Pornokitsch

Gary McMahon's The Concrete Grove (2011) is disconcerting little standalone - combining the grim reality of urban poverty with the supernatural horror of ageless otherworldly entities. It is, in short, exactly the sort of book you shouldn't read on the tube at night.

"The Concrete Grove" is the accepted nickname for Hailey Fraser's new council estate home. The estate, with the decrepit and towering Needle at the center, is the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder - "the bottom of the pile" as Hailey's mother phrases it. Hailey, 14, is a bright kid and a sensitive one. Although she puts on a brave face, she knows that she and her mother, Lana, are in trouble. At home, Hailey escapes with the television. Outside of her front door, she keeps her head down and walks as softly as possible. Her only real privacy comes when she sneaks into the abandoned rooms of the Needle - a meditative escape under tons of crumbling cement.

As the author of Altered Carbon, the Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Black Man, The Steel Remains, the upcoming The Cold Commands and a host of other acclaimed works, it isn't an exaggeration to say that Richard Morgan is one of the most significant figures in science fiction and fantasy today. 

He's also - if you'll excuse the moment of shameless fannery - one of the most significant figures to us. The lure of Richard Morgan is what brought Jared to his first British convention and it was our review of The Steel Remains that brought more people to this site than... er... us. We're indebted to him on many levels, not least of which is the simple fact that we love his books.

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PK: You’ve commented that the process of becoming a full-time writer was incredibly rapid (“Gollancz published it. Hollywood bought it. I gave up my day job.”). The pragmatic financial bits aside, was there a moment when the switch flipped and you knew it had capital-h-Happened? Or was it a slowly dawning awareness that your life had changed...

RM: I think it was the film deal that did it. Of course, I was blown away when I got picked up for publication, and again when I got all the great reviews. Truth was, I was even blown away when I first managed to get an agent, it had been so long coming. But it was the movie deal that secured me a life as a full time writer, and I was always well aware of that fact; the sad truth is, the pragmatic financial bits are the bits that really count - without that film money, I could never have gone full time. And more importantly, nor would I have had the freedom I then enjoyed to write exactly what I felt like writing instead of churning out a series of no doubt lucrative crowd-pleasing Altered Carbon copies.

Jo Walton's Among Others suffers from a serious identity problem. In retrospect, I'm sorry I read the dust-jacket blurb; the book advertised isn't the book sold. Among Others' cover-blurb makes it sound like a straightforward genre novel, more a Harry Potter knock-off for the chick-lit crowd than the meditative coming of age novel it actually is. And further compounding the novel's problems is its ridiculous cover, which positively squeals "squishy beach-read." Among Others isn't quite any of these.

At its heart, Among Others is a novel about being, y'know, among others, but for the first time - leaving the insular world of childhood and childhood fantasies; leaving a comfortable home environment to live somewhere profoundly alien; leaving one school for another; leaving one family for another; leaving one stage of existence for another. It's a bildungsroman, but an ambitious and delicately executed one, with a twist: the narrator can use magic. Maybe. The others aren't just terrifying aunts and hot boys; they're also fairies.

Another busy few weeks with some great events, a popular competition and some big announcements. 

Starting with the news:

• The Kitschies - our annual award - got bigger with Rebecca Levene and Lauren Beukes (2010 Red Tentacle & Arthur C. Clarke Award winner) joining this year's judging panel. We'll have more Kitschies-related announcements over the coming months, but, needless to say, we're pretty tickled right now.
• Lauren Beukes & Joey HiFi are hanging out in London on Saturday, 13 August. Why not come join them? (A huge thanks to the British Library and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for making this possible)
• We've also got one more big announcement that we've been saving for this week. A few all-seeing eyes on Twitter may have pieced it together already, but the full n' proper story will come out shortly.

After the jump, a recap of the reviews, features and events of the past two weeks.

We realized early on that we hadn't devoted much time on Friday Five to crime. So we tasked ourselves this week with listing our favorite detectives, in any medium. Predictably, however, the conversation soon devolved from "detectives we like" to "detectives we'd hang out with" to "detectives we'd do." As if we needed more proof that we're base and perverted people.

Join us after the jump in discussing the style, abilities, and general shagability winningness of our favorite snoops, shamuses, gumshoes, PIs and, uh, dicks.

Jared

With the exception of one choice (The Continental Op), my detectives all stem from the same ten year period (well, at least for their first books... all four wound up investigating for decades). This should be no surprise, especially since three of my five also come from the same publishing imprint, the immortal Fawcett Gold Medal. 

John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee: My love-hate relationship with Travis McGee is well-documented, so I can keep it short. Travis is alternatively emo and macho, brave and disgraceful, tender and self-absorbed... but he's always an absorbing character to follow. Were I ever to need a sensitive document destroyed or wedge of dodgy cash recovered, he'd be my man (as long as he stays away from my female friends...)

Dashiell Hammett's The Continental Op: Sometimes the classics are classic for good reason. The unnamed, middle-aged, stodgy, balding, grumpy Op is the ultimate detective. Always caught in the crossfire, always getting clonked on the head by some bad guy or another. He's the best there is at getting out of a sticky jam (especially when said stickiness involves six or seven different parties, an inept blackmailer and the decadent rich).

Stephen Marlowe's Chester Drum: Stephen Marlowe's globe-trotting private eye took cases big and small. He foiled communism, battled terrorism and smuggled a billionaire's sexy fiancée across a closed border (yes, he also shagged her, but don't tell the client). What I really like about Drum is - like Travis McGee - there's a subtle (but important) character arc across his dozens of books. He starts as an eager international rogue and hardens into a more world-weary soul as his friends (and ladyfriends) come and go.

Ed McBain's Meyer Meyer: Honestly, I'd choose the entirety of the 87th Precinct if I could. But if I'm forced to pick one, the oh-so-patient Meyer - he of the shiny bald head and terrible sense of humour - would be the one. Steve Carella may have the more dramatic cases, but the plodding, ever-vigilant Meyer always gets his man....

Richard S. Prather's Shell Scott: Towering well over six feet with his linebacker build and infamous shock of pale-white hair, Shell Scott is one of the goofiest detectives of the paperback era. But he sold tens of millions of copies, and for very good reasons. Scott certainly romped about in some goofy adventures (he's invariably naked at some point in every book) but the slapstick humor always had a pleasantly gritty edge to it and a wonderfully deadpan style. Plus, Scott's responsible for delivering some of the best lines in detective fiction: "He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled. Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I'd ever heard of."

Anne

By the end of Law & Order: Criminal Intent's run, the writers and producers had soaped up Vincent D'Onofrio's Robert Goren into a trembling jelly of a man - his father was revealed to be a serial killer, his mentor an unstable sociopath who offed Goren's drug-addict brother and love-interest/nemesis and gave Goren her heart in a box, his childhood friend a copycat serial killer who tortured and nearly killed his partner... the list goes on and on.  But at its best (the first couple of seasons), CI had everything I really like in a detective show: a Holmes-inflected lead (deeply brilliant; deeply weird; social ineptness; sliiiight problem with authority), a sensible partner, a supportive chief and a regular butting of heads with his (hot) DA. Ultimately, however CI was made by D'Onofrio's manic performance, and rightly so.

You've read The Thin Man, right? And you've seen the films, right? So you don't need me to tell you how flat-out fucking awesome Nick and Nora Charles are. Dashiell Hammett famously based his quippy couple on Lillian Hellman and himself, and the deep-seated affection with with the fictional couple banter over cocktails makes the novel really special, especially in contrast with the grim plot and secondary characters. The films are similarly brilliant, and we should all knock off work and watch again them right now.

I would be remiss if I left my other favorite detective couple off this list: the father-daughter team Veronica and Keith Mars. He's a former sheriff-turned PI; she's a high school student from the wrong side of the tracks with a chip on her shoulder and a taste for very, very bad boys. Great writing, great acting, and especially the relationship between Keith and Veronica kept Veronica Mars true to its noir roots while anchoring its modern sensibilities. Despite miserable ratings, the show hobbled along for three seasons, one of which (the first) is one of the best seasons of tv ever produced. 

The original armchair detective, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe is awesome in a completely different way from my other picks.  He never leaves his house. Clients come to him, and he sends his partner (and the real hero of the books) Archie Goodwin out into the great wide world to romance the ladies, collect bloody noses, and generally amass clues. (Aside: we named our family dog Archie Goodwin.)  But it's Wolfe who, from the comfort of his greenhouse, puts the case together.  If he can drag himself away from his orchids and his books and his omlettes long enough, that is. Stout wrote the Wolfe titles without reference to chronology or character development; they can be read in any order, but they're always fun.

At the opposite end of that spectrum lies Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey. The Wimsey books are almost wholly character-driven; read them out of order and you miss about half of what makes them so special, which is watching Wimsey's story unfold.  They're also, unlike the Wolfe books, enormously interesting as products of a specific time and place - England between the wars. The prose is gorgeous and the stories are fascinating, but the centerpiece of the novels is Lord Peter himself: he's a shell-shocked WWI vet with a flair for language and a lot of spare time and income to devote to hanging around Scotland Yard and digging up nasty little mysteries.  That the later novels are also deeply thoughtful examinations of life and love and faith and stuff? Total bonus.

Bex

What, no Philip Marlowe? Are you both insane? The Continental Op (and Sam Spade, c’mon!) defined the hard-boiled clichés, but Marlowe moved the genre beyond them. And unlike Hammett’s characters, he’s someone you might actually enjoy sitting down for a whiskey with.

Helen Mirren’s performance as DCI Jane Tennison is brilliantly uncompromising. She never asks you to like her, and you really don’t, but you absolutely understand how she wins the respect of the piggishly chauvinist men under her. Even at her schlockiest, Lynda La Plante knows how to tell a ripping good story, and Prime Suspect was the peak of her career.

The Wire’s a greater work of art than The Shield, but The Shield is perhaps the purest, most brilliant cop show ever made. And detectives Dutch and Claudette brought brains and integrity to a series that was usually about brawn and dirty compromises.

I love Dirk Gently. I loved the books and I loved Stephen Mangan on the TV adaptation – and they’re making more of them. Hurrah! Detective novel spoofs are a dime a dozen, but it took Douglas Adams to create a sleuth this weird and wonderful.

Nobody seems to have seen Zero Effect, which is a shame, as it updated Holmes long before Sherlock and did it flawlessly. Bill Pullman as Daryl Zero has never been better and Ben Stiller’s a surprisingly good Watson substitute.

Jared: There's NO WAY that Marlowe would be more fun to hang out with than the Op. Plus, there's a greater than 50% chance you'd be dead by the end of the meal... shot in the back by a figure in a black overcoat (IT TURNS OUT TO BE THE DAME).

Bex: Wait, if I'm choosing someone from our list to hang out with, I'm definitely going the Mars family. And if Keith's out on a case, all the better. 

Anne: You're both wrong.  Nick and Nora Charles.  We'd drink and quip and drink more and then play with Asta.

Bex: Actually, I think Dirk Gently would be the most fun. You kind of know what all the rest of them would say, but he'd be all over the place.

Kim Lakin-Smith's Cyber Circus, out this fall from NewCon Press, follows the adventures - and misadventures - of the titular circus. A group of performers in a flying dieselpunk machine bound from one post-apocalyptic town to another, barely eking out a living. The setting is a dust-choked, war-torn version of the United States, with only a few hollow reminders of our own reality.

Cyber Circus is the latest of the 2011 books that investigate the idea of exceptionalism using genre fiction. Al Ewing's Gods of Manhattan is a contemporary steampunk look at pulp heroes. Mark Charan Newton's The Book of Transformations explores the failure inherent in the very concept of "superheroism". Cyber Circus belongs in their number - a darkly poetic examination of what it means to be something other than human. 

The key difference between Cyber Circus and the other two is that it explores not superheroism but subhumanism. The book is packed with a wild cast of characters, all of whom have been lessened in some way; physically or mentally, they've had something taken from them or been altered into something deplorably specialised. The genre-typical fantasy tale explores the idea of identity by following a character's search for their own pre-determined greatness. Cyber Circus is the reverse - a quest for acceptance, as undertaken by a true group of misfits.

Lauren Beukes
(Arthur C. Clarke winner, Red Tentacle winner, 2011 Kitschies judge, etc.....)

Joey HiFi
(BSFA-winning cover artist of Zoo City)

Saturday, 13 August
1 pm - 4 pm
British Library 

Lauren will be speaking briefing inside the Out of This World exhibit at 1.15 pm.

Otherwise, Lauren, Joey and the other guests can be found wandering in the exhibit and in the reserved area of the British Library Cafe. Pubbery will continue into the evening. 

Zoo City goodies are being given away on the day - RSVP below to enter the drawing (or on the Event homepage).

Another passel of short fiction - a few spoilers are involved with the older works (they're from the early 1950s).

I wear my heart on my sleeve when it comes to KJ Parker. With the exception of a few "merely" great works, Parker has been consistently producing some of the best fantasy fiction of the past decade. The highlights were the Engineer series (which I still hold to be the finest fantasy trilogy) and the astounding "A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong". In fact, if it weren't for the latter, Parker's "Amor Vincit Omnia" would be the author's finest short work.

"Amor Vincit Omnia" (way back in early 2010) was Parker's first foray into proper magical fantasy, but, in the author's trademark style, the supernatural is treated with the same mechanical precision that "Birdsong" treats music or The Folding Knife discusses economics.

That precision - and the drive for systemisation - is the core of the story. The hero, Framea, is a student at the magical University, the Studium. His role in "Amor Vincit Omnia" is to track down an unauthorized magic user. The renegade has started spontaneously using magic (flying in the face of all the hard-working academics) and, more critically, has evidenced a form of magic that was previously thought impossible. (The renegade has also killed a lot of people, but that's far less important to the professors of the Studium).

The Black Chalice is the first volume in Abaddon's newest shared world: Malory's Knights of Albion. The setting's underlying proposition is ingeniously simple: someone's dug up a "lost" book of Malory's stories. The result is a fresh supply of the highest of high fantasy - noble knights venturing forth against unsavoury evil (historical accuracy need not apply).

If The Black Chalice is any indication, the series has also excelled itself in looking behind the trappings of the Malory tales and into the themes. The knights weren't godly paladins - they were deeply flawed men who embodied not purity, but the virtue of striving for purity. They were angry, brutal, horny warriors who failed again and again to achieve perfection. That perpetual dream - the ceaseless desire to do good - is what made the Knights of the Round Table something special. They weren't demi-gods, they were ordinary schmucks that had the balls to try awfully hard. (Well, it helps that they were all land-owning Christian white male aristocrats, but let's leave that alone.)

I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons for a fairly unreasonable amount of time and my (very tolerant) gaming groups now knows that I've developed a few pet peeves. For the sake of the historical record, here they are... 

Dwarves: I think I'd like Dwarves more if there were a second way to play them. However, since the dawn of dice, Dwarves have always been role-played as squat and sullen, something fully encouraged by the ridiculous "racial overview" guide in each edition's Player's Handbook. The height of Player of Dwarf's humor is a joke about how their women have shorter beards. The rest of his comedic repertoire is made up of homophobia-tinted elf-bashing and ale-related demands. This is supposedly a race of long-lived engineering geniuses - why are they always played as hangover fratboys?

Halflings: At least Dwarves have some sort of functional use. Of Tolkien's many crimes, saddling gamers with a merry fistful of Daily Mail-reading analogues is probably the worst. Even in Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit), the furry-footed housepests are remarkably useless.