The Anubis Murders

Part of our salute to Gary Gygax:

After we decided to launch Always Go Right on Gary Gygax’s birthday, I decided I should read one of his novels.  I had never done so in the past, so I set out to remedy that by ordering one of his fantasy works, The Anubis Murders.

Since I’m very familiar with the genre of fantasy literature, the fact that I had never really heard any buzz on any Gygax novels meant my expectations were pretty low.  Based on the fact that D&D is, at it’s core, a pastiche of sword and sorcery fiction, I figured the Anubis Murders would be a generic sword and sorcery tale.  I also assumed the writing would not be great or I would have heard more about his novels.  Well, the writing isn’t great, but it isn’t bad either.  What really surprised me was that the tale isn’t generic at all.

I was expecting a classic hero’s journey in a fantasy setting, but what I got was a Sherlock Holmes mystery in a fantasy setting, with a lot more sexual tension between Holmes and Watson. 

The very idea that this novel belonged to the mystery genre as well as the fantasy genre was my first clue that Gygax’s work was far from standard fare.  I’ve been thinking of how many other fantasy/mystery combos I’ve read and I haven’t come up with many.  The first one that sprung to mind was the excellent and underrated Garrett, P.I. series by Glen Cook.  But that has a definite Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett “hardboiled P.I.” feel to it that couldn’t be further from the Holmes end of the mystery spectrum.  I vaguely remember some mystery/fantasy short stories in the sci-fi/fantasy monthly magazines I convinced my high school library to order, but I’m looking for novels here.  If anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them as I’m interested in this sub-genre.

I also found the setting to be fairly inventive.  The novel is set in Yarth, which is an alternate Earth in which magic plays a large role.  So, instead of London, we get Londun, and some of Earth’s institutions, such as the Bow Street Runners, exist in some form on Yarth as well (check out this cool flash game for more on them).  Now, this whole alternate magical earth is hardly creative in and of itself.  But the main character and many of the elements of the story are Egyptian, and Gygax really does a great job with the Egyptian flavor throughout the novel.  The various systems of magic in Yarth can be quite different in nature and seem very well thought out by the author.   I found this a refreshing change from the usual fare.

The hero (the Sherlock Holmes character) is not what you would expect either.  Setne Inhetep is a tall, bald Egyptian wizard-priest, known for solving mysteries for the Pharaoh.  The Watson character, Rachelle, is a bit more traditional, a beautiful woman warrior.  She is ostensibly Setne’s slave, though she stays willingly.  There is definite romantic tension between these two.  I found a bit too much drooling over Rachelle in the narrative: “The blue-black curls, finely featured face, and superb curves certainly qualified her for inclusion in even an emperor’s harem.”  But she does display intelligence as well as valor and beauty.

The crime-fighting duo is contacted concerning the murders of various important personages throughout the world of Yarth which seem to involve the Egyptian deity Anubis.  This plot is fairly intriguing once things get moving.  We get a bit of Rachelle’s “backstory” but we don’t get a lot of exposition into the background of Setne Inhetep (how he became a wizard-priest, his work for the Pharaoh or any personal details).  That’s fine with me, as I prefer the in media res approach to pages of exposition.

On the whole, I enjoyed the mystery, with a few notable issues.  For one, Setne seems to suffer from “Batman Syndrome.”  Just as Batman would bust out with the “Bat Shark Repellent” or some other gadget in the old tv show at the perfect time, so Setne too often seems to have just the perfect charm hidden in his robes for the situation at hand.  Since much of the magical interplay is quite detailed and logical, though, I can forgive this.

I also wonder if Setne would be more of an appealing character if he displayed a weakness, or character flaw.  Even Holmes had his morphine injections. 

This paragraph has some minor spoilers so skip it if you wish.  There is a portion in the novel where Rachelle is “out of the action.”  This use of the damsel in distress trope struck me as painfully cliche.  What’s more, since she was absent for such a chunk of the story, Gygax missed out on the opportunity to further the interplay of the two and build on their interesting relationship.  A “Moriarty” character is also introduced late in the book, seemingly out of nowhere.  But since Doyle did something similar, I really can’t be too annoyed by it.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that Gygax simply isn’t a great writer.  He isn’t a bad writer either,  but his prose can be strangely uninviting and flat.  You do tend to notice this less as the novel goes on.

Even with these issues, I found myself reading far longer then I had planned in order to find out what happened next.  And I actually plan to continue on with this series because I am genuinely interested in the fate of the characters.  So, all in all, if the idea of a mystery set in a fantasy world appeals to you, you could do worse than this novel.  And I am impressed by the pure creativity Gygax demonstrates in this unusual book.