m not much of a Lovecraft fan. Many years ago I wrote a Cthulhu mythos short story, although it was more a consequence of work and reading “Fat Face” than anything by Lovecraft. Shea had that affect, I think, as his Cthulhu stories blend the atmosphere of horror with modernity. I have yet to ride a bus without thinking about “The Horror on the #33,” but every such tale is equally memorable.
What I do find memorable in almost every story by Michael Shea is the densely rich prose. He shares this ability with Vance and Clark Ashton Smith. While some arcane or invented words fall flat in fiction, these three writers make it look easy. Sadly, most of modern fantasy consists of books with swords or wands on their covers, and deal with wizards or Robin Hood-lookalikes battling evil kings or mages. The magical prose is lacking, the sense of wonder from the writing lacking. These books are churned out by the bucketful, while stories by writers like Shea, Vance, Smith, Leiber exist these mostly in the realm of the small press. In that sense, the golden age is long gone. The good news is that in the bibliography section in this book there are several stories listed that I haven’t yet read. Maybe one day a publisher will collect the rest of those stories in a companion to The Autopsy and Others, and include those two older pieces that were left out. In the meantime, we have books like this to remind us what we had, and what is gone.
Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin is best known for his gritty Inspector John Rebus novels, set in Edinburgh. The actions in Rankin’s novels take place in real time, such that Rebus eventually retired from the force, with 2007’s Exit Music. Since then Rebus has appeared in four other novels in a civilian capacity, while still helping solve crimes. After Rebus’ retirement, Ranking started another series, featuring Malcolm Fox, an inspector with the Scottish equivalent of Internal Affairs, called Complaints and Conduct. The first novel in the series is The Complaints, published in 2009.
Fox is both different from Rebus and similar. A former alcoholic, Fox is now a teetotaler, unlike the hard-drinking Rebus. They’ve both been married and divorced, but Fox’s marriage didn’t last long enough to produce children. He seems to fail with the opposite sex, unlike Rebus who has regular relationships, though most tend not to last. Working in the Complaints division, Fox initially comes across as a bit of a moralistic person, with a stiff, almost Calvinist personality. Yet when the chips are down and he’s forced into a corner, Fox is not above bending rules, lying, and pushing relentlessly against anyone he encounters, either criminals or superiors in the police force.
The novel opens with Fox having brought a case against a supposed crooked cop. Apparently there are few of these in Edinburgh, as the Complaints division is staffed with only three officers, one quite new. With no current cases, Fox is loaned to a vice division, one specializing in handling crimes against minors. He’s brought into their current case since another cop, Jamie Breck, is suspected of illegal online activity. Problems and conflicts arise when Fox’s sister’s boyfriend is found brutally murdered only days after he broke the arm of his girlfriend, and the investigating officer is none other than the suspect Fox has been tasked with investigating.
The Complaints is a novel dealing with good people doing stupid things, especially Fox. There are times Fox should know better, but instead of sitting back and letting others do their job, he thinks only he can find the answer. This results in his suspension from the force, along with Breck. This step falls into the typical cop theme, and once suspended Fox doesn’t just kick back his heels and relax, but manages to work himself back into the investigation, becomes a suspect, and eventually find redemption. Partnering with Breck, he drags Breck into a series of stupid actions and decisions, although in the end some balance is restored.
Having read all the Rebus novels, even the more recent ones where Fox and Rebus intersect, this was the first stand-along Malcolm Fox novel I read. I found that I enjoyed the lack of Rebus in this book. Although Fox made some stupid decisions, he’s not a stupid person. He didn’t change much over the course of the novel, and he shares the dogged persistence so prevalent in the Rebus novels. Still, Rankin manages to create a compelling character quite different from his regular protagonist. I wonder why he focused on Fox, rather than on continuing the series with Siobhan Clarke, Rebus’ partner and successor in the force, as the main character. Fox only achieved one other stand-alone novel, after which Rankin brought Fox and Rebus together for subsequent appearances.
The big news today is that Amazon announced it’s bought the rights to Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks’s Culture novel. I’m still surprised (no, not really) that Banks never won a Hugo Award for any of his Culture novels, as they are pure SF through and through. The novel will be turned into a series, and likely if successful will spawn adaptations of other novels. Alas, Feersum Endjinn isn’t a Culture novel, but still one of my favorite Banks books, as well as the non-M mainstream novel, Whit.
There are some novels that seem anchored in a specific place or time, or sometimes both. That doesn’t mean they are bad, but they exist like flies in amber—stuck in place. Then there are books that span ages. Eric Ambler’s outstanding novel, published in the US as A Coffin for Dimitrios and in the UK under the more sinister title, The Mask of Dimitrios, is set in the 1920s, and 1930s in Europe, but feels as current as today.
From Constantinople to Smyrna, from Sofia to Geneva, and finally Paris, Ambler weaves a tight tale of detection by a deceive writer tracing the path of a wily criminal. There is no motive other than curiosity here, yet Latimer, the protagonist, places himself in difficult and often dangerous situations, a strange affair for someone used to sitting behind a desk writing stories, not living them.
The criminal whose paths he traces built a life upon exploration, from fellow criminals to prostitutes to drug users and dealers. He worked himself up form the very bottom toward a place of potential respectability, something that seems true to life as well as multiple works of fiction, where the past of people in power often contains many skeletons.
Although written at the cusp of WWII, this novel could just as well have taken place during almost any decade in the past two hundred years, with wars, smuggling of people and drugs, and criminals quick to murder and betray. The prose is superb, the plot never wavers, and the ending both tragic and amusing.
Since my last foray into the world of Wooster and Jeeves I’ve found a few more stacks of Wodehouse books, increasing my library by nearly a dozen books. While not ideally suited to binge reading, I’ve read a couple more Wooster books, and a pair featuring the tales by a certain Mr. Mulliner, as related to a rapt audience in a local pub. (The fact that my compute attempts to auto-correct the name to Milliner is a sad testament to computer illiteracy.)
The two Mulliner books that I’ve read so far are both collections of short stories, each a tale of some hapless nephew, or cousin, or other relative of Mr. Mulliner’s. Nearly each story tells of a young(-ish) lad falling in love, his travails and eventual triumph. The stories are islands in time, so ideally suited for PBS costume dramas set in England between the wars, although likely some were written after WWII. They tell of a time when young men were gentlemen, often of leisure, with butlers and other people to take care of vital needs. Back then people belonged to various clubs, Great Britain still had traditions, and public school chums were chums for life. Some of the characters that appear in the Wooster and Jeeves books appear in these stories, so they exist in the same fictional universe.
Some of those things are obvious inventions, but I found it jarring to read a throw-away line about a tuck-shop, since that’s the term we used for such a place back when I went to school in Lusaka, Zambia, in the 1970s and 1980s. Some British traditions and nomenclature spans decades. This fact sounds trivial, but the reach of the British Empire stretched far across the world in untold ways. Does the tuck-shop still exist in places today?
While not every Mulliner story amuses on the same scale, and they tend to follow for the most part a certain formula, the ones that are good are dashed good, in Wodehousian terms. They’re maybe not Jeeves and Wooster good, but the best ones rise almost to that level.
Twenty or so years ago I bought my first Fritz Leiber book. It might have been The Swords of Lankhmar or one of the other books in the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series. Back in the late 1980s, early 1990s you could still find the old Ace paperbacks in good condition in used book stores. If you were lucky.
At any rate, I bought The Knight and Knave of Swords in hardcover in 1988 or 1989, since this was the first publication date, and picked up The Leiber Chronicles, the massive collection published by Dark Harvest, in the same year or shortly thereafter. I bought as many of Leiber’s fantasy books as I could find, especially the books set in and around Lankhmar with those two rogues. Yet one book eluded me – Swords Against Wizardry. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough, or I rejected the beat-up copies I found whenever there was a Leiber book in the paperback section of the (mostly) local used book stores I visited over the years.
This weekend I found a decent copy of the missing book, merely by chance, twenty or so years after my first introduction to Leiber’s works. For the princely sum of $3, marked down from $5, with an extra 20% that weekend, I’ve now added this book to my collection, garish cover and all.
I find it somewhat amusing since Centipede Press has begun the process to reprint in nice, expensive editions the entire eight books in the series, and likely I will end up buying them over the next few years. At least I have a reading copy.
Just over 20 years ago, on August 3rd 1997, the writer P. D. James began a one-year project, intending to keep a diary of her activities for 365 days. The complete title is Time to Be In Earnest: A Fragment of an Autobiography. Although herself a fan of reading diaries, she admitted to never keeping her own diary. Somewhat reluctant to partipate in someone writing an authorized biography, her short memoir is a begrudging nod in that direction, claiming for herself the right to write about her personal thoughts and histories. She includes personal information in brief snippets along with daily activities, so this may be the closest we get to learning about her life, aside from any unauthorized biographies. James doesn’t follow a rigorous schedule (a fact which she remarks upon at the end of the book), and there are almost as many gaps as there are entries.
The writing of this diary coincides with the publication of her then latest novel, A Certain Justice. During the year that followed its publication she embarked on multiple book tours, including one to Canada and one to the US. She also signed books at bookstores in the UK, including bulk signings for stock of 1,000 and 750 copies. On my bookshelf sits a signed first edition of A Certain Justice. Although it’s the US edition, the inlaid letter addressed “Dear Bookseller, please enjoy these signed copies…” implies James carried out stock signings in the US as well, which seems remarkable generous on her part.
In 1997 P. D. James owned a house in London, another house on the Atlantic coast in East Anglia, and an apartment in Oxford. She flitted between these three locales as well as many other places, a dizzying schedule for a full-time writer. As she’s not a driver, James relies on trains, busses, taxis, and friends to drive to engagements. This allows her to be a constant observer. Twice while on trains she complains (gently, it seems) about the noise from people on their mobile phones or audio devices. Imagine were she to take the train today, where smart phones are everywhere, and not just the nascent audio and texting devices of the late 1990s. On both occasions she wishes for a quiet compartment, which I found amusing when taking the train from London to Reading and Cardiff this summer. On those trains there was a quiet compartment, so obviously James was ahead of her time. Not just relying on public transport, she also walks along the streets of London. Her home, on Holland ParkAvenue just west of Kensington Palace and Hyde Park, means she often travels through Kensington Gardens on her way into central London.
I found it almost jarring when she mentions the Princess of Wales early in the book, wondering on the 17th of August why the public really cares about the antics of Diana and her lover. Only a few days later, on August 31, the Princess of Wales died in a car crash, spurring a waves of mourners depositing flowers outside Kensington Palace. I mention this, not because I particularly care about the British Royal family, but because 2017 is the 20th anniversary of this event, and it’s been in the news consistently over the past month. Reading James book for the first time, 20 years almost to the day she began her diary, the convergence of events is unsettling.
Throughout her entries James muses on her personal history as well as presents some thoughts on writing the detective novel. She elaborated on this in a dedicated book, Talking About Detective Fiction (2009) though much of her thoughts on the genre maybe surfaced first in her diary. On the other hand, she’s probably had thoughts about the genre and its writers for many, many years.
Often we forget that writers live their lives just like any one else, but I found it amusing to read about her travails with surly bus-drivers as she took the Number 94 bus down Bayswater Road, or shopped at Marks and Spencer for weekly groceries, or even at John Lewis, the department store that seemingly has everything, to judge by the one in Reading I walked through in 2017. Alongside these quotidian events she talks about her role at the House of Lords or jetting to Grand Cayman to visit fellow author, Dick Francis, or to visit Oxford and Cambridge, or other places in the UK. Such a busy schedule, I wonder how she ever had time to work on her fiction. She kept busy well into her 90s, although in this book she mentioned taking on fewer and fewer engagementsas she aged. As an aside, since the event took place after the publication of this book, she opened the crime section at Foyles bookstore in Charing Cross, a store I visited this past summer. It’s strange to think of James’s echoes haunting the very location where I stood and looked at her books.
This is a slim book, and as mentioned not every day of her so-called diary receives an entry. Still, James is a goddess in the field of British crime fiction, and anyone who reads her books will gain insight into the mind behind Inspector Adam Dalgliesh from these pages. Maybe one day we’ll get an authorized biography, even though P. D. James is now dead, and delve more into her mind and life, but for now this small book is a charming wonder and great way to remember her life.
Hideo Yokoyama’s sixth novel, Six-Four, is his first to be published in English, appearing in early 2017 under the imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and weighing in at 566 pages. My knowledge of Japanese detective fiction is admittedly limited. Aside from having read all of Haruki Murakami’s books, the only other Japanese book I’d read before Yokoyama’s novel was Natsuo Kiruno’s Real World, another crime novel.Yoshinobu Mikami, a former homicide detective recently appointed as press director, finds himself fighting many battles. His teenage daughter has run away from home. His relationship with his wife, Minako, herself a former police officer, is crumbling under the stress of their daughter’s disappearance. Meanwhile, he is assigned from homicide to become the director of the press relations group, and feels veru much like a fish out of water.
Mikami is new in his role, still finding his feet when balancing police needs to keep certain details from the the public while still satisfying a hostile press corps who question that very need for secrecy. Almost from the outside he finds himself at odds with the press contingent that covers crime and the police, when he withholds the name of a person involved in a fatal car accident. The fact that this person is connected to a government official makes his position more delicate. To the press that news would become a leading story, no matter any extenuating circumstances. The small but loyal police press department consists of two young male assistants (one of whom likely envisions himself one day in the job of press director himself), and a young female officer busted moved over from the transportation division. Mikami places himself almost in a fatherly role with the young Mikumo, limiting her contact with the devious and salacious members of the press, who frequent karaoke bars with the police outside work in a two-way street in terms of information and disinformation efforts.
As if dealing with the press and disappearance of his daughter wasn’t enough, Mikami also finds himself fighting internal political battles inside the police department. The press division isn’t the greatest of tasks, and supervisors and other divisions appear to be plotting against Mikami in various internal battles, jockeying for future appointments within the precinct and greater Tokyo police force infrastructure. A former classmate seems to be behind many of the plots, at least as envisioned by Mikami. This person, Ishii, hovers in the background, runs unofficial investigations of past cases. One such past case, Six-Four, becomes yet again a present case, as a high-ranking inspector from Tokyo plans a visit to pay his respects to the dead girl’s father, Yoshio Amamiya, who has suffered in silence for many years, and lost his wife one year ago, compounding his pain.
To facilitate the meeting between Amamiya and the police contingent, Mikami is sent to pave the way, both in his role as press director and as a detective from criminal investigations who worked the case, which remains unsolved to this day and weighs heavy on Mikami. The initial meeting doesn’t go well, and Mikami emerges with the feeling that he has failed his role, a feeling compounded during a meeting with his superiors. In that meeting the seeds are sown in his mind about internal plots within the department, various groups working at odds with each other, and maybe at the root is the failure of the Six-Four case fourteen years ago.
Events accelerate when a copy-cat crime takes place, with another young girl kidnapped and the exact same process as in the previous crime repeats itself. Finding himself at the center of various threads, from a rebellious and antagonistic press to imperious commanders and police chiefs seemingly plotting against him, Mikami sees the new case as a way to atone for past wrongs, and dives into his own investigations.
Although some of the plot points seems byzantine and contrived, Yokoyama’s massive novel became impossible to put down once the various plots had settled into their individual paths. The language is sparse, economical. As a reader I felt almost one with the protagonist, felt his paranoia and anguish, and wondered how the various elements would come together. Not everything is tied neatly at the end, and some mysteries remain, but Six-Four is one of the best crime novels I’ve ever read. Admittedly it felt slow to start, and the dispute with the press somewhat contrived, but the characters come to life in the pages. I should also note that the book was made into a two-part movie. I’m not sure if this was for the big screen or television, as I watched it this summer on an intercontinental flight between the UK and US. The movie remained relatively faithful to the book, something probably difficult for a book of that length and complexity.
Although I have generally moved away from reading science fiction and fantasy, there are a few writers I never will abandon.
Fritz Lieber’s sword and sorcery series about the two rogues, Gray Mouser and Fafrhd (the latter whose names I continually misspell) have a special place in my heart.
Centipede Press, publishers of exquisite limited edition books, have started the process to publish eight (8) books collecting all the fiction with these two characters. The cost starts at $75 per book, which will set any collector back a pretty penny by the end of the venture.
The first book, Swords and Deviltry, contains the original tales, some poems, notes by Leiber, and the origin of the two characters. The wrap-around cover by Tom Kidd is unreal and gorgeous. Anyone who manages to own the entire set will guard them jealously. It even smells unique.
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