Book Marketing 101: A Hiatus

I didn't have a particular topic in mind for this week, and I've been off at a conference in Las Vegas this week, so this week is going to be a bye.

But I did have two things I wanted to mention:

First, that one major inspiration for this series of posts has been The Book Publicity Blog, which I've been reading with great interest for many months now. I'm constitutionally incapable of doing a single-topic blog, but I do greatly admire those with more focus than I. It's written by a real book publicist, and is full of great thoughts on how it works and what authors can do. It made me want to cover some of the same territory from the slightly different perspective of marketing, which led to this series.

Second, I want to know what topics you readers most want to know about. What parts of marketing make the least sense to you? What questions do you have?

Movie Log: Phoebe in Wonderland

I have two children, both of the same sex, and the older one is not entirely neurotypical, so I was very interested to see Phoebe in Wonderland. The specifics in the movie aren't the same -- here it's two girls rather than my two boys, and her condition is different from my son's -- but there were enough parallels to make it very interesting for The Wife and I.

Phoebe is smart and about ten but starting to have more and more trouble at school; she's spitting at other kids and just generally having problems with impulse control. She's also creating very elaborate coping mechanisms -- of the I-have-to-wash-my-hands-a-specific-number-of-times type -- which are not really helping her fit in. And, related to both of those -- or creating both of them -- she's also having hallucinations. (She's played by the excellent Elle Fanning, who I note is twenty-three days younger than my own Thing 1.) In the movie, this starts subtly, keeping the audience's sympathies with Phoebe -- we see her interact with a series of rule-bound, dull teachers and with a ratty (he's too mean to be mousy), passive-aggressive principal.

At the same time, Phoebe's mother, Hillary (Felicity Huffman), is greatly conflicted about her decision to semi-abandon her own career (which appears to have been in the English PhD-industrial complex) to raise her daughters, and somewhat annoyed by her husband Peter's (Bill Pullman) success in that same area and/or his lack of support of her needs. She wants to believe that Phoebe will be better, or that there's nothing "wrong" with her daughter -- she also thinks that Phoebe's problems, essentially, have to do with Hillary. (Phoebe's younger sister, Olivia (Bailee Madison) doesn't get much screen time, but she has one great scene where she declares that she doesn't want to have to manage her older sister all the time.)

So, Phoebe is getting worse at coping with her everyday life, as her own brain is making that life harder and harder to live. But, one day, she decides to sign up for an audition for her school play -- an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland -- and quickly comes to believe in and trust the odd drama teacher, Miss Dodger (Patricia Clarkson). She gets the lead, and the play becomes a place where her new behaviors don't overwhelm her -- but, of course, the outside world threatens the world of the play, as it always does in stories like this.

Phoebe in Wonderland has a lot of cliches in it -- the One Special Teacher, the Wonderfulness of Theater, the Perfidiousness of Authority Figures, and so on -- and the script doesn't always live up to its potential, or to the performances it loosely contains. But the acting is uniformly strong, and Elle Fanning is particularly good. And if it has any connection to your own life -- if you, or someone close to you, is young and not neurotypical -- it's riveting.

Vegas Update

I'm still here, though I'll be gone early in the morning. (Not quite as early as my flight out on Sunday, but plenty early enough.)

And it looks like I will have managed the difficult trick of spending three days in Vegas without 1) gambling, 2) drinking, 3) seeing a show, or 4) doing any of the less-savory activities this city is known for. Harrumph. I didn't think I was actually that boring, but this isn't a great city to be visiting alone for a person who doesn't like to gamble. I also note that the heat makes one disinclined to go anywhere or do anything.

(Having four early mornings in a row -- one on the way here, and three here -- has also cast a pall on the idea of going out to do something "fun.")

But next time I really must drive in from LA with a Samoan lawyer and a car-load of assorted pharmaceutical mood enhancers.

Skin City by Jack Sheehan

So I'm in Las Vegas right at this very moment. Since I'm normally in New Jersey, to get here I had to fly. And, before I could do that, I had to pick some books to take to read on the trip.

That might seem simple, but when you have as many unread books as I do -- or, perhaps, if you merely are me -- picking what to read next becomes a process that can take several hours over several days, with lots of pulling things out, frowning, and then putting them back again. Eventually -- after seriously considering Replay, a book of Evelyn Waugh short stories, several Anthony Trollope novels, and the most recent novel in the "Malazan Book of the Fallen" series -- I finally decided to read books about Vegas while I was in Vegas.

I decided that because I came across this book, which I picked up from a "free books" shelf back at the book clubs soon after it was published in paperback by Harper in 2006. It was really now or never -- if I didn't read about about the sleazy side of Vegas before my first trip there, when would I ever? So I read a big chunk of it in Newark Airport, waiting for my flight, and then some more here.

And I have to warn you that this book is one of the largest manifestations of bait & switch that I've ever seen. It's packaged like a frat boy's guide to the seamy side of Las Vegas -- a burst on the cover says "Includes Insider Tips to Vegas's Best Adult Entertainment" and the inside flap has a list of topics covered, all strongly consumer-focused on the horny fella (or possibly gal or couple) coming to Vegas with an eye to something sexy.

The book itself was originally published in 2004 by Stephens Press, and I strongly suspect -- though the book doesn't say -- that the last chapter was added for the Harper edition (it declares that it was written in 2005, which is one clue) and that the other chapters mostly or partly were magazine articles to begin with. Those earlier chapters are nearly all very clearly and closely based on Sheehan's interviews with a very small handful of people each -- three female porn stars get their own chapters, as do a pair of high-priced prostitutes and a madam, as does a couple that run a swingers club, as do three lawmen who mutter darkly about prostitution being completely run by lowlife men and organized crime and full of underage girls (this being utterly opposite to the chapters that have interviews with women in the sex trade), and so forth. Sheehan makes no attempt to bring any of his separate pieces together, each chapter is about sex in one way or another, and they're all about people with some connection to Las Vegas (some more tenuous than others), but they're not about the sex industry here in any systematic way.

What Sheehan aparently did was write a number of magazine pieces that were all vaguely tittilating and had enough local color to be sold to a local outlet. Then, when the stack of those writings was as large as a book, he stuck them into a book without (as far as I can tell) doing much of anything to unify them. Two years later, he re-sold the book to Harper, which got him to add one last chapter on strip clubs (with lots and lots of thin sidebars, suitable for a Playboy article on the city), use that chapter as the hook, and misrepresent the whole book.

If you'd like to read a book of interviews with a few mid-rank porn stars, strippers, and call girls, here's Skin City. If you're looking for a serious (or silly, or wildly incorrect, or whatever) guide to the sex biz in Vegas, you'll be left feeling like the man at the strip club two seconds after the lap dancer realizes he's out of money.

Charles Brown, 1937-2009

Charles N. Brown, founder and long-time editor of Locus (and a fixture of the SFnal fan/pro scene even longer than that) died in his sleep on Sunday night, on the way home from Readercon.

On the one hand, I'm sure Charles would have appreciated dying on the way home from a con. But there are so many cons still to come that will now have to go on without him.

Charles Brown was one of the great Big Name Fans: smart and opinionated, talkative but good at listening, so familiar and dependable that he seemed like part of the furniture. But there's now a big hole in the room of SFF, and it will never quite be filled. Farewell, Charles.

His full obituary appears on Locus Online -- where else?

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 7/11

I'm starting this week's entry very early, since I'm scheduled to fly out to Las Vegas for a conference -- of the hard-living Association of Certified Fraud Examiners -- far too early on Sunday morning. So, if the following is disjointed, it might have gotten that way by being written over several days and several states. And, if it doesn't read as disjointed, that's just proof of my innate genius.

As I say every week: I get books in the mail to review, and I'm thankful for them. But I don't manage to review all of them -- some of them, in fact, I don't terribly want to read and review. (A personal message to any publicist reading this: not your books, sweetie. Yours are always wonderful. The ones from that other publishing house. You know the one.) And that's one reason why I do these posts every Monday morning: to note and say something about all of the books, even the ones that will sit on the to-be-read pile for so long that I forget about them, or forget why I wanted to read them.

Roc will be publishing the latest in Rachel Caine's "Weather Warden" series in August: it's called Cape Storm, it's the eighth in the series, and it will be a mass-market paperback like all of the others. I haven't really read this series -- I did read a chunk of one book as preparation for a meeting at Ace/Roc a few years back, but that doesn't really count -- but they've always looked like the kind of semi-soap opera contemporary fantasy that program does really well.

Also from Roc in August is S.L. Viehl's Crystal Healer, the (I believe) ninth "StarDoc" novel, about a genetically engineered interstellar surgeon. Again, I don't have any personal knowledge of these books, but I've read, off and on, her blog Paperback Writer, and she's got a grumpy but intensely professional tone there that is both smart and appealing.

It's been another two months, which means it's time for another volume of the dementedly wonderful Black Jack series by Osamu Tezuka to be published by Vertical. This time, it's Volume 6, which hits stores at the end of this month. I reviewed #1 and #2 for ComicMix, but not the later volumes -- though, as far as I can tell, they're all the same kind of nitro-fueled wackiness, and there's no real overall plot, so you could start here as well as anywhere.

I really, really need to read The Magicians by Lev Grossman, because the nice publicist at Viking e-mailed to ask me if I would be interested in seeing it, and I said I was. (That's one of my rules: if I ask for something specifically, I really do need to find time to read and write about it.) Grossman wrote one previous novel, Codex, which I did not read. He also writes and reviews books for Time magazine, and I think I complained about something he wrote there at least once. (It wouldn't be difficult; I complain about a lot of things.) The Magicians appears to be a post-Harry Potter literary fantasy novel, about a young man who goes to a secretive school of magic. There's also a map of a fantasy kingdom on the endpapers, so I suspect it becomes a portal fantasy at some point. The Magicians will be published August 11, and I really do intend to read and review it by then.

In the category of licensed novels that I couldn't evaluate at all fairly, there's Gears of War: Jacinto's Remnant by Karen Traviss, a novel based on a game that not only have I never played, but I've never knowingly heard of it before Del Rey started publishing books about it. This one is coming on July 28th, and Traviss is quite good at licensed-novel warfare, so -- if you do like the game -- this is probably at least an entertaining waste of time. I gather from the package that Gears of War is an Xbox game, which explains why I haven't heard of it; I'm of the other persuasion.

Next is a book I know I'll have to try out on my two sons (ages eight and eleven) -- My Rotten Life: Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie, Book 1, by David Lubar. It's a middle-grade novel from Tor's Starscape imprint, publishing in August. Nathan is a tween boy who, as you might have guessed, finds himself transformed into a zombie one day and wants to get back to being just a regular fifth grader.


I really hope that David Ratte's Toxic Planet isn't as thuddingly obvious as it looks -- it's a graphic novel (translated from the French and coming from Yen Press in August) in an unspecified future world that's so polluted that everyone wears gas masks all the time. It's also apparently funny. I'll save any further comment until I actually read it; it's the kind of thing I could see myself heaping scorn on, but -- if it actually is funny -- I could also forgive it quite a lot.

Enigma is the second novel by C.F. Bentley, and the sequel to her first novel Harmony. According to the letter, it's a "combination of military science, New Age mysticism and magic" -- which reminds me that it's been close to a decade since I saw anyone use the phrase "New Age" un-ironically. DAW published Enigma in hardcover; it was in stores last week.


The fourth and last book of Sherwood Smith's "Inda" saga is Treason's Shore, a big fat fantasy novel from DAW in August. If I remember right, Treason's Shore is just down the coast from the Deception Point, near the mouth of the Seditious River, and on the main trade route to the Confederacy of Apostacy. (I believe you can also see the Moon of Mutiny from there.) So just keep going the way you're going for about twenty miles, then turn left when you see Mount Treachery and follow the Connivance Trail for a fortnight. When you reach Castle Perfidy, you're almost there -- you can get a guide to the shore from there. (This vamping is brought to you by the fact that I've read none of the previous three books in the series, so I have nothing at all of substance to say. But Smith is generally a good writer, so, if you like this sort of thing, here's that thing that you like.)

The fourth novel in Kat Richardson's "Greywalker" series is Vanished, coming in in hardcover from Roc on August 4th. Richardson has always seemed smart and interesting when I've run into her online, so I feel guilty for not reading her books. This series is about a female P.I. (and I bet she's feisty -- contemporary fantasy heroines are nearly always called feisty, which seems to translate to "not a doormat") who got the ability to talk to the dead after being briefly dead herself (and not for tax purposes, either).

And last for the week is Flight, Volume Six, the latest annual anthology of comics storied edited by Kazu Kibuishi. It looks to be the same kind of suitable for nearly all ages material as the previous volumes, with most of the usual cast of creators returning for this one. And it's officially published by Villard as a trade paperback on July 29th, though you can probably find it in some stores right now, if you look hard. (I reviewed volume three here, and volume five for ComicMix; the other three volumes are still on my far-too-tall to-be-read pile.)

On Witches, and the Blades Thereof

Close to a year ago -- some books take more time to read than others, and some take months just to gather the courage to open -- Cat Eldridge of Green Man Press asked me to read and review a book for him. It had taken down one of his usual reviewers, he said -- she had asked to have it taken off her hands, and so Cat needed someone with a strong stomach, a way with invective, and a willingness to go big-game hunting.

(I mentioned this book when it arrived, so you readers can see for yourself just how long I have been dawdling over it -- and, by extension, how patient Cat must be.)

But everything must, eventually, come to an end. And so, now, it's my pleasure to link you to my review of The Witchblade Compendium, Volume One. I warn you: I'm a bit opinionated there, even for me.

(And, if that review makes you actually want to buy the book -- even though I'm standing there frantically waving my hands and trying to wave you away -- please use this link to do so.)

A Quote I Must Share

Context? We don't need no stinkin' context!

"Not that I particularly mind, you understand, but it’d be nice to know which comics I read involved cross-dressing prostitutes. My filing system is oddly specific."
- Chris Sims, Chris's Invincible Super-Blog

Brooklyn to Las Vegas

Today's activities:

• Get up early (for a weekend, at about 7) to make sandwiches and snacks and pack up the usual backpack.
• Cajole my two sons -- Thing 1 and Thing 2, currently eleven and eight years old -- into getting dressed and having a little breakfast.
• Bundle said sons into my car.
• Drive to Coney Island, via the impressive Verazzano-Narrows Bridge, which my boys were awed by.
• Park at the New York Aquarium, using my family membership to get in free. (Parking, sadly, wasn't free.)
• See various sea creatures for several hours.
• Get out onto the Boardwalk -- the first time I've ever been to Coney Island, actually -- and have lunch at a randomly-chosen establishment there.
• Ride the Cyclone, which we were astonished to see was running. (We knew Astroland closed down last year.) It's rickety and rattlely and very much the old-fashioned wooden coaster, and we loved it, despite the possible brain damage due to all the shaking.
• Back to the car to drive up to Prospect Park. (Drive all the way around the park, due to missing the entrance the first time. Whee!) Park, for free, at the Wollman rink. (Though we didn't have the cash to ride on the paddle boats, due to the Cyclone and lunch running through my wallet.)
  
• Wander through the park up to the Bandstand, for a free They Might Be Giants concert in the late afternoon.
• Enjoy the concert, particularly since the threatened rain never actually hit.
• Race back through the park to the car, pretending a circling helicopter is searching for us. (We may, perhaps, have been watching too many Bond movies lately, but it kept us all moving when we were pretty tired.)
• Drive back home, catching a drive-through dinner along the way.
• Collapse briefly, and then pack.

Tomorrow I will get up far, far too early and drive to lovely Newark Airport (don't talk to me about Liberty at an American airport) for a 7:35 AM flight to Las Vegas, where the high temperature for the next four days is expected to be 107. Feh. I expect not to leave the Bellagio, where I'm manning a booth at the ACFE annual meeting, unless forced outside by fire alarms or something similar.

And then I'm back here on Wednesday, and I hope things will settle down a bit for a while.

So I don't expect any substantial blogging tomorrow. On the other hand, I may be spending a lot of time in my Bellagio room, which could mean I'll catch up on things. We'll see which it ends up being, won't we?

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Listening to: Josh Ritter - Golden Age Of Radio
via FoxyTunes

Another Quote

You don't look so bad; here's another.

She gets off the bed and onto her knees to kiss the forehead of each sleeping boy. Wendy taught me to curse, matched my clothing, brushed my hair before school, and let me sleep in bed with her when bad dreams woke me up. She fell in love often, and with great fanfare, throwing herself into each romance with the focus of an Olympic athlete. Now she's a mother and a wife, who tries to get her screaming baby to sleep through the night, tries to stop her boys from learning curse words, and calls romantic love useless. Sometimes it's heartbreaking to see your siblings as the people they've become. Maybe that's why we all stay away from each other as a matter of course.

- Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You, p.321

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Listening to: Loop 2.4.3 - Zodiac Dust
via FoxyTunes

Sins of Blogging

One of the worst things about blogging is that sometimes you (by which I mean me) find yourself reading through random old posts of your own, chuckling at your own wit and thinking what a jolly fellow that writer was.

And down that road lies nothing good at all. So I need to stop it.

(But one of the Firefox add-ons I recently added is very bad for my self-control; I check to see what posts got hits every day, and look at some of them -- and AutoPager automatically loads up the previous post below that, and the previous post below that, and so on....)

Quote of the Week

"The girls around the bar shake themselves lightly in time to the music, pouting the way girls do when they dance, like they're experts in something we'll never understand. I need to stop looking at these girls. No good will come of it, You keep looking at girls like this and then one day you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror behind the bar, and if you're not yet too old, you're on the borderline, and the last thing you ever want to be is the old guy in the bar. There's no dignity in it."
- Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You, p.274

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Listening to: John Vanderslice - Fetal Horses
via FoxyTunes

The City and The City by China Mieville

The cliche goes that books are like a conversation -- they speak to each other and to the reader, some telling jokes, others grabbing the lapels and pleading, a few lying languidly back and rolling out unlikely tales. The City and the City, in that company, is that one guy at the party who seems personable and interesting, but keeps returning to some utterly insane pet theory. You want to like that guy -- his stories start wonderfully, and have great touches -- but then every other sentence is about the Trilateral Commission and you find yourself mentally disengaging from even the seemingly-sane parts of the conversation. But, if you stick with it, you just might find that everything that guy says makes sense in the end -- and then you have to decide if that means that he's just gotten you to drink his Kool-Aid.

The City and the City is a police procedural: gritty, street-wise, particular, grounded. But it's also set in a bifurcated city-state that could have come right out of Borges or, more pointedly, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. The setting is fabulist, which keeps dragging the narrative, and the reader's attention, away from the specifics of the police investigation -- the reader's mind keeps trying to reconstruct the entire plot as a metaphor or allegory, and that's just not what The City and the City is trying to do. For most of the length of The City and the City, Mieville whipsaws back and forth -- often within the same sentence -- between the grounded, street-level detective work of Inspector Tyador Borlu, and the existential issues of "unseeing" the other city.

The metaphor of the two cities is so strong, and so foregrounded, that it demands thought on nearly every page, but it also frustrates any thoughts running along the same lines as the mystery plot. The intertwined but utterly separate cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma cannot be investigated and questioned in the ways Borlu is tracing his murder case; they demand to be worked out metaphorically, like a fable. We can read Beszel and Ul Qoma as rich and poor, as black and white, as Christian and Muslim, as capitalist and communist, as any dichotomy we like -- it doesn't fit all of those equally well, and it's a deeper, richer metaphor than any one of those, but it inevitably makes the reader think of other commensal rivals, other thoroughly interwoven yin-and-yang partners.

So The City and the City keeps jarring the reader out of the story to think about the world -- as a Science Fiction or Fantasy book often will do. But The City and the City isn't a SFF book; it's meant to be a mystery, a story about a cop in a very real -- only the slightest bit alternate-historical, to allow this city and city to exist -- world. And that's the problem; it's a novel crosshatched as intensely as the most heavily-trafficked square in its fictional world, bouncing itself between mystery and SFF phrases and ideas in every paragraph, humming with motion as it vibrates between two genres, trying to be in both and neither at the same time.

Somewhere in the Balkans, or at least a vaguely defined "Eastern Europe," exists the conjoined twins of city-states: Beszel and Ul Qoma. They occupy the same space, as anyone else in the world would define it. But somehow -- and, apparently, no one in either city now has any idea how this came to be -- they are entirely, utterly separate. So separate that residents of each city must "unsee" events taking place in the other city, must pretend that half of the cars on the streets, and people on the pavements, and buildings in the sky do not exist at all. There are areas of "totality" of one city or the other, but this novel only rarely takes place in them; the reader begins to assume that they are very few and not well-trafficked. Streets, parks, squares, even buildings are "cross-hatched," with parts being totally Beszel and parts totally Ul Qoman -- and every citizen of either city must have a near-perfect mental map of both cities, and a gazetteer of the acceptable clothing, architecture, body languages, and gestures from each culture. Every Beszel, every Ul Qoman must already know what he is seeing to know what he is seeing -- and to know, most importantly, what he is not seeing.

For seeing the other city is "breach," and this is the very worst crime in both cities. So bad, in fact, that it's turned over to an super-secret agency called Breach, which in some ways is a servant of the two city-states' governments and in some ways is their superior. Breach is known by all in both cities to be everywhere, all the time -- all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful, and swift to anger, like the Old Testament God. Some technical matters are handed over to Breach by the governments, but the day-to-day cases -- where a man stares at a building in the wrong city, or talks to a person in the other city, or walks down the wrong street -- is handled swiftly and apparently mercilessly by the agents of Breach, who appear from nowhere and whisk the offenders away, usually never to be seen again. No one in either city knows anyone who ever became a Breach agent; Breach has no connection to their normal world -- except that it permeates that world entirely.

This is a fantastic setting for a fabulist story, and it resonates strongly with many real-world cities and urban issues -- from the obvious ones like the question of Jerusalem to more subtle issues like the "unseeing" of urban homeless and blight to the existential question of whether we can ever see something unless we already know what it is. Mieville has created a wondrous pair of cities, utterly suitable for a great fantasy writer, full of wonder and deep mysteries.

But then he used them to tell the story of Inspector Tyador Borlu, of the Beszel Extreme Crime Squad. And, in a mystery story, what the audience -- and the detective -- have to do is pay attention to everything, to sift out the important from the trivial. But, instead of being able to do that, we get Borlu going on for pages and pages about how this street is full of buildings he doesn't see, and how he's driving even though most of the traffic is cars that he's not officially noticing, and on and on and on. Mieville never lets the mystery plot get any traction; the reader is left thinking not that this is a particularly difficult case, but that policing these cities is utterly impossible, and that they should have collapsed into utter anarchy long before now. (And then the reader smiles at that thought, too, since it mimics what so many have said about so many cities so many times, and wonders if Mieville built that in as well.)

Perhaps everything holds together because of Breach and only because of Breach -- that certainly is Breach's opinion, and seems to be Mieville's. Criminals may be terrified of running away from a crime, for fear of putting one foot wrong and falling into the cold, implacable hands of Breach. It's possible; Mieville spends a lot of time in the first half of the novel building Breach up as an effectively supernatural agency. The characters he has talking about Breach are all cops, and mostly veteran, smart, powerful cops. But they don't complain Breach the way big-city cops complain about the FBI, nor do they have the kind of burning scorn those cops have for Internal Affairs. Borlu and his colleagues find Breach just as ineffable as the regular people of Beszel and Ul Qoma; they talk about Breach in vague platitudes and nonspecific references, showing clearly that even they don't have the slightest clue who Breach really is, how they do what they do, and what the extent of their powers is. They're not cops talking about their rivals or superiors; they're medieval penitents crouching before an angry, unknowable God.

The plot is set in motion by a murder -- a young woman was killed in one city and dumped in the other -- and Borlu investigates, only a bit above the minimum required, since obviously they'll be able to hand it all over to Breach. (And when did a good cop ever think that way? "Oh, just let the FBI/SEC/Internal Affairs/Special Crimes/ATF come in; they'll be sure to find the real culprits.")

That doesn't happen, which shocks and stuns Borlu and his colleagues. So he actually has to investigate this case -- actually has to do his job. (Which is the opposite of the standard police procedural plot, which usually sees obstacles thrown up to the detective at every turn.) But Borlu, partially because of the difficulties of investigating across cities, ends up spending most of his time dealing with more existential matters -- not seeing buildings and people and cars, not talking to suspects, not Getting Off His Ass and Knocking on Doors. It's reminiscent of mysteries set in corrupt and totalitarian societies, where the detective is just going through the motions until his superiors decide who the crime will be pinned on. But that's not going to happen here; if Borlu doesn't clear this murder, no one will.

So the case sees Borlu talking to the same people over and over, mostly about philosophical, existential issues of the two cities -- and, in particular, the semi-crackpot theory, which the dead girl may have believed, that there's a third city named Orciny hidden between Beszel and Ul Qoma. There's very little tracing of physical evidence, and hardly any serious interrogation of potential witnesses -- the murder is less the core of the plot than the Maguffin that Mieville uses to give Borlu an excuse to go first to Ul Quoma and then to more unexpected places.

The City and the City is a deeply frustrating book, one that has the lines of a mystery but continually thwarts all attempts to read it as one. But it's also not much more satisfying as a fantasy -- again, it has elements that read as fantasy, or hint at fantasy, but it collapses those as the book rushes to its conclusion. There are novels that take elements of two genres -- and often those are crime fiction and speculative fiction -- and work within both successfully. The City and the City, though, sets the genre conventions in opposition to each other, and oscillates between them, ending somewhere in the wastelands in between. It does have its strengths, and Mieville's muscular prose and compelling conception of the twinned cities make it a very readable, if ultimately frustrating book.