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.
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.
Victor Milán died on February 13. I learned the news one day later, and found it nearly impossible to believe. I’d known Vic for nearly two decades, mostly via email, though we met a few times in person in the mid-1990s when I attended some SF conventions. He wrote an article once for Prometheus back when I used to edit the newsletter, and we discussed books and other subjects when we corresponded. We were both huge fans of Lack Vance, a topic that came up several times. He was alway writing, and publishing great books, all entertaining stories across many genres. I’ve read only a fraction of his books, mainly ones that were published under his own name, not his many pseudonyms. Looking at my stack of his books I’m surprised to find that I own only ten, even though in all he wrote close to 100 novels.
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.
Although I have generally moved away from reading science fiction and fantasy, there are a few writers I never will abandon.