Review of Perish by the Sword by Poul Anderson

This review of Perish by the Sword by AM Romer will be at the top of the blog for the next week. Newer posts will appear below it.

The outstanding thing about Perish by the Sword is that Poul Anderson has captured a particular time and place perfectly. It’s like a tourist’s guide to Northern California, 1959. You can see it, hear it, and feel it in the air. Here are the Berkley scientists in their labs and offices, the post-war tech, and Russia forever in the background. Here are the San Francisco Bay houses, complete with sunken lounges and after-work martinis, and the women with their cropped hair, their own jobs and their own sports cars. And here’s the bar, Howl, full of beat poets (of course) and groovy cats, and young men who’ll do anything for ‘the experience’. The sense of place and time he’s given us is awesome; it’s a gift, and that’s the joy of this book. But unfortunately, what is joyless outweighs it.

In an interview (find it here), Anderson explains how he begins to conceive of a book: he wants to say something about a particular topic – a philosophical concept or thought experiment, or an observation on the political and social movements around him, for example – and then develops a story around that. It sounds great for sci-fi. Arguably, the motivation at the core of all sci-fi is the question What if…? But this is where Perish by the Sword falls down.

It reads as though the author has made a decision to write a novel in the ‘detective’ genre, maybe as a kind of exercise, to see if he can do it. He has developed his plot points, the crime and the solution, and the elements of contemporary culture he wishes to include, and then – and only then – has he populated this plot with characters. It’s as though he has precisely mapped out all the moves in a game of chess for both players, and then carefully places the pieces on the board in their required positions, rather than letting the game unfold. The plot is enacted by the characters – it does not grow naturally from them. There is the strong sense that they exist mainly to fulfil plot points and genre requirements, whereas great characters seem to have a life of their own and are caught up in events which they or other characters have created. The result is that I can’t care about them. I don’t care if they live or die; they are items moved upon a game board because the author needs them to move. This results in a distinct lack of tension – because I don’t care enough to be invested, to worry about the wrongly accused or who might next be put to the sword.

Even their names felt carefully constructed, along with their background, psychological profile, linguistic habits, eccentricities of behaviour and interests. Yes, the name Trygve Yamamura indicates his ‘San Francisco melting pot’ heritage, but it will never get this detective into the canon. And Colquhoun (huge, fiery-tempered bloke with a suitably Scottish moniker) was slowing the pace – not because of his character, but because of having to read and then remember how to pronounce his name.

For someone who is a seasoned reader in the crime genre, the perpetrator stood out from the beginning. In fact, it seemed so obvious that I thought there must be a twist, and it was the thought of this that kept me reading… but there was no twist. By the end, when Yamamura gives a straightforward walkthrough of the murder and how it was done, I’d already been waiting some time for the characters to catch up to what I already knew. If this doesn’t happen quickly, it doesn’t matter how brilliant the writer is in terms of language or imagery – frustration sets in. Some elements of the denouement were a surprise, hinging as they did on the tiniest, seemingly throw-away lines and observations. But rather than coming across as ‘clever’, so that the reader has that rush of revelation, Oh, of course! Why didn’t I see it? that characterises the best Poirot stories, it felt almost mathematical: the clues so carefully scattered, gathered together at the end by the detective into a neat equation, but one I had no real interest in working out.

People love to solve problems. The detective story is a sophisticated series of problems and puzzles, and good ones test their readers’ knowledge of human psychology, as well as their familiarity with the conventions of the genre itself. Perish by the Sword was not so much a test for the reader as an illustration of Anderson’s ability to create a plot. The characters were figures made to fulfil the plot’s requirements: the detective, the victim, the suspect, the love interest, the murderer. And the overall reason for the book’s existence felt like it was an exercise for a very intelligent author in ‘writing a murder mystery’. Detective Yamamura occasionally showed glimpses of being his own person, rather than the author’s puppet, but in the end he too felt like a chess piece in an intellectual game. So despite my fantastic tour of Berkley and San Francisco in the late 1950s, I was left cold and, ultimately, bored by the novel – and by the characters who played out their pre-assigned roles and behaviours exactly as planned. 

AM Romer
August 2019