Book Review: Weird Detectives

Weird Detectives: Recent InvestigationsEdited by Paula GuranPrime Books, 2013 Despite the subtitle, the 23 stories contained in Paula Guran's anthology Weird Detectives: Recent Investigations aren't particularly recent. Three are from 2004, one each from 2005, '07, and ''08, and none later than 2011. All entries are examples of a booming sub-genre called urban fantasy, in which the term 'paranormal investigators' refers not only to the type of crime but to the type of investigator: the cases could involve witches, werewolves, and vampires, but gone are the days of haggard, decidedly human Carl Kolchak tracking down clues - instead, the crime-solvers here are also witches, werewolves, and vampires, and the principles of logic and deduction are supplemented (and often invalidated) by the vagaries of sorcery.Paranormal investigators have been a part of fiction for decades, but the sub-genre blossomed in the first years of the 21st century, and it's tempting to see the least wanted correlation imaginable. Jim Butcher's "Harry Dresden" novels - in which the title character, a sorcerer, investigates crimes, and Charlaine Harris' "Sookie Stackhouse" books - in which humans and vampires live side-by-side in a fictional New Orleans town - sparked the reinvention of the sub-genre for modern audiences, and both those series took off in 2000-2001 and flourished in the following decade. Likewise most of stories in Weird Detectives have their origins in those years.That's the unwanted temptation: to see these stories and the sub-genre they represent as sickly flowers sprouted from the black, acrid loam laid down during the eight-year interregnum of George W. Bush, a president who smilingly admitted to never reading and who commented that the jury was still out on the theory of evolution. During the W. years, intelligence and rationality were re-branded as elitist frippery, and popular belief in angels and demons skyrocketed. Something of this awkwardness inevitably bleeds through to the pages of most paranormal thrillers, since careful reasoning and painstaking forensics don't align very well with supernatural beings and reality-altering enchantments, as, for example, Carrie Vaughn's rookie investigator learns in "Defining Shadows":

Hardin came to the supernatural world as a complete neophyte, and she had to look for advice wherever she could, no matter how odd the source, or how distasteful. Friendly werewolves, for example. Or convicted felons.Cormac Bennett styled himself a bounty hunter specializing in the supernatural. He freely admitted he was a killer, though he claimed to only kill monsters - werewolves, vampires, and the like. A judge had recently agreed with him, at least about the killer part, and sentenced Bennett to four years for manslaughter. It meant that Hardin now had someone on hand who might be able to answer her questions.

Most of the authors in this collection - which includes some of the biggest names in the genre - do their best to brass their way right past these kinds of contradictions, and in this case readers are helped to tag along by the uniformly high quality of the stories Guran has chosen. Dean Cameron's Boston-based "Swing Shift" delivers a taut climax, for instance, and Justin Gustainis' electrically good "Deal Breaker" features his rough-and-ready popular character Quincey Morris. As a reminder that not all these tales take place in Newark, Lilian Stewart Carl brings readers back to the court of Elizabeth I and her fabled alchemist John Dee in the atmospheric story "The Necromancer's Apprentice." And the entries by genre-founders like Butcher or Harris (whose "Death by Dahlia" is especially entertaining) anchor the book in good solid storytelling.As anyone who's ever seen the HBO adaptation of Harris' books will attest, there's often another element anchoring paranormal mysteries - and it's only slightly mystical. Perhaps readers can detect a whiff of it in a scene from Elizabeth Bear's "Cryptic Coloration" set at a New York street-basketball game:

Even without ink, he had the best body on the basketball court. Hard all over, muscle swelling and valleying as he sprinted and side-stepped, chin-length blond hair swinging in his eyes. He skittered left like a boxer, turned, dribbled between his legs - quadriceps popping, calves like flexed cables - caught the ball as it came back up and leaped. Parabolic, sailing. Sweat shook from his elbows and chin as he released.

If the NBA were like that, cable subscriptions would quadruple ...Weird Detectives sports an eye-catching cover by the great Ana Fagarazzi, and, thanks to Guran, it also features a first-rate line-up of fascinating stories. And if many of those stories appeal more to the gut than to the mind, well, we can have the audacity to hope that a new sub-genre is right around the corner.