June 23, 2005

Murder by Magic: Twenty Tales of Crime and the Supernatural, Rosemary Edgehill, ed.

Of these short stories, only "Cold Case" was both a supernatural story and a 'fair' mystery, meaning one in which the reader has clues sufficient to solve the puzzle but isn't likely to. Diane Duane didn't use much otherworldly material, and didn't overexplain it. (And it's just a neat, spine-chilling little ghost story.)

Of the rest, some are successful because they reuse the background from longer books. Debra Doyle, e.g., has much fun with pseudo-academic footnotes pointing out what she hasn't explained; she also has a classic ghost-story ending. "Doppelgangster" (Laura Resnick) lives up to its silly name. But mostly the stories were too short for the idea: so much of the 'magic' had to be explained to make the 'mystery' comprehensible that there was a constant rumble of stage-machinery coming on and off set, and no time for misdirection.

ISBN: 0446679623

So wrote clew in SF&F.
And thus wrote others:
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