Fantastic Deities and Where to Find Them

I have never been very good at approaching my reading systematically. I will pick up whatever the heck I want to read, whenever I want to (or am able to). Thus, a look at my to-be-read pile will reveal a mish-mash of genres, authors, and page counts. Some books are barely longer than 150 pages, others are well over 1000. Dante’s Divine Comedy is palling around with a bunch of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels, and my Paul Halter omnibus can be found next to a Latin edition of Winnie the Pooh. Sometimes, I pick up a book that is extremely long, and then it takes me a long time to finish it. Which means that the review takes a long time to go up. Hence the delay since my last review. With this word of explanation, I’d like to begin talking about Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

But before I do, let me answer the objection: “This is a crime fiction blog! What on earth are you doing reviewing a fantasy novel?” My answer is this: I have no answer for you. Technically, you could consider this a mystery novel – there is a mystery that is solved at a certain point in the novel – but I wouldn’t recommend approaching it as such. The reason I picked up this book is tangentially related to crime fiction – Bryan Fuller’s next project after the fantastic TV series Hannibal was a television adaptation of American Gods. I was intrigued by the description, and the book landed on my to-be-read pile. I felt like picking this book up a few weeks ago, so I did.

Blackbeard's Revenge

…And unmoor’d souls may drift on stranger tides

Than those men know of, and be overthrown

By winds that would not even stir a hair…

—William Ashbless

John Chandagnac is off to the New World aboard the Vociferous Carmichael. He has only one thing in mind: he wants to find his uncle, Sebastian Chandagnac. But this will not be a happy family reunion. It turns out that Sebastian Chandagnac is a ruthless criminal. He claimed that his poor brother, the rightful heir to a fortune, was dead, and made off with the cash. That brother, John’s father, was a puppeteer, and ended up dying a pauper, from starvation and the cold. John is furious and wants to get to his uncle, reclaim the fortune that rightfully belonged to his father, and get even.

But you know what they say about the best-laid plans. John’s plans for revenge are suddenly halted when his ship is attacked by a gang of pirates, led by the infamous Philip Davies. And they weren’t working on their own: a few of the Carmichael’s passengers were in league with the pirates, helping them to take over the ship. One of these is Benjamin Hurwood, an eccentric one-armed professor with a beautiful daughter named Beth. When Davies murders the Carmichael’s former captain, Chandagnac, in a fit of fury, attacks the pirate and wounds him. As a result, Davies allows the other passengers to go free, but John Chandagnac is given a different choice:

“Join us, wholly adopt our goals as your own, or be killed right now where you stand.”

There are monsters in Mirkwood!

Growing up is hard, but it’s even harder when you are a dwarf, living in a small town in Nebraska, where other kids physically torment you and everyone else shuns you, leaving you as an outcast. If you’re Dr. Robert “Mongo” Frederickson, you might even move to New York City and get a PhD in criminology, becoming a university professor after giving up a highly successful career in the circus. It’d take a lot to bring you back to your home town… such as the death of a favourite nephew.

Tommy was a bright kid. He had an incredibly high IQ and was a veritable wizard with a computer. He was also a very big fan of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and was part of a group of kids who played a game called “Sorscience”, where you score points by matching real-life phenomena to events from The Lord of the Rings. He and a fellow player were discovered dead, apparently a murder-suicide between two young gay lovers. The town is shocked and so nobody minds it when the whole incident is covered up as quickly as possible. But Mongo is then hired by an unusual person: Coop Lugmor, who abused Mongo when they were children, tries to hire the dwarf to investigate the deaths. According to Coop, his younger brother was no “fag” and he wants Mongo to prove it and catch the person who did this.

The Thing

I read Rivers of London around Halloween, but I never got around to posting my review. I thought it would be a perfect read for the time of year, combining the detective story with the fantasy genre. The plot basically revolves around a gruesome series of murders with a supernatural origin. Some thing is causing normal residents of London to go around brutally murdering each other. Police constable Peter Grant is present at the scene of the first murder, and when his friend goes off to get coffees for them both, a man walks up to Peter telling him he witnessed the crime. Only there’s a bit of a catch: the witness is a ghost.

And thus Peter soon finds himself working for a division of Scotland Yard that deals specifically with the supernatural. Only it’s not quite what it sounds like: there are literally only two people, counting Peter, working for this division, and it seems like half of Scotland Yard is in on the secret. Either way, author Ben Aaronovitch manages to write a good story, which isn’t quite fair-play detection but it isn’t in full cheat-the-reader mode either.

Death to the Vampire!

Just last week, fellow blogger TomCat took a look at Mike Resnick’s Stalking the Dragon, a parody of hardboiled detective stories with a simple premise at heart: the story, while told in a hardboiled style, took place in a parallel universe with goblins, leprechauns, dragons, and the like walking down the same streets as the private eye, John Justice Mallory. And I instantly resolved to read one of these books in the near future (especially seeing what time of year this is). Well, that day is today, and the book in question is Resnick’s Stalking the Vampire.

It’s Halloween, and detective John Justice Mallory notices that his partner, Winifred Carruthers, seems unusually pale. That’s when he notices the bite-marks on her neck, and he quickly deduces that they were inflicted by her nephew Rupert, who has come over for a visit to his aunt. Well, it’s true: on the boat over to New York, Rupert was bitten by a vampire named Aristotle Draconis, and now Mallory has to figure out how to protect Winifred from her nephew. But then Rupert disappears, and is later found murdered outside Winifred’s apartment. Is Draconis responsible? And if not him, who?

The Adventure of the Magical Murderer

I stumbled over the film Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame by accident, as I was looking up an adaptation of Robert Van Gulik’s The Haunted Monastery. The film seemed okay, but the trailer rather turned me off. It didn’t seem like my kind of movie. Well, I was wrong… but I was also right. This movie is a strange mixture of stuff I really like and stuff I don’t care for at all.

The idea for a plot is a really darn good one. As Wu Zetian prepares to be declared Empress, a series of spontaneous combustions occur that threaten to ruin the coronation. Detective Dee is released from prison, where he was thrown 8 years before for treason, and he is ordered to track down the criminal and serve justice.