Jongor of Lost Land

Robert Moore Williams Jongor of Lost Land (1942)
This has been a very pleasant surprise. The cover seems to promise Tarzan with the serial numbers filed off, which is sort of what it is, a bit, but not quite. Much as I love the work of Robert Moore Williams - what I've read of it - I'm under no illusions regarding his membership status within the canon of science-fiction sausage machines churning them out back in the thirties and forties, so it was difficult to get too excited about the prospect of this one beyond the possibility of the author's characteristic narrative brainfarts to liven things up.

In the negative, it's kind of pulpy, but we knew that and wouldn't be reading if it was a problem. You can probably guess at least some of what happens just from the cover.

And yes, it really is more or less Tarzan, but Tarzan under the influence of Abraham Merritt rather than Edgar Rice Burroughs, meaning we get a Shaver-esque degenerate race which has inherited the lost city of a once great civilisation, superscientific crystals of power, mysterious rays, mind control, dinosaurs borrowed from The Lost World, and a story which is short, punchy, genuinely weird and massively satisfying. It takes peculiar random swerves as do most of Robert Moore Williams' books, but he's reigned it in a little with this one keeping it all on the coherent side of crazy, more or less; and, frankly, it's better written than Tarzan, greatly more imaginative, and almost completely lacking in any equivalent to Burroughs' dull racist chortling over the slapstick antics of dumb savages. Jongor is astonishingly original for something composed almost exclusively of familiar pulp tropes.

Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds

Manly W. Wellman & Wade Wellman
Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds (1975)
I suppose someone had to do it, and given the corpulent central cell of this particular Venn diagram, I'm surprised there haven't been more - although Andrew Hickey's The Book of the Enemy is substantially different, should anyone be about to mention it. Ordinarily I might shy away from such crowd pleasing schlock, particularly given that recent developments among certain self-identified fan groups suggest that we can no longer tell the difference between inspiration and quotation; and, of course, I've already found some Goodreads pillock describing this book as steampunk.

The premise is what Conan Doyle's characters were doing during Wells' War of the Worlds - characters in the plural because the authors team Holmes up with Professor Challenger from The Lost World and somehow it actually sort of works. The authors additionally draw on Wells' The Crystal Egg, establishing an association that even Herbert himself left somewhat unresolved; so it embellishes and underscores War of the Worlds, fleshing out certain details even when attempting to contradict them, and as such makes for a surprisingly satisfying read, possibly because it's a Challenger novel more than anything. I hated the character in The Lost World, suspecting Challenger to be a genuine and unrestrained expression of Conan Doyle's misanthropic regard of his contemporaries as intellectual pygmies. The Wellmans, however, allow the character his alleged scientific genius while clearly having fun with his endless declarations of the same; and so we essentially get a version of the Wells novel told from the perspective of those living off the side of the page, and told very well too. I'm sure Holmes obsessives might have something to say about this, not least the detail of Sherlock getting busy with Mrs. Hudson - whom I still picture as played by the significantly older Mary Gordon in the Basil Rathbone movies, so that was odd - but who gives a shit, really? Sherlock Holmes' War of the Worlds is nothing life changing but it's a lot of fun and at least held my attention for a couple of hundred pages.

Dwellers in the Mirage

 

Abraham Merritt Dwellers in the Mirage (1932)
This is my third Merritt, and possibly my last depending upon how charitable I'm feeling should I happen across any of the remaining five in a used book store. While there's much to recommend Abe, of those I've read, this is the third of his novels to feature what is more or less the same story which, in case you can't be arsed to skip back to September, I've already summarised thus:

...belonging very much to the genre inhabited by Conan Doyle's Lost World, much of what was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and particularly H. Rider Haggard's She, which I gather substantially influenced Merritt; thus we have scientific blokes who venture forth and discover a lost civilisation of some description, consequently resulting in thrills, scrapes, and at least one of their number copping off with a lady in a metallic bra.

 

As with both The Moon Pool and The Face in the Abyss, Dwellers in the Mirage gets off to a frankly astonishing start before settling into a hundred or so pages of people running around with swords, and people who seem to have crept into the book while you weren't looking so it's anyone's guess who the hell they're supposed to be.

Merritt writes beautifully, like a grown man version of that to which Lovecraft aspired but never really quite achieved. His characters are fascinating and the set ups and situations into which they stumble are genuinely bizarre, and additionally spiced by the author pulling off some fairly detailed and hence plausible scientific explanations for the weirder aspects of his tale. Here we have a man who finds himself sharing a body with the personality of some mythic warrior from antiquity, and who then discovers a lost civilisation of pygmies living beneath a remote lake, except what appears to be a lake is actually some peculiar atmospheric effect concealing a Carboniferous landscape. The first half reads a little like Asimov turning his hand to sword and what may resemble sorcery but is actually a perfectly logical scientific phenomenon.

And I reflected, now, that science and religion are really blood brothers, which is largely why they hate each other so, that scientists and religionists are quite alike in their dogmatism, their intolerance, and that every bitter battle of religion over some interpretation of creed or cult has its parallel in battles of science over a bone or rock.

Unfortunately, the second half seems to be grunting fights, and I lost track of who was fighting who or how it started. In fact our man seems to have switched sides at some point, and I still have no idea why, or who Dara was supposed to be, so it became quickly exhausting. This is a shame because Merritt's Khalk'ru is essentially Lovecraft's Cthulhu written by a man with a solid understanding of physics and who isn't crippled by a pathological fear of foreigners.

Bugger. There's so much that's good about this one that maybe I should give him another chance. I guess we'll have to see.

Genocide

 

Paul Leonard Genocide (1997)
I know I'm only going to end up writing the same review I always write of underwhelming Doctor Who tie-in novels, but what the fuck, why not? Maybe something nice will happen.

As I've stated on several occasions, I used to be addicted to these things. There were two published each month for a while and I bought and read every single one of them without fail, not quite to the exclusion of anything else, but with hindsight I really wish my focus had been a little wider. My subsequent tendency to sneer is therefore derived from my eventually having realised that quite a few of these books were pretty poor, which is massively embarrassing given how amazing I once believed them to be. This possibly informs my tendency to overreact when writing reviews of Who novels. I additionally tend to throw babies out with whatever bathwater happens to be available because I dislike almost anything which calls itself fandom, and I'm disappointed with anyone who can claim such a fervent degree of allegiance to bland, button-pushing generic entertainment product; and I'm disappointed with them because that was me a couple of decades ago.

Nevertheless, given the tonnage of eighties X-Men comics I've purchased over the last couple of years, I'm not really in any position to disparage the Doctor Who novel on the grounds of it being either juvenile or mass produced, because - aside from anything else - I still fucking love some of this shit even if I don't necessarily want to hang around with anyone dressed as one of the characters; so I'm going to try to break it down a little further.

Mark Hodder has observed that the once considerable popularity of the fictional detective Sexton Blake seems to have waned roughly correspondent to the rise in popularity of Doctor Who, prompting Hodder to further speculate upon their similarities, and how it could be argued that the two characters have occupied more or less the same cultural niche at different ends of the century*. Blake was initially a response to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, an arguably more egalitarian interpretation freed from the limitations of single authorship, and even if Blake was more product than Holmes, he benefits from being born to an era prior to the full mechanisation of the production line, figuratively speaking, meaning even serials such as those featuring Blake, Doc Savage, Perry Rhodan or whoever else, might showcase the singular vision of an individual author rather than a committee or a fucking focus group. In writing terms, we're talking craft more than art but this isn't to say that we're talking artless, and for my money, the best Sexton Blake has been equal to or superior to Conan Doyle's antecedent. In other words, pulp - as is generally applied willy-nilly by persons who rarely seem to understand quite where the term came from - doesn't have to mean low quality.

I see something of this as being applicable to Who, and to how Who has evolved over the years into something which is more or less all product. Of course, it's always been a mass produced and undeniably populist deal, and anyone who ever mistook Who for handwritten Kafka manuscripts unpublished during the author's lifetime is a fucking idiot; but mass production tends to be corporate, and the nature of the corporation has changed from something which may once have supported stables of semi-domesticated creative weirdos to what it is now, wherein marketing has become so invasive as to infest every stage of the allegedly creative process to a degree which seems almost comparable to ideology. In terms of Who, both televised and written, this means we've gone from slightly cranky but occasionally inspired outsiders who drew their influences from across the board, to persons who are usually fans with all the brand loyalty implied by the term, whose inspiration is mostly self-referential, and who have been hired to fill a quota and tick certain boxes. Doctor Who went off the air in 1989 when it was discovered that only seven people were still watching. It returned as a one-off special in 1996, which - for me - approximately represents the corporate singularity, the point beyond which the whole enterprise became more akin to product than anything derived from even a diluted artistic vision. It was specifically designed to capture an audience, to corner a market, and creative considerations were subservient to this goal.

Going back a couple of years, Virgin Books took it upon themselves to publish novels continuing the series in print alone once the TV show went tits up. The series was called the New Adventures and they were mostly pretty good, or at least that's how I remember them. Having been pitched at what was by definition a dwindling audience, none of whom were children - at least not physically - the authors were free to go wild, to come up with all manner of crazy shite which we never would have seen on the screen. So even those who might be deemed slavering continuity obsessed fans occasionally shone brightly, and as a result, many of the New Adventures worked as science-fiction novels in their own right.

Then someone presumably noticed the success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and figured it might be worth giving the Who goose another squeeze just in case there were a few more golden eggs still to be popped out; and so it came back, as described above, and because we didn't want to take any chances, we got all of our best people on the job, the award winners, the proven sellers, the stars of the marketing department. We held meetings and asked the kids what they wanted, then pulled our findings apart so as to work out what they really wanted even if they didn't know it. We published our conclusions. We talked to the shareholders. We got a great deal.

So where the Virgin books had been mostly decent, occasionally exceptional, and at least aspiring to something other than text which asks us to imagine we're watching a TV show, the BBC novels which supplanted them were patchier, with occasional flashes of inspiration arising apparently in spite of the general thrust rather than as part of the strategy; and Genocide seems sadly illustrative of this.

I remember liking it a lot but seem to have outgrown the form, I suppose you might say; and it's not even a bad book. Paul Leonard wrote a lot of these things and was generally competent, able to string a sentence together and good for just the sort of weird, screwy ideas upon which Who first built its reputation. Here we have time trees - and you can probably guess what they do from the name - which facilitate the unfortunate extinction of the entire human race thanks to a species of four-eyed horses - all of which seems to hint at the influence of Larry Niven, at least from where I'm standing. His prose is mostly workmanlike and efficient without being truly dull, and he occasionally slips into clipped cinematic non-sentences for the sake of drama or pacing without ending up looking like a wanker, as so many others often do.

This was enough for me back in 1997 but this time around, I can't quite get past those elements which seem to betray the overbearing hand of editorial direction. We're clearly reading something aimed at a younger age group, and someone at head office doubtless thought we'd identify with Sam and all of her modular teenage concerns; and we're reading something which quite clearly aspires to viewing as an imaginary television show on our mind's inner screen, right down to entire alien races represented by just three actors in funny costumes.

Paul Leonard does as good a job as he can within the limitations of the revised form, and it starts well and doesn't read like fan fiction - as was often the case; but once the big ideas have been delivered, there's not actually a lot of story to be had. It certainly didn't need three-hundred pages and sags horribly after the first hundred or so, descending into inconsequential scrapes and running around until it's time for The Generation Game. It really feels as though these BBC novels were the last good thing, or at least the last with any potential beyond mere sales figures and pushing that consumer loyalty button. Genocide had potential, but time was running out.

*: Unfortunately I can't remember where he made these speculations, so it was probably some private correspondence or other.

The Moon Pool

 

Abraham Merritt The Moon Pool (1919)
To recap the salient points from the previous review, Merritt was huge in his day - in terms of reputation and sales rather than actual physical volume - but seems to have pretty much sunk from view in recent years. This was his first novel and is the second I've read, and is probably better than The Face in the Abyss in some respects while being more or less the same sort of deal, belonging very much to the genre inhabited by Conan Doyle's Lost World, much of what was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and particularly H. Rider Haggard's She, which I gather substantially influenced Merritt; thus we have scientific blokes who venture forth and discover a lost civilisation of some description, consequently resulting in thrills, scrapes, and at least one of their number copping off with a lady in a metallic bra. I'm drawn to Merritt specifically because he was a major influence on not only Robert Moore Williams, but also Richard Shaver; and for what it may be worth, the influence on H.P. Lovecraft - with whom he additionally collaborated at one point - is difficult to miss, particularly on the likes of The Dream Quest of Unreadable Kadath. In fact, it's probably fair to say that The Moon Pool amounts to Lovecraft with better planning and less Nigel Farage. I've seen it claimed that Merritt's writing was unfortunately of its time, usually meaning openly racist, but if so - leaving aside certain creaking stereotypes - actual xenophobia doesn't seem to feature in this one so far as I noticed.

In its favour, The Moon Pool gets off to an astonishing start, albeit one which quite clearly betrays the influence of Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow, promising weird fiction filtered through a semi-scientific lens of such focus as to foreshadow Asimov during certain passages.

 

'I know how hard it is, Larry,' I answered. 'And don't think I have any idea that the phenomenon is supernatural in the sense spiritualists and table turners have given that word. I do think it is supernormal; energised by a force unknown to modern science—but that doesn't mean I think it outside the radius of science.'

Thus do we venture forth into the depths of a lost underground and formerly advanced civilisation - identified as Muria but probably referring to Lemuria - ruled by the Silent Ones, who clearly aren't human, and at the mercy of the terrible Dweller, the inhabitant of the moon pool of the title and who may or may not be made of moonlight; which Merritt admirably attempts to describe in approximately sciencey terms of sufficient conviction as to facilitate suspension of disbelief. So, as I already implied, it reads not unlike Lovecraft but without the drippy overwritten mysticism.

Unfortunately though, aside from our eminently likeable narrator, we also have his cosmopolitan band of adventuresome guys to contend with, comprising Olaf, Marakinoff, and Larry. The main point of Olaf seems to be the occasional comment about how something or other seems a bit like something from Norse myth. The Russian scientist Marakinoff doesn't really get to do much more than Olaf and never quite delivers on the promise of being the scheming bad guy. Larry O'Keefe, on the other hand, never shuts up, and barely a fucking page passes without our being reminded of just how Irish he is, which gets seriously tiresome.

'Sainted St. Patrick!' O'Keefe gazed ruminatively at his automatic. 'An' he expected me to kill that with this. Well, as Fergus O'Connor said when they sent him out to slaughter a wild bull with a potato knife, Ye'll niver rayilize how I appreciate the confidence ye show in me!'

Everything that happens reminds O'Keefe of something Irish and we get to hear all about it, and eventually I forgot what I was reading beyond having a vague impression of it occurring underground. I don't recall any specific mention of O'Keefe wearing a green bowler hat or carrying a pig under his arm, but my concentration wasn't all it could have been during a few of his more extended observations.

Additionally, as we come to the inevitable conclusion in an underground war, I couldn't help but notice misty-eyed eulogies to those making the ultimate sacrifice - which struck me as a little peculiar for something written in 1919; and Merritt mumbles darkly when referring to the Russian revolution, as possibly embodied by Marakinoff. Neither detail necessarily leaves a taste anything like so unsavoury as any of Lovecraft's odes to Tommy Robinson, but it doesn't help after all the greenface we've had to wade through in order to get to the actual fucking story. In terms of novels wherein adventuresome types discover underground civilisations, The Moon Pool could have been one of the best had Larry spent a lot less time banging on about Leprechauns and Brian Boru.

Drowning in Beauty: the Neo-Decadent Anthology

Justin Isis & Daniel Corrick (editors)

Drowning in Beauty: the Neo-Decadent Anthology (2018)
I'm not particularly well informed when it comes to the history of literature and the movements which have come and gone, excepting in relation to science-fiction or where writing has occasionally intersected with painting. I tentatively associate the Decadents with Symbolist art of the late nineteenth century, implying ornate, even florid prose following the logic of the mythic more than the crudely realistic, which at least squares with Huysmans' Against Nature, and possibly David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, plus a load of others which I've never read. Happily, these potential gaps in my knowledge don't seem to matter too much because the Neo-Decadents aren't in the revival business, at least not in the sense of certain sniggering twats with cogs and watch-springs glued to their top hats; and these Neo-Decadents are additionally defined by what they're against, much of which has me punching the air because up until now, I thought it was mostly just me. Crucially, for the sake of this review, amongst that which they reject we have writing which aspires to be something in another medium, writer's workshops, writing advice with all of its attendant careerist bullshit about character development, story arcs - basically all of the rote tedium which gets in the way of the actual writing, and which is usually only necessary if you can't actually fucking write and therefore have no business attempting to do so. Not everyone has a book in them, and maybe we should leave it to those who have.

The collection kicks off with an informative introduction and a couple of manifestos setting out the stall, much of which brought me great joy for reasons already stated, and which promises great things to come in the pages which follow; and for what may be the first time in publishing history - if you'll excuse the apparent hyperbole - great things do indeed come in the pages which follow. Drowning in Beauty seems to be loosely themed around varying notions of beauty, but without feeling as though anyone has been at work with a shoe horn, and even where the beauty is weird and upsetting from certain angles, its pleasure aesthetic is nevertheless communicated without recourse to any of the usual clichés - ironic contrast, or the sort of button pushing I'm sure you'll learn all about at the writers' workshop. These twelve authors work with different levels of realism, telling quite different kinds of story but with the same love of rich, expressive language where a single sentence may undertake more than one crudely descriptive task. It's ornate but never purely for the sake of design and even where that which is described may remain mysterious, the voices are clear, with nothing one could call impenetrable.

That said, I personally didn't quite connect with Avalon Brantley's Great Seizers' Ghost - more down to setting than the way it was told - but that was the only one. Initial skimming gave me cause to raise an eyebrow and roll an eye at all the transgressive weirdy music references in James Champagne's XYschaton, but upon reading the story I found it did the exact opposite of what I'd anticipated, justified what would have seemed clichéd under other circumstances, and was ultimately unlike anything I've read before - somehow deeply appalling and yet unmistakably descriptive of a form of beauty. Other highlights include Justin Isis' The Quest for Nail Art, Colby Smith's Somni Draconis, Brendan Connell's Molten Rage and Ursula Pflug's Fires Halfway, and I'll stop there rather than simply typing out the contents page because it's all good - great even, frequently startling and strange without having to pull silly faces, all of which makes Drowning in Beauty an absolute joy to have read, and a breath of fresh air the size of continental Europe after Conan fucking Doyle's droning train timetables. If you like to read, meaning actual writing, meaning anything you might read for reasons other than that it reminds you of something else and will probably do what you expect it to do, then you need the Neo-Decadents in your life.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
I seem to recall that I hated The Lost World and regarded Doyle's Professor Challenger as a massive twat, while Doyle himself regarded The Lost World as one of his proper novels, unlike all that populist detective stuff; and Sherlock Holmes seems to have enjoyed a significant resurgence in popularity of late, most of which I've tried to avoid, the exception being a novel by Philip Purser-Hallard because I'd happily pay full price to read an Andy Capp novel if Philip Purser-Hallard had written it. We've had Cucumber as Holmes on the telly, an ingenious update in which Watson is advised to deal with his PTSD by writing a blog, which is well peng and edgy and shit; and we've had Elementary because apparently we'll now watch any old shit described by Netflix as bingeworthy if there's some homeopathic trace of Sherlock in the mix.

So why did I read this thing again?

Firstly, it was free, something which caught my eye at a lockdown bookswap event when not much else did; secondly, because I loved the Basil Rathbone movies when I was a teenager, and even to the point of reading one of the novels, possibly The Sign of Four, which I seem to remember enjoying; and thirdly, I suppose, to see what the fuss was about.

Not much, as it happens. Adventures collects a load of the short stories from The Strand or whatever it was in which they were published, and they're very short - mostly twenty pages or so, which doesn't really allow much room in which anything can happen. That said, Doyle's Holmes is more engaging than his Challenger, and it's quite nice to read something of modest narrative consequence; and they're nicely written with an elegant turn of phrase.

The problem is that at this length, these stories don't have the space in which to be anything more elaborate than crossword puzzles, and so become repetitive very quickly as one proceeds through the collection - possibly depending upon how much one enjoys crossword puzzles. Typically, most of the story is anecdotal, reported to Holmes, or to Watson, or else by one to the other. Usually someone or something will be missing and the details will seem almost ostentatiously resistant to analysis, which of course guarantees that they'll yield in about another fifteen pages; then we find out that Holmes was right, and why, and onto the next tale, repeat to fade…

I'm sure these tales had their charm when in isolation in whatever periodical, but the cramming only serves to expose their flaws, how thin they actually are, how absolutely lacking in ambition they were, wishing only to divert the reader for thirty minutes or so. Here and there we have glimpses of Doyle's thoughts on detection, even how we perceive the world around us, what we notice and what we miss, but in each case, just as it gets interesting, space demands we suddenly think about an intriguingly shaped stain on some cunt's trousers for the next few paragraphs. Being as I don't actually sploodge in my pants every time someone mentions Victorian England, top hats, or most exceedingly delightful difference engines, the appeal of these things began to wear thin for me after the first hundred or so pages, and by the half-way point I was no longer able to keep my concentration affixed to whatever inconsequential observation of nothing particularly interesting was being made upon the page; so I gave up and read something better.

Lesson learned.

The Vanishing Man

Philip Purser-Hallard The Vanishing Man (2019)
I loved the films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce when I was a teenager, and so much so that I have a vague memory of checking one of the Conan Doyle novels out from my local library, but otherwise I couldn't really care less about Sherlock Holmes. This is one of an ongoing contemporary series relating further adventures of the great detective which is distinguished through having been written by Philip Purser-Hallard, who is great, so here I am with what may be the first book I've bought new rather than second hand this year.

The last Conan Doyle I read was The Lost World which I actively hated, so I'm not sure whether Purser-Hallard gets Holmes right to the standard a Holmes purist would expect, but it feels right to me. My only raised eyebrow was hoisted during a few of the more dialogue heavy chapters, page after page of exposition which is something I've never liked because it always feels as though the author would rather be working on a television series; but on the other hand, I suspect this may simply be part of the Holmesian territory, so it's not a problem.

Most appealing of all from my point of view is that this is definitively a Purser-Hallard novel, as such returning to themes which run through his previous works, notably those of transcendence and spiritual evolution, even to the point of bringing Gideon Beech, the playwright modelled on George Bernard Shaw, back from Peculiar Lives of 2003.

It's not difficult to see why this one held such appeal for Purser-Hallard given the setting of an era during which a number of his thematic preoccupations were in the ascendant - the birth of science-fiction from nineteenth century spiritualism, new ideas about God and humanity and our place in the universe, and a chance to play around with all of this in The Vanishing Man; so we additionally get a stand-in for Madame Blavatsky, proposals hinting at the cosmology of C.S. Lewis' cosmic trilogy, passing references to Hy-Brasil, and an occult detective named Constantine - although patently not the one famed for hanging out with Swamp Thing. Purser-Hallard accordingly stretches the limit of Holmes' universe as far as it will go in the general direction of the fantastic without quite jumping the shark, then bursts the bubble, returning us all to Earth in elegant fashion and no pandering either to expectations of steampunk cliché or any other attempt to jazz things up by turning it into something else entirely.

I'm still not convinced we need new Sherlock Homes in 2019 - although I'll concede there's no harm in it - but if we really must, then I'm very happy to have Philip Purser-Hallard writing it.

Ten Great Mysteries

Edgar Allan Poe Ten Great Mysteries (1845)

I suppose Ten Stories of Which a Certain Portion Might Be Deemed Adequately Mysterious would have seemed cumbersome, and I think it was The Black Cat which tipped it for me, representing the point at which I noticed I was once again straining to find the value in something old, undeniably worthy, hugely influential and generally hailed as a copper-bottomed classic when truthfully I'm bored absolutely shitless.

I'm prepared to acknowledge that Poe was a major talent and an important figure in the history of literature providing anyone supporting that position with any degree of fervour is prepared to acknowledge the possibility that his alleged strengths are very poorly represented in this collection. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, and The Pit and the Pendulum are all readable, as I suppose is The Black Cat on a purely technical level. At his best, Poe works up a thoroughly convincing atmosphere and there's an undeniable poetry to his words - as you might reasonably expect. The two stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin are of particular interest in providing obvious inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, but also in being more than simple detective tales, but tales about the mechanics of perception and understanding as explored by means of a pipe-smoking detective seeking clues. Elsewhere Poe cooks up powerfully claustrophobic first person narratives which I would imagine almost certainly inspired H.P. Lovecraft, and also - quite unexpectedly - A.E. van Vogt.

Beyond this, we have short stories which doubtless worked better for the less-jaded readers of the time than they do for me in 2016. The main problem is that nothing much happens in any of these, and most seem to amount to single extended scenarios intended to induce a sense of unease; and also that a few of them felt like I was reading a long, long letter from a fucking solicitor. My attention could just not be kept upon the page, no matter what. You might suppose it serves me right for all those hours spent playing Super Mario Kart, but I've read shitloads from the 1840s or thereabouts, and shitloads from the 1840s or thereabouts which hasn't bored me to tears quite like this bunch. Even Fitz-James O'Brien wrote a better yarn if you can ignore the routine anti-Semitism.

Some of the stories were okay, if hardly serving to justify Poe's stellar reputation; others were simply dull, just as all those other stories by Robert Louis Stevenson were dull; and then there's The Black Cat which effects a reaction with descriptions of its protagonist torturing and then killing his pet cat. I'm sure no real cats were harmed but I really dislike this sort of lazy revulsion-response button pushing associated with certain strands of horror fiction and certain realms of the internet. Whilst shock is as valid a tool as any in the creation of art, it requires skilled application rather than just shoving it in our faces whilst making a lurid, gurgling noise. The Black Cat is simply vile and ham-fisted, the just deserts conclusion justifying the means with all the conviction of your average busted kiddy fiddler protesting that those photographs were purely for research purposes. I guess Poe was hoping to get a reaction, and he succeeded in so much as my reaction is that he can fuck off, and that I've cancelled any plans I had to read any more of his yawnsome shite ever again. I'm glad his name has been posthumously associated with pisspots.

The Once and Future King

T.H. White The Once and Future King (1958)
I was about to read Philip Purser-Hallard's Trojans, the final part of his thus far exceptional Devices trilogy, when I saw this in the second-hand book store and bought it with the idea that a little homework couldn't hurt. Devices refers to large chunks of Arthurian legend, and I seem to recall White's book having been described as the definitive work bringing it all together into roughly the shape we recognise today; except it turns out that I was actually thinking of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur of 1485 to which The Once and Future King itself refers and which I am similarly yet to read; but I've started so I may as well finish.

The Once and Future King, rather than being the definitive version, brings Arthurian legend into the twentieth century in so much as that it's a modern novel written in a contemporary style whilst relating a tale set in the twelfth century or thereabouts. All those Arthurian occurrences are traditionally dated to times prior to even Egbert of Wessex, the first Saxon king and arguably the first English king by some definition; so the six-hundred year relocation initially unsettled me. At first it seemed like White just needed a way of bringing Robin Hood into the Arthurverse - curiously something which likewise occurs in Philip Purser-Hallard's The Locksley Exploit albeit with more satisfying purpose, to my mind - which demands the reader avoid thinking too hard about what Richard the Lionheart may or may not have been up to around the same time.

Even more disconcerting, at least for me, was that the first of the four books of The Once and Future King turns out to be The Sword in the Stone, as famously adapted by Walt Disney. I've never seen the animated film but would guess it's probably fairly true to the book, given that the tone of the book, occasionally harking back to the absurdity of Cervantes as it does, somewhat foreshadows Harry Potter and even the Monty Python version of this tale. Try to read this without thinking of John Cleese and the rest:

Sir Ector blushed deeply and called out: 'Ah, Grummore, come over here a minute, will you? I want to introduce a friend of mine, old chap, a chap called Wood, old chap—Wood with a W, you know, not an H. Yes, and this is King Pellinore, Master Wood—King Pellinore.'

'Hail,' said King Pellinore, who had not quite got out of the habit when nervous.

'How do?' said Sir Grummore. 'No relation to Robin Hood, I suppose?'

'Oh, not in the least,' interrupted Sir Ector hastily. 'Double you, double owe, dee, you know, like the stuff they make furniture out of—furniture, you know, and spears, and—well—spears, you know, and furniture.'

I was expecting more frowning, more grunting, more faces set sternly against the northern wind, which isn't to say I was necessarily disappointed so much as that it took more getting used to than I had anticipated. White talks quite directly to his audience as though we're sat before him upon the hearth rug, and so we have references such as to Merlyn putting his fingers together like Sherlock Holmes, and we are left with a strong impression of The Once and Future King having been written for English school boys at the upper end of the 1950s educational ladder.

Children believe such things to this day, and think that they will only be able to bowl well in the cricket match tomorrow, provided that they are good today.

As an aside, even without the references to Merlyn and his unsettling knowledge of centuries to come, anyone who enjoyed Marc Platt's Lungbarrow as I did might appreciate why I should raise an eyebrow at this passage:

'Would you show me your home?'

'Certainly,' said the badger, 'though, of course, I don't use it all. It is a rambling old place, much too big for a single man. I suppose some parts of it may be a thousand years old. There are about four families of us in it, here and there, take it by and large from cellar to attics, and sometimes we don't meet for months. A crazy old place, I suppose it must seem to you modern people—but there, it's cosy.'

At the risk of committing what is probably literary treason, there's a problem with The Once and Future King, or at least I experienced one. It's nothing to do with kids turning into Disney owls, the twelfth century remodelling, the disconcerting contemporary asides, or any of White's screwing around with the source material, all of which is done with a purpose which becomes gradually apparent. The problem is that said purpose takes so long to emerge from the narrative. I can understand the writer not wanting to play all of his cards at once, but as soon as we're past The Sword in the Stone it really gets to rambling and bumbling to itself with no clear indication of where we might be heading, and while the book remains readable throughout, personally I was a little bored in places. I'm putting this down to my never having read Le Morte D'Arthur.

That said, the point of it all is beautifully expressed once it becomes apparent why White felt compelled to write in the first place. The Once and Future King evokes the age of chivalry in contrast to White's era, and unfortunately also to our own - it might be argued. His invocation of Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich, and the pseudo-Darwinian cult of power as its own justification, as given by Agravaine during the first chapter of the fourth book, is hard to miss.

'We could say that we were in favour of a national movement. For that matter, we could join them together and call it national communism. But it has to be something broad and popular, which everybody can feel. It must be against large numbers of people, like the Jews or the Normans or the Saxons, so that everybody can be angry.'

White also seemingly predicted Death in June and other neofolk types who have built careers on simply exploring controversial ideas and imagery, such as the controversial idea and image of Adolf Hitler as a great bloke who was only saying what everybody was thinking.

Mordred had begun dressing with this dramatic simplicity since the time when he had become a leader of the popular party. Their aims were some kind of nationalism, with Gaelic autonomy, and a massacre of the Jews as well, in revenge for a mythical saint called Hugh of Lincoln. There were already thousands, spread over the country, who carried the badge of a scarlet fist clenching a whip, and who called themselves Thrashers.

Once this novel stops messing about and gets down to the business of what is on its mind, it becomes a formidable work, and so much so as to oblige me to forget having been bored; and given the chilling accuracy of White's analysis of the rise of the Nazis, his argument seems unfortunately well-suited to our own era, and to how we respond to what is happening in our world.

At last he had sought to make a map of force, as it were, to bind it down by laws. He had tried to codify the evil uses of might by individuals, so that he might set bounds to them by the impersonal justice of the state. He had been prepared to sacrifice his wife and his best friend, to the impersonality of Justice. And then, even as the might of the individual seemed to have been curbed, the Principle of Might had sprung up behind him in another shape—in the shape of collective might, of banded ferocity, of numerous armies insusceptible to individual laws. He had bound the might of units, only to find that it was assumed by pluralities. He had conquered murder, to be faced with war. There were no Laws for that.

I suppose now I need to read Le Morte D'Arthur.

The Silent Thunder Caper

Mark Hodder The Silent Thunder Caper (2014)
Just to get it out of the way, I had some initial doubts about this one. Aside from my being pretty much a stranger to detective fiction in general, the somewhat cartoony cover just didn't inspire confidence, which I realise is probably a facile observation but it would be stupid to deny that cover art has no influence on my initial impression of a novel. Happily, holding a physical copy in my hand dispels all doubts, it being a pleasantly chunky doorstop of a hardback, beautifully put together and reminding me of the Dean & Son hardback children's editions of Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island and other classics my grandfather used to buy for me as a child in a sadly premature effort to introduce me to culture; and the cover works very nicely out here in the physical universe, and in a way which it doesn't on a screen for some peculiar reason.

As for detective fiction and the possibility of me being out of my depth, I dipped a toe into an anthology of Sexton Blake material some months back, most of which I enjoyed, so this isn't entirely unfamiliar territory, and not least because it's written by Mark Hodder - he who once so cruelly poured admittedly eloquent and descriptive scorn upon my overachieving sphincter back during our college days, despite my defence of it having been a bad pint, or something.

Anyway, down to business: Sexton Blake as some readers may already know is the star of a long running detective serial of over a hundred's years vintage, now under the wing of Obverse Books. Roughly speaking, he's the Sherlock Holmes who isn't afraid of a punch-up, but the more you read, the more he begins to feel very much his own distinct character. Mark Hodder, having been a fan of Blake for a long time and curator of Blakiana, the dedicated website, was a great choice as author to the first of what will hopefully be a long-running series. Even aside from the sort of attention to detail he brings to the regular cast of Blake, Tinker, Mrs. Bardell and others, his Burton & Swinburne novels have already shown him to be a thorough and expressive hand when it comes to period pieces of this kind. The Silent Thunder Caper strikes a fine balance, perfectly evoking the atmosphere of a time in which even the humble telephone was relatively new-fangled, achieving nostalgic effect without parody, and somehow avoiding any suggestion of affectation - the sort of thing you get when a nineteen-year old reads himself some Lovecraft and decides to have a go. Most surprising of all - at least to me - is how happily The Silent Thunder Caper sits in two places at once, constituting both solid Blake and a great Mark Hodder novel with the sort of political convolutions, elaborate plotting, and earthy humour which have served the Burton & Swinburne books so well. As ever, Hodder delivers an accomplished and thoroughly classy narrative, and anyone who has ever enjoyed his superior pedigree steampunk will find a lot to love here.

If not for the sake of comparison but nevertheless serving as such, this hardback also reproduces G.H. Teed's The Wireless-Telephone Clue from an issue of Union Jack first printed in 1922, an earlier Blake story serving as introduction for some of the characters of The Silent Thunder Caper. Teed seems to have been generally acknowledged as one of the best Sexton Blake authors, and his tale sits quite comfortable alongside Mark Hodder's continuation as both complement and contrast with a narrative which could probably have been condensed to a couple of pages in terms of incident, yet remains engrossing for a hundred or more.

I'm pleased and genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed this.

Erasing Sherlock

Kelly Hale Erasing Sherlock (2006)
Nosing around on the internet in search of Erasing Sherlock reviews for the sake of comparing notes in the event of there being some major detail of the narrative which I've somehow missed, I encounter:

The way Holmes is described I could not avoid imagining our modern day Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch, in the role - although the novel might have been written with Jeremy Brett in mind as Sherlock was not even a twinkle in the eyes of Moffat/Gatiss at the time.

I suppose I'm not really entitled to my usual upswell of wrath given that I tend to picture Sherlock Holmes as Basil Rathbone - or Peter Cook at a pinch - and that while I'm almost certain I enjoyed whichever book it was I read as a kid, I more recently found the same author's The Lost World borderline abominable; but nevertheless, I like to think of Erasing Sherlock as a novel rather than as something which didn't quite get the funding to become a brill television show; and as for fucking Cucumber, give me fucking strength, and once you've given me fucking strength kindly fucking fuck the fuck off.

...and yes, that sound you heard was indeed my sneering.

Anyway, Erasing Sherlock began life as a time travelling Holmes novel which won an award of some kind, and justifiably so, and was then reborn as a Faction Paradox novel without, so I gather, too much tweaking given how it was already in that same thematic ball park. The story is roughly an expansion of that detail of quantum theory in which the act of observation changes that which is observed. Here we have a time travelling student observing the great detective as part of her doctorate, changing the nature of that which is observed specifically by shagging him; which turns out to be part of some larger experiment investigating whether or not it is possible to change the past, in this case by erasing the historical figure of Sherlock Homes, hence the title.

As may be apparent from the above, this all works on a number of layers. At one end of the scale we have the notion that the events of the narrative reduce Holmes to a merely fictional character - just as he is in the universe in which this novel was written - which might also be deemed to pertain to the macrocosm of how an author relates to her characters. One interpretation might be that Kelly Hale specifically wished to relate to this character in sexual terms, thus I suppose presenting further commentary as an aspect of fan fiction; although this isn't something which is made explicit in the text, and Holmes is far from an idealised fantasy figure, but it's there if you want to look for it. That said, I tend to dislike supposedly erotic fiction usually because it bears more relation to the clichés of advertising than to that which it purports to evoke, but Kelly Hale writes it really well, focussing on the texture and poetry rather than peddling typically gushing crescendos. Thankfully this isn't Fifty Shades of Sherlock; and yes, I'm sure some loser has already engaged themselves with that particular pointless exercise, and there will be the inevitable dreamy picture of sodding Cucumber on the cover of the resulting shitty Amazon eBook.

If I have any criticism of Erasing Sherlock, it is only that it feels at times a little like characters waiting around for the massive explosions of the final chapter, in the meantime busying themselves with the intrigue of picking over various plot details to see what happens; but having said that, I've a feeling this may be more to do with me than the novel, given that I'm not predisposed towards an interest in either Holmes or detective fiction as a genre, and it has been quite difficult to read some of this one with all sorts of feline drama going on at the other end of the bedroom - Kirby producing massive lung-destroying human-size turds in the litter tray, Tony trying to roger the kittens and all sorts of stuff you don't really need to know about. The salient points are that Erasing Sherlock is a wonderfully observed and rendered piece of fiction which manages to do at least a little more than just have adventures and solve puzzles, and as everyone keeps saying, Kelly Hale should be a household name on the strength of the quality of her prose; and if you're incapable of reading this one without thinking ooh Cucumber, maybe you should stick to your beloved Jason of Star Command DVDs, or just cease to exist altogether. Either would be acceptable.

The Lost World

Michael Crichton The Lost World (1995)
I remember enjoying the film. In fact I remember enjoying this book last time I read it, but I guess that was a while ago, back when I was less fancy than I am these days. Once both myself and the book reviews algorithm of the Sunday Express found Crichton's Jurassic Park sequel gripping, but we have since gone our separate ways. These days I am distracted by the science which whilst fascinating and possibly legitimate is phrased as though cribbed from Reader's Digest, or at least something with the sterile tang of dentist's waiting room; and the story wanders as though plotted by a small child, new developments unfolding as they occur to him and each new character introduced with a big copypasta wodge of notes from the original plot outline. In this respect The Lost World seemed painfully formulaic, Lawrence Burton decided.

He was about five foot seven. He had brown hair. He sat frowning at the computer, thinking back to those morning's spent reading Crichton's Lost World, struggling to recall if the film had been quite so bad. He wore beige trousers and a cheese hat. He enjoyed country ham and biscuits but hated paying taxes. His wife's name was Phyliss, and she was very, very pretty.

The Lost World is four-hundred pages of undifferentiated suspense upon which Crichton has stuck a succession of sciencey post-it notes, far too many of them opening with scientists believe, presumably so as to avoid either naming any name which might get in the way of the plot by making it look a bit stupid, or committing the tale to anything which could turn out to be bollocks should anyone get around to inventing Google.

Scientists believe - for example - that the pyramids of Egypt could not have been built without recourse to extraterrestrial technology, which is the sort of thing that crackpots, the Daily Mail, and crackpots who write for the Daily Mail tend to peddle, scientists in this case usually meaning a bloke who has studied at Oxford in the sense of having once been there on the National Express and read a few pages of some book about flying saucers in the shop before buying it.

I gather Crichton didn't really want to write this one and it sort of shows, as though he grudgingly accepted the job on the grounds of it being paying work upon which to hang a couple of pet theories for the sake of making it less of a chore, and because paying work is always better than a kick up the arse. The pet theories in question derive from chaos mathematics, which here supposedly support the idea that dinosaur extinction came down to shifting behavioural algorithms 'n' shit, as opposed to a bloody great asteroid screwing up the entire planet for a few hundred years. Chaos theory demonstrates that dinosaurs possibly forgot how to take care of their young and became chavs. I suppose it works if you really want it to, but I can't help feel it's one of those fancy designer ideas explaining something which already has a much better explanation, namely the one about the aforementioned asteroid.

Dinosaurs accordingly enter the narrative in convenient sequence like the prizes on Brucie's conveyor belt or the cast of one of those books in which the cow says moo, immediately followed by the duck saying quack. The fossil record for maiasaurus, for example, preserves her skeleton along with those of a clutch of her hatchling young, and so she has a name which translates as Caring Mother Lizard which must surely be more of an accident of geology than an indictment of the parenting skills of other dinosaurs; but nevertheless Crichton's cast of yelping scientistics encounter maiasaurs busily preparing oven chips and mini-pizzas for their young, helpfully illustrating their characteristic qualities. This scene is followed by the dome-headed pachycephalosaurs headbutting things in illustrative spirit. Had there ever been a dinosaur known for its expert knowledge of fine wines, the next chapter would have doubtless unfolded just as a pachycephalosaur nuts their battered transport, busting open the trunk and spilling bottles of Chateau Latour-Martillac across the savannah.

I think that's most of the jokes I can be bothered to wring out of this one, and they should be sufficient to give a reasonable impression of how gripping this novel really isn't. If not, then it's probably worth considering that even Spielberg's big screen exercise in hot-dog retail dispensed with most of Crichton's story. It's possibly less offensive than what Conan Doyle did with the same title, but that isn't saying much.

The Casebook of Sexton Blake

David Stuart Davies (editor) The Casebook of Sexton Blake (2009)
I've never been particularly drawn to detective fiction, so this collection is some way outside my normal fare; but Obverse Books have acquired the rights to publish new Sexton Blake material, and Mark Hodder has written one, and I'm probably going to be writing one - or at least attempting to do so - so here I am, doing my homework like a good boy.

Sexton Blake was, according to the usual internet sources, either the poor man's Sherlock Holmes or the Sherlock Holmes who wasn't afraid of a bit of a scrap every once in a while, depending on where you look. More helpfully, he was a character who emerged from the pulp magazines of the early twentieth century as written by numerous authors, and who most recently appeared with name changed to Victor Drago in the short-lived Tornado comic back in 1979; at least up until the publication of Mark Hodder's The Silent Thunder Caper this year. The parallels with Holmes are difficult to miss, but Blake - whose character remains both consistent and distinct throughout the writing of the six different authors collected here - has sufficient appeal of his own to explain his having remained generally popular for more than a century. I've not read any of Conan Doyle's Holmes since my school days back in the late 1600s, and having recently read and strongly disliked The Lost World I'm disinclined to renew my acquaintance with Arthur's works, but based on what little I can recall, Blake seems an altogether more fallible, likeable, and plausible character. He detects, but not to the point of absurdity or to the detriment of the story. He misses details here and there, and so there's no the angle at which this goldfish bowl is placed clearly indicates that the gentleman who purchased the bus ticket was wearing women's knickers, most likely a pair stolen from his wife's sister; and I doubt he could be portrayed on the telly by anyone quite so annoying as Cucumber.

I realise that with this collection being what it is, it's unlikely to include any of the real stinkers, but all the same, these seven tales testify to Blake as considerably more engaging than I expected him to be. As Mark Hodder points out in the introduction, each provides a genuinely fascinating snapshot of the times, specifically England at the turn of the century. The writing is generally lively and not lacking in gentle humour. As tales churned out to a series of deadlines, it seems they were at least churned out with a generous spirit, being well written above what one might anticipate considering their supposedly inauspicious origin. Additionally, there's a sense of experimentation here, of wishing to avoid the bed-wettingly generic or gung ho which one might, perhaps wrongly, associate with detective fiction; and so Blake and Tinker play for England in The Football Mystery, or turn the other cheek and let a criminal escape, having decided that the poor fucker has already suffered enough in The Black Eagle. My only criticism is that I generally found these stories to be longer than seemed necessary - particularly The Slave Market - which is either down to the word count required by the original publishers or my being unaccustomed to the genre.

I may have groaned at the size of this thing when it first came in the mail, but I'm nevertheless glad to have read it.

The Lost World

Arthur Conan Doyle The Lost World (1912)
As a kid, I loved the black and white Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, and so much so that I read at least two of Arthur Conan Doyle's novels being as they happened to have them at the town library; but this was a long, long time ago, and to be brutally frank, these days I couldn't really give too much of a shit about the great detective, generally speaking, and especially not in any incarnation involving Benedict Cucumber. I appreciate that Holmes has many, many fans but the appeal eludes me, and in all honesty feels like my fellow huboons are no longer able to cope with the idea of novels that don't come as a nice tidy and collectable series of sequential scrapes and adventures with running gags and a regular cast just like proper entertainment, the stuff that's good enough to be made into telly. Not having read any Arthur Conan Doyle for three decades, I realise and even hope that I'm almost certainly wrong; although none of this impacts on the general impression I had of him as an accomplished author, and so I approached The Lost World with the same anticipation as I would the work of H.G. Wells.

I spent the first half of the novel looking for patterns that weren't there, assuming that the vaguely repellent Professor Challenger and his bumptious gang of explorers perhaps represented the scientific and imperial orthodoxy of the early twentieth century obliged to confront their own vanity by encounters with the unknown in the form of prehistoric reptiles. This I took from the fact that The Lost World keeps kicking them up the arse, except of course they mostly tend to roll with the punches, which are reduced then to a series of scrapes and japes.

It also seemed possible that The Lost World might be Conan Doyle responding to H.G. Wells, or at least to the contemporaries of H.G. Wells, by playing them at their own game:

'My dear chap, things don't happen like that in real life. People don't stumble upon enormous discoveries and then lose their evidence. Leave that to the novelists. The fellow is as full of tricks as the monkey house at the Zoo. It's all absolute bosh.'

Maybe The Lost World is the science fiction novel done properly in Conan Doyle's view, as perhaps indicated in the Duke of Durham's speech near the close of the tale:

'Apparently the age of romance was not dead, and there was common ground upon which the wildest imaginings of the novelist could meet the actual scientific investigations of the searcher for truth.'

That said, there is little to suggest a devotion to scientific rigour equivalent to that of the later Asimov and his pals. The fabulous dinosaurs of The Lost World are presented as horrors, with little discussion of their habits or anachronistic survival, and of course there are those pterodactyls with wing spans of twenty or more feet.

Then again, there also seemed to be the possibility that this was a tale of jolly chaps set in contrast to the inhuman scientific eccentricity of Challenger, an interesting character, but not really a sympathetic one. You certainly wouldn't want him batting for your team:

'You should cultivate the scientific eye and the detached scientific mind,' said he. 'To a man of philosophic temperament like myself the blood-tick, with its lancet-like proboscis and its distending stomach, is as beautiful a work of Nature as the peacock, or, for that matter, the aurora borealis. It pains me to hear you speak of it in so unappreciative a fashion.'

Ultimately, I had to conclude that I was overthinking this, and that The Lost World really is just a romp, a ripping wheeze, or the literary equivalent of a good hard game of Rugger before tea, as Brian Aldiss puts it. In fact, it pretty much does everything that Aldiss gives as a reason for disliking John Wyndham's novels, and which John Wyndham's novels don't actually do - chaps having a jolly exciting time with thrills and scrapes aplenty.

There's nothing wrong with a bit of brainless adventure, but for my money, The Lost World doesn't actually do it very well. Whilst it contains none of the commentary or criticism of Wells, and is written by an author who generally supported the colonial interests of his country, the imperialism is fairly understated, as is the casual racism that so often infects novels of this vintage. So it scores fairly high in those respects, and is as elegantly composed as you would expect of Conan Doyle; but I expected more, and I didn't anticipate being quite so bored as I was. Oh well.

Servant of the Underworld

Aliette de Bodard Servant of the Underworld (2010)
Having something of an interest in Mesoamerican culture reaching beyond that which can be gleaned from Big Bird's Book of Aztecs, I've tended to avoid this sort of thing for fear of blowing a gasket. I can't help it. Rightly or wrongly, I take a proprietorial view of Mexican culture. I don't like the fact of it having been demonised as crude and lacking in any qualities beyond the sanguinary for the last few hundred years, and nor do I appreciate its ham-fisted appropriation by hack writers looking for something exotic and just a teensy bit weird with which to spice up their latest exercise in paying off a credit card.

Anyway, Servant of the Underworld was free, one of a big pile of paperbacks published by Angry Robot from which guests at a San Antonio science-fiction convention were invited to take their pick.

The appendix, an essay in which the author describes how she came to write this - her debut novel - and to which I first turned, should perhaps have rung alarm bells. Aliette de Bodard speaks of the inspiration drawn from Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, then from a series of French novels set in ancient Egypt, and at length describes the plotting and research of Servant of the Underworld. I raised a Paxmanesque eyebrow at de Bodard's renaming the ruler Itzcoatl as Ixcoatl, a revision which recasts the Obsidian Serpent as some bloke called either Face of a Serpent, Serpent Eye, or One Who Appears Like a Serpent; and then I read of her concerns regarding the setting of her novel, studying maps, struggling to work out the distance between certain places, and how the chinampa plantations of Xochimilco would have appeared. I wondered to myself why she hadn't just gone to Mexico City and had a look around, particularly as the chinampas are still there and the city even has an airport, no longer requiring one to endure a five day hike across the mountains on the back of a donkey.

Anyway, suspecting I was probably just being sniffy for the sake of it, I turned to the first page...

I'm not accustomed to reading murder mysteries, and I've no idea whether they're all like this, but the first few chapters, if not exactly bad, comprise little but plot textured with a wearying check-list of local details. The prose is functional and not much more. To be fair, I'm not sure I've ever seen the appeal of this genre given that most stories will necessarily be a variation on the theme of someone being murdered, leading to someone else deducing the identity of the killer; and I don't know why I should be excited about that. I suppose then it must be the mood and sense of place which draws the reader, except Servant of the Underworld has all the personality of a diagram littered with fiddly plot points laboriously picked out through characters for whom it is very difficult to care. There is no art here, no poetry, just narrative mechanism. The writing isn't terrible, but neither is it particularly inspiring, and it really isn't helped by interludes such as the little girl looking at our hard-boiled Mesoamerican investigator with eyes like liquid pools, as opposed to eyes like football pools, I suppose.

Has anyone ever in the entire history of everything just once looked into another's eyes and been struck by their resemblance to liquid pools, presumably liquid pools bearing no similarity to those of asymmetrical shape which form when you spill your beer in the kitchen whilst trying to fry an apricot at two in the morning? Aside from those composed of light, don't most pools tend to be liquid?

This wouldn't bother me were the detail - that which is supposed to distinguish Servant of the Underworld from any other recycled Agatha Christie - not quite so poor. Please feel free to skip the inevitable list which follows because I'm sure no-one else finds this stuff of any interest; but for the record, contrary to that which is suggested in this novel:

• The honorific suffix of a name is indeed -tzin, but it only really works when replacing the existing, usually applicative suffix -tl, -li, or -tli. The name Acatl with an honorific suffix is therefore Acatzin, not fucking Acatl-tzin, which is like prefixing someone's name with Mister Sir.
  
  
• The nahual or nagual is an animal spirit, usually twinned to a specific individual (regardless of whether or not they are aware of this) and can be of any species, not just a jaguar. It is entirely unlike a Dementor from Harry Potter.


• There was no priesthood dedicated to the Death Gods. This is not a quirk of regional government or preference so much as something which, were it otherwise, would contradict much of the existing theology. I appreciate that Aliette de Bodard admits to taking a few liberties in regard to this, but that really doesn't make it better.


• Mictlan is a region of the underworld, not the underworld in its entirety.


• There is a character called Ohtli. Ohtli simply means Road, which seems reminiscent of those people with exotic tattoos of Chinese characters which actually read shirts cleaned $5.


• Girls in Tenochtitlan were generally taught in the home, not in schools, as described in detail in Codex Mendoza.


• The priesthood was almost exclusively male. There were very few priestesses, and none of high rank that we know of.


• Marriages were arranged and not a case of the young girl going out and having a look for some eligible bachelor, as is also described in detail in Codex Mendoza.

There's probably more but I gave up at around chapter four. None of the nits picked above are exactly unforgivable, excepting possibly the thing with honorific suffixes and getting Itzcoatl's name wrong, but it all adds up with all period or theological detail seeming so sloppy and arbitrary and incidental to the almighty labyrinthine plot that the whole becomes difficult to take seriously; and everyone speaks as though they could have been cast in almost any murder mystery from any era with just the furniture shuffled around for the sake of local flavour, all pulling stern Bruce Willis faces and exclaiming what in the Fifth World is going on here?

I hate giving up on a book, and I've only done it on three occasions over the last five years, and never on the same day as I began reading the thing; but this is horrible, a cynical exercise in writing a by-the-numbers fantasy bestseller, and life is too short.

The Case of the Invisible College

Andrew May The Case of the Invisible College (2010)
Andrew May wrote some fairly interesting online material on the subject of A.E. van Vogt's fix-up novels, and following a link on the site in question, I arrived at a page dedicated to the man's own self-published fiction. The Case of the Invisible College with its faux Edward Young Penguin cover and the promise of tales about chimps writing Shakespeare, books bound in human skin and so on, proved difficult to resist.

Being self-published through Lulu, some would perceive a certain stigma here, an unfortunate association derived from a reasonable percentage of self-published novels being a steaming pile of shite spewn forth without recourse to grammar, editing or peer review - not even some kindly friend pulling Dave aside to point out that actually, a cross between Star Trek and Babylon 5 really isn't going to set anyone's world ablaze, or that people who don't actually read books probably have no business writing them. Whilst sadly legitimate as criticism in certain cases, it might also be pointed out that mainstream publishing has similarly produced its fair share of poop over the years, so self-publishing of itself need not necessarily be equated with low quality. Furthermore, I myself grew up with fanzines and all manner of enthusiastically photocopied horrors bound with uneven staples, all self-published, and it never occurred to me that anyone might consider such publications inferior by virtue of having been produced solely by some bloke with green hair. Sometimes it requires genuine inspiration to print up something that will be of interest to almost no-one, at least not until two decades have passed and surviving copies are turning up on eBay at fifty quid a throw. My point, I suppose, is that for all its faults, print-on-demand remains a field with great potential, and if you're expecting genuine surprises, it's a good place to look.

The Case of the Invisible College didn't quite set my world ablaze, but it's brief and a lot of fun. The customary criticisms made of the self-published are rendered irrelevant by the clear and lively prose of someone who has evidently spent time learning how to write and how to put a story together. These are, I suppose, what you might call Fortean detective tales - more Conan Doyle than Grant Morrison - weirdly ripping yarns perhaps. My only real criticism would be that most of them are pretty short, and might have benefited from expansion rather than having all that exposition crammed into such a reduced word count; and that this reduced word count also results in a slightly modular feel with information revealed in natty little blocks very much in the vein of those robot tales by Isaac Asimov that I could never quite get along with; and this is compounded by the somewhat repetitive style of denouement whereby our narrator tidily announces that the case of the such and such - invariably also the title of the story - is SOLVED in upper case, this doubling up as acronym for the Secret Oxford League of Volunteer Extracurricular Detectives of which he is a member.

That said, I gather these stories are reprinted from some periodical and such criticisms may be at least as pointless as bemoaning how those Peanuts cartoons always seem to run to just three or four panels. The seven tales collected here as The Case of the Invisible College are probably a little more hard-boiled than my standard fare, but they're well written with good humour and the odd flash of genuine inspiration.