This is a debut novel, but you may recognise the author’s name. For not only is Luke an author but you may have seen him as an actor – he was Long John Silver in the television series Black Sails.
As the first novel this one introduces us to Fetch Phillips, a cantankerous, moody, grumpy sort of guy who makes his way (barely) through Sunder City, a city of iniquity and decay worthy of comparison with other decrepit urban areas.
I’m Fetch Phillips, just like it says on the window. There are three things you should know before you hire me:
1. Sobriety costs extra.
2. My services are confidential.
3. I don’t work for humans.
It’s nothing personal – I’m human myself. But after what happened, it’s not the humans who need my help.
I just want one real case. One chance to do something good. Because it’s my fault the magic is never coming back.
The beginning was a little generic. I couldn’t help feeling it was (at least to start) something I’d read before, an homage like many others to the film noir detective novels of the 1930’s. The cover also didn’t help, making the book at first glance feel a little like a Rivers of London ripoff, or a poor man’s Ankh-Morpork. (I thought of this before finding out that the author himself admits to being inspired by Terry Pratchett’s city in an illuminating interview at the back of the book.)
To the author’s credit, I found that the lead character was not as unremittingly nasty as some of our genre characters have been of late. Fetch is more like Glen Cook’s Garrett P.I. than like someone out of Tyler Whitesides’ The Thousand Deaths of Ardor Benn. He has some redeeming qualities, although admittedly they are often well hidden beneath his snarky exterior. It may not be a characteristic that’s too realistic, but it’s bearable. This is a character damaged by his life-experiences, trying to survive in a changed world, a change that he blames himself for.
The surface plot is the usual detective fare. Fetch is hired by Principal Burbage to investigate the disappearance of a teacher at an interspecies school. Professor Edmund Albert Rye is a Vampire, a species that since the start of The Coda and the ensuing loss of their ability to gain sustenance through drinking blood, is in decline. Rye was also one of the founding members of The League of Vampires, the group who has vowed to protect, not prey, on weaker species, which leads Fetch to discover that this may be more than a simple missing person case.
What is actually more interesting is the back-plot that we get along the way. This is about how Fetch managed to cause the loss of Magic in an event known as The Coda, although some of this is explained in clunky blocks of exposition, such as during a school sex education class lecture at the beginning of the book. However, once the book has got over its slightly wobbly start, it finds its feet and clicks along at a great pace.
What worked for me most, more than the characterisation, was that the world of Sunder City is interesting. It is not a medieval-esque world, but a fairly modern one. There are cars and telephones, for example. It’s what we would probably describe as a factory town, created atop an underground fire pit to smelt iron. The Sunderites are generally straightforward folk – often tough, belligerent and worn down – that made me think of a 1920’s New York in style and manner. It feels industrial, with old, decaying warehouses, dark and dim bars and limited light sources. A flood in a shanty town shows the reader how precarious some areas of the city are.
This precariousness doesn’t just apply to the buildings, however. Most of all The Last Smile in Sunder City is about a world where magic, once part of everyday life, has gone and how the inhabitants deal with the consequences. Wizards, witches and warlocks have been rendered impotent. Vampires can go out in daylight, but no longer get sustenance from blood, which leads them to eventually just crumble into dust. Ogres are now having to get jobs as bodyguards, whilst dwarves are reduced to squatting in properties they can no longer afford. Necromancers have to earn their keep by working in the City Morgue, whilst Sirens are often having to make do with getting by singing and playing music in bars or even becoming strippers in less salubrious environments. Nail Gangs roam the streets, vigilante groups killing ex-magic characters for fun. It’s a sobering yet imaginative world.
What doesn’t help is that Fetch himself is a pariah, outcast from the elite ruling body known as The Opus. He’s also a human, despised because it was Humans who caused the magic to go away. Along the way we discover that he’s an ex-soldier whose life-experiences have led him to become this dour, broken person, and yet one who wants to make amends and help, despite the consequences to himself. This meandering backstory gives us glimpses into the wider world of Sunder City, which are intriguing, even if not always directly related to the story at present.
And it is this that really engaged me. By the end, and despite my initial reservations, the character of Fetch and the world he inhabits won me over. Whilst The Last Smile in Sunder City is clearly a debut novel, but one with an intriguing set-up, and once it got going became an engrossing and entertaining read that kept my attention happily whilst reading. There’s scope for more novels here, which I’m pleased about, as more books will no doubt follow. (Indeed: Dead Man in a Ditch is due in October 2020.) Now that the premise has been set up, I suspect things will now get very interesting.
Sample extract here: www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/the-last-smile-in-sunder-citybit-excerpts/the-last-smile-in-sunder-city/
The Last Smile in Sunder City by Luke Arnold
Published by Orbit Books February 2020
352 pages
ISBN: 978-0356512884
Review by Mark Yon
I like the main character “Fetch” who is a for Hire detective trying to make some money, I guess I would call it. There’s a vampire named Edmund who is missing that he is supposed to try and find, a reptile cop, a half werewolf guy, and siren he must find along the way. The story reminds me of Lord of the Rings with all of the imagery and the way you are taken into a very descriptive world that is similar, yet very different from our own. I read it in one sitting, and usually I can’t get through one without taking a bunch of breaks and needing a few days, if that tells you something. The book I’m reading now that is really good too is “101 Quotes from Alice and Wonderland” which goes through the sayings of Wonderland like “curiouser and curiouser” and goes through the meanings of these terms that are rather bizarre and unusual to us Earthlings.
https://cutt.ly/Ztr3WWF