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A Master of Djinn
Nov. 15th, 2021 10:04 pmA Master of Djinn, P. Djèlí Clark. Novel in the same world as "Dead Djinn in Cairo" (available online here) and The Haunting of Tram Car 015 (my review here). This was so much fun - detective story meets pulp-action-adventure. Clark has a real talent for writing cinematic action sequences, leading to the Scott-Westerfeld-esque experience of reading along thinking "this would make a great movie" but also you're basically already watching the movie.
I was thinking as I read this about detective stories and "copaganda" - I feel like maybe detective stories and police procedurals are in a similar place right now to where romance novels were awhile ago, where there was this argument about whether the genre was inherently anti-feminist. Ok, going by a google search, people are apparently still having this debate! But I think a strong movement has emerged within the genre for "better" romance, whether that's queer romance or het that subverts heteronormative scripts and expectations. (I went through like six phrasings there for "better", including "liberated", "antikyriarchal", and "less problematic".) I think we will eventually see something like that with law enforcement fiction (or maybe we already have, I don't follow the genre), where there are people figuring out how to retain what is appealing about it without playing into pro-police narratives. (And of course some people will still want copaganda in its worst forms, just like some people still like their romance full of toxic masculinity and shitty stereotypes. At least I assume so... I select my personal romance reading to try to avoid all that so I don't really know, but it's a giant genre that sells a zillion books, so probably there's a lot of different things out there.) A lot of Clark's plot is pretty standard detective-fiction tropes - but we're in a magical alternate-history Cairo and the protagonist is a dapper lesbian and (spoiler for something pretty early in the book) ( Read more... ). So we're a long long way from NYPD Blue. And I would expect that some of those moves - protagonists who aren't straight white men, settings outside the US - will be common go-tos for "better" detective fiction. The magical alternate history on the other hand is just Clark being awesome.
(I'm curious now how much crossover there actually is between people who read "normal" mysteries and people who read fantasy mysteries. Like are there people who will dip a toe into Rivers of London but nothing with, like, a map.)
I was thinking as I read this about detective stories and "copaganda" - I feel like maybe detective stories and police procedurals are in a similar place right now to where romance novels were awhile ago, where there was this argument about whether the genre was inherently anti-feminist. Ok, going by a google search, people are apparently still having this debate! But I think a strong movement has emerged within the genre for "better" romance, whether that's queer romance or het that subverts heteronormative scripts and expectations. (I went through like six phrasings there for "better", including "liberated", "antikyriarchal", and "less problematic".) I think we will eventually see something like that with law enforcement fiction (or maybe we already have, I don't follow the genre), where there are people figuring out how to retain what is appealing about it without playing into pro-police narratives. (And of course some people will still want copaganda in its worst forms, just like some people still like their romance full of toxic masculinity and shitty stereotypes. At least I assume so... I select my personal romance reading to try to avoid all that so I don't really know, but it's a giant genre that sells a zillion books, so probably there's a lot of different things out there.) A lot of Clark's plot is pretty standard detective-fiction tropes - but we're in a magical alternate-history Cairo and the protagonist is a dapper lesbian and (spoiler for something pretty early in the book) ( Read more... ). So we're a long long way from NYPD Blue. And I would expect that some of those moves - protagonists who aren't straight white men, settings outside the US - will be common go-tos for "better" detective fiction. The magical alternate history on the other hand is just Clark being awesome.
(I'm curious now how much crossover there actually is between people who read "normal" mysteries and people who read fantasy mysteries. Like are there people who will dip a toe into Rivers of London but nothing with, like, a map.)
