I’ve long believed Warren Ellis is a crime-fiction writer at heart.  The first series of Wolfskin was a clear example of sword-and-sorcery comics, but had that distinct Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars feel, a dyed-in-the-wool crook playing both sides.  Comics like Aetheric Mechanics and Captain Swing are solid steampunk works, yet revolve around cops-and-robbers shenanigans.  One of the driving tenets of our work here at Boomtron is that any good story is going to have a vital aspect of crime fiction in there, even if it’s a small one, and the oeuvre of Warren Ellis is about as nearly perfect an example of that as I can find.

I. Introduction
II. The Holy Trinity – Chester Himes, Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines
III. Gone, Forgotten and Waiting for Discovery – Robert Deane Pharr & Clarence Cooper Jr.
IV. The Best of the Rest
V. Lost to History – Jerome Dyson Wright & Charlie Avery Harris
VI. The tip of the Iceberg (but not necessarily Slim) – Books for further consideration
VII. Conclusion

I. Introduction

Years ago I came across a veritable treasure trove of crime fiction. I was at a local library looking through the books that were for sale when I saw a forgotten box of books tucked away in the corner. Curiosity got the better of me and what I discovered inside the box were worn paperbacks with dated covers by authors that I had never heard of. Books with titles like Whoreson, Poor Black and in Real Trouble and The Jones Men. Books that featured characters with names like White Folks, Kenyatta and Giveadamn Brown. All of these books would tellingly bear the stamp of the Maryland DOC.

Comic book nerds are easy targets.  Fish in a barrel and on crutches, to boot.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but going to down to comics conventions and making fun of grown men dressed in tights or in Klingon make-up is not unlike heckling the Special Olympics.  Maybe it’s less guilt-inducing, but that’s about it.

History as it is written is full of holes, of secrets and of omissions. The so-called “secret histories”, fictional or otherwise, are the stories of the forgotten and the suppressed, the stories of those who have been deprived of a voice to tell their version of the past. Ekatarina Sedia’s The Secret History of Moscow is not a story about Moscow per se, but rather a novel about those broken and maladjusted people who lack a voice of their own and who don’t quite “fit” into our modern world of progress, improvement and self-realization.

Maledicte marks Lane Robins’ first effort as a novelist, and a glance at the cover – which depicts and androgynous face in profile, eyes covered with an ornate Venetian-style domino, the title written with gothic type and the tagline: “A novel of love, betrayal, and vengeance” – it quickly becomes clear that Robins is aiming at a brand of dark fantasy of manners and courtly intrigue that have been very successful in the hands of writers like Jacqueline Carey and Ellen Kushner.

Like any other year, 2005 was going to be a heavy book-buying year for me, and like every other year there are those dozen or so books I anticipated even more so than the rest of the worthy choices that I would be collecting to add to my book cases. The added anticipation of these “choice” works is born of pure personal speculation, books I have been waiting for, or authors who were above even being just proven commodities. It is out of these books I thought the cream of this year’s crop would derive from.

Jo Graham embarks on an ambitious project with her debut Black Ships as she Graham reinterprets the story of The Aeneid, re-locating Prince Aeneas and his quest for a new homeland to the late Bronze Age of the Mediterranean world.

Empire in Black and Gold is the debut of British author Adrian Tchaikovsky and the first installment in a trilogy titled Shadows of the Apt. In his debut Tchaikovsky gives us a heroic narrative where a small group of travellers offer resistance against overwhelming odds – a narrative pattern typical of epic fantasy. Empire in Black and Gold is, however, a fantasy that is far from generic. Rather it offers a story of politics, war and ruthless imperial aggression set in a highly imaginative world inhabited by nations that model themselves in the style of their insect totems:

The ability to boil something down to just one word has power. To use that word is impressive but to know the meaning of the word is the key to unlocking a world that exists behind the façade of reality that every man faces. To know the meanings of the true powers of the world is a gentlemen’s club of exclusivity and some degree of intimidation. Casanova knows how to use these acronym as the magic words they are, and it is building on a rich history of spy words always meaning so much more, but being able to say it all in just a handful of syllables.

If you’ve been at all concerned with the state of fantasy in the past few years, you’ve probably noticed a drastic shift in genres.  The market has split wildly into many segments, including that bastion of pseudo-gothica and girls with tight pants, urban fantasy.

The Time Weaver is the fifth and final book of Shana Abé’s drakon series, which is a historical fantasy-romance about, yes, glittering dragon people.  It follows Honor Carlisle, the only drakon Gifted with the ability to weave time, and her quest–aided or hampered by her adoptive mother who Dreams the future–to change the path of her destiny.  Not the part where she ends up with Alexsandru, the dark drakon prince of her dreams in every time she’s ever weaved herself into, but the part where everything and everyone she loves end up destroyed while she can only watch it happen.

The fact that Warren Ellis has a run on any X-Men title should be enough to merit pause and reflection. That he was then able to craft a science fiction dirge about mortality and creation after the pop sensibilities of Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s run is a feat unto itself. Reading through the first two arcs of Ellis’ run I was struck by the notion this comic was completely about death. On many levels. The death of a dream, the death of creation, and ultimately, the death that always comes for us and the choice we must make in its face.