George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois (Eds)
Titan Books
Otago Daily Times, November 8th 2014
Rogues is a cross-genre anthology in which the central character is, in some shape or form, a scoundrel. The resulting is an interesting if patchy collection where a straight crime caper rubs shoulders with an extra-terrestrial con-job and historical mystery with supernatural fantasy.
Although it is a bold experiment and I sympathise with the editors’ attempt to combat the increasing fragmentation of the publishing market, I’m not sure it is entirely successful. In part this is a matter of personal preference – I’ve never been all that interested in scam stories and I don’t find rascals as fascinating as Martin and Dozious obviously do – but it also reflects the difficulty of arranging a collection around a central theme. For all the differences in style and form there are only so many possible variations on the classic trickster trope, and while some stories are both great fun and very clever, being confronted by 21 of them en masse can lead to aesthetic indigestion.
That said, I was pleasantly surprised by find myself enjoying stories by authors I would never otherwise have bothered with, and Gillian Flynn gets my vote for the best line of the year (“I didn’t stop giving hand jobs because I wasn’t good at it…I quit because when you give 23,456 hand jobs over a three-year period, carpel tunnel syndrome is a very real thing”).
Rogues is fun to dip into and I am certainly going to check out the editors previous two collections, Warriors and Dangerous Women. But I’ll be checking them out of the Public library rather than adding them to my own.
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