“Her voice said ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor’: and she is, as far as that goes. Then again, so were Crippen and Mengele, and they both sold patent medicines in their time.”
Oh yes, Mike Carey’s third Felix Castor novel, Dead Men’s Boots, is out this month from Orbit and even just part of the way into it I’m impressed. I’ve said before that the first two books in the series, Devil You Know and Vicious Circle, were not only mightily impressive novels, mixing the supernatural with the Noir gumshoe genre and a very nice line in descriptive prose that brings the darker side of London to life, they also gave a clear impression of a distinct background to Fix’s world being constructed as the stories progressed. Even now, only a few chapters into the third novel I’m getting that same feeling I got from Straczynski’s Babylon 5 story arc, that feeling you started to get in the second and third seasons where you suddenly realised the episode you were watching harked back to little details in far earlier episodes (Neil Gaiman also did this quite a bit with the Sandman); what seemed like background detail at the time becomes more relevant, pushing the viewer or reader not only to pay more attention and wonder more where this will go, it also makes you want to go back to the beginning and see those earlier events with the new knowledge gleaned from later events.
The world of the living and the dead is being built up slowly, carefully in Mike’s books and along with action and humour he also slips in some quite deep philosophical and spiritual questions that will sit in your head long after finishing the book – why are the dead returning so often now? Why are new creatures appearing? What effect do these events have on a society which has to deal with the seemingly impenetrably separate realms of life and death intermixing? What does it do the the mind of the Faithful of any religion? What does it do to those with no religion? What happens to a spirit when an exorcist banishes it? All of which is a fancy way of saying “oh boy, this is good, this is very good!”, he said, trying to remain professional and not jump up and down with a big excited grin. If, like me, you’ve been following Mike’s prose debut you will seriously want to get your hands on Dead Men’s Boots; if you haven’t started reading them yet then you should be. We’re moving into autumn; chiller winds, rustling leaves and longer, darker nights – the perfect time to sit down with a book like this. Meantime check out some new video segments that Orbit‘s George Walkley has posted up with Mike discussing Dead Men’s Boots, Vicious Circle and Devil You Know.
(Mike Carey discussing his latest novel Dead Men’s Boots for the Orbit blog)
Fri, Sep 14, 2007
Books