Fantasy And Mystery

I said before that "Dead Phone" by Poul and Karen Anderson is both a detective story and a ghost story. I will now add that I think that it is primarily a ghost story.

The action of the story starts with a phone call from a dead man, although only the reader recognizes the nature of the call. The story climaxes with the realization that the murdered man's phone was dead at the time when the detective had received the call from him. The murder mystery element of the story is rushed and occurs between these two supernatural elements.

The detective, Yamamura, and certain police officers refer to their previous contacts. I take this to refer to at least one of the three detective novels featuring Yamamura. Normally, I would suggest that the story be republished as an epilogue to one of the novels, whichever seemed appropriate. However, the story's supernatural element puts it into a different category.

Anderson wrote many volumes set in the past and many more set in the future. Between Past and Future, I suggest that there is space for two "Present" boxed sets of Anderson volumes:

Fantasy
(i) the contemporary fantasy novel, The Devil's Game;
(ii) a collection of alternative reality and contemporary fantasy short stories, culminating with "Dead Phone."

Mystery
(i)-(iii) the three Yamamura novels.

Thus, the detective would cross over from the Mystery volumes to one of the Fantasy volumes. Mystery and Fantasy, in turn, would come between the many volumes of heroic fantasy/historical fantasy/historical fiction/historical science fiction and the many more volumes of futuristic science fiction. Yamamura strangely provides a degree of unity or continuity between four of the intermediate volumes.

Andersonian Fantasy by Sean M. Brooks

The late Poul Anderson was best known as a writer of "hard" science fiction. But, he also wrote a smaller, but significant body of fantasy. I listed the most important of these works below.

THE BROKEN SWORD (1954, rev. ed. 1971)
THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS (1961)
OPERATION CHAOS (1971)
OPERATION LUNA (1999)
HROLF KRAKI'S SAGA (1973)
A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST (1974)
THE MERMAN'S CHILDREN (1979)
THE DEMON OF SCATTERY, with Mildred D. Broxon (1979)
CONAN THE REBEL (1980)
THE DEVIL'S GAME (1980)
FANTASY (1981)
WAR OF THE GODS (1997), regretfully, I think this was a weak, for Anderson, book.

I hesitate at including THE KING OF YS in this list because this four volume novel is best thought of as a historical novel. It does contain some very slight fantasy elements. One of the longest and most argumentative of my letters to Poul Anderson was a discussion of THE KING OF YS.

Except for the regrettably weak WAR OF THE GODS, Anderson's fantasies are of such high quality that I find it difficult to name the two or three I admire most. But THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS is definitely one of them. And A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST is unusual in being written almost entirely in blank verse. TEMPEST was written as a homage to William Shakespeare and his plays.

The stories I listed below are found in the collection called, with regrettable unoriginality, FANTASY. The collection includes two non fiction articles by Poul Anderson and an "Afterword" by Sandra Miesel

"House Rule"
"The Tale of Hauk"
"Of Pigs and Men"
"A Logical Conclusion"
"The Valor of Cappen Varra"
"The Gate of the Flying Knives"
"The Barbarian"
"On Thud and Blunder"
"Interloper"
"Pact"
"Superstition"
"Fantasy in the Age of Science"
"The Visitor"
"Bullwinch's Mythology"
"Afterword: An Invitation to Elfland," by Sandra Miesel

Truthfully, the list I gave above includes stories which are at least borderline hard science fiction. Examples being "House Rule" and "Superstition." I especially admire the rigorous logic Poul Anderson uses in developing ideas most of us would call fantasies. Two examples of that being "The Tale of Hauk" and "Pact."

Before he died in 2001, Poul Anderson arranged to have several of his books and stories posthumously published. The last of his fantasy stories, "The Lady of the Winds," was published by FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION in the Oct/Nov 2001 issue.

I am convinced Poul Anderson was a master short story writer. In both fantasy and hard science fiction. By turns poetic and elegiac, and scrupulously faithful to known science or not too impossible extrapolations from what was known. He also excelled in describing his characters and the backgrounds of his stories.