Over the years I had my Wordpress blog I wrote a fair few book reviews, most of which I’ve imported into my Substack archive, though I also reviewed for The Bookbag. Chances are you won’t have read them, and even if you did you may be in the mood now for a book you didn’t fancy then so I thought I’d collect a few together, with supplementary recommendations. I started with crime and thrillers set in the real world and as a follow-up here are a few that aren’t.
Cyberpunk: Yorkshire
I’m going to start in Yorkshire again, because frankly why not? You don’t get a right lot of fantasy and science fiction set in Yorkshire, which I think is a great shame. Imagine my excitement then, when I heard about Airedale by Dylan Byford. Fans of my audio sitcom Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays may be interested to note that Lee-Ann’s hometown of Bingley is in Airedale. I lived there for a while about 20 years ago, and for most of the intervening time I’ve lived in Wharfedale, which is the next valley over. In my review I said:
If you like William Gibson but have always wished someone would write in a similar vein but with uncool characters in small town Yorkshire (it can't just be me), you are definitely onto a winner here
Byford’s novel is a cyberpunk police procedural, for which no prior knowledge of Airedale is required. The main character is a forensic computing expert who doesn’t normally come into contact with actual dead bodies, but it just so happens he does tonight and he can’t let it go. There is a follow-up called Calderdale coming out this year from Northodox Press.
Cyberpunk: Rutland
Long before Dylan Byford brought cyberpunk to small town Yorkshire, Peter F Hamilton was doing similar for Rutland with his Greg Mandel series: Mindstar Rising, A Quantum Murder, and The Nano Flower. I reviewed the first two novels, though apparently not the third.
Greg Mandel is a private detective who used to be in the army; the army gave him implants that enhance his ability to read moods, which is quite handy in the detecting game. I referenced William Gibson in both of those Peter F Hamilton reviews so if you enjoyed Neuromancer, but you’d like to read more novels set in England, you’re in the right place. And honestly, if you know of any more let me know.
Cyberpunk: the original
While we’re in William-Gibson-style territory, let’s mention Virtual Light by William Gibson, which I can't believe I hadn’t read as a teenager. It's from 1993 but set in 2005, which when I read it in 2020 was further in the past than it was in the future when Gibson was writing it. I had to laugh at the portable fax machines, but the masks and the passing mentions of pandemics resonated. It's a proper thriller (albeit with a cyberpunk flavour) involving stolen wearable tech, bike couriers and a failed policeman, as well as weird millennial cults and big data.
It occurred to me after reading it that so much Gibson (and many other stories) hinge on exploitative capitalist societies - people forced into situations because of their lack of money and/or status (need the money so bad to pay the rent/bills that they're prepared to do something illegal or against their principles, or can easily be manipulated into such). Depressing as that is, it does make for a cracking read.
Noir on Mars
In 2014 I read Red Planet Blues by Robert J Sawyer, who had won a whole mantelpiece full of awards over the previous few years. It was an assured romp through a twisty plot full of double-crossing, kidnap, murder and mistaken identity, handled with wry humour but with its share of grit and science. If you like Chandler and Hammett but aren’t averse to some future-set extra-terrestrial fiction, I can recommend Red Planet Blues.
Alex Lomax is the only private detective on Mars, scraping a living under the protective dome of New Klondike. Like all the best fictional private detectives he’s got a nice line in wisecracks, an eye for the ladies and a reputation that precedes him. New Klondike likewise is a typical frontier town full of fossil-hunters determined to strike it rich, people on the run, corrupt cops. And a writer in residence.
It all starts with what seems like a simple missing person case, but then Lomax starts to uncover things that might be best left undisturbed. Like the truth about what happened to the men who first found fossils on Mars and started the fortune-hunting rush. All this in low gravity, with the added complication of essentially immortal transfers (people rich enough to upload their mind into custom-built and largely indestructible android bodies).
Sawyer has written several other SF novels with a murder mystery element, though I have never got round to reading any.
Noir in an alternative Paris
When I reviewed Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds in 2018 I said you’d love it if you enjoyed Red Planet Blues. Earth has been uninhabitable since the Nanocaust, but field archaeologists like Verity Auger still make trips there to study its artefacts. When she messes up on one of those trips, Verity is handed an offer she can't refuse and finds herself on a secret mission for which her expertise on twentieth-century Paris will be invaluable.
Government scientists have discovered an unstable entrance to a poorly-understood galactic transit system whose origins they know nothing about. This particular branch appears to lead to 1950s Paris, though not quite the same version Verity's studied. All she has to do is use the transit system and retrieve the belongings of a murdered government agent who went through before her.
Meanwhile jazz-loving Paris-based private detective Wendell Floyd is on his uppers as usual, and takes on a murder case against his better judgement. At least, the client thinks it's murder but Floyd's inclined to go along with popular opinion and stick to accident or suicide. Until he starts to wonder if the victim was actually a spy, particularly when another one shows up.
This is part spy thriller, part space opera, part beautifully-rendered fifties noir, and I loved every minute. With more twists than a journey through an unstable pseudo-wormhole, Century Rain has tension, romance, dry humour, and a suitably tear-jerking Casablanca reference or two. It touches on ethics and the unknown consequences of new technology, but it can be approached simply as a wild adventure. Perfect for sci-fi fans who also like Raymond Chandler.
Noir in the unreal
Staying with classic noir but in an altogether odder setting, we have The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry. The city detective agency’s star detective has gone missing. Charles Unwin, the clerk who has typed up his reports for 20 years, is on the case, armed only with a manual he doesn’t have time to read. I described the rigidly bureaucratic setting at the time as ‘Kafka wearing warm socks, drinking cocoa, and cuddling a purring cat’. BBC radio had Toby Jones reading it in 2017 and very good it was too.
If you liked The Manual of Detection and can stand your fantasy pretty dark, you'll love The Body Library by Jeff Noon. It’s the second of his Nyquist series, from 2018 (the first is A Man of Shadows).
Private detective John Nyquist is on a simple tail job that turns out not to be, and finds himself mixed up in something beyond his understanding. It was weird and unsettling, blurring the lines between the fiction we're reading (the 'reality' of the novel) and the fiction within their world, focusing on worlds within books and the power of words.
I haven't read the first Nyquist book because it sounded like it was firmly in the horror genre, and I had a nasty feeling this novel was heading that way too but it pulled back from the brink. Still not for the overly squeamish, I think, but I enjoyed it when I read it in 2020.
Also in 2020 I read The Imaginary Corpse by Tyler Hayes.
Noir starring a cuddly toy triceratops - it sounded mad enough to be bordering on genius, which turned out to be a fair assessment.
Set in the Stillreal, which is populated by ideas strong enough to have their own existence, we follow Tippy the triceratops as he investigates the actual final real death of an idea, which ought not to be possible. Not for the out-and-out cynics, but original and I really enjoyed it despite being pretty cynical myself (I do re-read Paddington Bear now and then though, so there’s clearly a soft centre).
Sherlock Holmes, kind of
Where would any crime readers or writers be without Holmes and Watson? I came to Sherlock Holmes in the eighties via my dad and the Jeremy Brett TV adaptations but I’m not precious about the characters so a ‘based on’ or a ‘reworking of’ is fine by me as long as it’s done well. Although it has to be said, I can’t stand the Benedict Cumberbatch TV series despite trying it a few times.
In 2017 I ran across Two Hundred and Twenty-one Baker Streets in the local library. Edited by David Thomas Moore, it’s an anthology of fourteen reimaginings of Holmes and Watson across time, space and gender, and it’s almost entirely brilliant. Two-thirds of the way through the book, as I finished another story and declared how much I loved it, my other half pointed out that I’d said that after every one so far.
There are stories set in America, England, Australia, even a high fantasy universe courtesy of Adrian Tchaikovsky. There’s a female Watson with a male Holmes, and vice versa, there are pre-Victorian stories, present-day stories, one set in the future, even a couple of stories where the main characters are not called John Watson and Sherlock Holmes. And yet in each one the essence is there, some riff on the famous partnership, a recognisably Holmesian character who always puts facts before feelings. There is also, naturally, Mrs Hudson.
Some work better than others in terms of mystery or solving a puzzle, but there’s plenty in the collection for any Sherlock Holmes fan with a predilection for alternative history or SF.
I hope you’ve found a book or author to explore. Let me know in the comments or by replying to the email.
I finished the first draft of an SF noir novel in 2014, kept coming back to it and rewriting, submitted it to a couple of places but ultimately never got anywhere. The last rejection I got, in 2020, said “I won’t be following up our earlier interest in Lachlane’s Centrified City. I liked it enough to read to the end, if that’s any help, and I was really taken with the voice and style.” Close, in other words, but no cigar.
However, in a tenuous attempt to offer you some fiction to read, in 2011 I did have a short crime story in a magazine called Comets and Criminals that also published speculative fiction. You can still read The Dovedale Affair at the Internet Archive, even though the magazine itself is long gone. In small-town Yorkshire a young man called Stephen Conway copes with the world by constructing a monologue as though he’s Philip Marlowe. One of his former classmates is dead and if he’s not careful he’ll get the blame.
“I looked at her pleading brown eyes and saw the bags beneath them; it felt cruel to continue but she’d wanted me to break the silence.”
“I give up. Fine. Keep quiet. I’m going to work, I’ll see you tonight.”
I watched my mother fight her way into a coat that was too thin for the weather, and went back to my room to think about last night.