Secrets of the Wee Free Men and Discworld

by Linda Washington

  The Tsurani society had a Far East flavor while the Midkemians went the medieval Europe route. Other series followed such characters as Arutha and Pug beyond the Riftwar drama.

  The World of the Wheel of Time

  Robert Jordan’s massive Wheel of Time series might seem like The Lord of the Rings upon first glance with its Emond’s Field, the Shire-like village from which Rand al’Thor and his friends (Mat, Egwene, Perrin) hailed. After all, we know we’re in the midst of a society like something out of a Renaissance fair. The world opened much wider as Rand traveled with his friends and the Aes Sedai—a female channeler or mage—and later went their separate ways (a breaking of the fellowship). With its Westlands, city states (Tar Valon), blighted areas, and seas, you feel as if you live there.

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  Terry Pratchett: Man of Mystery

  A CONVERSATION IN THREE ACTS

  Act I, Scene I: In Which the Players Are Discussed

  Setting: Your home or wherever you happen to be now.

  Us: Take a street-smart detective/cop/medieval monk/nosy British aristocrat/bounty hunter/little old lady well versed in psychology and an impossible case, and what do you have? A definitive work of mystery fiction by the likes of Terry Pratchett, P. D. James, Ed McBain, J. A. Jance, Lawrence Block, Janet Evanovich, Sue Grafton, Agatha Christie, Lilian Jackson Braun, Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe, Ellis Peters, Dorothy Sayers, Sara Paretsky, Ross Macdonald, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Cornwell, Robert Parker, Ngaio Marsh, Ken Follett, Tony Hillerman, Margery Allingham, Georges Simenon, Donald Bain/Jessica Fletcher, and many others.

  You: Terry Pratchett? Discworld Terry Pratchett?

  Us: Glad you asked.

  You: I really didn’t. I’m just reading this.

  Us: Since you asked, consider the mysteries solved by Commander Samuel Vimes and other members of the Watch.

  Every great work of mystery fiction needs at least two ingredients: (1) an intriguing mystery, many times involving a formidable adversary, and (2) someone to solve it. In a mystery subgenre such as police procedurals, a team of experts are put to the test. But many whodunit mysteries rest on the personality of the leading detective—amateur or professional.

  The City Watch miniseries has many of the elements of mystery subgenres (classic whodunits, private-eye novels, cozies, police procedurals, suspense, thrillers) and defies them all.30 For that reason, we’d dub Pratchett’s main detective—Sam Vimes—the “Hardest-Working Crime Solver” in mystery fiction. Wondering why?

  You: Not really, no. But I’m sure you’ll tell me.

  Us: We will in the next scene. We have a lot of lines in that one.

  DISC-CLAIMER:

  Plot spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk.

  Act I, Scene II: In Which Mystery Subgenres Are Discussed

  Us: First, some handy definitions of mystery subgenres:

  Whodunits

  Who took the countess’s priceless diamond bracelet? Who killed the blackmailer? With mysteries like these, the main question, naturally, is “Whodunit?” The whodunit subgenre is the largest of the mystery subgenres. In books of this ilk, “great ingenuity may be exercised in narrating the events of the crime, usually a homicide, and of the subsequent investigation in such a manner as to conceal the identity of the criminal from the reader until the end of the book, when the method and culprit are revealed.”31 This group includes “cozies”, “locked room” mysteries, and “aristocop”32 mysteries. (For more on “aristocop” mysteries, see “The Titled Crime Solvers: It’s in the (Blue) Blood”.)

  With classic whodunits such as The Woman in White and The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe (considered the first published detective story), or Bleak House by Charles Dickens, you might think of the well-crafted plots faster than the characters’ names.

  You: Bleak House is on DVD. Let’s see, there’s Esther Summerson, Lady Dedlock, Mr. Tulkinghorn, and there’s …

  Us (interrupting): The Sherlock Holmes novels, on the other hand, are classic whodunit detective novels. You might read them because of Sherlock Holmes, rather than the plot specifically. (For more about that, don’t miss “Vimes versus Holmes: The Smackdown” in Act II, Scene I.)

  You: My favorite Sherlock Holmes novel is—

  Us: Let’s move on to private-eye novels. These are nonpolice detective novels. The characters are realistic rather than eccentric. These mysteries are populated by “old school” characters like Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Nick and Nora Charles, Lew Archer, or the Continental Op and “the next generation”: V. I. Warshawski, Matthew Scudder, Kinsey Millhone, Stephanie Plum, or the erudite Spenser (no revealed first name). (If you’re confused about which author wrote which character, see the end of the chapter for a list.)

  This is where personality counts. Many private eyes in fiction have similar traits. They’re tough (they have to be, to solve the grisly crimes in their beat), jaded, hard drinkers (or at least alcoholics on the mend), and have enough determination to stay with a case even after someone tries to run them over or push them out of a window. Most are good at what they do, or at least keep at a job until the truth is revealed.

  Cozies. According to an article written by mystery writer Stephen P. Rodgers,33 a cozy mystery is “a mystery which includes a bloodless crime and contains very little violence, sex, or coarse language. By the end of the story, the criminal is punished and order is restored to the community.”

  With cozy mysteries, you might think of such characters as Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, Jessica Fletcher, Jim Qwilleran/ Koko/Yum Yum. (You can’t get much cozier than two cats.) Rather than ranked as strictly amateur sleuths, characters like Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey are considered criminologists and are regularly consulted by the police. (And Poirot is a former cop.)

  Police procedurals. According to a definition posted at the Mystery Guide site, “police procedurals must be realistic depictions of official investigations. They emphasize teamwork, methodical pavement-pounding, lucky breaks, administrative hassles, and endless paperwork.”34

  If you’re a fan of such shows as Prime Suspect, CSI, or Law and Order (with all of its spin-offs)—

  You: What has this got to do with Terry Pratchett?

  Us (as if you hadn’t spoken):—you probably like your mysteries by the book, according to realistic police procedures. This is the form popularized in America by the late Ed McBain, Patricia Cornwell, Tony Hillerman, J. A. Jance, Joseph Wambaugh, and many others. But looking at the European police scene, you’ll find such characters as Roderick Alleyn, Adam Dalgliesh, Endeavour Morse, the world-weary Jules Maigret, Reginald Wexford, and the forensics experts Brother Cadfael or Kay Scarpetta. These crime solvers walk a grisly beat.

  Suspense. Sometimes suspense and thrillers are lumped together. In suspense stories, the focus is on whether the villain will be caught before he or she strikes again. These are the edge-of-your-seat mysteries, many of which involve females as lead characters—the kind who can’t help investigating even when the body count climbs. When you think of suspense, you might think of writers like Mary Higgins Clark (Moonlight Becomes You), Nancy Atherton (Aunt Dimity Goes West), or Anne Perry (The Cater Street Hangman ). We would add Terry Pratchett to that list, even though Vimes has never shown his feminine side.

  You: I see. I would’ve preferred a chart, though. Visual aids rule, you know.

  Us: Moving on to the thriller, the focus is on fast-paced action where chase scenes and technology abound. The villains may be megalomaniacs bent on taking over the world or simply average joes gone postal. With thrillers, the main element is time. The clock is ticking to catch that kidnapper before the victim is killed or the bomb explodes. Writers like Tom Clancy, Ken Follett, and Elmore Leonard are well known in this subgenre.

  Act I, Scene III: The Plot Thickens

  Whodunits

  Us: The Pratchett novels Men at Arms a
nd Feet of Clay can be described as “who-or-what-dunits,” thanks to the fact that you never know what species (dragon, dwarf, werewolf, vampire, golem, troll, etc.) might have done the crime. Even so, both novels have the same “whodunit” elements as do classic works by Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe. See for yourself as we compare Feet of Clay to Collins and Dickens’s novels.

  You (happily): A chart! (See charts on pages 36 and 37.)

  Us: The Fifth Elephant also has a locked-room mystery element as Vimes investigates the theft of the famed Scone of Stone from a locked museum and a mysterious death that took place in a locked area.

  Act II, Scene I: Enter … the Detective

  Vimes versus Holmes: The Smackdown

  Us: Sherlock Holmes is unquestionably the most famous detective in fiction.

  You: No question about that.

  Us: But Holmes is the kind of clue-analyzing detective who rubs a clue-hating cop like Vimes the wrong way. A discussion of methods might result in a Smackdown battle of Vimes and Holmes. We can’t help but wonder who would win in a battle of the minds. Maybe it would go like this.

  You: Will Holmes and Vimes enter from stage left or stage right? Us (brightly, because we always agree with you): Uh, thanks for sharing that. Take it away, Holmes and Vimes.

  Holmes: “How often have I said … that when you have eliminated

  the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”35

  36

  Vimes: “The real world was far too real to leave neat little hints. It was full of too many things. It wasn’t by eliminating the impossible that you got at the truth, however improbable; it was by the much harder process of eliminating the possibilities.”37

  Holmes: “I have a lot of special knowledge which I apply to the problem, and which facilitates matters wonderfully. Those rules of deduction … are invaluable to me in practical work. Observation with me is second nature.”38

  Vimes: “Every real copper knew you didn’t go around looking for Clues so that you could find out Who Done It. No, you started out with a pretty good idea of Who Done It. That way, you knew what Clues to look for.”39

  Holmes: “There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps.”40 Vimes: “I never believed in that stuff—footprints in the flower bed, tell tale buttons, stuff like that. People think that stuff’s policing. It’s not. Policing’s luck and slog, most of the time.”41

  Pratchett and the Private Eye

  Us: Although Vimes isn’t a private investigator, he’s asked to turn in his badge a number of times during the course of the series, which forces him to act like one. (See Jingo and Guards! Guards!) So, how does he fit in the hard-edged world populated by the likes of Kinsey Millhone, Philip Marlowe, and Sam Spade?

  42

  You: Uh, you’ll use another chart, perhaps?

  Us: Good idea! (See chart here.)

  Us: Vimes may be hard-boiled like this lot, but he’s also slightly cracked, thanks to living in Pratchett’s world. Like Marlowe, he can be insubordinate, even though he can never one-up Vetinari, Ankh-Morpork’s Patrician. Like Sam Spade, Sam Vimes is quick with an elbow when it comes to a fight. And, like Sam Spade, he fights dirty.

  Like all classic fiction private eyes, Vimes works cheap—more than Carrot’s $43 per month, plus allowances (the Last Hero rate). (Marlowe earns $25 dollars a day, plus expenses, and Archer gets $50 a day, plus expenses.)

  Murder with a Cozy Feel

  Us: Although many of Pratchett’s mysteries take place within the teeming sprawl of Ankh-Morpork, some have a cozy element. So, while Pratchett might mention that a man has been beaten to death with a loaf of dwarf bread (and that’s easy to believe if you know about the consistency of dwarf and other battle breads), you won’t actually see the crime take place or see any (at least much) blood.

  You: You mean like in Saw IV?

  Us (as if you hadn’t spoken): While Fletcher and Marple have the edge on coziness, Vimes at least is a contender.

  The Titled Crime Solvers: It’s in the (Blue) Blood

  Us: During a period known as the “Golden Age” of mysteries in Great Britain (between World War I and World War II), such writers as Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Dorothy Sayers wrote their novels. They were the “queens” of English detective mysteries, the creators of the upper-class detectives Roderick Alleyn (Marsh), Albert Campion (Allingham), and Peter Wimsey (Sayers).

  If they’re the queens, Pratchett must be the joker.

  You (shifts uneasily at your current location on Earth): No comment.

  Us: Pratchett plunks his square-peg character into the round hole of this gentlemen’s league of suave, well-dressed, and well-educated detectives—a description no one would dream of using for Vimes.

  Here’s how he measures up to the other members of the gentlemen’s league.

  Us: Vimes would be the first to admit that, unlike his esteemed colleagues, he’s no gentleman, nor the son of a gentleman. Thrust into society, thanks to his marriage to Lady Sybil and promotions for services rendered, Vimes is the thorn in everyone’s side. Vimes’s problem is that he can’t stop annoying the upper crust—Lords Selachii, Rust, and others, many of whom happen to be the assassins hired to kill him or Vetinari. If he encountered Alleyn, Wimsey, or Campion, Vimes might be tempted to stick him with a lobster fork rather than pass him one.

  43

  Police Procedurals: Murder by the Book

  Us: With ex-magistrate/employees of the British Home Office (P. D. James), you would expect accurate details about police procedures. But what of Pratchett?

  You: Yeah, what of him?

  Us: Thanks to his journalism background, you get the feel of the mean streets, even if they’re fictional. Here’s how Pratchett’s copper compares to the others. (Go back and read the table … until you’re back here.)

  Harrowing Horror and Subtle Suspense

  Us: Every good suspense story needs a page-turning plot to keep you on the edge of your seat. Although he does not churn out suspense novels in the purest sense of the genre, Pratchett ratchets up the suspense quotient in most of the books about the Watch. His books might aptly be called horror suspense Buffy the Vampire Slayer/ Exorcist/Underworld style. After all, Vimes has stared down dragons (Guards! Guards!), negotiated with golems (Feet of Clay), wrestled and escaped from murderous werewolves (The Fifth Elephant) and a venomous vampire (Feet of Clay), and been influenced by evil entities such as the Summoning Dark (Thud!) and the gonne, a whispering weapon invented by Leonard of Quirm (Men at Arms) which destroyed the life of assassin Edward d’Eath.

  Vimes has fallen out of windows, down mineshafts and waterfalls, and escaped by the skin of his teeth, all for the sake of keeping our pulse rates up and our lights burning far into the night as we follow his exploits and those of the officers under his command—the always unsettling Angua, the courageous Captain Carrot, and “dumb and dumber” Colon and Nobby.

  You: They’re more Laurel and Hardy-esque.

  The Thrill of the Chase

  Us: If you haven’t read much of the Discworld series—

  You: I’ve read most of them.

  Us (again as if you had not spoken):—you might envision Ankh-Morpork’s quaint cobblestone streets, clacks towers, and stagecoaches as a low-tech world far different from that of The Hunt for Red October and other Tom Clancy creations. But for a plot that combines technology Pratchett-style (which Vimes refers to as “technomancy”; for more about that, read chapter 19) and political shenanigans—the kind a writer like Clancy or Frederick Forsyth would discuss—look no further than Jingo. It has a Day of the Jackal-meets-Hunt for Red October element with a side order of JFK and Lawrence of Arabia. The technology kicks in with the introduction of various Burleigh and Stronginthearm’s weaponry (the Shureshotte Five and the ominous-sounding Streetsweeper) and Leonard of Quirm’s Going-Under-the-Water-Safely-Device, a.k.
a. the Boat, which is really a submarine.

  The thrill and danger of the chase is the focus of The Fifth Elephant , when Vimes runs for his life from werewolves playing “the game,” and of Night Watch, when Vimes chases Carcer, a psychopathic killer, through time.

  Act II, Scene II: The U(nu)sual Suspects

  “If the point of your story is ‘whodunit,’ the culprit needs to be worth the finding. Often the nature of the villain, and how absorbing a character he or she is, will affect the flavor of the whole rest of the story.”44

  You: Where’d that come from?

  Us: You’ll have to check the footnote. A good mystery needs a worthy adversary who makes the detective earn his or her pay. Sherlock Holmes has criminal genius Professor Moriarty (The Final Problem, The Valley of Fear), Jack Stapleton (The Hound of the Baskervilles), Irene Adler Norton (“A Scandal in Bohemia”), and others. Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe have various double-crossing clients. Poirot has a slew of murderers and thieves foolish or egotistical enough to match wits with him.

  You: A slew of murderers? Is that a collective term like a muster of peacocks or a murder of ravens? A murder of murderers perhaps?

  Us (hastily): But what of Vimes?

  You: My cue to say, “Yeah, what of Vimes”?

  Us: In a Pratchett-created world populated by werewolves, dragons, vampires, assassins, golems, dwarfs, and trolls, the sky’s the limit for unusual suspects.