GEOFFREY CAINE – Curse of the Vampire. Diamond, paperback original; 1st printing, May 1991

   If M*F is a magazine for detective mysteries only, this review certainly has no business being here. Luckily it isn’t, or at least since it’s my magazine, I can read and review what I like. (Can’t I?)

   The book does feature a retired Chicago cop, however, and maybe that’s enough connection to make it legal, but Abraham Stroud’s days of retirement are not likely to be easy ones. This is only the first of many adventures to come.

   This one takes place in Stroud’s home town, but according to page 183, there are “all manner of nasty creatures the world over.” The “family” of vampires in this book are only a taste of what lies ahead. (Next in the series: off to Russia and Wake of the Werewolf.)

   The gimmick is vampire today is apparently to find some sort of pseudo-scientific rationale for their existence, and to create some sort of well-suited setting for this enemy of man, one in which they can find new ways to survive in an otherwise alien world.

   This is all well and good, but it can backfire on them, as it does in this book. This perhaps may require a plot alert warning, but I’ll forgo it and tell you that what Stroud and friends come across is a chemical substance called succinylcholine (S-choline, for short) which is a deadly poison to the creatures.

   Stroud’s demented handyman — yes, there’s one of those, too — is the only one who knows about it, but it works. (Keep the name of the chemical in mind. Who knows? It may come in handy some time.)

   It wouldn’t have been difficult to have come up with a “scientific” explanation for the stuff as well — you know, essence of garlic or something — but unfortunately, the author didn’t take the chance to do so.

   But the book ends with the grandest sort of cemetery shootout, a true pulp style holocaust that inflicts tremendous damage on both sides. In fact, if you are a fan of the pulps, this is as close a descendant to those old magazine stories as I’ve read in a long time. Wild imaginative story-telling is a grand old tradition to be following in, and I’m glad to see it still around today.

Bibliographic Notes:   Geoffrey Caine was the pseudonym of Robert W. Walker, who has made a good career of writing novels in the horror/psychological suspense/thriller vein, mostly under his own name. There were only three books in this series. I don’t remember reading either of the other two, but it’s possible that I did. (Note that I no longer see the need for making excuses for posting material on this blog which is not purely detective fiction.)

       The Abraham Stroud series —

Curse of the Vampire. Diamond, 1991.
Wake of the Werewolf. Diamond, 1991.

Legion of the Dead. Diamond, 1992.

   Vampires, werewolves and zombies. You can’t go into a bookstore today and avoid them. Caine was obviously a man ahead of his time.

PATRICK LEE – Deep Sky. Harper, paperback original, January 2012.

   Even though everyone makes up their own, there are certain rules that readers of fiction must live by, and #4 in the spiral notebook that I always carry with me (figuratively speaking) goes something like this:

   Never read the third book in a trilogy without reading the first two first.

   The proof of a rule always comes in disregarding it, as I did this time, and it will be a long time before I do so again.

   Preceding Deep Sky in the author’s “Breach” trilogy are The Breach (December 2009) and Ghost Country (December 2010), and what we have in this, the third book has a a wind-up whizz-bang opening – the roof comes off the top of an ordinary home in the suburbs, a Sparrowhawk missile is fired, destroying the White House and most of its occupants, including the President – followed by an only slightly less dramatic bunker-busting bomb taking out half of the heavily guarded structure containing The Breach, a la Marvel comics – and an ending that veers so far off into sci-fi La-La Land that even the most fervent enthusiast’s eyes will glaze over.

   I know. Mine did.

   The Breach, as long as you are asking, is some sort of super-secret connection between our world – a wormhole, perhaps – and another, located somewhere else in the galaxy or beyond at some point in time in the future, perhaps. No one knows. All they know is that mysterious artifacts keep slipping through, some useful, others having no discernible purpose.

   Whoever ordered the destruction of the White House and the killing of the President is unknown, but the Vice President, hastily sworn in, is definitely on the side of the bad guys. On the other are Travis Chase, head of Tangent, and his lover, Paige Campbell, whose father was one of the founders of Tangent. Both survive the bunker-bomb blast, and with the use of the devices spewed out by the Breach, begin a book-long investigation into the tragedies and who’s behind them, an investigation conducted on the run, with all of the forces of the US Government acting against them, knowingly or not.

   The first half of the book is a lot of fun, even though the standalone reader (me) has to assume a lot about the events that have previously taken place. But when events in the previous books are suddenly needed (pulled out of the air) to make sense of this one, the fun ceases and the rest of the book (with 150 pages to go) is a mish-mash of techno-babble, super-sized futuristic technology and carloads of information dumped on the reader with no room to yell out for help. The air is sucked out of the book.

   That the leading characters are stick figures goes with saying. (Perhaps we were to have learned all we needed to know about them in the first two books.) This is a techno-thriller, after all, not Moby Dick. The author has a a grand imagination. It’s too bad he couldn’t pull it off, not even in the 150 pages that were left to pull it off in.

   This is a Big Scale book — there’s no doubt about that — but when a Big Scale book isn’t given enough space to answer all the questions, nor to fill in the holes in the plot, then it’s no better than a Small Scale book without any questions. (I’m thinking of halves of Ace Doubles from the 1950s and 60s here.)

PostScript:   I classified this as Science Fiction, correctly, I believe, but you’re much more likely to find this book in the section where your local store keeps the Tom Clancy thrillers.

BARBARA HAMBLY – Those Who Hunt the Night. Ballantine/Del Rey, hardcover, December 1988; reprint paperback, 1990.

   Most assuredly a tour de force, if there ever was one. If you don’t know the story, hang on to your Bunsen burner. Under considerable duress, James Asher, one-time foreign agent for the British government is hired by Don Simon Ysidro to find out who is killing the vampires of London.

   The year is 1907, and the fact is that Ysidro himself became a vampire in 1555. Held over Asher’s head is the life of his wife Lydia, who is herself a scientist of some ability, and who knows something of the pathology of blood.

   Several of Ysidro’s companions are dead, with stakes in their hearts and their coffins opened to the light of day. What Ysidro cannot understand is how a human could be doing these deeds any vampire’s knowing, and thus he turns to what would otherwise be unthinkable: he is asking the assistance of a human. (Worse than that, of course, is actually allowing a human to know of the vampires’ existence.)

   Nominally a detective story, there are a few flaws along that line, mostly those of conjectures that somehow become facts within minutes of their being stated, and small jumps of logic that on occasion stumped me badly. (And sometimes they are wrong, leading to long wild goose hunts that circle back upon themselves, and only then are they crucial to the story.)

   What this may sound like is a horror story, but it really is not, although with vampires involved, how could there not be any chills? What it is, when it comes down to it, is a science fiction novel. There is a reason the story takes place when it does, and that’s because in 1907 there was just enough known about blood and bacteria and related matters to provide a solid “scientific” basis for the existence of vampires, and not yet enough to know that they are not possible.

   And always overshadowing Asher’s investigation is the question of how it’s going to work out when it’s over. Ysidro is a creature who has killed thousands of humans in his “lifetime,” and yet he and Asher become strange allies in their hunt for the killer of the vampires, and each in their own way begin to stand taller in the opinion of the other.

   While there may not be a definitive answer to this not-so-subtle problem, Hambly does offer the reader a resolution to it. She also supplies a solution to the mystery itself, and of the two (resolution and solution), it is the solution to the mystery that is stronger.

   All in all, this is a fascinating book, one I didn’t think I was going to read — it’s not my usual bill of fare — but as it turned out, I’m glad I did.

[UPDATE] 05-20-12.   Unknown to me until now, this was the first of a series of vampire novels that Barbara Hambly wrote about Jim Asher. I’ll list those below.

   Hambly is one of the few authors I can think of who has written as many mysteries as she has in the SF/Fantasy field. Most notable among the former are her eleven novels (through 2011) featuring “free man of color” Benjamin January, a Creole physician and music teacher whose first adventure takes place in New Orleans in 1833.

      The James Asher series —

1. Those Who Hunt the Night (1988)
2. Traveling with the Dead (1995)

3. Blood Maidens (2010)
4. The Magistrates of Hell (forthcoming: July 2012)

STANLEY SHAPIRO – A Time to Remember. Random House, hardcover, 1986. Signet, paperback, 1988. Made-for-TV Movie: Filmed as Running Against Time (USA Network, 1990), with Robert Hays, Catherine Hicks, Sam Wanamaker.

   Coming across a [paperback] copy of Stanley Shapiro’s A Time to Remember exactly 25 years after the murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas was too much of a coincidence to resist, and so I read another volume in the growing library on that event.

   This is a science-fiction mystery in which, using time travel, a man goes back to 1963 to try to prevent Lee Harvey Oswald from shooting the President. (Shapiro does not refer to any conspiracy theories.) The science portion is not very believable, nor is the fiction much better. There are some dizzying jumps between 1963 and 1985, and much of the suspense is the result of the author causing incidents with a rather heavy hand.

   Still, there are times when Shapiro writes very well, and a chase scene is described as suspensefully as the master, Cornell Woolrich, might have told it:

   The brief confrontation between a naive scientist and a Dallas prostitute on page 44 is almost, by itself, worth the price of the book. Most important, there is the endless fascination of the single most traumatic event of our time.

Editorial Comments:   This is the author’s only entry in the Revised Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin. Stanley Shapiro was far more well known as a Hollywood screenwriter: he was nominated four times for an Oscar, winning once, for Pillow Talk (1959). For a full list of his credits on IMBD, go here.

JACK WILLIAMSON – Mazeway. Ballantine/Del Rey, hardcover, 1990. Paperback reprint, October 1990.

   Younger science fiction writers may have technical proficiencies that Jack Williamson can only dream about, but other than that, I think his dreams are the stuff that dreams are made of.

   There is something somebody once called a “sense of wonder” in trying to describe a certain brand of science fiction, and Jack Wiliamson has it, and he always did: his first published story was in 1928. He had then — and still does — an awe of the future that younger writers take for granted, as everyday events, and their books are (arguably) the poorer for it.

   But what’s this book about? Nothing more than a few representatives of mankind trying to make the evolutionary leap from planet to space. How? By playing the eldern’s Game of Blade and Stone on the double planet Mazeway – sort of like taking a hard, rigorous entrance exam.

   Winning the game means mankind’s acceptance into the wider world of the entire universe.

   Why such exalted creatures such as the eldern need such a childish way to enter into their ranks is not precisely clear, but given the premise, admittedly not a new one, Williamson delivers an old-fashioned homily on growing up and getting along and maturing.

   It is, as well, a murder mystery. May I quote from page 80? Benn Dain, Terran, is making demands of the Hydrans concerning his friend and mentor, Edward Gibbon Beta, whose brother by fission at birth has been killed, under mysterious circumstances:

   Find the killer, they do, although I’d have to agree that it is not one that Ellery Queen, say, in his wildest dreams would ever have recognized. And as much as I like what some of the newer SF writers are saying, as futzy and outdated books like this might be, it’s still my kind of story.

[UPDATE] 01-18-12.   You didn’t miss a great deal when I shortened this review to post it here. Back in 1991 and for a reading audience of mystery fans who might not have known who he was, I spent a few paragraphs of time telling them something about Jack Williamson’s background as a writer.

   Today, however, all I have to do is include a link to an appropriate page, and you’ll know what I said about him then, and a whole lot more. (I also spent some time justifying the inclusion of a SF writer in a mystery journal. I stopped worrying about that a long time ago.)

MARTIN SCOTT – Thraxas. Baen, paperback original; 1st US printing, September 2003.

   Private eye novels come in all flavors and from all directions. Let me start with the opening paragraph or so, and you’ll see what I mean, and right away:

   His sometimes assistant is a barmaid named Makri, a handy lass with a sword and prone to wearing a tiny chainmail bikini. This introductory volume in the United States actually consists of two novels as published in England: Thraxas and Thraxas and the Warrior Monks, and weighs in at a hefty 442 pages, in my opinion well worth your money at $7.99, and decidedly so if you’re still with me after reading that first paragraph above.

   And I’ll leave the plots for you to discover on your own. The books are exactly what I am sure you think they are, and better. They’re funny, too. Since you can’t stop me, I’ll continue with some quotes from the second half of the book:

   I’ll stop here. Fantasy and the true detective novel don’t really mix — take for example the impossible crime of the missing two-ton statue, which no one saw being removed — utterly fantastic? Yes.

   On the other hand, there is a fair-play clue involved, one that gives Thraxas the key to the case as soon as he hears it. That it lies in what he overhears a talking pig say means only that there’s more to the world than either you or I are apt to ever become aware of.

   And there’s more to come!

      The Thraxas novels —

   UK editions:

Thraxas. April 1999.
Thraxas and the Warrior Monks. May 1999.
Thraxas at the Races. June 1999.
Thraxas and the Elvish Isles. August 2000.
Thraxas and the Sorcerers. November 2001.
Thraxas and the Dance of Death. May 2002.
Thraxas at War. July 2003.
Thraxas under Siege. May 2005.

   Baen omnibus editions (US):

Thraxas. September 2003:    Contains Thraxas and Thraxas and the Warrior Monks.
Death and Thraxas. August 2004:    Contains Thraxas at the Races and Thraxas and the Elvish Isles.

   Baen single novel editions (US):

Thraxas and the Sorcerers. June 2005.
Thraxas at War. February 2006.
Thraxas and the Dance of Death. July 2007.
Thraxas under Siege. August 2008

MATTHEW FARRER – Crossfire. Black Library /Games Workshop Ltd., paperback original; 1st US printing, July 2003. A book in the “Warhammer 40,000” series.

   I confess that I haven’t read any of the other Warhammer books, but the series consists of a long list of novels taking place in a universe set far in a future ruled by the Emperor’s Imperial Guard, the “ever-vigilant Inquisition” and the “tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus.” Lots of bloody warfare, I gather, with “no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.”

   Maybe it’s a video game, too, or a role-playing game, or maybe I have it all wrong. In any case, if you haven’t already skipped this review and gone on to the next one, the small incident on an isolated planetary system that this novel is about has both a crime, or a series of crimes, and an active detective whose career seems to be only beginning. Really. Stay with me, and I’ll tell you what I mean.

   What caught my eye first was the cover. A punkish young lady with reddish, short cropped hair, dressed mostly in shiny black – either leather or metal, or a combination thereof – holding a light saber of some sort in one hand and a huge pistol-looking affair in the other.

   Her name is Shira Calpurnia, and she is the newly arrived Arbites officer on the planet Hydraphur. From the first sentence on, we know, hey Jenny, we’re not in Kansas any more, when she meets Genator-Magos Cynez Sanja, of the Order Biologis:

   An attempt to assassinate Shira is made soon thereafter, and hunting down the miscreants responsible takes the remainder of the book, which consists of 320 pages of very small print, and baroque prose nearly always as dense as the short extract above.

   Or as below, taken from page 51:

   Words fail me. I could not write like that in a million years.

   I’ll skip all of the action, all of interesting if not fascinating, all of it filled with a sense of wonder that I haven’t felt as strongly as this since I was about 12 years old. Not that I understood it all. Maybe you have to be, um, 12 years old. But the ending I understood, and you will, too:

   She may not look the part, but Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and all of other virtuous gumshoes who have toiled and labored in the mean streets the world over have a worthy descendant in Shira Calpurnia, destined (I believe) to continue on with other adventures.

UPDATE [June 2006].   I was correct. Shira Calpurnia has indeed appeared in a follow-up entry, and a third one that will be showing up soon looks extremely interesting:

   Legacy. Black Library, pb, US, August 2004. Shira takes more of a background role in this one, more of a novel of political intrigue than a mystery novel (from what I can deduce from a rather meagre description).

   Blind. Black Library, pb, US, July 2006. A telepath is killed with no weapon found nearby. Said to be a locked room mystery. It sounds like a must-have to me.

[UPDATE #2] 08-16-11.   These three are all there are in the series, so far. Enforcer, released in 2010, is an omnibus collection of all three.
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JUSTIN GUSTAINIS – Hard Spell. Angry Robot, US, paperback original, July 2011; UK, ppbk, June 2011.

   Hard Spell, “an Occult Crimes Unit Investigation” novel, and the first in a projected series, is set in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Scranton, like the rest of the country, has been learning to deal with the “supernatural element” for some fifty years in the wake of the infiltration of returning World War II troops from Europe by various supernatural beings.

   It’s not been an easy path and the dream of the day envisioned by Martin Luther King when “naturals and supernaturals” would live together in harmony is not yet realized.

   Detective Stan Markowski is a member of the Scranton “Supe Squad,” housed in the basement of Police Headquarters, and works with his long-time partner, Paul di Napoli, on the night shift (and the implied pun is probably intended).

   When di Napoli is killed by goblins in a negotiated situation that turns sour, he’s replaced by Karl Renfer, a “tall, gangly kid, all elbows and knees,” whose career came under a cloud after his former partner claimed he failed to come to his defense during a confrontation with a voodoo master raising corpses from the dead. Renfer was cleared by a Review Board, but Markowski is still wary of his younger, less experienced partner.

   Both detectives are put to the test by a series of murders related to an ancient book of necromancy, the “Opus Mago,” that will give the possessor the power to awaken one of the Great Ones, powerful entities who predate man and, if they are resurrected, could have the power to supplant him.

   Or, as the irreverent Renfer so colorfully puts it, the “Opus Mago” is a “recipe book for cooking up different kinds of Truly Bad Shit.”

   This alternative history crossover nimbly maneuvers a narrow path through the minefield of the conflicting demands of the police procedural and the apocalyptic horror novel in a promising debut for the fledgling series.

Editorial Comments:   A neat trailer for Hard Spell can be found here on YouTube. Number two in the series, Evil Dark, is on Angry Robot’s schedule for April 2012.

   If this kind of crossover fiction is your kind of thing, here’s an anthology that’s chock full of them: Those Who Fight Monsters: Tales of Occult Detectives, edited by Justin Gustainis (Edge, 2011). I’ll list the contents (and detectives) as the first comment. (Some of these I already knew about, others I didn’t.)

NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN – The Thread That Binds the Bones. Avon, paperback original, 1993.

   I don’t find much fantasy that I like anymore, whether it’s a function of my own jaded sense of wonder or they’re just not writing ’em like they used to. I enjoyed this one.

   It’s the story of a strangely talented young man who blunders into an even more strangely talented family living in the Oregon boondocks, and what happens between them. Reminds me a bit of Suzette Haden Elgin’s Ozark novels, though it isn’t as good. The plot has holes in it, but the writing’s good, and the characters are engaging.

Editorial Comment:   I haven’t finished looking through all of Barry’s old reviews, but this is the first I’ve come across that’s either a fantasy or science fiction novel. By my usual standards it’s too short to post, but I thought in this case I’d make an exception.

MURRAY LEINSTER – Operation Terror. Berkley F694, paperback original, 1962. Cover art: Richard Powers.

   Next up, Operation Terror by that veteran boshmeister Murray Leinster. It’s easy to dismiss Leinster as a competent hack from the 60s, but there were all too few who could hack words so proficiently.

   Operation starts off as Earth (or more precisely, Boulder Lake) is invaded by beings from another world, complete with flying saucer and paralyzer-beam, monitored helplessly by one of those competent, thoughtful, quick-thinking scientific type that we readers of sci-fi all imagined ourselves to be.

   But as our hero sets about rescuing a distressed damsel and escaping the aliens, the invasion starts to seem more and more hokey, a development that steps up the suspense as he tries to counteract the alien rays, get to safety, warn the authorities, protect the girl and save the planet, all in the space of about a hundred-sixty tightly-packed pages.

   These days when Sci-Fi has been replaced by multi-volumed tomes of “speculative fiction” we can but look back and admire the terse economy of writing like this.