Good Guys

"Stephen Brust is an amazing fantasy writer. For literally forty years—since I was twelve years old—he has been publishing this long-running noir sword-and-sorcery series called the Vlad Taltos books . He’s nearly done with them. He’s grown to be quite a pal of mine, although he’s a good generation older than me. We have the same editor. It is clear that Brust is deeply conflicted about finishing the series that has been his life’s work. He keeps getting stuck on it and doing other things to not write it, including writing other books. This is one of those. It’s a book about a conspiracy to do good things in the world, a conspiracy to make other people happy. It shares its lineage with a Hugo Award-winning short story by Bruce Sterling called “Maneki Neko.” It is a crossover between noir and conspiracy novels. Conspiracies play a large part in noir. Often, the thing that’s being unwound by the noir protagonist is a conspiracy. In this case, the noir protagonist is the conspiracist. He’s part of a conspiracy, and it is in the nature of conspiracies that they often contain conspiracies of their own. They nest inner conspiracies. Think of Winston Smith meeting O’Brien in Orwell’s 1984 , and discovering that the party has another sub-party within it that is a conspiracy against the party, which turns out to be a conspiracy against the conspiracy against the party. It’s those wheels within wheels that give this some of its noir flavor. What really conveys the noir flavor, as with all of Brust’s work, is his impeccable, absolutely brilliant, dry, noir voice. It’s funny, it’s wry, it’s understated. He is a genius in every way. The language is delicious, and the dialogue and the characters are great. You want to be around a bar with this group of characters. As with every group of Brust characters, you just want to be hanging out with them in a con suite at a science fiction convention. Brust is a musician and I’ve actually been in con suites with him and other musicians bantering, drinking, singing. He is one of those guys. He’s a bard, and the book shows it. Yes, the protagonist, Donovan is tasked with solving a string of increasingly grisly murders, and the result is a police procedural—with magic."