Murder by Magic Excerpt

By James Wray Nov 25, 2004, 6:49 GMT

It 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.

Introduction Copyright © 2004 Rosemary Edgehill