The Song Behind Today’s Review Title

[For the past several reviews I’ve picked a song lyric as the title of my review post. It’s been fun looking for songs that reflect the book I’ve read, and I hope it gives you the review reader a bit of fun too, and a catchy tune to take with you through your day.]

How many songs can you think of that are about detectives? Two come to my mind.

First, there’s Elvis Costello’s Watching the Detectives, his late 1970s tune (and his first to chart in the UK. He has said the song was inspired by American detective TV shows and an all-nighter listening to the Clash’s first album.

Second, we’ve got Private Investigations the 1982 hit by Dire Straits. Mark Knopfler, lead singer and lyricist for the band, has not been too forthcoming about the song’s inspiration, but it’s often seen as an homage to the works of author Raymond Chandler and his fictional detective Philip Marlowe. While the lyrics are open to interpretation, the music video has elements that look close to a detective story, though they aren’t the homage to old-time detective movies the way Costello’s video was.

Those are the only two I can think of. Sure, there may be other pop songs that have detective-ish themes (Private Eyes by Hall & Oates for example), but none I can think of that so directly tie into the detective stories found in books.

So today’s title comes from the lyrics of the Dire Straits tune, my favorite of the two. You can hear the tune and see the official music video (what a flashback to the 80s!) on this YouTube video.

The Reinvented Detective is a collection of short detective stories set in science fiction or fantasy worlds. There are 22 works in the collection, arranged in sections called “Reports”, “Artifacts”, and “Judgements”. Each of the three sections starts with a poem, leaving 19 detective stories in the book.

Science fiction short stories collections have a long history. Many of the most famous twentieth-century sci-fi writers got their start writing short stories for pulp magazines like Astounding Stories, Other Worlds or The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Robert Heinlein, Issac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke all got their start writing short stories for these and other pulp magazines. Later these short stories would be gathered up and published in book form for a new generation of readers (folks born in the 1960s or later, like me.)

Cat Rambo, one of the editors of The Reinvented Detective was co-editor from 2007 to 2011 of Fantasy Magazine, an online successor to those early pulp magazines. She also writes fantasy herself, as does Jennifer Brozek, the other editor of today’s book.

Rambo and Brozek set out to collect detective stories from 23 mostly science fiction and fantasy authors (a few stories are co-authored, thus more authors than stories). Most, if not all, of the stories were purpose-written for this collection. Writing detective stories is not necessarily in these authors’ wheelhouses, though in the short author bios at the end of the collection at least one confessed to a lifelong love of cozy mysteries.

As with any collection of stories, you are going to like some more than others. Personal favorites for me included The Gardner’s Mystery: Notes from a Journal, Overclocked Holmes and In the Shadow of the Great Days. The first, by Lisa Morton, is the story set in a bio-engineered caste society, where a “Level 4” gardener, plays detective against her caste. The second, co-authored by Sarah Day and Tim Pratt, tells the story of an Holmesian AI detective who meets her Moriarty in another AI. The third story, by Harry Turtledove, is set in a future dystopian Boston where the mystery is just one aspect of a multi-layered story.

And Go Ask A.L.I.C.E. was a lot of fun too. By Lydia Morehouse, it’s the story of what happens after a run-in between a cop and a “real girl” streetwalker in a time where in-person sex work is restricted to robots.

I’d happily read book length stories based on the characters and settings of these four. Others are perfect as short stories. Some tried to capture a noir detective vibe, others went for the big city cop story, others took their own direction, but all blended sci-fi with some sort of mystery story. I have to say I found them all enjoyable.

The great thing about short story collections is you can read one story, go off and live your life, then come back and read another and not worry that you’ve lost the thread of the book. Perfect for winter nights in front of the fire interrupted by episodes of Star Fleet Academy or A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, or the English detective show (on PBS of course) Bookish.

RATING: Three Stars ⭐⭐⭐

RATING COMMENTS: A collection of detective stories from 23 sci-fi and fantasy writers. Like any collection you’ll have your favorites but I found them all enjoyable.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I read a reviewer’s ebook copy provided through Edelweiss by the publisher Caezik SF &Fantasy.