The Sword-Edged Blonde

I was writing my review as I read this book, and prepared to recommend it with some caveats, when in the last ten pages, the author pulled out something that pissed me off so badly I would very much like to mail him a half-pound of dead catfish by surface mail in August. I'm giving it three stars, because it's good writing, and perhaps it deserves four, but I'm just not capable of that kind of magnanimity.

First, in its favour, the book is a good example of the noire detective story in a fantasy setting. I've seen it done before, but I don't think I've seen it done better. The protagonist, Eddie LaCrosse, is not so cynical that he is unlikeable, if liking the protagonist is crucial to your enjoyment, as it is to mine. The characterisation is serviceable, if not precisely subtle and multi-layered, and the fantasy world approximately Lankhmar in general tone.

The quotes on the back describe this book as hilarious, but I actually didn't find it all that funny: not as in "that's not funny, I'm offended!" but rather I really only found one or two points where I recognized that humour was supposed to be (and IMO, succeeding at) happening. Probably a sensahuma mismatch, your mileage may vary.

Now, (with vague spoilers) on to my caveats, building to an unhinged rant: the hard-boiled detective novel really is the novel of defensive white man-pain, and don't expect that to change here. Eddie's left a trail of dead women behind him, which is tragic, really. For him, obviously. The funny thing is that Eddie seems to recognize that he's nothing special, and that the women he loved and lost deserved to live as much as he did (if not more); and yet, this is Eddie's novel, and it's littered with dead women who give his backstory a tragic zest.

At point, Eddie needs information from an effeminate homosexual-- who abruptly drops his mannerisms, claims they're a show, and grudgingly gives Eddie the information he needs-- after his partner has been assaulted and his business been threatened. Maybe it wouldn't get to me so much if he wasn't the only queer presence.

A minor annoyance as well: the title. There is only one narratively significant blonde in the book, but nothing makes her particularly 'sword-edged,' and it annoys me that apparently a snappy title is more important than respecting the actual fact of her.

At the end, however, our hero retires to his hole in the wall detective agency, and in walks the identical twin of a woman he lost many years ago. I cannot actually think of a way to make the substitution of one woman for another more insulting. Oh, sure, Eddie muses to himself that "I knew she wasn't Cathy, of course; one woman couldn't replace another," and yet, she walks into his life in the last ten pages of the book, and could not be more obviously signalled to be the woman meant to make him happy if Bledsoe had festooned her with garlands spelling "SHE'S THE ONE." It's one thing to have an epilogue hinting that the protagonist is on the verge of finding romantic happiness, but to use identical twins in this way; rather than a book which acknowledges the differences between individual women, this one brings a woman in and the punch-line is that she's exactly the same. She is doubtless distinct from her twin in many ways, but the book ends, and the reader never hears of it.