Mystery and the locked room

In The Raven's Seal, now on its way to galley proofs, I tease the reader with a locked-room mystery as a celebration of that venerable device. What is the locked room apart from a piece of machinery that can show us something about how plots work, as well as the gears and levers of reading?

BBC News magazine puts the locked room on display.

It occurs to me that all mysteries are versions of the locked room, except that the walls and door have been removed or, more precisely, replaced with the horizon.

Update - The Raven's Seal

My novel, The Raven's Seal, an historical mystery with a Dickensian edge, has been contracted for publication by Top Five Books, an independent publisher of quality mysteries and classics. Details to follow, after the manuscript is delivered.

Codex - Lev Grossman

Codex is not exactly a prologue to The Magicians, but a nicely constructed intellectual thriller that signals some of Lev Grossman's later work.
Again, the young male protagonist, Edward, is talented and smart, but not quite smart enough to achieve, or even know, exactly what he wants. Moreover, he is inevitably overshadowed, defeated even, by a more capable, or perhaps only more focused, woman, Margaret.
New York is again the setting, and again it is the city and the state's secret places, its libraries, that are the most interesting. Grossman is able to make the territory of the mind as engaging as the city streets - a hallmark of the intellectual thriller with a touch of metafictional conceit.
One thing that makes Codex particularly engaging is the way the story moves between the present-day narrative, the lost medieval codex of the title, and the open computer game-virtual world that reflects and in some ways binds them. All of these imaginary worlds are compelling, though for different reasons, and this is where the ability to create other worlds in books and games is singularly intriguing and a binding theme. And yet, as in The Magicians, the ultimate dreamworld, once achieved, somehow fails to satisfy, leaving the protagonist chastened if not wiser.

Glory Road - Robert A. Heinlein

Only a fantasy novel by a mechanically minded science fiction author could be this dull and literal-minded. It is as if every instinct that enforced verisimilitude, or at least plausibility, in his science fiction oeuvre led Heinlein to over-explain and literalise every potential marvel in 'Glory Road'.

This is a shame, really. I read 'Glory Road' as a teenager and brought away an impression of its action and brisk pacing, and the sense of the adventurer's road across uncountable imaginary realms is powerful and evocative. But, on rereading, I'm left only with a dash of perfunctory action and a great deal of trans-dimensional expository dialogue, sandwiched with cultural-relativism lite.

There's none of the light touch that Fritz Leiber brought to pulp fantasy adventures, and far too much effort extended in making the wonderful seem believable, as though Heinlein had decided to write a fantasy to show that he could, and used all the science fiction techniques at his disposal to show that he couldn't.

The Master of Ballantrae - on the toss of a coin

Since the plot hinges on the toss of a coin, the entire novel is a matter of opposites: Jacobite and loyalist, older and younger brother, wanderer and steward, lover and husband, charm and restraint, selfishness and duty. And at the centre of it is a struggle over who merits their place as the hero of the novel: the feckless, charming, amoral and ambitious Master, or his stolid, honourable, introverted and subtly dull younger brother, who through the toss of a coin suffers one side of an extraordinary inversion, becomes the laird, husband and father, while the bold, talented heir becomes a wondering adventurer. Stevenson seems almost as fascinated by testing, or reframing, the very nature of a hero in an adventure plot.

But, the economy of detail, the absolute precision of characterisation through action, is almost perfect. Perhaps only a novel based on chance can be this finely, exactly, constructed and controlled.

The D&D Resurgance

This piece in Salon.com traces the 'rediscovery' of Dungeons & Dragons by middle-aged men (primarily).

We are ready to embrace those nights of unbridled game-playing and storytelling as crucial, formative experiences that were as real and memorable as any heroic feats on the football field...


But, as much as I applaud this renaissance in game-playing, imagination and story-telling (having no slight interest in these myself) I have a few reservations about this 'rediscovery'. These reservations can be encapsulated in three characters: D&D.

I recently returned to role-playing games myself after a hiatus of many years, but my game of choice was never D&D. In my teens, I came into role-playing games with Traveller, the science fiction game, and, after several years of intermittent to non-existent play, went on to play RuneQuest and now its modern compilation, Basic Roleplaying (BRP). So D&D for me, and I suspect many others, was never a system that engaged me (though its worlds no doubt informed a lot of our RuneQuest fantasy gaming).

D&D, though it has many capable and imaginative players and DMs in all its versions (and a fascinating classic or 'old school' movement for enthusiasts), it is still, in all its incarnation, a system with severe mechanical flaws. I won't go into details here, but game mechanics matter in as much as they influence pacing and ease of play, and the kind of play they require. Combat in D&D, for example, is generally slow and uninspiring, and miniatures-based combat seems to be the principle focus of the current edition. And, let's face it, in all versions of D&D you gain experience and level-up by defeating monsters (which usually means killing) and looting exclusively. Of course, you can always house-rule your way around these rules, but at what point do the house-rules accrue to a point where you've really rebuilt a fundamentally flawed game?

So, whether you chafe at D&D's restrictions or revel in them, I'd prefer to celebrate the rediscovery of all RPG's without tying it down to one particular exemplar in the shape of D&D.

The Magicians, Lev Grossman

The Magicians succeeds because Grossman tells a compelling story with psychological depth and great pace and verve, but it seems to me that it is based on two conceits that could have stood independently as novels in their own right, and somwhere between these two strands it leaves a central concern of the novel unresolved.
In the first place, The Magicians is plainly a Harry Potter for adults, replacing the magical boarding school with the magical college, and hence teenage angst with early-adulthood self-realization. Of course the young magicians are also college students, but here they get drunk, sleep with each other for the wrong (and right) reasons, suffer identity crises, ennui, career doubts, and generally fumble their way towards adulthood. Grossman captures their competitiveness and anxiety nicely, recasting apprentice magicians as essentially the top-tier of ivy-league students on competitive scholarships. The risk here (as it is in Harry Potter) is that the magical education systematizes and hence literalizes magic, turning it from an art to a craft, from a technique to a technology. Fortunately, Grossman mitigates this by revealing that there are depths beyond depths in the magic his students explore.
In itself, this advanced Harry Potter, the dealings of a hidden class of magicians in upstate New York would be intriguing, but here Grossman avoids engaging in this by introducing a second, though not unrelated strand.
This conceit is one of adult entry into a child’s world of wonder, specifically a faux-Narnia named Fillory. Here, adults with adult concerns attempt to discover and remain in a world of essentially childish magic and wish-fulfillment. The corollary to this, of course, is that one must be careful what one wishes for.
My main dissatisfaction with The Magicians is that when Grossman moves his characters from the subtle conflicts and perplexities of upstate New York into the childishly fantastical world of Fillory, he fails to answer the question that arises so compellingly for the graduate magicians: what is magic for? In mounting the quest into Fillory, he demonstrates that magic and fantasy of themselves cannot bring happiness any more than money or success, and that the regression into the child’s fantasy world can have destructive outcomes. Where magic comes from can remain a mystery, but how to use magic, and how to use it for the good, remain unanswered, and by the end Grossman seems to waver awkwardly between the possibility of renouncing magic altogether and the open-ended conjuring of higher, stranger planes of fantasy, a little like a Dungeon Master seeking even wilder adventures for his already over-powered players.