Readers who know Jack Vance strictly through the Dying Earth or Lyonesse story cycles are most likely going to be gobsmacked by the publication (courtesy of the gracious folks at Subterranean) of Dangerous Ways, a collection of three short mystery novels Vance penned in the 60s and early 70s.
The introduction, by Terry Dowling and Jonathan Strahan, attempts to address any possible confusion of the “err, are you sure it’s that Jack Vance” sort. Sketching out Vance’s impressive, if less well known, career as a mystery writer, they make the case that his mystery and his speculative fiction are essentially of a piece, and that the things that a reader enjoyed about, say, The Eyes of the Overworld can also be found in genre-appropriate form here as well. To a reasonable extent, they’re right.
Of course, the fit isn’t quite congruent. All three mysteries – The Deadly Isles, The Man In The Cage, and Bad Ronald, seem very much artifacts of their time, unapologetically so. What that means in practical terms is that all three feature a cast of characters who are very much types as much as they are characters. The cool, pragmatic man of action who is forced by circumstance to unravel a mystery that he’d rather have no part of – there’s one of those in each of the three novels. And there’s one of each of his counterweight as well, the distanced, dispassionate woman whose initial disinterest in the hero is wrapped in sophistication, but who succumbs to his charms once he demonstrates how virile he is. The minor characters shine, but the dyad at the center of each tale is profoundly familiar.
Of the three novels, the most original and disturbing is the last, Bad Ronald. Spoiled rotten by his mother, the titular Ronald is a chilling alternate take on the standard Vanceian sociopath. But when that sort of self-absorbtion gets transferred from the far future to the present day, and the body count suddenly isn’t monsters or decadent barbarians but nice young ladies who just happen to live in the wrong house, then the sort of behavior that’s charming to read about in a story of Cugel the Clever carries more weight and fewer laughs.
The middle book of the set, The Man In The Cage, offers more moral ambiguity but no characters as striking as Ronald. On the other hand, it won an Edgar for Best First Novel, and was adapted into an episode of Boris Karloff’s anthology series Thriller, so maybe that’s not such a bad thing. When Darryl Hudson’s brother Noel disappears during a smuggling run in North Africa, he travels to Tangiers to try to find him. That’s the premise; the real pleasure of the book is in the slippery set of double-crosses the various characters inflict on each other. What makes the scenario work is that all of the characters – from the Algerian mercenaries who want their missing payload to the barflies and crime lords of Tangiers – have strong and believable motivations for their generally unpleasant actions toward the hero. What makes it click is that there’s the strong sense that these characters don’t exist just to make the hero’s life hell; they’re doing what they’re doing for their own good reasons, and he just happens to be in the way. Nor does Vance shy away from an ambiguous ending here. While erstwhile ice queen Ellen McKinstry’s occasional maunderings about being a suburban housewife might distract, they make more sense in the context of the awful moral void she and Darryl are confronting under the merciless North African sun.
As for the first book in the collection, it’s probably the lightest of the three. Like most good accidental detectives, Luke Royce needs to figure out who “murdered” him and why, and ideally before the murderer works his way through all of Luke’s relatives as well. While the story moves at a good clip, the story as a whole is fairly straightforward, and the climax isn’t terribly exciting. This, of the three, is the mystery we’ve seen before, leavened only by Vance’s signature style, and his steely willingness to off a supporting character without mercy or regret.
To call this collection a must-read is perhaps to overstate the case. Nevertheless, there’s much of interest here for both the mystery fan and the Jack Vance devotee. Even The Deadly Isles has some snappy banter and sharp characterization to recommend it, and the other two tales have more than that.
And above all, watch out for Bad Ronald. He’s very bad – and thus quite good – indeed.
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