Where Ana and Din Solve a Big One

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a very successful book. Super fun. Well done.

This is mostly a mystery, or a detective story, with odd and fun investigators solving a murder in a fantasy world that is like no other. In this world, giant creatures like Kaiju crawl out of the sea, and the society of this empire is focused on defeating them when they appear. The mystery has bearing on that struggle, so although it's a kind of a low fantasy, with smaller stakes for most of it, it also has some of the hallmarks of high fantasy.

The setting is unique, at least to me, so that I can't say which, if any, modern culture inspired it. There are several races, but I don't really know what they are, and numerous religions, but they aren't described. We just get a multicultural setting without any of the usual hangups, and I thought it worked really well.

Ana Dolabra, the investigator, is a crusty, hard-to-figure-out public servant, but she also likable and funny. Her assistant, Din, is very controlled, very still, but he's interesting in many other ways. They make a great pair. Like most of the people who work for government, they are altered by grafts, making them smarter or faster or better able to recall or stronger, etc. This is used throughout the book, and it gives the land an exotic feel that adds to the story.

This was super fun to read, and I wondered if other people knew about it. Then I found out it won the most recent Hugo, so I guess somebody did see it.... :)

If you like mystery or fantasy, and if you like clever main characters, this is a great book to choose.

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Where Guy Garrick Uses Gadgets to Get His Man

Guy Garrick by Arthur B. Reeve
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This gadget-filled 1910's novel is somewhere between cozy detective story and gangland mystery, and I liked it, probably more than I expected. (One reviewer said it put him to sleep. Some books do that to me, too, so I get it, but I kept finding this one entertaining. To me, it was like a window on an era.) The general consensus is that this is about a 3 stars out of 5 book, but I gave it 4, and I stand by it.

Let me attempt to explain.

Set in circa 1910 New York City, this is in tone a kind of American Sherlock Holmes mixed with The Shadow, with the very confident detective keeping everyone in the dark while he uses skills none of them have to gather clues and put together leads, revealing all in the final scene. It has a bit of Wild, Wild West flair with strange electrical or chemical inventions throughout, and you can feel the spirit of the times, the gee whiz passion for automobiles and inventions and science. (The author on several occasions refers to someone being an excellent driver in a way that seems very quaint today, reminding the reader that most people weren't driving cars yet in 1914. It reminds me of the naïveté of internet hacking movies in the 1990s.) That sense of progress and rapid technological change is soaked into every part of the story.

There's also a fascination with bad guys, with gangsters and gambling and guns and underworld crime, that is evocative of a particular era in American history. That rather dark background, contrasting with the strange inventions and optimistic tone, give the story an alternate history feel and an almost steampunk sensibility. It struck me that it comes pretty close in character to the team Doc Savage assembled about 15 years later, with a chemist and a geologist and an "electrical wizard" (among others) using science to solve mysteries and save people.

This story is about some baddies involved in illegal gambling operations that the police discover when investigating a murder and stolen cars that have a slight connection with the operation. Guy Garrick teams with the police to solve the mystery, track down the murderer, and put the ringleaders of the very impressive gambling hall out of business. The difficulty is that the criminals are entrenched, have a lot of fancy science at their disposal, and have made plans for every kind of police action.

I thought this plot worked pretty well. It was fun seeing Garrick sort of invent bugs and lie detectors and a dozen other odd devices that, if they ever existed, did not take off. Luckily, unlike, say, Jules Verne, most of the descriptions of the inventions were pretty brief, so we don't get too bogged down in the pseudo-science.

Quick read. Lots of Sherlock/gangland/steampunk/science fiction vibes. Plenty of fun, I thought.

One thing confused me. This is volume 11 of the Craig Kennedy mystery stories. There is no character named Craig Kennedy in this book. I don't get that.

Not for everyone. I think my interest in mostly-overlooked authors of 100-150 years ago makes me enjoy this more than some other people might. But who knows? I read this in an inexpensive hardcover I got off eBay (the best way to read old books), but I'm sure it's on gutenberg for free. If you like Sherlock or The Shadow, you might like this.

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Where I Accidentally Read This a Second Time

Celebrated Cases Of Judge Dee by Robert van Gulik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Did you ever get well into a book and think "This is more than a little familiar..."

Funny story.

I don't think I ever did that before this, but it's crazy that I did it with this book. It's super unique, an actual Chinese detective novel from the 1700s translated into English, and I liked it at the time. Somehow I forgot entirely. I still wasn't sure until I checked my goodreads history to see.

I think I read it more carefully this time, kept more of the minor characters straight in my head. It's surprising to me how modern this book feels, how familiar, even to a western reader like me.

So now I have read it twice, although I seldom reread books. And I liked it both times. Judge Dee is a cool character--despite his use of torture, which was expected at the time--and is very Sherlockian in his detective work. And there's a bit of wuxia in the action scenes featuring his investigators. It's no wonder they made movies and tv shows with him as a character.

If you have an interest in the history of detective stories or want to look at Chinese history from a different angle, you might enjoy this. I did.

Here's my original two sentence review from 8 years ago:

This is a very accessible novel, with useful notes and preface by the translator. It's a pleasure to read on its own, as a mystery novel with intertwined stories, but even more interesting when read with an eye toward Chinese manners and history.

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