Firebird (2011) by Jack McDevitt

In 2021, I began a small expedition into science-fiction territory with the Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath series, written by Jack McDevitt, which takes place a hundred centuries in the future as humanity has spread itself across the Milky Way System – accumulating ten-thousand years of history, space-age artifacts and unresolved mysteries. Alex Benedict, "the world's most celebrated antique dealer," earns a living with Chase Kolpath tracking down rare, long-lost artifacts and dragging answers to age-old historical mysteries out of the mists of time. So the series is a distant cousin of the detective story and McDevitt cited G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories as a source of inspiration, while readers compared the series to a Space Opera Ellery Queen.

The series began with the world-building A Talent for War (1989), in which Alex Benedict tracks down a legendary and long-lost warship, but the mystery element emerged in the next two novels. Polaris (2004) is a locked room mystery, of sorts, concerning a scientific expedition that vanished from a sealed space yacht and Seeker (2004) concerns the historical mystery of a lost space colony from the Third Millennium. Regrettably, Echo (2010) turned out to be the first dud in the series undermining the world-building of the previous novels with an ending that wanted it both ways and an epilogue that made everything even worse. So began to wonder if I had gotten all out of the series that was of interest to me and the time had come to abandon it, but then got news a new title was forthcoming, Village in the Sky (2023). It sounded intriguing enough to see if the next was a return to form and perhaps continue with the series after all. 

Firebird (2011) is the sixth title in the series and begins when Karen Howard contacts Rainbow Enterprises to tell them she inherited the estate of her sister, Elizabeth Robin, who was married to Christopher Robin. Karen Howard has some personal items that belonged to her brother-in-law that she wants to put on the market. Benedict and Kolpath are tasked with getting the best price for the collection.

Christopher Robin was a controversial physicist who "explored the fringes of science" like whether consciousnesses can survive death, the multiverse and "thought maybe we were getting occasional visitors from one" – like sightings of unidentified starships that fade out ("ships from another reality?"). So he was someone who "asked questions nobody else dared to ask" and "looking for breakthroughs in areas that are considered beyond the pale by most of his colleagues." But what gave him fame was his mysterious, never explained disappearance. One day, Robin had "come home from somewhere, had gotten out of a skimmer at his front door, and never made it into his house." Nobody knows whether he accidentally fell into the ocean and the body was carried out to sea, got pushed or simply disappeared voluntarily. Maybe the physicist had "walked across a bridge into an alternate reality."

So more than enough angles to drum up public interest and drive up the demand for the Robin artifacts, but, once Benedict begins to dig into the mysteries the physicist left behind, he simply can't let go. Decades ago, Robin witnessed one of these phantom vehicles that have been reported over the centuries and was able to get pictures of it. Curiously, Robin had been present at previous, never explained sighting of another unidentified ship. When they learn Robin had been buying and losing yachts at an alarming rate, it became impossible to ignore. Was he actually trying sending "the yachts into one of these alternate universes he was always talking about" or something else?

A fascinating premise for a futuristic-historical, quasi-mystery, but the mystery of Robin's disappearance and his equally mysterious and secretive experiments become something of a MacGuffin. Benedict and Kolpath eventually figure out what Robin was up to, but the implications of their discovery shifts the story in a different direction with the physicist becoming a bit of an afterthought by the end (ROT13/SPOILER: arire ernccrnevat be trggvat erfphrq, ohg na rdhngvba naq fuvc ner anzrq nsgre uvz). However, it makes an engrossing science-fiction yarn and has a really good subplot centering on the advanced A.I. that's are all over the place. While hunting for clues, Benedict and Kolpath go to Villanueva, "colonized during the Great Migration" and "gone now almost as long as Adam and Eve,” which became a religious settlement that suffered an end-of-days catastrophe – getting swallowed by "a massive dust cloud." The people who refused to evacuate died and only their A.I. systems came out of it unscathed, which somehow remained operative and tidied everything up. But they're incredibly hostile to humans. So the planet is declared a no-go area. Benedict and Kolpath eventually come under attack after landing, but they manage to escape and rescue an Elementary School A.I. (Charlie) who had pleaded to be rescued ("I thought of what it would be like, trapped in an elementary school for seven thousand years"). This has some serious consequences when Charlie asks them to help rescue the other A.I. trapped on Villanueva. Something that damages and stains Benedict's reputation and public image.

So, in the end, Firebird is a much better science-fiction novel than hybrid mystery and therefore misses the appeal of Polaris and Seeker, because it's the historical mysteries that attracted me to the series in the first place. However, I can also see McDevitt needed to go heavy on the science-fiction in Firebird to setup the next two novels, Coming Home (2014) and Octavia Gone (2019), which appear to resolve a plot-thread that was introduced in the first book. Hopefully, they'll prove to be Polaris and Seeker of the second (or is that third?) phase in this engrossing series. But, speaking as a detective fanboy, it's a little tragic that this series was not conceived as a full-blown science-fiction mystery hybrid. So many of the worlds depicted in this series would lend themselves perfectly for all kind of different detective and thriller stories (see previous reviews for suggestions).

To cut a long, rambling review short, Firebird comes recommended to fans of the series, but, if you're only interested in the mystery element, you should (for now) stick with the first three titles in the series.

Worlds Apart: Joseph Commings' "The Scarecrow Murders" (1948) and Jack McDevitt's "In the Tower" (1987)

There were two short stories on the big pile that I wanted to get to sooner rather than later, but the stories differ vastly in nature, one being a classic locked room mystery and the other an archaeological science-fiction tale, which gave me the idea to discuss them together – under the flimsy umbrella-theme of "worlds apart." One concerning a stumbling, shotgun-wielding scarecrow and the secrets of an archaeological dig site on an alien world. So my apologies in advance, if it devolves into some overlong, vaguely coherent rambling. 

Joseph Commings' "The Scarecrow Murders" was originally published in the April, 1948, issue of 10-Story Detective Magazine and brings Senator Brooks U. Banner to a small, rural town in the upper reaches of New York State. Banner is a detective who simply can't help himself and when he heard Cow Crossing had been the scene of an unusually coldblooded, unexplained murder he was "like a kid is tempted with custard."

The victim in question, Beverly Jelke, had been swimming in the creek when she had "half her head had been blown away by the charge of a double-barrelled shotgun" and her murderer likely "fired from the heavy brake that overhung the banks at that point." But who? Beverly Jelke had been bitterly quarreling with her brother, Hudson, to the point of nearly coming to blows. She had wanted to sell the failing family farm, but Hudson flat out refused. And that gives her brother a potential motive. So the elephantine Senator Banner, bombastic as ever, decides to invade the family farm to invite himself and Judge James Z. Skinner to stay the night ("I'll raid your ice chest" as "he patted his punchbowl tummy").

Beside the Hudson siblings, the other people who live, or work, on the farm include Hudson's beautiful wife, Celeste. His ugly, scarecrow-looking eccentric uncle, Magnus Fawlkes. A young, hired farmhand, Wayne Markes, whose mind is entirely occupied by a girl student over at Foxchase Hall. During the night, the sound of a shotgun blast awakens the whole farm and the sprawled body of Hudson, "part of his scalp and his face blown away by buckshot," is discovered on the porch step – which gains an otherworldly quality by the first lights of dawn. The murderer's "heavy, ungainly shoes" left a clear track of prints out towards the open fields. However, the single line of footprints led straight to a gaunt scarecrow that "idly flapping its empty arms at them." A pair of battered, heavy soled shoes were standing under the scarecrow and they "fitted the tracks." A nicely done reversal of the usual single track of footprints normally found these type of impossible crime stories, but the scarecrow is not done yet.

So, on the following night, Banner quarantines everyone by locking them in their bedrooms with a chair placed under the doorknob as an added security, but that night he hears the clumping sound as if the heavy shoes "were hanging loose on feet that were mere bones—or sticks!" This is followed by a scream and the roar of another shotgun blast. Somehow, the scarecrow had materialized in a locked bedrooms and nearly took a third victim before, shotgun in hand, vanished without a trace. There's more than enough here to satisfy the rabid locked room fan with the problem of the scarecrow's footprints being the better of the two, which is original in presentation with a perfectly serviceable solution. Regrettably, the second locked room-trick is nothing special, but not to the overall detriment of the plot because here it couldn't have worked any other way. Just like his previously reviewed short story, "The Grand Guignol Caper" (1984), "The Scarecrow Murders" is arguably a better detective story than a locked room mystery. A richly clued, tapestry-like plotted detective story that works, as a whole, without depending on a single trick, twist or surprise. I didn't catch on to the murderer's identity until the attempted murder in the locked bedroom. Commings added another winner to his name and shows he could have been a credible threat to Edward D. Hoch's title as the King of Short Stories had he been a little more prolific.

On a side note, I previously reviewed Paul Halter's Le masque du vampire (The Mask of the Vampire, 2014) in which I pointed out Halter's greatest weakness is the lack of historical color or characters who act out-of-time – only to encounter a murderer here who could have come creeping out of Halter novel. Maybe his characters didn't always act entirely out of their period. So, if you like Halter, Commings' "The Scarecrow Murder" comes highly recommended.

Last year, I began to dig into Jack McDevitt's science-fiction series featuring two space-faring antique dealers, Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath, who track down and sell ancient artifacts a hundred centuries in the future. There's always a historical mystery attached to their potential merchandise that has waited for centuries, or even millennia, to be solved. So the series has been compared to a space-age Ellery Queen, but McDevitt named G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories as the source of his inspiration. McDevitt focuses on answering the question "what happened?" instead of whodunit, why and how. You can call the series a very distant cousin of our beloved detective story.

Recently, I reviewed the fifth title in the series, Echo (2010), which has the two antique dealers getting involved with the star-crossed legacy of an alien hunter, Sunset Tuttle, who spent a lifetime scouring McDevitt's sparsely populated, largely unexplored galaxy for other intelligent species – only finding a few so-called "living worlds" teeming with animals and plant life. Or did he? Echo began promising enough, but ended up being the weakest title encountered thus far. And one that left me with a few questions. One of the questions being why the story only referenced the Ashiyyur, only intelligent species and technological civilization humanity has encountered, but ignored the ruins of an alien civilization on Belarius that was briefly mentioned in A Talent for War (1989). If you have read my previous reviews, you probably noticed the ruins on Belarius has become somewhat of an obsession. I find it incredible such a wonderful and fascinating setting was only mentioned in passing in a series centering on archaeological and historical mysteries of the far-flung future. It seems like such a waste, right? Well, it turns out there's a sort of short prequel story set in the Alex Benedict universe that answers some of my questions.

Jack McDevitt's "In the Tower" was first published in Terry Carr's Universe 17 (1987), an anthology series of original science-fiction short stories, which was relatively recent reprinted in Cryptic: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt (2009). 

"In the Tower" sets up one of the locations from A Talent for War, a settled water world called the Fishbowl, which shares its binary star system with Belarius. There are two very different kind of secrets at the heart of the plot that get terrifyingly twisted together in the final pages. One of the mysteries concerns the melancholy and untimely death of a painter, Durrell Coll, whose work went from "the exuberance of his early period to the bleak unquiet masterpieces of maturity" without "an evolutionary stage" – a series of works "progressively more introspective, technically more accomplished." So his grieving lover, Tiel Chadwick, is determined to get to the bottom of what drove Durrell to his death. A search that brings her to the Fishbowl where she eventually hears the story of an ill-fated attempt to excavate the ruined cities on Belarius.

Firstly, the plot-thread concerning Durrell's depression can be boiled down to a character-driven whydunit of the modern school with a neatly done science-fiction hook. However, the solution and how it tied (cruelly) to the archaeological excavation on Belarius betrayed Chesterton's influence. Secondly, the story about that excavation answered some of my questions. I now get why the Belarians were only mentioned in passing and ignored altogether in Echo. They were a feudal civilization that "never got past a medieval stage" and funding to continue excavations were cut because, whatever they left behind, "could make no conceivable contribution to Confederate technology." And then there's a wide variety of exotic, highly evolved predators who snatched people away or devoured their prey "in full view of a work crew." Not exactly what Tuttle had in mind when searching the stars for another civilization.

I'm still of the opinion Belarius is wasted as a setting and should be used for a cross between Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939) and Aliens. Just let a billionaire/amateur archaeologist finance a new expedition to Belarius accompanied by armed mercenaries who have to clear out the site and erect a fence around it. A killer can then pretend they missed one of these clever predators, hiding somewhere in the ruins, as a camouflage for a series of murders. Add to this the archaeological/historical mysteries of the Belarian civilization (e.g. how was it possible for creatures with "pale, bloated, gas-filled bodies" to construct massive buildings without an archaeological trace of "heavy equipment of some kind"). Such a novel has all the potential to be a science-fiction mystery classic rivaling Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel (1953).

So, all in all, I really enjoyed these two vastly different short stories for vastly different reasons. One is an excellently plotted, Golden Age detective story with a locked room/impossible crime angle and the other a science-fiction story that provided some context to the series it inspired. But enough rambling for one day. The next review is going to be of that obscure, long out-of-print Dutch detective novel I alluded to in my review of Echo.

Echo (2010) by Jack McDevitt

Jack McDevitt is an American science-fiction writer specialized in xenoarcheaology, history of the future and the countless mysteries hidden in the unfathomable depths of deep-time, which formed the foundation of the ongoing series starring two antique dealers, Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath – who run their business more than 9000 years in our future. The series has been compared to a Space Opera Ellery Queen, but McDevitt cited G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown as his inspiration. McDevitt is more interested in answering the question "what on Earth happened" than who, why or how. So their cases concern valuable, often long-lost artifacts and the historical mysteries attached to their potential merchandise. 

A Talent for War (1989) has Alex Benedict hunting down a legendary warship that got lost among the stars centuries ago. Polaris (2004) is the Mary Celeste of the far-flung future as Benedict and Kolpath try to figure out what happened to a scientific expedition that vanished as by magic while observing an ancient star counting down its final hours. Seeker (2005) took even a step further with a hunt across space-and time for an entire colony that went missing during the pioneering days of space colonization, which is pure science-fiction with a historical mystery as engrossing as James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977). And an ending to match its premise!

So the steady increase in scope and quality lead me to skip the fourth, thriller-ish sounding novel, The Devil's Eye (2008), in favor of the fifth entry in the series. 

Echo (2010) opens with Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath, of Rainbow Enterprises, coming across a strange object, "a pale white stone tablet," on an auction website and attracting heir attention are the even stranger, indecipherable symbols engraved on the front – an unknown language that can't be identified. Apparently, the tablet was used as a lawn ornament in front of the house that once belonged to the late Sunset Tuttle. A somewhat tragic figure in his day.

Sunset Tuttle had dedicated practically his entire life to searching the stars for alien civilizations and sailed his starship, Callisto, around "the Orion Arm in his fruitless quest." Not entirely fruitless. Tuttle discovered hundreds of so-called biozone worlds of which "only a handful had actually been home to living things." These rare, living worlds "possessed forests and creatures that scampered through them" and "seas teeming with life," but never had he come across a civilization or traces of past intelligence. McDevitt's universe is vast and largely empty as life, particularly intelligent life, is extraordinary rare. The only other intelligence humanity has come across are the Ashiyyur, or the Mutes, but, over the centuries, humanity has began to see them more as annoying neighbors they have to get along with than aliens.

As an aside, A Talent for War briefly mentioned the ancient ruins of a third, intelligent species on a now sun-scorched, dangerous planet, called Belarius, which had been humanity's only evidence anything else had ever gazed at the stars – before their disastrous encounter with the Mutes. Somehow, this is never mentioned in the series again and is noticeably absent in Echo. You would expect it would be a site of prime interest to an exploring hunting for clues of an alien civilization.

So the stone tablet and symbols makes Benedict extremely interested, but the tablet proves to be an elusive Macguffin as Benedict and Kolpath can't seem to get their hands on it. This forces them to take the long-way round by delving into the past of the explorer, track down the people he knew (including a hermit and his wife who have an entire planet to themselves) and rummage the archives and records. This time, the archives and records have precious little to offer coming on top of several assassination attempts and constant stonewalling to the point where there are people who prefer death over divulging their closely-guarded secrets. Consequently, the middle portion of the novel presents the best and worst of the story.

On the one hand, the constant stonewalling without uncovering anything to propel the plot forward comes at the cost of the pace, which really slows down the story. This is padded out with a temporary rift between Benedict and Kolpath who wanted to get away from all the desk work and being called "a glorified grave robber" to her face. Not all that unreasonable. But it really slowed down the story. On the other hand, the stonewalling in combination with the premise hammered down Benedict and Kolpath had a paradox on their hand of Chesteronian proportions. Sunset Tuttle had devoted his entire life to finding someone else out there to the point that his name became a verb, "to tuttle," which meant "to persist in an endeavor with no hope of success." There was a general agreement that, if he had found aliens, he would have organized a parade and "ridden down Market Street with an alien mayor." So, if he was successful, why did he keep quiet?

That brings us to the second problem of Echo. A Talent for War and Polaris had nicely balanced openings and conclusions, while Seeker stands out as the star of the series by under promising and over delivering. 

Echo promised a little too much and wisely began to temper my expectations as the ending came in sight, which I found acceptable enough as it was initially presented. Although it retreaded the ending from a previous novel and McDevitt appeared to have been in two minds about the nature of the disturbing secret (ROT13/SPOILERS) svefg fhttrfgvat gur cbffvovyvgl bs n cynargnel trabpvqr, orsber frggyvat ba n qvfnfgre gung pbhyq unir orra ceriragrq). I honestly think the first option would have been more in line with the middle portion of the story, but liked the Twilight Zone atmosphere towards the ending as they began to close in on the truth. I hoped the epilogue would neatly tie everything up by addressing the unanswered questions, but it turned out to be a case of wanting to have it both ways and that rarely works – which kind of ruined everything that came before it. The short epilogue (ROT13/MORE SPOILERS) erirnyrq gung gur pvivyvmngvba Orarqvpg naq Xbycngu qvfpbirerq ba Rpub VVV nera'g gur erzanagf bs n uhzna pbybal gung jnf ybfg gb uvfgbel, ohg uhzna-ybbxvat nyvraf jub bayl unir sbegl-gjb puebzbfbzrf n fbzrjung fybjre chyfr engr naq urnegorng. This was casually thrown out in the last two pages as if it shouldn't have been a major plot point of the story itself.

It also left me with a nagging question. How is it possible that (ROT13/MORE SPOILERS) gung gjb, vqragvpny-ybbxvat uhzna pvivyvmngvbaf pbhyq nevfr vaqrcraqragyl ba qvssrerag cynargf znal yvtug lrnef ncneg? V fhccbfr gurer'f fbzr vagreany ybtvp va gur frevrf gb rkcynva vg nf gur yvivat jbeyqf unir ryx-yvxr znzznyf, qvabfnhe-fvmrq ercgvyrf naq frnf svyyrq jvgu bprnavp yvsr. Fb lbh pbhyq fhttrfg gung gurer'f bayl jnl gb qb yvsr, vagryyvtrag be abg, va ZpQrivgg'f havirefr, ohg jurer qbrf gung yrnir gur gryrcnguvp, zvaq-ernqvat Zhgrf? Vg jbhyq znxr gurz n pbzcyrgr naq hggre nabznyl va gur xabja havirefr. Naq vs gurer'f nal xvaq bs pbaarpgvba orgjrra gur uhznaf jub bevtvangrq ba Rnegu naq gur uhznaf sbhaq ba Rpub VVV, gurl'er abg ernyyl nyvraf, ner gurl? Zber yvxr irel qvfgnag pbhfvaf. Which ever interpretation you pick, you're either left with an unexplained anomaly or something invalidating the epilogue. And somewhat undermines the world-building of the previous novels. Just to tack on an “ah, gotcha” moment at the end.

Regrettably, Echo is the weakest entry in the series so far, but not for a lack of ideas or ambition. But how those ideas were executed. And an ending that wanted it both way. The epilogue really didn't help.

I intended to tackle one of those obscure, long out-of-print Dutch detective novels next, but I might return to Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr before taking that gamble. So stay tuned!

Seeker (2005) by Jack McDevitt

Last year, I took an excursion into the deep antiquity of the faraway future with the first two archaeological science-fiction mysteries in Jack McDevitt's Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath series, A Talent for War (1989) and Polaris (2004), who work as antique hunters, dealers and explorers a hundred centuries in the future – a time when humanity had spread out "across more than a hundred worlds." Since humans are going to human, wherever they go, human expansion to space has left its mark on the universe. Abandoned, long-lost space habitats and stations older than the pyramids in our time. Starships disappearing into the void of space and ended up in the seam between history and myth. Derelict ships and failed outposts orbiting distant planets and stars. Even some ancient ruins of a dead alien civilization on a now sun-scorched planet. 

So humanity in McDevitt's universe has accumulated a huge pile of strange stories, unsolved mysteries, dangerous secrets and a ton of collectible artifacts during their nine-thousand years of exploring the stars and settling planets. Some of those secrets and artifacts can spell trouble when the wrong people become interested, which gives the series its "detective pull" and the novels have been likened to Ellery Queen in space. McDevitt cited G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries as the prime influence of his science-fiction stories as his stories are not so much about the who or why, but "what in Heaven's name is going on here?" The series is perhaps best described as having a "passion for the past, and for the relics that survive the ages, that wait for us in the dark places where no one goes anymore." An attitude perfectly exemplified in the third and arguably best (so far) of the Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath novels. 

Seeker (2005) won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2006 and the story is more science-fiction than a space mystery, but the central mystery and solution is in the same league as James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977). A pure science-fiction novel with a genuine and engrossing mystery, which was so good we appropriated it. And they could very well lose another one! :)

Amy Kolmer approaches Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath, of Rainbow Enterprises, to appraise a ceramic cup, "sort of thing you might buy in a souvenir shop," but there's "something antiquated" about the green-and-white eagle etched into its side and the Mid-American English symbols – dating the cup back to the Third Millennium ("nobody spoke English in the Fourth"). A little research reveals the cup is possibly linked to the legendary colony ship, Seeker. During the middle of the Third Millennium, the Earth had become overcrowded, torn by war and wrecked with environmental problems. The political leaders of the time had become "increasingly ruthless" and America became a repressive theocracy. A growing group of dissatisfied people, known to history as the Margolians, yearned for freedom and, when interstellar travel became a possibility, they decided to leave Earth.

On December 23, 2688 (a mere 666 years in our future), the Seeker carried the first nine hundred people to their secret planet, Margolia, which was the first of three trips together with its sister ship, the Bremerhaven. They made three trips each over a two-year period carrying more than five thousand people to a new world. Their leader told the world that where they were going "even God wouldn't be able to find them." And he was right. Some of the original colonists returned to Earth when the ships came back to pick up more immigrants, but they had no idea where Magnolia was located and the colony, as well as its two starships, became lost to history and passed into legend. So the cup is an eye-gouging rare collector's item, if it really came from the Seeker, but verification is going to take a lot of work.

Chase Kolpath is Alex Benedict's "pilot, social director and sole employee" whose official title is executive assistant and she does most of the legwork during the first part of the story. She begins with tracing back who owned the cup, which begins with their client's burglarizing boyfriend to a forty year old mission of the Department of Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research. This will send her all over the galactic neighborhood.

Chase visits a space station orbiting a black hole, named Morinda, where thousands of researchers and scientists "were measuring, poking, taking the temperature of, and throwing assorted objects into, the beast." Dumping trash into a black hole sounds like something we would do. However, I particularly liked Chase's visit to one of the worlds of the Ashiyyur, or the Mutes, who were the only intelligent species of aliens humanity encountered and our "technological equals" – acting as "sometime friends, sometime rivals, occasional enemies." During her stay on that world, Chase has to go to the Ashiyyurean Museum of Alien Life-forms crammed with stuffed creatures and plants plucked from "living worlds," but they also have the Hall of the Humans dedicated to "the only other known technological species." Ashiyyureans placed us high on the evolutionary scale (just "a step below the Ashiyyur"), even though "our primary mode of communication was yapping." Fair enough.

While the two relic hunters are busy at work on the puzzle of the lost colony, trouble is brewing on the sidelines as Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath have accusations leveled against them of being nothing more than grave robbers and looters. An attack spearheaded by a "near-legendary archaeologist," Casmir Kolchevsky, who's pushing for some serious legislation "to stop the thieves and vandals who make a living looting the past." But there someone else lurking in the shadows who tries to take Benedict and Chase out in more drastic way. So there are some crime fiction elements to be found here, but they were not very inspired and the murderous attempts felt like a retreat of previous novel. Nothing to the detriment to the overall plot as they only served as the B-stories to pad out the main storyline. The main storyline became better, and better, as the astonishing truth of what happened to the Magnolian colony began to come into focus and it's a genuine rug-puller! A truth even more fascinating and intriguing than its premise that both fires up the imagination and makes you disgusted with being stuck in the 21st century.

So not much else can be said about the second-half of the story without giving anything away, but what I can do is unnecessarily pad out the review with an alternative solution that occurred to me while reading.

McDevitt's universe is a lonely, mostly empty space where intelligence is concerned. Only humans, mutes and whoever build those ruins, on Belarius, were the only intelligent creatures who had ever gazed at the story. Since this is a science-fiction novel (not a detective story proper), I began to wonder if perhaps one of the colony ships had accidentally flew too close to a black hole, got flung back in time and settled on a planet where they evolved into the Ashiyyureans – while the second ship simply got lost in space. So the only intelligent species humanity encountered among the stars were human after all (it kind of made sense), but eventually rejected the possibility because surely they would have discovered, sooner or later, a genetic kinship between their species.

By the way, the worlds of the Ashiyyureans is perfect for an impossible crime in the spirit of Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun (1957)! The Ashiyyureans are a race of telepaths who live in "a society where everybody's thoughts are open" and can boost about don't having "many hypocrisies." Not easy to get away with murder when your thoughts can be openly read. What if a murder happened and everyone's thoughts turned out to be pure and innocent? There's an in-universe solution to the problem. I mentioned in my review of Polaris that there's mind wipe and personality adjustment technology to give criminals an entirely new personality, psyche and memories. What if the murderer uses the technology to create a near-perfect copy of his own personality and memories. Removing only the incriminating thoughts and memories of the murder. After the murder is committed, the culprit reboots his brain and a pre-programmed A.I. removes the device, which then wipes its own memory before replacing it with near-perfect copy without the incriminating memories. Sure, the tempering with the A.I. is bound to be discovered, but that can function as both a red herring and a tell-tale clue.

So, as you can see, this series has been a fun, unexpected back road in my own exploration of the detective story and look forward to Echo (2010). Yes, I'm skipping The Devil's Eye (2008) as it seems to be more of a thriller than archaeological space opera mystery.

Polaris (2004) by Jack McDevitt

Several months ago, I probed A Talent for War (1989) by Jack McDevitt, an American science-fiction author, who specialized in futuristic archaeological and historical science-fiction mysteries asking that age-old question, "what in heaven's name is going on here" – strongly influenced by G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown. McDevitt prefers the how-the-hell-was-it-done over the whodunit and cites he has "always been a devotee of the locked room murder" with Chesterton's "The Arrow of Heaven" (The Incredulity of Father Brown, 1926) as a personal favorite. So you can probably understand how a pure science-fiction writer appeared on my radar. 

McDevitt's admiration for Chesterton's detective fiction found an expression in his series about a space-faring antique dealer, Alex Benedict, who plies his trade among the stars and settled worlds a hundred centuries in the future. Trouble usually knows where to find him through his business dealings in rare and valuable space age artifacts or sticking his nose a little too deep in a historical mystery.

Alex Benedict was introduced as a one-and-done deal in A Talent for War, but the various characters, fascinating premise and the vast, richly detailed setting would have been wasted in a standalone and so he was brought back in the 2000s – adding seven novels and two short stories to the lineup. I believe these additional novels is what earned McDevitt a comparison with Ellery Queen as most of his attention in the first novel was directed to an impressive and convincing piece of world-building. A multi-world civilization, spread out across the stars, populated with a thousand billions human beings and one other intelligent species, the Ashiyyur, that humanity has come across during its exploration of the Milky Way. But there are still some serious limits to the technology that allowed humanity to colonize distant planets. And the humans who inhabit those planets are still very human. They left behind more than ten thousand years of history, space age urban legends and a ton of unsolved mysteries.

There aren't that many examples of world-building in the traditional detective story. You have Christopher St. John Sprigg's Death of a Queen (1935), Peter Dickenson's The Poison Oracle (1974) and Seimaru Amagi's Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998). Robert van Gulik's reconstruction of Tang Dynasty-era China in his historical Judge Dee series has been likened to the world-building more commonly associated with the science-fiction genre. So I'm always impressed when someone can make an entire, living and breathing, civilization appear out of thin air.

However, as impressive as the world-building was in A Talent for War, I was glad to discover there was an actual detective hook in the second novel with an intriguing central puzzle. A puzzle that can be summed up as the Mary Celeste in outer space!

There were fifteen years between the publication of A Talent for War and Polaris (2004), which came with a notable change. The books are now narrated by his assistant and superluminal pilot, Miss Chase Kolpath. She has been with him since the Corsarius affair, twelve years ago, which "led to some rewriting of history" and "a small fortune for Alex." This time, they're confronted with another problem that was left open ended in the history books.

Sixty years ago, "six of the most celebrated people in the Confederacy" boarded a luxury, the Polaris, to accompany a scientific expedition to a 6-billion-year-old star, Delta Karpis, "drifting quietly through the great deeps with its family of worlds" – now counting down its final hours. A year previously, a white dwarf entered the planetary system, "scattering worlds and moons," became "a dagger aimed directly at the heart of Delta Karpis itself." So there are several ships closely observing the approaching destruction, which is both spectacular and tragic as one of the planets is the home of "large animals, living oceans, and vast forests." But has this closely observed collision anything to do with what happens next? Polaris is ready to make the jump back home and Captain Madeleine English tells the communication officer at the Indigo Station, "departure imminent," but the starship never appeared on the other side.

Another starship was dispatched to the last-known position of the Polaris and was discovered a week later, substantially off course, without a trace of the VIPs or crew! There's no sign of a struggle or evidence of a hurried departure. Someone, or something, eliminated "the sole witness the investigators might have had" by shutting down the ship's AI. This suggested to some people "the existence of a supernatural power out there somewhere" that's "capable of invading a sealed ship before an alarm could be sent." Since there was no real answer to be found, the incident passed into the realm of conspiracy theories with the most popular explanations inevitably involving a third, unknown race of aliens. Even ghosts enter the picture as people claim to have seen spirits on the now renamed ship.

Sixty years later, Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath have discovered and are in the process of exploring the ruins of a giant, eighteen hundred years old Shenji outstation orbiting a blue giant on the on the edge of Confederacy space. The locations of many of these outstations were lost to time and finding one will get the attentions of archaeologists, historians and collectors. Such as Winetta Yashevik, archaeological liaison at the Department of Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research, who plan to open a new wing to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Polaris incident. Survey is planning "a two-week-long extravaganza" with a banquet and an auction to sell off some Polaris artifacts that were locked in storage for decades. Alex and Chase seize the opportunity to pick some choice items for themselves with the outstation as exchange, which is both a stroke of luck and a harbinger of doom. A huge bomb explosion at the Survey destroyed the entire Polaris collection except for the artifacts currently in Alex and Chase's possession. That's where the problems really begin for the two antique dealers.

The customers who bought the artifacts receive strange visitors, one aptly named Flambeau, who show great interest in the artifacts, but nothing appears to be stolen or anything to suggest criminal intentions – besides, you know, the bombing of the Survey. But this changes when an attempt is made to get Alex and Chase out of the way. More than once. So, naturally, they begin a deep dive into history as they interrogate virtual rendered avatars of the people ("a projection backed by a data retrieval system") who went missing and talks with some very old witnesses and somewhat lonely AI stuck on a distant outstation. While they're rooting around in the past, they come across a string of missing persons with dodgy records and even some (suspected) murders. More importantly, two hot button issues of the future begin to drift to the surface.

Firstly, one of the VIPs on the Polaris, Professor Tom Dunninger, had devoted his life to cracking the secret of life extension, or practical immortality, "who was reported to have been on the track of a major breakthrough" before boarding that doomed starship. There were rumors that "a few immortals were actually created" who were still out there somewhere. Stuff of legends. However, it got the professor in the crosshairs of some people and groups who believed it would lead to even more over population, which might seem silly when you've got an endless, practically empty, universe to explore and colonize. But there's a logical reason given for this concern. Technically, they could move people from a densely populated world to the virtually empty super continent on Sacracour, but the 1064 superluminals of the Confederacy has an average passenger capacity of twenty-eight people. Just try moving even a fraction of the eleven billion people on Earth to Sacracour with those numbers. So not everyone was happy with Dunninger's work during a time when people already had an average lifespan of more than a hundred years. Secondly, there's the mind wipe and personality adjustment technology used to give incorrigible criminals an entirely new identity, psyche and memories, which comes with more ethical exclamation and question marks than the death penalty. I'm honestly surprised its use was implemented without a huge conflict or an outright, multi-world war. I think mind wipes is something people would go to war over, if it was forced on them.

So the backdrop here is as alive as in the first novel, but what about the mystery? The detective pull of the plot? You have to keep in mind that Polaris is not a traditionally-structured, or plotted, detective story, but the central puzzle was pretty good with the problem of how the people disappeared from the derelict Polaris counting as a legitimate locked room mystery – although one with a relative simple and routine solution. Still a very well presented and handled impossible situation. Much more inspired was the motive behind all these incidents and one person in particular turned out to have been the victim of a truly hellish crime, which definitely had a Chestertonian touch. Something that reminded me of "The Worst Crime in the World" from The Secret of Father Brown (1927). 

Polaris definitely benefited from not having to setup an entire section of the universe, populated with two technically advanced species with tens of thousand years of history between them, which made for a stronger and more focused science-fiction mystery. I very much look forward to the third entry in the series, Seeker (2005). 

Notes for the curious: I couldn't cram this in anywhere else, but one of the little touches to the backdrop that made the setting so convincing and alive is the distribution between alien life and intelligent, technologically advanced species. There's humanity, the Ashiyyur and the fifty-thousand-year-old ruins on a now inhospitable planet, which were once "humanity's only evidence that anything else had ever gazed at the stars" (mentioned in A Talent for War). There's plenty of life to be found on the planets. Alex and Chase visit the previous mentioned Sacracour that has an eight billion year old bio-system complete with "walking plants, living clouds, and, arguably, the biggest trees on record." Polaris also provides an answer how humans can settle all these living worlds without getting sick and dying. Apparently, the viruses and germs on most worlds are incompatible with humans with an occasional exception, like Markop III, where "viruses and disease germs loved Homo sapiens." I doubt this is scientifically accurate, but that's where the fiction in science-fiction comes into play and appreciate the attention to detail. This is something McDevitt easily could have glossed over without anybody noticing.

A Talent for War (1989) by Jack McDevitt

Back in 2013, Ho-Ling Wong introduced the traditional mystery corner of the web to James P. Hogan's Inherit the Stars (1977), a science-fiction novel that's at its heart a detective story, but on a scale that's impossible to do in a conventional, earthbound mystery novel – landing a comfortable spot on the Japanese Tozai Mystery Best 100. Hogan's Inherit the Stars left behind a who's who of the classic and modern detective-and crime story. Even science-fiction author and part-time mystery novelist, John Sladek, had to eat dust with his almost universally beloved Invisible Green (1977) trailing far behind Hogan's hard science-fiction tale. Something smelled fishy! 

A closer inspection of Hogan's futuristic puzzle of 50.000-year-old human remains in a spacesuit discovered on the Moon proved to tick "about every single box that we want to see filled" with a "slow, devious, torturous and extremely clever unraveling of a complex puzzle." So we shamelessly appropriated Hogan's Inherit the Stars from the science-fiction genre.

Needless to say, I was not adverse to reading more of these archaeological space mysteries, but only found Ross Rocklynne's 1941 novella "Time Wants a Skeleton." A whowasdunin centering on an out-of-time human skeleton found inside cave on an ancient asteroid. But nothing more came to my attention until recently. 

Jack McDevitt is an American science-fiction author who specialized in archaeological and historical novels set in the far-flung future that often have a detective hook. McDevitt came to my attention as some of his work has been compared to Ellery Queen and probing a little deeper discovered that he credited G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown as hugely influential on shaping his Alex Benedict series. This comes with the caveat that McDevitt is not "an enthusiast about detective stories in general," but loves "the magic of Father Brown" that have more to do with "trying to figure out what on Earth happened" than simply whodunit and cites one of Chesterton's well-known locked room mysteries, "The Arrow of Heaven" – collected in The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926). So he belongs to the school of thought that believes the how of a crime is often more interesting than the who. A school that has Dorothy L. Sayers as its headmistress and John Rhode as its main lecturers.

So why not give McDevitt a shot and, if I like the series, boldly go where I've seldom gone before by dabbling in some chronological reading. 

A Talent for War (1989) is the first title starring Alex Benedict, an antique dealer, who lives and operates about 10.000 years into the future when "a thousand billion human beings" had settled "several hundred worlds" that formed a troubled Confederacy of planets. The story opens with the news that the flagship of the newest class of interstellars, Capella, had "slipped into oblivion" along with twenty-six hundred passengers and crew members, which failed to reenter linear space. Something that has happened before and none has ever reappeared. So everyone aboard is pretty much lost forever. And legally dead.

One of the passengers was Alex's uncle, Gabe Benedict, who left his estranged nephew his
entire estate and a historical puzzle dating back to "the last great heroic age" which has "provoked historical debate for two centuries." Two hundred years ago, an ever-expanding humanity came across an alien civilization, Ashiyyur, which resulted in an armed conflict between possibly the only technological cultures in the entire Milky Way. Christopher Sim was a history teacher from Dellaconda who became the leader of the Resistance and from the helm of his "immortal warship," the Corsarius, "spearheaded the allied band of sixty-odd frigates and destroyers holding off the massive fleets of the Ashiyyur," which eventually turned the tide as the other planets began to recognize the danger – driving the aliens back to their sullen worlds from which they came. But this victory came at a price. During his famous last stand, Sim was betrayed and abandoned by his crew with the name of navigator, Ludik Talino, becoming synonymous with cowardice. The names of the other deserters were lost to history and so is what exactly went down during that decisive and historically significant battle.

What did Gabe Benedict, an amateur archaeologist, knew that sent him tracking off into a region of space, known as the Veiled Lady, two centuries later? What is the connection with secretive journey of the CSS Tenandrome?

CSS Tenandrome is a big survey ship "involved in exploration of regions deep in the Veiled Lady," a thousand light years from Gabe's home planet, which returned under very mysterious and hushed circumstances. This churned the interstellar rumor mill. Officially, it was reported the ship's Armstrong units were damaged, but all kinds of rumors were flying around alleging it was either a plague ship or there was a time displacement that severely aged the crew members. There even rumors that the ship came across a new race of aliens or "an ancient fleet adrift," but "something among the encrusted ships" had "discouraged further examination" and returned home.

Alex has to take a deep drive into history to not only figure out what really happened two-hundred years ago, but what his uncle knew that could rewrite history. Admittedly, this makes for an engrossing, but slow-paced, read that takes some time to finish.

Alex has to gather and track down a ton of historical records, online and offline, war-time poetry, notebooks and watches simulated reenactments as well as visiting distant worlds, a historical society and even interviewing a representative of the Ashiyyur. But everything moves very slowly with only three points of action in the entire story. One very brief with the other two being saved for the end of the story.

So most of the story has either Alex sifting through information or talking with people, which is approach exceedingly rare in the detective genre and don't think it even has a name. I suppose you could call it a "research novel" with Katsuhiko Takahashi's Sharaku satsujin jiken (The Case of the Sharaku Murders, 1983) as the only example that comes to mind, but done on a much smaller scale than A Talent for War. The Case of the Sharaku Murders merely deals with an academic search for the true identity of a mysterious woodblock print artist who was briefly active during the late 1700s under a pseudonym. This makes the puzzle component of the plot is difficult to discuss, because it's as vast as our own star system. However, I was very impressed with the amount of world-building that was done. A massive, multi-worlds world that felt like it's actually populated with a human civilizations.

Over the years, I've read a tiny sampling of science-fiction mysteries and one thing always surprising me is that the earliest titles sketch a picture of the future in which culture and technology has stagnated or even regressed. Manly Wade Wellman's Devil's Planet (1942) takes place on a drought-stricken Mars in the 30th century, but technology is clunky with references to only 19th and early 20th century literature and culture. David V. Reed's Murder in Space (1944) takes place in mining community around an asteroid belt, but courtroom photographers still use flashbulbs and John Russell Fearn's The Master Must Die (1953) has snail mail between Earth and Mars. One stamp is enough to cover the cost of sending a letter from Mars to Earth. What a difference half a century makes!

I'm not an expert, of course, but I thought technology was much more convincingly handled here with Alex's conversation with an A.I. version of his dead uncle being eerily predictive of the very recent developments with a controversial deepfake technology digitally resurrecting dead relatives or friends. I also appreciated that the Armstrong Drive was not used as a magic wand to simply transport between the stars, because there are some serious limitations as to its reach and maneuvering that required a ship "to materialize well outside star systems" – which "left the traveler with a long ride to his destination." A trip to Andromeda was still off the table. But what I really appreciated where the little historical and cultural touches in combination with current affairs playing out in the background giving you the idea all those worlds truly are swarming with humans.

Every chapter begins with an excerpt or quote from a fictitious piece of future literature, philosophy or commentary on the war and wished McDevitt had told more about the history and myths surrounding the various settled worlds.

Alex reminiscent about his own home world that "only an historian can tell you now who first set foot on Rimway," but "everybody on the planet knows who died in the attempt" and trying to find the wreckage of Jorge Shale and his crew was the first archaeological project of his life. But he never did. Alex also visited a settled water world, appropriately known as the Fishbowl, which shares its binary star system with a planet that was once the home of an intelligent species, Belarius. A now inhospitable place which houses fifty-thousand-year-old ruins that were "humanity's only evidence that anything else had ever gazed at the stars" before their running into the Ashiyyur. Belarius has been largely given up as it's "an incredibly savage place" crawling with "highly evolved predators" in its dense jungles. What a great backdrop that place would be for an archaeological, space age mystery novel. Something halfway between Agatha Christie and Predator!

But more important is that long-ago battle and the symbol Christopher Sim has become to the Confederacy, which is just as important two centuries later as there's a political crisis brewing in the background of interstellar proportions. Earth is holding "a referendum on the matter of secession" and there are constant clashes along the Perimeter with the Ashiyyur. So hostilities with the Ashiyyur might be "the cement that binds your Confederacy together" and "stem the political power of separatists." This makes finding answers to a 200-year-old mystery potentially dangerous and highly explosive.

McDevitt wrote an imaginative, richly detailed and engrossing story that constructed entire worlds with its own history around the central puzzle with the only drawbacks being the slow pacing and not having quite the detective pull of Hogan's Inherit the Stars. But you can probably put the latter down to having to setup an entire universe while exploring one of that interstellar civilization's many stories. So you can expect a review of his second novel in the not so distant future.