Magic and Murders

IT’S A HARD ACT TO put a new spin on the Sherlock Holmes pas­tiche, but Robert Jackson Bennett manages to do it brilliantly in his fantasy genre. In The Tainted Cup (Hodderscape; 432 pages; ₹1,819), an acerbic female Sherlock Holmes and her young uptight assistant Watson must solve a series of murders at the edge of the Empire of Khanum before the seawalls are breached by a Titan.

Immunis Anagosa Dolabra aka Ana is a brilliant imperial investigator with “bone-white hair, wide smile, and yellow eyes.” She has been posted to Daretena, at the outer edge of the empire, and reminds her new assistant, Dinios Kol aka Din, of a madhouse cat roving through a home in pursuit of a suitable sunbeam, though always willing to torture the occasional mouse.

This is a world where humans can choose to be magically altered, where the blood of the Leviathans works peculiar changes, where a Titan could break through the sea walls and kill thousands in a matter of hours, and where engineers who build and main­tain these walls are prized.

A high-ranking engineer visitor, Commander Taqtasa Blas, is murdered in the mansion of one of the Empire’s wealthiest families, the Hazas.

Ana believes in minimising outside stimulants by never going out if she can help it, and by blindfolding herself in the company of others. Her assistant Din must do the footwork, get to the crime scene, round up the suspects and interrogate them.

Din is an Imperial engraver, “altered to remember every­thing I experienced, always and forever,” handy for memorising safe combinations and the exact wording of past conversations.

To Din’s horror, he finds a tree growing out of engineer’s body. Then a top-ranking official shows up from the border city where the victim was posted. Ten more engineers have died, all with trees sprouting from their bodies, and a breach has occurred in one part of the city walls. This is now a matter of national security.

Ana and Din have to find the killer and the motive before the next breach of the city wall occurs. As they comb through the suspects—high-ranking engineers and members of the Haza family—they uncover layers of deceit and intrigue, chase many red herrings, and face deadly assassins who may or may not be working for the Hazas.

Told in first person by Watson (Din), we have a fresh and in­teresting take on the Holmes-style puzzle solving, a rounded set of secondary characters, and a solution that a careful reader has a fair chance of finding by the end.

Ana is an inspired choice for Holmes—and takes his pecu­liarities to a fantasy setting. She devours information, and it is up to her assistant to ensure hapless visitors are not subjected to her questioning. She cuts through the crap, has a Machiavellian mind, abhors boredom (craves drugs, “moodies” they are called here), and is always one step ahead of the adversary.

The interactions between her and her new assistant have a warm and humorous touch, and provide the driving force of the book. “Of all the Sublimes who could have been my assis­tant, why did it have to be the one with a forty-span stick up his ass?” she hisses through gritted teeth when Din refuses to procure illegal moodies for her.

Or when Din speculates that the only reason­able answer to why Ana had been appointed to this backwater hole, was banishment. “I’d only worked for Ana for four months,” he says, “but you just had to spend one minute with her to realize she had a gift for inciting outrage.”

Din too harbours secrets, making his Watson much more compelling than the original. Clever, crisp dialogue, and a heavy sense of menace are evoked splendidly by Bennett. The pace never flags as Bennett artfully mixes emotional heart, action, and intellectual curiosity to titillate us with the puzzle of how the engineers were killed, who killed them, and why. Well worth reading even if you are not a fan of the fantasy genre.

A splendid start to a new series.

MUNICH WOLF by Rory Clements (Bonnier Books; 400 pages; ₹1,572)

Set in 1935 Munich, the heart of Nazi power, Munich Wolf is an intrigue-filled, well-researched thriller with twists that keep us in suspense till the very end. Detective Sebastian Wolff at the Kripo, the criminal police, must walk a tight line between doing his job and falling foul of the Nazi party, which he despises.

The Bavarian capital is a magnet for young, aristocratic Britons who come to learn German, swim in the lakes, and drink and party with SS boyfriends. When the Honourable Miss Rosie Palmer is found murdered in a park and strange symbols are drawn on her body with lipstick, Wolff is put on the job. He has the best clear-up rate in the corps and the only one who speaks good English. To his disgust, his new assistant is Sergeant Hans Winter, a political officer who, at the beginning of the book, had packed off Wolff to Dachau concentration camp for not doing the Heil Hitler salute properly. Thanks to Wolff’s mother’s brother, a rich wheeler-dealer nicknamed the Pig, Wolff is freed. The ‘best detective’ in Munich is assigned Rosie’s case.

The tainted cup is a world where humans can choose to be magically altered, where the blood of the leviathans works peculiar changes, where a titan could break through the sea walls and kill thousands in a matter of hours, and where engineers who build and maintain these walls are prized

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Hitler’s attention is on the case, Wolff is told. Rosie’s close friend was Unity Mitford, Hitler’s girlfriend. And her local guardian, Walter Regensdorf is a wealthy and powerful friend of Hitler’s. This is a world where the rich and powerful and the Party members are beyond the reach of the law.

Wolff interviews the highly entitled and sneering lot of rich British toffs parked in Munich with blithe disregard for the ugly underbelly of Nazism. He discovers that Rosie was involved with a Jewish man whom she’d met in England when he was at Cambridge. He, of course, is a convenient scapegoat and is soon arrested and convicted for the murder. Wolff doesn’t believe him to be the killer, but can do little about it. Then Wolff receives an anonymous letter with the photo of another beautiful girl who was killed and whose body bears the same lipstick markings with occult overtones as Rosie’s.

Followed by the secret police, Wolff must find the killer who may be linked to the highest echelons of Nazi Germany.

Clements does a great job of conjuring the manic, gay, fervent, dangerous, and mor­ally diseased air of 1930s Munich peopled with fictional characters and real life historical persons like Hitler, Eva Braun, Unity Mitford (who was obsessed with Hitler), Putzi Hanfstaengl (Hitler’s PR man), and members of the Thule Society (an occult and antisemitic group that influenced the Nazi party).Wolff’s girlfriend works along­side Eva Braun at a photo studio run by another friend of Hitler.

At home, Wolff struggles to deal with a teenaged son, a cardholding member of the Hitler Youth. Clements captures the daily moral battles Wolff faces, and his struggles to keep his humanity untainted by Nazi brutality. “Yes, it was true, he was taking the path of least resistance. Why? Because he had to, for who would look after Mutti [his mother] and Jurgen [his son]? Who else would investigate these murders? If he stayed free, perhaps he could do some good, perform some small service to keep the flame of justice alive in his benighted yet beloved country.”

These deeply problematic moral questions will resonate with all of us. How do you live a morally unsullied life under a political regime whose values are abhorrent to you? How far will you go to protect the innocent? These are the questions Wolff has to face while hunting for the killer in the highest echelons of the Nazi regime in this gripping and hugely satisfying thriller.

About The Author

Shylashri Shankar

Shylashri Shankar is the author of Turmeric Nation - A Passage Through India's Tastes