Murder by Magic
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Contributions copyright: Introduction, copyright © 2004 by Rosemary Edghill; “Piece of Mind,” copyright © 2004 by Jennifer Roberson; “Special Surprise Guest Appearance by . . . ,” copyright © 2004 by Carole Nelson Douglas; “Doppelgangster,” copyright © 2004 by Laura Resnick; “Mixed Marriages Can Be Murder,” copyright © 2004 by Will Graham; “The Case of the Headless Corpse,” copyright © 2004 by Josepha Sherman; “A Death in the Working,” copyright © 2004 by Debra Doyle; “Cold Case,” copyright © 2004 by Diane Duane; “Snake in the Grass,” copyright © 2004 by Susan R. Matthews; “Double Jeopardy,” copyright © 2004 by Peggy Hamilton-Swire; “Witch Sight,” copyright © 2004 by Roberta Gellis; “Overrush,” copyright © 2004 by Laura Anne Gilman; “Captured in Silver,” copyright © 2004 by Teresa Edgerton; “A Night at the Opera,” copyright © 2004 by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller; “A Tremble in the Air,” copyright © 2004 by James D. Macdonald; “Murder Entailed,” copyright © 2004 by Susan Krinard; “Dropping Hints,” copyright © 2004 by Lawrence Watt-Evans; “Au Purr,” copyright © 2004 by Esther Friesner; “Getting the Chair,” copyright © 2004 by Keith R. A. DeCandido; “The Necromancer’s Apprentice,” copyright © 2004 by Lillian Stewart Carl; “Grey Eminence,” copyright © 2004 by Mercedes Lackey; Afterword, copyright © 2004 by Rosemary Edghill.
Copyright © 2004 by Rosemary Edghill and Tekno Books
Introduction copyright © 2004 by Rosemary Edghill
All rights reserved.
Aspect
®
name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books.
Aspect
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: October 2004
The Hachette Book Group Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-446-51054-7
Contents
AT THE CROSSROADS OF MAGIC AND MURDER
Special Surprise Guest Appearance by . . .
The Case of the Headless Corpse
PART II: Murder Unclassifiable
PART V: Murder Most Historical
AT THE CROSSROADS OF MAGIC AND MURDER, PREPARE TO BE SPELLBOUND . . .
“Witch Sight”
by Roberta Gellis: Innocence is not always what it seems in this tale of a young witch charged with the murder of her best friend.
“Doppelgangster”
by Laura Resnick: Somebody is whacking mobsters all over town, from Skinny Vinny Vitelli to Johnny Gambone. But if Vinny and Johnny are six feet under, who are these wiseguys who look and talk just like them?
“Dropping Hints”
by Lawrence Watt-Evans: The wizard’s murderer was one of five identical homunculi. One of them was lying . . . but how to tell which?
“Au Purr”
by Esther Friesner: From a Nebula Award–winning maestro noted for her love of wicked puns comes a catty tale that is sure to give “paws.”
“A Tremble in the Air”
by James D. Macdonald: Family secrets aren’t the only things buried in this drawing-room mystery featuring Orville Nesbit, psychic researcher.
Rosemary Edghill
I
t is a truism of publishing that sooner or later every author wants to commit murder, and I have proof: a new take on the mean streets from Laura Resnick, a charmingly chilling story from Carole Nelson Douglas, alternate police procedurals from Josepha Sherman and Keith DeCandido—detectives amateur, private, and decidedly outside the law, in settings ranging from the haunted galleries of Elizabethan England to the worlds of the Eraasian Hegemony. And from Jennifer Roberson, perhaps the strangest detective of all.
I hope you’ll enjoy these twenty stories ranging from the past through the future, set both here and . . . Elsewhere.
When I set out to assemble
Murder by Magic,
the contributors had only two rules to follow to write a qualifying story: there had to be a crime (preferably murder), and magic and the supernatural had to be somehow involved, either in the commission or in the solution of the crime.
As you will see, that left plenty of room for variation, from James Macdonald’s very traditional psychic investigator to Will Graham’s wisecracking supernatural adventurers to Josepha Sherman’s deadpan hilarious civil service magicians to Diane Duane’s lyrical tale of a policeman’s last case. And, yes, in Debra Doyle’s Eraasian country-house “murder,” a homage to detective fiction of the 1920s and a tragedy in the Classical sense of the word.
When it came time to choose an order for the tales in
Murder by Magic,
I found that the stories seemed to fall naturally into five categories that turned out to pretty well encompass most of the variations on today’s supernatural detective story. Some stories were easy to fit into my five pigeonholes—a historical occult mystery certainly is, after all, and a historical mystery with animated chairs is naturally fantastical. But others I hesitated over until the last minute—was “Overrush” a Murder Most Modern or a Murder Unclassifiable? Which subgroup did “The Case of the Headless Corpse”
really
belong in? Was “Snake in the Grass” Unclassifiable or Fantastical? At last, with much trepidation, I made my final decisions. You may agree with me, or you may not—the fun of getting to be the editor is that I get the final say about what goes where. And certainly you’ll have your own favorite stories out of all those presented here, as I have mine (I’m not telling which ones mine are, but here’s a hint: there are twenty of them).
Opinions exist to differ, but one thing I’m sure we’ll both agree on is that, based on the evidence, the Occult Detective is alive and well a century and more after his “birth”—though Doctor John Silence might be hard put to recognize some of his literary descendants.
And whether it’s a story of clandestine and unexpected magic set in the real world, or a tale set in an alternate universe in which magic openly replaces science, the rules for a good mystery—supernatural or otherwise—are always the same: find the killer and bring him (or her, or even it) to justice.
I hope you’ll enjoy your foray into the shadows, where impossible crimes are commonplace. I’ve gotten you some excellent guides.
Come.
There’s nothing to fear.
Murder Most Modern
Jennifer Roberson
Jennifer Roberson has published twenty-two novels in several genres, including the Cheysuli and Sword-Dancer fantasy series and the upcoming Karavans saga. She has contributed short fiction to numerous anthologies and has edited three herself. Though the story’s heroine is indisputably
not
the author, she does nonetheless live with ten dogs, two cats, and a Lipizzan gelding and has frequent—if one-sided—verbal conversations with all of them.
I
n the Los Angeles metro area, you can pay $250K-plus for a one-bedroom, one-bath bungalow boasting a backyard so small you can spit across it—even on a day so hot you can’t rustle up any sweat, let alone saliva. And that’s all for the privilege of breathing brown air, contesting with a rush “hour” lasting three at the minimum, and risking every kind of “rage” the sociologists can hang a name on.
But a man does need a roof over his head, so I ended up in a weird little amoebic blob of an apartment complex, a haphazard collection of wood-shingled boxes dating from the fifties. It wasn’t Melrose Place, and the zip wasn’t 90210, but it would do for a newly divorced, middle-aged man of no particular means.
Interstate 10 may carry tourists through miles of the sere and featureless desert west of Phoenix, but closer to the coast the air gains moisture. In my little complex, vegetation ruled. Ivy filled the shadows, clung to shingles; roses of all varieties fought for space; aging eucalyptus and pepper trees overhung the courtyard, prehensile roots threatening fence and sidewalk.
I found it relaxing to twist off the cap of a longneck beer at day’s end and sit outside on a three-by-six-foot slab of ancient, wafer-thin concrete crumbling from the onslaught of time and whatever toxins linger in L.A.’s air. I didn’t want to think about what the brown cloud was doing to my lungs, but I wasn’t motivated enough to leave the Valley. The kids were in the area. Soon enough they’d discover indepen-dence, and Dear Old Dad would be relegated to nonessential personnel; until that happened, I’d stay close.
Next door, across the water-stained, weather-warped wooden fence, an explosion of sound punched a hole in my reverie. I heard a screen door whack shut, the sound of a woman’s voice, and the cacophony of barking dogs. She was calling them back, telling them to behave themselves, explaining that making so much racket was no way to endear themselves to new neighbors. I heartily concurred, inwardly cursing the landlady, who allowed pets. She was one of those sweet little old widow ladies who were addicted to cats, and she spent much of her income on feeding the feral as well as her own; apparently her tolerance extended to dogs, now. Dogs next door.
Barking
dogs.
Muttering expletives, I set the mostly empty beer bottle on the crumbling concrete, then heaved myself out of the fraying webwork chaise lounge with some care, not wanting to drop my butt through
or
collapse the flimsy aluminum armrests.
The dogs had muted their barking to the occasional sotto voce
wuff
as I sauntered over to the sagging fence, stepped up on a slumping brick border of a gone-to-seed garden, and looked into the yard next door. When they saw me—well, saw my head floating above the fence—they instantly set off an even louder chorus of complaint. I caught a glimpse of huge ears and stumpy legs in the midst of hurried guard-dog activity, and then the woman was coming out the back door yet again to hush them.
I saw hair the color some called light brown, others dark blond, caught up in a sloppy ponytail at the back of her head; plus stretchy black bike shorts and a pink tank top. Shorts and tank displayed long, browned limbs and cleanly defined muscles. No body fat. Trust her to be one of those California gym types.
She saw me, winced at renewed barking, and raised her voice.
“Enough!”
Amazingly, the dogs shut up.
“Thank you,” she said politely, for all the world as if she spoke to a human instead of a pack of mutts with elongated satellite dishes for ears and tails longer than their legs. Then she grinned at me from her own wafer-thin, crumbling, three-by-six concrete slab. “They’ll quit once they get used to you.”
“Those are dogs?”
Her expression was blandly neutral. “Not as far as
they’re
concerned. But yes, that is what their registration papers say.”
“They’re not mutts?”
“They’re Cardigan Welsh corgis.” She made a gesture with her hand that brought all three of the dogs to her at a run, competing with one another to see who’d arrive first. “I work at home much of the time, or I’m not gone for long, so I’ll try to keep them quiet. I’m sorry if they disturbed you.”
I didn’t really care, but I asked it, anyway, because once upon a time small talk had been ingrained. “What do you do?”
Abruptly, her expression transmuted itself to one I’d seen before. She was about to sidestep honesty with something not quite a lie, but neither would it be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. “Research.”
And because I had learned to ignore such attempts, and because it would provoke a more honest response, I asked her what kind.
Across the width of her tiny yard, the twin of mine, and over the top of a sagging fence that cut me off from the shoulders down, she examined me. A wry smile crooked the corner of her mouth. “You must be the private detective. Mrs. Landry told me about you.”
“Mrs. Landry’s a nosy old fool,” I said, “but yes, I am.” I paused. “And I imagine
she
could tell me what kind of research you do.”
Unexpectedly, she laughed. “Yes, I imagine she could. But then, we met when she hired me, so she ought to know.”