Do we need another new variation on the Holmes/Watson duo?
Of course we do! We love the trope.
Build a fantastical futuristic world for our crime solvers to play in, and I’m in!
Robert Jackson Bennett’s latest novel The Poisoned Cup
delivers complex world-building, richly imagined horror scenes, and elements of pulp fiction and whodunnits. It's weird and wonderful, with maddening characters, all memorable, from the lowliest to the loftiest.
You may not find the brilliant Ana Dolabra all that endearing, but her much-maligned assistant Din (yes, we hear echoes of “dim”) is an engaging narrator who stays impeccably calm and polite no matter who’s dishing out the verbal abuse. And everyone seems to dish it to him.
Dinios Kol is a very young and constantly underestimated assistant to the clever, condescending Ana Dolabra. Ana is profane, constantly dropping F-bombs and snark. Din takes it all in stride, even when his boss tells him he has “the exact right appetite for bland, bloody-minded drudgery that makes an assistant investigator excel.”
Din is an “Engraver.” He observes and remembers every detail at a crime scene. He memorizes volumes of information. Ana is a genius, but an eccentric. She almost never leaves the house. She sends Din to the crime scenes, then wears a blindfold when he comes back to recite his hours-long reports. How is this efficient or practical? Never mind. It makes her memorable with her vivid red scarf over her eyes. Her yellow eyes. With bone-white hair and “vaguely feline” mannerisms, not to mention her total lack of a social filter, Ana is more like a “mad housecat” than the greatest investigator in the Empire. She stays indoors, often blindfolded, as “Too much stimulation drives a person mad.” Ana repeatedly asks Din to bring her “moodies,” mood-altering drugs, to alleviate the monotony that afflicts the brilliant. Will he come through with illegal drugs for her, or is he too scrupulous to comply? (I’m not telling.)
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Din, with his spotty academic record and inexperience, a boyish-looking age 20, always surprises whoever is at the crime scene. Thwarting expectations is what he does best.
The opening scene is atmospheric, with the stone walls of a politician's estate emerging from a mist. A man is dead, killed in a most unusual way. "A very large clutch of trees had spontaneously grown from within the deceased, tearing him apart from the inside," or some contagion that resembles a forest, and other victims soon follow. The details are lurid, so let us look instead at the setting. (You're welcome!)
The Empire of Khanum is vast, complex, and mind-boggling. Lowly workers keep the empire running while corrupt politicans kill to keep their secrets. People are augmented with extraordinary traits, from hulking giant soldiers to the “Sublimes,” whose minds are altered to have superhuman skills. Lanterns filled with glow-worms illuminate buildings made of living plants.
It took a while for me to start liking Ana, who has “a gift for inciting outrage.” She sounds insufferably full of herself, but she makes up for it with her appreciation of the lowly workers.
“That’s the real Empire right there, Din,” she tells him as they pass a crew of muddy workers replacing cracked bricks. “The boys and girls who fix the roads.” People love the Legion with their swords, she says, but “it’s the maintenance folk who keep the Empire going. Someone, after all, must do the undignified labor to keep the grand works of our era from tumbling down.”
I especially love Ana for this: “The Engineers make the world. Everyone else just lives in it.”
What a world it is. The Empire “spends endless amounts of blood and treasure defending a whole continent from sea beasts the size of small mountains,” leviathans that wipe out whole cities. Throughout the novel, tremors and alarm bells interrupt the murder investigations.
“It often made it hard to go about your everyday tasks,”
Din narrates. “What was the point of fetching food or fixing up your house or caring for your family when a titan could break through the walls and kill you and a thousand others like you in a matter of hours? What was the point of doing anything, really?”
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Ana finds plenty to do, or for Din to do, while she solves the murder mystery. Hundreds of pages and surprises unfold.
The important part, for me, is that Ana shrugs off the sense of futility that plagues poor Din. “It’s not all walls and death and plotting!” she tells him after unveiling the culprit. ”Nor is it dreary dispensations and bureaucracy! We do these ugly, dull things for a reason - to make space where folk can live, celebrate, and know joy and love.”
Now that’s my kind of Sherlock.
I’ve enjoyed other variations on Sherlock, but this one is the strangest I’ve encountered yet. In a 2015 Wall Street Journal article “Slipstream Fiction Goes Mainstream”, Anna Russell and Jennifer Maloney define slipstream fiction as “the new weird,” mixing science fiction, fantasy or horror and slipping it into mainstream or literary fiction.
“The Poisoned Cup” is a great read, no matter what genre you call it. So many rich and varied details bring Din and Ana to life. Their world is weird and intriguing, a great escape for a few hours from the cold of the Midwest in this brutal start to winter of 2024.
Thank you, Net Galley and Random House Publishing Group/Ballantine/Del Rey for an eARC of this book.
Robert Jackson Bennett is the author of American Elsewhere, The Troupe, The Company Man, Mr. Shivers, The Divine Cities trilogy, and The Founders Trilogy.
His work has received the Edgar Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Phillip K. Dick Citation of Excellence, and he has been shortlisted for the World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Locus Awards.
He lives in Austin with his wife and two sons, one of whom is very large and one of whom is very loud, and he focuses on writing and not maintaining his website.
The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan, #1)
Pub date: 06 February 2024
