Review: Trent's Last Case

Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An unusual classic mystery from a close friend of G.K. Chesterton's, best known as the inventor as the clerihew (that's what the C in his name stands for). He and Chesterton collaborated on several books, in which Bentley wrote biographical verses about famous people and Chesterton illustrated them.

In this book, Trent, a painter who routinely quotes English poetry like Lord Peter Wimsey (though different poets, I think), starts the book with an established reputation as an amateur detective. This reputation was established in adventures which were not chronicled prior to this one; this is the first book of what eventually became two novels and a collection of short stories, though internally it reads as if it's the end of the series. He's called in by a newspaper he occasionally works for to investigate the death of a prominent American financier currently staying in England, where he maintains a house. By coincidence, Trent knows the uncle of the financier's wife, and they meet at the nearby hotel and discuss the case.

The odd features include that the dead man appears to have dressed in a hurry, but also in a way that a person wouldn't normally dress (which, to me, instantly pointed to someone else having dressed him, but that's not a conclusion that Trent gets to straight away). He also behaved oddly on the night of his death. Also, nobody heard the shot that killed him, and nothing is missing, apart from half a bottle of whiskey.

From this intriguing base we get what is, for much of the time, not a conventional mystery at all. Trent investigates, finds clues, comes to a theory... but he has fallen in love with the widow, and thinks she might be involved at least indirectly, so he chooses not to pursue his main suspect. There's then a long interval in which he tries, unsuccessfully, to forget about his love interest. When things shift in such a way that he talks to the suspect after all, he finds that things were not at all as they appeared, and the book finishes with a startling twist, leading Trent to declare that this is his last case.

It has the poetic observations and the slightly askew quality one might expect from a friend of Chesterton's. It's not a formulaic book, by any means, which makes it interesting to me, and I think its departure from the expected mystery formula works.

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Review: In Brief Authority

In Brief Authority by F. Anstey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While it isn't quite the ever-escalating farce that Anstey did so well in The Tinted Venus or The Brass Bottle , and is neither as packed with incident or as comedic as either of them, this is an amiable comedy set in England and Fairyland in 1914. The advent of the First World War leads to an author's introductory note excusing the use of German names from the Brothers Grimm, and an epilogue which abandons comedy and talks seriously about the war.

The story involves a suburban English family with pretensions to be upper-middle-class; the husband, Sidney, is a partner in a firm which does something, I don't remember what (maybe it was never specified), but is ignored by his senior partner whenever he suggests anything; the wife is a social climber with absolutely zero ability at self-reflection or self-critique, and nobody has as high an opinion of her as she has herself; the older daughter has pretensions to be an intellectual, but has no real grasp of the subjects she goes to hear lectures about (including the philosophy of Nietzsche, which almost leads to disaster later on when she encourages a love interest to adopt it); the son would like to be one of P.G. Wodehouse's idle, useless rich idiots, but isn't rich, and has just been sacked from his job for being idle and useless and a bit of an idiot; only the younger daughter, who's about 10, is anything like a decent human being. Her governess, Daphne Heritage, is, it turns out, the heir to the throne of a fairytale kingdom, though she's unaware of this, and sells her employer a pendant she inherited from her father to cover a debt incurred by her late mother. The pendant is the mark of the heir, and so when a representative of the kingdom turns up, he mistakes the mother of the family for the queen, and they are installed as the royal family of Märchenland (Fairytale Land) in the capital city of Eswareinmal (German for "Once Upon a Time," if I'm not mistaken).

Nobody except the family themselves consider themselves remotely qualified for this job, especially the supposed Queen Selina, and they proceed to make a mess of things. The son, Clarence, is now rich... but still idle, useless, and a bit of an idiot, and bored because nobody will play golf with him and he can't get any cigarettes. Daphne is smart enough not to give in to his rather half-hearted attempts to woo her, particularly since his intention is for her to be his mistress rather than his princess (he doesn't use the word "mistress", but it's clear enough what he means).

Various people get engaged, or are supposed to get engaged but don't, and meanwhile the rather doddery old Court Godmother, who isn't as good at manipulation as she ought to be, discovers the mistaken identity. Since it was partly her mistake, she doesn't necessarily want to announce it, but she uses it as leverage to try to resolve the situation as she feels it should be resolved, with mixed success.

Everyone's plans go awry, in fact, since nobody is particularly bright or competent, and a difficult time is had by all before we get a good fairy-tale ending - somewhat brought down by the ensuing realities of the war in the epilogue, in which Clarence finally does become good for something.

It's not by any means my favourite Anstey book, but it's amusing, and worth a read.

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Review: Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy

Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've said in other reviews of his books that you don't read Freeman Wills Crofts for the characters. That's a little unfair; in this book, there is a decent amount of characterization. It just mostly isn't applied to the detective.

Inspector French is such an Everyman he might well have been designed as a reader self-insert character. I don't know if that was something people consciously created a century ago; whether it was or not, kudos to FWC for creating such an outstanding one.

French does have one personal characteristic that isn't completely generic, though, and it's that he's able to win people round so they want to tell him things, by being genuinely affable and taking an interest in them. He uses this ability to win friends and influence people a number of times in this volume, to progress what seems initially to be an unpromising investigation with few clues available.

A remote house on the Yorkshire moors is owned by a miser, and he, his two servants (who are a couple), and his young niece live there. The niece is invited to visit an acquaintance, and while she's away, the house burns down. Three bodies are found in it, in positions corresponding to the master's bedroom (one) and the servants' bedroom (two), and the safe, rather than containing thirty or forty thousand pounds in banknotes - the miser having been one of those Scrooge McDuck types who likes to have his money in his house so he can play with it - contains only burnt scraps of paper. Bad luck; a tragic accident.

Or is it? When a banknote turns up that was reported destroyed by the local banker, who had a list of serial numbers of the latest batch he'd sent out to the house, it rouses the banker's suspicions, and he calls in the police, who manifest in the form of Inspector French. It's several weeks since the fire, and the trail is now as cold as the ashes. French gets a sense of the village and follows up some leads, which initially get him only to dead ends. But, being French, he perseveres methodically, and there's a shocking twist and a tense action scene at the climax.

The emphasis is, as always, on the procedural investigation, but there's a better romance subplot than in the earlier Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery , and the various characters take on, if anything, more reality and solidity than in most mysteries of the time; the cleverly planned crime is also motivated believably. Solid, like French's investigative method, and recommended.

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Review: A Bayard From Bengal Being some account of the Magnificent and Spanking Career of Chunder Bindabun Bhosh, Esq., B.A., Cambridge

A Bayard From Bengal Being some account of the Magnificent and Spanking Career of Chunder Bindabun Bhosh, Esq., B.A., Cambridge by F. Anstey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a tricky one. It's a British author pretending to be an Indian author, and comically getting English idioms wrong as he tells a story of an Indian man (not the supposed author) in England, having unlikely adventures that sometimes assume that England is like India. The illustrations are also supposedly by an Indian illustrator, though actually by an English one, and are done in a Mughal-influenced style, showing the British scenes as a not-very-knowledgeable Indian person might imagine them.

It wouldn't fly today, in other words; there would be a firestorm on Twitter, and the author would have to disappear and resurface several years later, possibly under a pseudonym. The tricky part is that the main body of the text is actually quite amusing at times, though that's brought down badly by the supposed translations of parables and the pseudo-author's commentary on the illustrations, the first of which is often not funny at all, and the second of which is heavy-handed and obvious.

On the whole, not recommended.

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Review: Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Stories of the Witch Knight and the Puppet Sorcerer

Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Stories of the Witch Knight and the Puppet Sorcerer by Garth Nix
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The contribution of the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories to this volume's DNA is strong and clear, not only in the general feel of the world and the partnership between the two protagonists, but in the tone of the stories. The various encounters they have do not tend to end well for other characters, or even for Sir Hereward; he frequently desires to dally with women they encounter, but even if they're not outright antagonists they're often victims and/or agents of the otherworldly entities that the pair hunt down and exterminate on behalf of the Committee for the Safety of the World.

The language, too, is similar to the prose of Fritz Lieber (author of the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser tales). It's not as over-elaborate as, say, Jack Vance, whose stories I particularly dislike, mainly for the alienated, dark characters, but also for the overwrought prose, which unfortunately gets imitated by other writers who don't have the chops to pull it off. Nor is it the highly charged, dramatic prose of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. It's formal in cadence, but mostly straightforward in syntax, and progresses at a steady pace through these shadowy mini-tragedies, helping to insulate the reader by its very matter-of-factness from the horror of some of the events.

There is the odd dangling modifier, and there are a few too many commas between adjectives sometimes (including one after "one," which is an adjective, technically, but should never have a coordinate comma after it). Otherwise, the copy editing is good, and while the author sometimes uses an old-fashioned piece of technical vocabulary as part of his worldbuilding and tonebuilding, he always seems to use it correctly.

I'd read three of these stories when they were collected before, but was happy to come back round again and read several more. While they're darker than I usually prefer, they're well written, and I enjoyed them.

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Review: Worlds of Eternity

Worlds of Eternity by Aaron Hillsbery
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

The authors never use one short sentence when three long sentences will do, and it quickly became tedious to read. Here's an example:

"A faint vibration came from Michael's pocket. It was his phone, demanding attention. Mindful of the person seated next to him, he kept his elbow close to his body as he struggled to extract the device. After considerable effort, he finally succeeded. Straightening himself, his eyes fell on the screen, revealing a new message."

Or you could just say, "Michael's phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out - with some difficulty because of the crowded tram - and saw a message from his sister." That's 25 words in two sentences, and it conveys slightly more information than the 54 words in five sentences above.

A lot of those long sentences involve an introductory participle (like the last sentence quoted above), and occasionally those participles dangle, referring to something other than the grammatical subject of the sentence. There are also a few issues with tense (missing past perfect, mingling of past and present), the usual excess commas between adjectives, and some odd or incorrect use of vocabulary, like "she glanced the woman" instead of "she glimpsed" or "she glanced at". It's well within the normal range of errors, probably better than average, but that tedious, long-winded prose means there's not much plot per thousand words, and slows the pace to a crawl even in the action scenes. I only got 5% of the way through, so I can't say much about characterization, worldbuilding, or plot; it moved so slowly I hadn't seen much of any of those yet, just wordy narration of the mundane and obvious.

I received a pre-release version from Netgalley for review, and some of the minor issues may be fixed before publication.

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Review: The Adventures of Dr Thorndyke

The Adventures of Dr Thorndyke by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This author pioneered the "reverse mystery" which most famously appeared in the TV series Columbo, where we, the audience, see the crime committed and know who did it, and the interest is in watching the detective work it out. Thorndyke is no Columbo; he's a snob, for a start, and as sophisticated and elite as Columbo is an everyman. He also relies on meticulous forensic science to track down the perpetrators, no matter how careful they have been.

These stories are varied; most, but not all of them are "reverse mysteries". They're entertaining mainly from a problem-solving point of view.

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Review: The Attenbury Emeralds

The Attenbury Emeralds by Jill Paton Walsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There are a couple of mentions early in the Wimsey canon of his first case having to do with the Attenbury Emeralds, and in this book we finally get that story. Suffering from shell shock (what we now call PTSD), Lord Peter in 1921 was just starting to take his first tentative step back into society, a country house party with people he had known for a long time. There's a theft involving the emeralds of the title - or, rather, one emerald in particular, the "king stone," which turns out to be one of a set, sold off by an Indian maharajah to save his people from famine in the 19th century.

The whole business is rather reminiscent of a similar mystery in one of the Wimsey short stories, down to the host not wanting his guests treated like criminals and even how the stone is to be smuggled out, though in this case the plan is both less clever and yet more successful. The inept police inspector that Lord Peter later clashes with in Whose Body? is in charge of the investigation, and his sergeant, Charles Parker, is the same man who becomes Peter's friend, collaborator and eventually brother-in-law.

There are one or two very minor inconsistencies I noticed between this book and the Dorothy Sayers portion of the series. The one is that several people, in Peter's flashbacks, call him "Lord Wimsey" and he doesn't correct them, as he did in one of the early books. The possible second is that Bunter's son (now revealed to be named Peter) seems closer in age to Peter and Harriet's eldest, Bredon, than he did in A Presumption of Death, where he was referred to as a "baby" while Bredon was three years old; it's not completely out of the question to refer to a toddler as a baby, of course, and it's never actually stated that they are the same age or close to it in this book, just that they are both at Eton and Bredon is 16, which means that Peter Bunter could be 14 or so. I'm overthinking it, aren't I?

The actual mystery involves multiple similar emeralds and multiple occasions when they could have been switched in a plan that stretches over decades and requires at least three murders. In the end I felt it was improbable - the plan, that is. (view spoiler)[A woman living in poverty is so outraged by her late husband's family's rejection of their marriage that she holds on to a valuable stone that she legitimately owns and that could make her and her daughter comfortable if she sells it, because by complete coincidence she could also use it to get a weird sort of revenge against different members of the family entirely, and she picks the revenge option and kills three people to keep the very long-term plan on track? And also the two stones were both at the same party during World War II, again by coincidence, and someone present doesn't recognize her sister's close friend, and it's all a red herring, because they could have been switched then but, as it turns out, weren't? It's all a bit thin.

Not, then, as strong as the earlier Jill Paton Walsh books in the series, both of which built on much more foundation of Dorothy Sayers (the first an unfinished manuscript, the second a series of epistolary pieces published during World War II). Peter and Harriet are still mutually supportive without question or deviation, which was endearing in the earlier books, but here seems less real somehow, as if they really should argue about something, at least, given the strain they're both under. I'll still read the last book in the series, but now with reduced expectations.

That's not to say it's a bad book; it just doesn't reach the heights of the earlier ones, for me at least (and apparently for others, based on the average ratings by other Goodreads reviewers). It goes on my annual recommendation list, but in the lowest tier. (hide spoiler)]

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Review: OverLondon

OverLondon by George Penney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Many books claim to be in the tradition of Terry Pratchett; far fewer can back it up even partially. This one, I think, can, though of course, compared with the master's best work, it falls short. Then again, compared with his best work, his early work fell short as well.

The setting is an alternate-history Britain where the differences are intentionally absurd. "Floatstone" enables cities (and airships) to fly, including OverLondon, where we lay our scene. Ann Boleyn, rather than being executed, went mad, had Henry VIII executed instead, and declared herself a deity, breaking from the Catholic Church. This is mentioned as having been several centuries ago, but it's not clear exactly when we are; there are elements that feel Elizabethan, including doublets and the existence of a playwright named Wobblespeare who's obsessed with Verona, but there are other elements, like bowler hats and the general clockpunk aesthetic, that feel more Victorian. It didn't seem like the worldbuilding was intended to make much sense, so I won't ding it for the fact that, while printing (except of the Vengeful Queen's holy book) is forbidden - this is a plot point - "penny dreadfuls" still exist, a phenomenon that was only enabled by cheap printing. There also seem to be a lot more cathedrals in OverLondon than in real-life London, though we don't see any bishops. There are anthropomorphic animal people, just because that's amusing.

The book needs more editing, including for some basic things like punctuating a dialog tag as if it was a separate sentence and not preceding or following a term of address with a comma, as well as the increasingly common "may" when it should be "might" and a collection of mostly familiar vocabulary errors: tenants/tenets, reigns/reins, proscribe/prescribe, disenfranchised/disenchanted, produce/product, rifled/riffled, discrete/discreet. The authors occasionally put too many negatives in a sentence and end up reversing the obviously intended meaning, and don't always get apostrophe placement right. It's no worse than average, but needs a tidy-up. These are mostly things a lot of people get wrong, which accounts for the fact that none of the many people mentioned in the acknowledgements apparently spotted them.

The plot is a kind of farcical hard-boiled mystery; I say "hard-boiled" because there's quite a bit of violence directed at the investigators, they spend a lot of time in the mean streets, they're chronically short of money and they drink a lot (especially their leader). Also, (view spoiler)[they end up getting shafted for the reward (hide spoiler)].

Priests are exploding, and Captain Reign, a swashbuckling pirate who has just managed to save her life by signing up as a privateer, becomes a private ear or investigator to try to earn enough money to get her ship out of hock. Her ferret-girl cabin boy Flora and intellectually different bosun Sid assist, or do something that sometimes resembles assisting, as does a clever young artificer named Elias. I enjoyed the reluctant thugs, the grubby urchins, the sinister guild leaders, the Cry (the sole news medium, town criers who announce the news on the hour), the flamboyant villain, the scary nuns. It's a fun world, and although sometimes it's violence or squalor played for laughs, it never felt like dark comedy. I'm not sure what makes the difference; the overall light and zestful tone, I think, and the optimism the characters retain about life and human nature.

I would definitely read more in the series, and it makes it firmly into the Silver tier of my annual recommendations list.

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Review: The Aeronaut's Windlass

The Aeronaut's Windlass by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm a fan of Jim Butcher's urban fantasy series, even though it's now getting darker than I usually prefer. He used to be one of the few authors I bought in hardback, because his books stand up to re-reading; he has a smooth, competent style, wry humour, and a knack for writing action, and his main characters are clever, creative and principled.

All of those characteristics are on display in this book, which I've been wanting to read for a while. I enjoy the idea of steampunk, even though the execution often lets it down, so I wanted to see how a writer I knew was above average dealt with it.

As I expected, Butcher refuses to follow the unwritten rule that you can have airships, or you can use vocabulary correctly, but not both (since I listened to the audiobook, I can't swear that there are no homonym errors, but I doubt it, because he's not prone to those). I did notice he sometimes fell into the common error of using "may" during past tense narration instead of "might," and possibly confused "hurling" and "hurtling" at one point. His young female characters are actually intelligent and sensible, though Gwen is a lot less sensible than Bridget. And he includes talking cats, an element which improves every book I've seen it used in, even otherwise bad ones.

The characters in general are varied and distinctive, and several of them get viewpoints. There are three completely different etherealists, semi-wizards whose work with ethereal forces leads to various kinds of mental illness and eccentricity, and one of them, Folly, is a viewpoint character. There are three completely different Spirearch's Guard who get viewpoints: the experienced and competent Warriorborn Benedict, the princessesque Gwen, and the physically strong and personally humble Bridget, who is technically a member of the quasi-aristocracy but whose house has fallen to the point where that doesn't make much difference in practice. She works with the cat Rowl (I'm assuming the spelling, because audiobook); there are several other completely distinct cats, but only Rowl gets a viewpoint. There's also the airship captain Grimm with a viewpoint, and one or two of the invading marines.

As well as these central characters, we get several members of Grimm's crew, none of whom I had any trouble telling apart; a couple of other guards, including an aristocratic snot that Bridget is going to duel at one point, though that whole subplot disappears and is never revisited after another spire attacks; the Spirearch, a puckish older man with a lot more political influence than he pretends, and considerable nous; and Brother Vincent of the Wayist Temple, a Buddhist-like sect of martial artists and librarians. Of course, listening to the audiobook means that the different characters literally get different voices, but I feel like I would have been able to distinguish them on the page just as easily. Their interpersonal and (in the case of the viewpoint characters) intrapersonal dynamics make sense and are in close relationship with the plot, both driving it and being driven by it, as they should be.

The worldbuilding is... local. What I mean is that we don't get much that isn't directly plot-relevant. We know that humanity has inhabited Spires, made out of almost-indestructible Spirestone by the long-gone Builders, on a hostile world for thousands of years. We know they get their meat, leather and food in general from vats, because one of the characters is from a family who has a vattery. We know quite a bit about how the various kinds of etheric crystals work, because they power the airships and the weapons and are valued, scarce resources, and another character is from a family that grows them. We know that the creatures of the surface are highly dangerous, because the heroes fight some, and that therefore wood (which apparently can't be grown in vats, but has to be harvested from the surface) is extremely expensive. But we don't know where metal comes from; it just never comes up, even though quite a few things are made of metal - usually brass, because, after all, this is steampunk - and we know that iron rusts extremely quickly if not protected by a copper coating.

Spires trade, but also fight, using airships in both cases; they're more or less countries, just vertical countries made out of extremely hard stone. And that's the background to this book. A spire that periodically goes to war for economic reasons is attacking the spire where our heroes live, and they must pull together and be heroic in order to repel the invasion. There are pitched battles, investigations, negotiations, and a small amount of romance of sorts, as well as coming-of-age-style character growth.

It gets intense; there are deaths of innocents and named characters, widespread destruction, and considerable pain of various sorts for our heroes, including a strong depiction of post-battle horror of the kind that can lead to PTSD. For my taste, it (and the recent books in Butcher's main series, The Dresden Files) are getting darker and more intense than I prefer; I'm more of a cozy fantasy reader these days. But they're so well done that I tolerate it better than I would from a less skilled author. I'd still hesitate to read a sequel, because military SFF has never been a favourite of mine. I'm a fan of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan novels despite, rather than because of, the military parts, for example, and the ones I like the best are the least military.

The mismatch to my personal taste does figure into my rating, placing this in the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list, rather than the Gold tier it might deserve if I was rating more objectively. It's still a recommendation, especially for fans of Butcher, Bujold, and steampunk done well.

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Review: Grand Harvest: From Field to Fable

Grand Harvest: From Field to Fable by Jaakko Koivula
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I like to read books by writers from outside the US and UK (and Canada/Australia/NZ) occasionally, to broaden my exposure to other world traditions, and I don't know much about Finnish folklore (or, really, Finnish anything) apart from knowing that it was a source for Tolkien, who based Gandalf on a character from the Kalevala and whose Elvish languages were influenced by Finnish. So when this came up on Netgalley - with a cover that playfully references the famous American Gothic painting by Grant Wood - I picked it up.

English has a lot of idioms. I don't usually notice this until I read a book by someone who doesn't have English as their first language (or, occasionally, does have English as their first language but isn't very good at it) and doesn't write it idiomatically. Many of the issues here are, as usual, with the wrong preposition being used, but sometimes it's word order, or whether something is plural or singular. The author mentions the book having had a lot of editing; unfortunately, it still could do with some more, not just for the non-idiomatic English but for some typos, occasional errors in dialog punctuation, and other minor glitches.

Setting that aside, it's an enjoyable fantasy, which walks an unusual line between an overall cozy feel (small town, people just living their mundane lives as farmers and traders and crafters) and a darker undertone; the town is under what could be described as a curse effectively disguised as a blessing, the dwarves who live there (especially their leader) have a harrowing backstory, and there are some bandits who... do not come to a good end. Also, there's been a (possibly natural) disaster which has rendered magic largely ineffective, because what runes do has changed. The dwarves and their human fellow townspeople don't think this has anything to do with them, because, for reasons connected with the harrowing backstory, they don't allow magic in the town, but... it does have something to do with them, and a couple of young wizards have to convince them of this fact in order to save everyone's lives - which they are determined to do, despite some danger to themselves, because, like everyone apart from the bandits, they are basically decent people.

If the book has a weakness, it's that most of the various dwarves aren't distinct enough that I could easily keep them straight in my head, a problem that could be alleged of the dwarves in The Hobbit or, for that matter, Snow White as well. Perhaps it's inherently difficult to make dwarves individual, for some reason. Otherwise, it's an enjoyable story with good emotional beats and arcs. The ending could have been crisper and more decisive, but it's not a big fault. I don't know that I'd bother with a sequel; it didn't grip me really strongly, and the non-idiomatic English was distracting. But it's not a bad book by any means.

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Review: Suitor Armor: Volume 1

Suitor Armor: Volume 1 by Purpah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Since I've been reading some manga lately, I thought I'd review this graphic novel when it came up on Netgalley. It's not manga; it's Western, but it has some of the same feel as a fantasy manga.

Humans and fairies are at war, and so Lucia, a fairy girl, has to keep her wings hidden while she takes care of her mistress, the rather airheaded but non-toxic young betrothed of the serious, somewhat older king. Her mistress's father has apparently rescued her, in circumstances that will doubtless get a flashback in due course (not in this volume, though).

Meanwhile, the arrogant royal wizard has created an animated suit of armour, which defeats the previously undefeated champion knight (much to the knight's fury and humiliation; his squire has a tough job keeping him from going completely off the deep end, but he's not actually a bad person). The armour gives the rose that is the traditional prize for winning the tournament to Lucia, who starts treating the enchanted object as a person; he then starts growing into the role. Lucia discovers that she is able to use powerful magic, and does so while fairy spies are in the castle. We also get a revelation about the relationship between the knight and the squire. Nearly everyone is now keeping secrets from at least someone, and while nobody (apart from the spies) is an outright antagonist - and even they are somewhat sympathetic - differing perspectives and agendas combined with the secrets do put some of them at odds, while forging alliances among others.

Because this is Volume 1, it's mainly setup, rather than anything being at all resolved by the end. That means that it's mainly potential, not yet realized, and that, in turn, makes it difficult to evaluate. So far, none of the characters have a great deal of depth, but it's early days, and I suspect there could also be more tension and drama to come than we see in this initial volume. I'd say it's promising enough to keep reading, but not an instant favourite.

(By publisher request, review held back until the week of publication.)

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Review: The Emperor's Soul

The Emperor's Soul by Brandon Sanderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Most people, when they're taking a month's break, do something that isn't related to their job.

Brandon Sanderson, apparently, writes a Hugo-winning novella.

At novella length, the worldbuilding and the magic system are a bit thinner than his usual, not very far beyond the initial inspiration of looking at some East Asian seals in a museum and thinking (in the way Sanderson does), "What if that was a magic system?" The main character uses such seals to "Forge" - that is, to alter the essence of something in a way that is plausible if it had a different history. She's been caught stealing from the Imperial Palace, fortunately at the exact same time as the emperor has been brain-damaged in an assassination attempt and can be expected to spend 90 days out of the public eye in mourning for his assassinated wife, and the faction that backs and largely controls the emperor want her to do the impossible - Forge his missing soul, so that he can continue ruling and they won't be displaced from power.

The idea that she achieves this (and so much else) in 90 days when it should take years is made somewhat more plausible by the knowledge that the author wrote this book in a month (though he did have plenty of time to revise and improve it). As a novella, it's inevitably somewhat linear, though it does have some clever structural features which are fully visible only when you reach the end. The protagonist is clever and skilled, and I do enjoy watching a clever, skilled person do what they do so well (and here I mean the author as well as the protagonist).

The antagonist still feels like a threat, even though we know, at a meta level, that the protagonist will win out; the way in which she wins out is clever and, in its way, amusing, though this isn't as humourous a book as many of Sanderson's. The East Asian feel is present, though not as in depth as a novel would make it.

Given the length Sanderson usually writes at, a novella is his equivalent of a short story from a more normal writer, and it should probably be judged as such rather than compared to his novels directly. Considered as a short story, it has everything it needs to succeed.

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Review: Echoes of the Imperium

Echoes of the Imperium by Nicholas Atwater
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

Too dark for my taste, but as far as I read (not very far), well done.

Opens with a bloody and destructive battle at the fall of the Imperium; in the next chapter, 20 years later, the narrator is an airship captain with a serious drinking problem. The words "dark," "gritty" or "brutal" are not in the blurb, but ought to be, because they warn people like me off books like this that we won't enjoy. I've enjoyed the much, much gentler books of Olivia Atwater before, so massive death and destruction in the first chapter blindsided me.

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Review: A Presumption of Death

A Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Continuation novels - continuing a classic series, but written by someone other than the original author - are always controversial. Some fans will always find something that strikes them as a jarring note, that marks this upstart thing as inferior to the genuine product, that doesn't ring true to them for the characters. And Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are complex characters, too, both highly intelligent, determined to respect one another in a way most couples of the time did not, and with by now a complicated pair of backstories to be reckoned with, not to mention their habit of quoting widely from English literature.

All that as preface to saying that for me, this did work as a continuation of the series, and that's a big compliment to the author. It draws in part on the "Wimsey Papers," a series of epistolary pieces that Dorothy Sayers published in 1939 in the Spectator, so Jill Paton Walsh did have a foundation to build on of events in the characters' lives and their thoughts about the war.

If anything, I felt that there were moments when it seemed a little too carefully researched, or expressed thoughts which make sense to us in hindsight but which might not have occurred to people at the time, like the reference to Quisling ("may his name be cursed for centuries" - his name is, indeed, a synonym for "collaborationist traitor" now in English and several other languages, but at this point he was in many ways an obscure figure who was not obviously going to have such a fate). I did wonder, too, whether there was going to be too much intertextuality, a common failing of continuation novels, when the topic of advertising people came up; but there wasn't, in the end, a reference to Lord Peter's undercover stint at an advertising agency. (There was in the previous volume, briefly.)

Generally, though, to me it read smoothly, and the characters felt continuous with their earlier appearances. We even got Miss Climpson, with her distinctive rambling and opinionated but still insightful style of communication, and Miss Climpson is my personal favourite.

The plot is not quite like any of the previous books, and this, too, helps it to resemble the previous books, no two of which are quite like each other. In fact, I could make a stronger case, on purely internal textual grounds, for The Five Red Herrings not belonging to the canon than I could for this one, without cheating any more than the average textual critic.

Speaking of the plot, it's one that is particular to its time and place, rural England in early World War II, and both time and place are strongly evoked. It has resonance for me, because it involves youthful members of the RAF, and just five years later than this book is set, my father went to England with the RNZAF and had a lot of the same experiences as those young men (he was then 22) - I'm sure including hiding his actual feelings in order to be able to carry on. There are also a couple of references to servicemen snatching what might be the last opportunity to be intimate with their girlfriends before going off to fight; the mother of my oldest friend was the result of just such a liaison. The reality of an entire population not having enough food or sleep and yet somehow carrying on comes through strongly, and it's made clear how the government was out of touch with the population and often poorly organized, and how some of their measures were resented and even circumvented, even while people in general were fully committed to the goal of winning the war.

Peter spends much of the book off on a secret mission somewhere with Bunter, with Harriet left to happily take care of not only her own but her sister-in-law Mary's children at their country house, to participate in village life (much changed by the war), to do the initial spadework on the murder of a land girl during an air raid practice, and to overthink everything, particularly her own feelings about the war (which is classic Harriet).

The ultimate resolution of the mystery is very much in tune with the feel of the times that the whole book has created: a messy, uncomfortable, improvised, best-efforts thing that's not at all how it would have been done in peacetime, but that tries its best to live up to at least some ideals in non-ideal circumstances. Because the rest of the book's emotional beats come to a satisfactory conclusion, this works.

I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series, where Jill Paton Walsh had even less of Dorothy L. Sayers to work from and had to create it largely out of whole cloth. Will it still feel organic with the rest of the series? I think it's likely.

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Review: A Presumption of Death

A Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Continuation novels - continuing a classic series, but written by someone other than the original author - are always controversial. Some fans will always find something that strikes them as a jarring note, that marks this upstart thing as inferior to the genuine product, that doesn't ring true to them for the characters. And Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are complex characters, too, both highly intelligent, determined to respect one another in a way most couples of the time did not, and with by now a complicated pair of backstories to be reckoned with, not to mention their habit of quoting widely from English literature.

All that as preface to saying that for me, this did work as a continuation of the series, and that's a big compliment to the author. It draws in part on the "Wimsey Papers," a series of epistolary pieces that Dorothy Sayers published in 1939 in the Spectator, so Jill Paton Walsh did have a foundation to build on of events in the characters' lives and their thoughts about the war.

If anything, I felt that there were moments when it seemed a little too carefully researched, or expressed thoughts which make sense to us in hindsight but which might not have occurred to people at the time, like the reference to Quisling ("may his name be cursed for centuries" - his name is, indeed, a synonym for "collaborationist traitor" now in English and several other languages, but at this point he was in many ways an obscure figure who was not obviously going to have such a fate). I did wonder, too, whether there was going to be too much intertextuality, a common failing of continuation novels, when the topic of advertising people came up; but there wasn't, in the end, a reference to Lord Peter's undercover stint at an advertising agency. (There was in the previous volume, briefly.)

Generally, though, to me it read smoothly, and the characters felt continuous with their earlier appearances. We even got Miss Climpson, with her distinctive rambling and opinionated but still insightful style of communication, and Miss Climpson is my personal favourite.

The plot is not quite like any of the previous books, and this, too, helps it to resemble the previous books, no two of which are quite like each other. In fact, I could make a stronger case, on purely internal textual grounds, for The Five Red Herrings not belonging to the canon than I could for this one, without cheating any more than the average textual critic.

Speaking of the plot, it's one that is particular to its time and place, rural England in early World War II, and both time and place are strongly evoked. It has resonance for me, because it involves youthful members of the RAF, and just five years later than this book is set, my father went to England with the RNZAF and had a lot of the same experiences as those young men (he was then 22) - I'm sure including hiding his actual feelings in order to be able to carry on. There are also a couple of references to servicemen snatching what might be the last opportunity to be intimate with their girlfriends before going off to fight; the mother of my oldest friend was the result of just such a liaison. The reality of an entire population not having enough food or sleep and yet somehow carrying on comes through strongly, and it's made clear how the government was out of touch with the population and often poorly organized, and how some of their measures were resented and even circumvented, even while people in general were fully committed to the goal of winning the war.

Peter spends much of the book off on a secret mission somewhere with Bunter, with Harriet left to happily take care of not only her own but her sister-in-law Mary's children at their country house, to participate in village life (much changed by the war), to do the initial spadework on the murder of a land girl during an air raid practice, and to overthink everything, particularly her own feelings about the war (which is classic Harriet).

The ultimate resolution of the mystery is very much in tune with the feel of the times that the whole book has created: a messy, uncomfortable, improvised, best-efforts thing that's not at all how it would have been done in peacetime, but that tries its best to live up to at least some ideals in non-ideal circumstances. Because the rest of the book's emotional beats come to a satisfactory conclusion, this works.

I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series, where Jill Paton Walsh had even less of Dorothy L. Sayers to work from and had to create it largely out of whole cloth. Will it still feel organic with the rest of the series? I think it's likely.

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Review: Uncle Dynamite

Uncle Dynamite by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Despite references to the atom bomb and Eric Johnston (president of the MPAA at the time of original publication, 1948), this is clearly set in Wodehouse's eternal interwar period for all practical purposes, and the characters have not noticeably aged from their pre-war appearances. In fact, it remixes so much of his classic material that any Wodehouse fan will recognize most of the elements immediately. There's an uncle, to start with (Uncle Fred/Lord Ickenham), one of Plum's genial, eccentric old buffers who ought not to be let out without a keeper; an ill-tempered retired British civil servant; a determined, managing young woman, daughter of the civil servant, to whom a hopeless poop (Lord Ickenham's nephew Pongo Twistleton) is engaged; a bright young thing, to whom the hopeless poop ought to be engaged; a large Man of Action type, to whom the managing young woman ought to be engaged; a ponderously interfering policeman; a country house; a Maguffin which ought, by all principles of natural justice but against the actual letter of the law, to be stolen from said country house; and a complicated plan to do so that involves people impersonating other people and sneaking about at night, and that is foiled by one of the many coincidences which abound in the plot (most of them aimed at getting the cast together in one place).

Is this a criticism? No, it's not, because as Wodehouse fans we love these elements, and will read them over and over in fresh combinations, all the while distracted by the sparkling of the language.

One element that I don't remember seeing before is the sympathetic treatment of a middle-aged woman, the wife of the grumpy retired civil servant and mother of the managing young woman. She looks like a horse, but that's not her fault, and she personally regrets it; she makes up in good-heartedness for the failings of her spouse, which she puts up with out of devotion to him. There's also a housemaid who has a lot more personality than most of the female servants in Wodehouse, who usually have few and basic lines and act like frightened poultry when they're not simply furniture. This one rises to the level of a character, and a determined, intelligent and effective character at that, despite her Cockney origins, gender, and occupation, which don't normally get such positive treatment in the master's earlier work. He appears to have been quietly progressing in some ways; perhaps his experience of being interned during World War II played a role.

The other shift I noticed from his pre-war work is that, for Plum, this has its risqué moments. There are several references to Lord Ickenham's grandfather's collection of nude statues of Venus, and a young woman gets her dress accidentally torn off while escaping a policeman. The actual relationships are just as pure as always, though.

Though Wodehouse had been involved in controversy because of his wartime (non-political) broadcast from Germany while interned there, and had suffered some loss of popularity as a result, he still had plenty of dedicated fans, and perhaps he didn't want to risk alienating those he had left by too much of a departure from his classic style. In any case, his classic style is what this is in, and if you enjoy Wodehouse it will be pleasantly familiar.

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