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Miss Wildthyme
& Friends Investigate
MAY 2010
1. THE FOUND WORLD
2. THE IRREDEEMABLE LOVE
3. ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR SHEILA
4. THE SHAPE OF THINGS
Obverse Books’
third volume of transtemporal shenanigans takes a slightly
different format to the previous two, dispensing with the short stories in
favour of four linked novellas. Each story stands comfortably alone, but
together they make up a single, over-arching narrative. The linking
MacGuffin is a mysterious yellow perfume bottle with uncanny properties,
which makes only the briefest of cameos in the first story but becomes
essential to the plot of the fourth. More than that, the four storylines
are linked by and through the ever-expanding universe that has sprung from
the minds of Paul Magrs and his equally loopy associates.
Jim Smith’s The Found World kicks things off in highly enjoyable
style. While ostensibly a sequel to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic work
The Lost World, events soon grow beyond the scope of Doyle’s
original protagonists, Edward Malone and Professor Challenger. The author
concocts a world filled with fictional characters from a manner of
sources, be they further Doyle works (a starring role for an older John
Watson) or more obscure sources (Molly Malone puts in an appearance, but I
don’t think she’s related to Edward). It’s a Kim Newman or Alan Moore
styled version of the Edwardian period, held together by pure verve and a
sense of fun. That’s not to say a few dinosaurs don’t make it into the
mix; there’s even mention of a poor Brontosaurus who is saddened to
discover that it’s nothing more than a misidentified Apatosaurus.
Among the palaver, we’re introduced to the idea of Incrementals, entities
that exist because the collective imagination insists that they must. It’s
a fine exp-ansion of the Obverse world to yet more peculiar boundaries.
While the novella spends a good deal of time introducing and then dropping
characters, when the narrative kicks in its rewarding, leading to a final,
spectacular confrontation with none other than Count Dracula - and finally
explaining just why he always comes back from death…
Nick Wallace, best known to Who fans as the author of the eighth
Doctor novel Fear Itself, provides the second story. The
Irredeemable Love features the Manleigh Halt Irregulars, the peculiar
band of time-hopping sleuths introduced in the Panda Book of Horror
(in the short story The Delightful Bag by Paul Magrs). It’s a work
of thick, potent prose; a chilling and seductive murder story. Each of the
Irregulars gets their turn as the focus of the investigation, before it
rewinds to explore the background to the terrible events that are
occurring in what was once a respectable household. The telling is
somewhat opaque in places, occasionally to the point of confusion, but the
richness of the prose conjures up an evocative atmosphere and is worth
persevering with. It stands alone as an effective chiller, while at the
same time linking into the further mysteries of the book.
The multi-talented Cody Schell, as well as providing glorious graphic
design for the book,
is the author of tale three, the wonderfully-titled Elementary, My Dear
Sheila. It features a return from his character from his previous
story in The Celestial Omnibus, the Mexican masked wrestler Señor
105. The mysterious masked man invites various acquaintances to a small
shindig and bookgroup, the likes of which include a snake-skinned rival
wrestler; an overweight nightclub owner; and a sort of were-tiger, who
appears as a Japanese man but dresses as a stereotypical Englishman. All
of which pale in comparison to the eponymous Sheila, who exists as a
sentient isotope of helium safely encased in a party balloon. Before long,
murder is afoot, which soon descends into a truly bizarre series of
adventures involving a mystical lost city, time-travelling aliens and a
horrific zombie plague (and more). Utterly
daft and utterly charming, the overall impression is of an author bursting
with ideas and too little space to explore them. Give Schell a novel and
he could rival Robert Rankin for far-fetched fiction.
Having made brief appearances in the preceding three instalments, Iris and
Panda finally return as the stars of the fourth and final story, The
Shape of Things, by Obverse supremo Stuart Douglas. Characters and
events from the earlier tales come together in unexpected ways to impact
on what, at first, seems to be a simple case of Iris and Panda assisting
with a murder investigation. Before we know it, Panda has been radically
inflated, increased to the human-like stature seen on the books cover (in
the rather beautiful illustration by Bret M Herholz). Not only that, but
his intellect has been increased in kind. Soon, Iris has become Panda’s
sidekick, as they zoom around time and space solving mysteries and showing
off,
a situation that Iris doesn’t like one bit. We even get to explore Panda’s
deeper character, something treated with more seriousness than one might
expect from a stuffed animal.
Nonetheless, events can’t continue like this, for there is still the
enigma of the yellow bottle and its arcane contents. Getting Iris and
Panda back into the centre of events helps give this story more focus than
the preceding three, and the enjoyably daft tale quite cleverly ties up
previous events while still leaving them thoroughly baffling. Although it
fails to truly work as an overarching story, the four novellas are linked
enough to satisfy, and are individually distinct enough to provide the
variety we’ve come to expect from the short story collections. Although I
still prefer that format, this new approach is a successful experiment and
one that could only benefit from being repeated.
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