The best of C. L. Moore

Northwest of Earth
Jirel of Joiry

Catherine Lucille Moore, better known as C.L. Moore, was one of the few women regularly writing and getting published in the science fiction and fantasy genres during the great era of pulp fiction during the 30s and 40s. She wrote extensively, sometimes in collaboration with her husband, Henry Kuttner – their joint stories were often published under a pseudonyms, most notably Lawrence O’Donnell and Lewis Padgett .

In her solo writing, she created two of the greatest characters (in my not-so-humble opinion, of course) to grace the pages of the science fiction and fantasy pulps – Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry.

Northwest Smith is the quintessential mercenary, adventurer and rogue – willing to take on any job if the price is right, outside the law but grounded in his own sense of honour, smart, bold and not easily taken in, but with a certain weakness for women in distress, particularly if they are beautiful and exotic – and Northwest Smith’s worlds, where humans are newcomers, barely children among the ancient and often decadent alien races that have gone before, some of those women can be very exotic indeed.

But Northwest Smith, memorable creation that he is, was not all that different from the heroes of a good many pulp stories. To my mind, CL Moore’s best creation is the tough-as-nails, brawling warleader who makes no allowances for her gender, the unmatched warrior Jirel of Joiry. As tall and strong and as skilled with a sword as any man, Jirel was one of my earliest heroes – proud, fierce, competent, fully in command of the men who fight and if necessary die for her. Jirel was the kind of woman that no one else was writing, or would write again until a good 40 years later.

The Jirel of Joiry stories – most of them, anyway – have been available in a single volume for many years now, going in and out of print under a variety of titles, but never vanishing completely. The Northwest Smith stories have just been recently released after a hiatus of more than 50 years in a single volume containing a forward by C. J. Cherryh and a previously uncollected story, “Quest of the Starstone,” co-authored by Moore and Kuttner in which Moore’s two finest characters meet and fight side by side.

Naturally, I snapped up the new release of Northwest of Earth, and was most happy to spend several hours lost in the lush writing and fantastic tales of ancient and unknowable evils; this of course was more than enough of an excuse to pull my worn copy of Jirel of Joiry off the shelf and indulge myself further. They just don’t write like that any more – which is probably a good thing, because there is a thin line between gloriously extravagant and overblown when it comes to this style of prose. But Moore was one of the masters, and it’s good to have stories like “Shambleau” and “Black God’s Kiss” close at hand.

Between Heaven and Hell

The Demon and the City, Liz Williams

The second of Williams’s Detective Investigator Chen mysteries, The Demon and the City, was as usual an intriguing and well-written story, but unfortunately, rather light on Detective Inspector Chen, who does not appear until about half-way through the book. The bulk of the preliminary investigation falls to his newly assigned demon associate Zhu Irzh, whom we met in the first book – and while I do enjoy the character, I’m more interested in Chen, and in the interplay between the two, than I am in the former vice cop from Hell. However, when Chen does appear on the scene – and even more so when his former patron deity Kwan Yin arrives to help them save Heaven and Earth – the full flavour of the first novel is back.

The first novel gave us a quite thorough tour of Hell – this novel shows us much more about Heaven in this unique fantasy based on Chinese religious traditions, and furthermore gives us some hints about how the different religious traditions in this fantasy near-future Earth interact.

It’s a tale of a complex plot involving a Chinese goddess, the patron saint of dowsers and fung shui practitioners who is dissatisfied with her Celestial position, Jhai Tserai, an Indian deva or spirit masquerading as human, who is the head of the very powerful Paugeng corporation, and a large cast of humans, demons, Celestial beings and assorted other creatures.

The story opens with the gruesome death of wealthy heiress Deveth Sardai, whose mutilated corpse disappears from the morgue almost before a bored and sexually frustrated Seneschal Zhu Irzh can begin his investigations. Deveth, it turns out, is the former lover of Robin Yuan, a lab employee at Paugeng whose current assignment is to monitor what she thinks of as “the experiment” – an otherworldly being, believed to be some kind of demon or other Hellspawn, who is being subjected to experimentation and modification under the direct orders of Jhai Tserai.

Williams has more than just action going on here, of course. There are some very interesting perspectives on the nature of good and evil as the story progresses and we see characters from Heaven, Hell and Earth acting and interacting in unexpected ways.

In short, a rollicking good read with some philosophical underpinnings, but I do hope there’s more of Detective Chen as well as Seneschal Irzh in the next volume of the series.