Dear all,

I’ve read a few fantasy murder mysteries in the last few months. Antonia Hodgson’s The Raven Scholar, Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Drop of Corruption, Mina Ikemoto Ghosh’s Hyo and the Deep-Rooted Demon. I also read something in a wildly different genre - Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette, translated by Kate Briggs.

I’ve always enjoyed murder mysteries. There’s something so satisfying about knowing the reason that the book exists. Some books are coy about this, but the murder mystery declares itself at the beginning. It tells you - someone will die, or appear to have died. Someone will have killed, or seem to have killed. Join me, and we’ll find out what’s what.

Something I find quite interesting about these fantasy murder mysteries, though, is that they have two challenges. They have to help you understand this world, which is quite different from the one we live in.

The Raven Scholar is in a fantasy world with a kind of caste system tied to various animals. A Drop Of Corruption (and its predecessor The Tainted Cup) are set in a land beset by a near-constant kaiju invasion. Hyo and the Deep-Rooted Demon (also a sequel - this time to Hyo the Hellmaker) exist in a Japan-inspired world in which gods and humans live side-by-side, but only on the island of Onogoro.

These are worlds that must exist under some logic that the author presents to us throughout, never taking too long to exposit detail lest we find ourselves bored.

But the book also has to be a good murder mystery. Since murder mysteries live and die by the ways in which we think about their central conceit, the worldbuilding now must do two things. It must make us interested in the world, which is different in many ways to our own. It must also be so internally consistent about those differences that you can make a good murder mystery about it. The details must be clear and easy to remember, but they also have to be weird and different.

There’s a lot of craft that goes into it, which is why even though I didn’t actually enjoy The Raven Scholar all that much (though I did read it all the way through) I liked how tricky it was with its twists and turns.

Lili is Crying is also a book that tells you what it’s about upfront. It’s about Lili, who is Crying. Set in the Provence district of France, Lili lives with her mother. Because she lives in France, we don’t really need to be told things like how do people build houses in France or what kind of magical artisans exist. Instead, Bessette can do something quite insane and pass it off as normal.

At no point in this book, which is written more like poetry than continuous prose, does any character’s dialogue appear in quotation marks. Bessette uses the em-dash (which has now become the hallmark of LLMs) to indicate dialogue. This means there’s no indication when a character stops speaking and starts thinking. What is public? What is private? The whole book seems to be asking this.

But the book is also clearly fantasy. Lili has a cousin who is 30. He is 30 at the beginning of the book, when she is in her early 20s, and also at the end of the book, when she is in her late 40s. At no point is this addressed. Time seems not to have passed for this one shepherd in Provence, even as the Second World War takes place in the background.

I would recommend Lili is Crying more than any of the fantasy murder-mysteries I read, even though the former are exactly the kind of book I can’t get enough of. Such is the nature of taste.

Next time - colour and whether it exists.

Cheers,

mvs