Review: The Case of the Sleeping Beauties

The Case of the Sleeping Beauties is a novella that I wrote back in 2015. Ambitiously subtitled “a Utah Sinclair mystery”, it did not make any significant splash. It’s got 67 lifetime sales, a 3.8 rating, and a single proper review. Some of this is simply a lack of marketing: back in 2015 I had written some fanfic and not much else, and was still working as a software engineer. I’m not sure why I wrote this novella, or decided to put it up for pay (unlike virtually everything else I’ve written, it’s never once been up for free), but I consider it an abject failure, at least as far as writing for money goes. Also the cover sucks. The whole thing is 20,000 words, so short enough that I can easily blow through it in an afternoon. Also (still) available in EPUB, MOBI, and PDF for patrons, but I don’t have firm numbers for how many people read it that way, nor if it did anything to encourage patronage.

But is it an artistic failure as well?

There is actually another Utah Sinclair mystery, it was intended as a trilogy of novellas that together would be long enough (and coherent enough) to stitch into a full book with the three cases being individual “acts”. I don’t know the last time I reread The Case of the Sleeping Beauties, but my guess is that it was while I was trying to complete The Case of the Slaughterhouse Prophet, and that would have been almost a decade ago.

The story was written at a time when I was playing Malifaux, a skirmish game, and is clearly heavily inspired by that, though with the serial numbers filed off. It follows Utah Sinclair, a private detective of the yonside as he wanders around a rambling city trying to figure out where undead prostitutes are coming from.

Prose

The first thing I noticed is just how much noir it’s channeling, and how much is being put into descriptive phrases. Stuff like this:

The first human through the portal from earthside had found himself on the outskirts of an empty city, one that seemed like it had been cobbled together by an orgy of deranged architects.

Or this:

There were a few maps of Cathopolis, but they only agreed on the areas that the Priz maintained control over. Everywhere else was a geographical bedlam.

Or this:

He was the sort of person who was waiting to disgorge his thoughts, like a mother bird ready to feed a starving chick.

Or this:

I had a revolver strapped to my ankle, one affectionately advertised in the back of the penny dreadfuls as the Silent Witness. It was supposed to be a subtle weapon, but it was still a gun, and if I’d paid chits for it instead of pulling it off a dead man I might have written a nasty letter to the manufacturer about its supposed silence.

Or this:

It took me a moment to realize it, but he was dressed up like a Catholic priest, all in black with a white collar. Even if he’d been standing in the middle of the Vatican with the Pope vouching for him, it wouldn’t have been convincing. Partly it was the scars on his face, but it was also the head that had been shaved with a secondhand blade. The snub-nosed shotgun at his side didn’t help matters either.

I assume that this is channeling Raymond Chandler, since I read a lot of detective fiction when I was a teenager (my dad had loads of the stuff) and Chandler was always a favorite. I think the density of these flourishes could be higher, and if you’re going with this style, it’s better that it’s liberally peppered in. You don’t want to sink into the rhythm “normal” prose only to have a tiny speck of flourish pop out at you.

There were a lot of things that I tightened up while reading, partly because this is the easiest thing in the world when reading in GDocs, but I don’t know that I’ll push a change to the ebook, partly because I would need to figure out how. Most of these changes are fairly minor. There’s an overuse of semicolons, which I think I was in love with at the time, a romance that hasn’t lasted. There are a few minor tweaks that are just on the order of “no, the phrase ‘mechanical fingers’ might be misread as poetic, it should reworded to be clear that these are prosthetic”. A few of the tweaks are just to reduce down how much text there is, making it more punchy, so “the Priz didn’t tax any property that a person might want to claim in this part of the city” becomes “the Priz didn’t tax property in this part of the city”, and this is essentially inarguably better, tighter, cleaner prose.

Also I fixed some typos, and those do make me feel like I need to figure out the reupload.

Character

I think I’ve gotten better at character voices through the years, but here I kind of doubt myself, since everything seems fine in that regard. Utah and his partner Ralph don’t talk enough early on in my opinion, and there might be a few too many characters introduced in rapid succession, which is a problem when they’re not advancing the plot. Cyanide Sally is a bartender who owns the House of Skulls, and she serves a bitter almond special that’s (supposedly) fatally poisoned one time in every hundred, and this is very fun … but it’s irrelevant to the plot, it’s just fun for the sake of fun.

I do think that Ralph gets speaking lines a bit too late, given that he’s the second main character. My advice to my past self would be that he should be getting characterizing dialogue from the word go, and that this central relationship should be better understood by the reader much earlier. And they should be more distinct from each other: the orthogonality thesis is that every set of characters should only overlap where there’s something interesting to say with that overlap. Cover up the names and see if you can tell who said what line! This does not work for Ralph and Utah, but I think it does work for most of the other characters. And I guess I wouldn’t say this is fatal, since it’s not like there’s some grounding character arc between our detective and his sidekick.

Utah himself is … fine. Some of his characterization comes through in the narration, and there were a few moments I particularly liked from him, but I’m not sure that I could sketch him out in a sentence. He’s down on his luck, loves to break rules, lies through his teeth, scrambles around and gets back up from the hard punches. I’m not sure that this is enough. A job should be more than a job, I guess, and I do get the sense that he’s skeeved out by the necromancy, but … well, that brings us to the other thing.

Theme

This is, if you squint, or maybe even if you don’t, a cop story about sex work. It also kind of doesn’t have that much to say about either of those things.

Utah is a private detective, doling out justice for people who can pay him. In real life, private detectives come in a variety of flavors, but one of the most common is just the pursuit of things that are not actually criminal issues, like breach of contract, or adultery. This is a criminal issue within their world, but it’s one that no one in power is pursuing. There’s some clear contempt for the regular cops from Utah, and some further contempt for the law itself, since he breaks all kinds of laws in this lawless world, including murdering two men, which doesn’t greatly affect him. This is self-defense, but still. I don’t think there’s some great thesis on criminality or justice here, and the novella overall is justice-neutral, seemingly unconcerned with what’s right or wrong, only trying to work the problem. This is maybe fine?

And the sex work stuff is seen through the lens of Utah, and this is also seen as maybe being just morally neutral in a matter-of-fact way, something that people do in order to get by, no different from working in a coal mine or whatever. And there’s exploitation, but that’s no different from working in a coal mine. So I think this story has a viewpoint, but not a thesis.

Does a story need a thesis? Does a little novella like this need to have something to say about the world and the people in it? I don’t know, I guess not, but I sure do prefer when there’s something to grab onto. I am a sucker for story structure though, and a nice little character arc, and this piece … does not really have that. Utah is challenged, but he’s not challenged to his core, and does not grow and change, and this probably fine for a 20k word novella.

I think in the end it’s more of a “wouldn’t it be fucked up” kind of story, and in this case I don’t particularly like that, since it’s not fucked up enough.

Ideas

One of the other things that I look for in any story is cool ideas, and this is one of the things that I like most about reading long ago pieces, because sometimes I’ve forgotten those ideas.

The idea density is okay, but I would have liked to see more. A weird fiction setting is a playground for ideas, and I feel like especially in the back half, there’s just not enough playing going on. It is only 20k words, but that feels like it’s enough for easily twice as many little fucked up weird things. So that’s what I would do, include more fucked up weird things. (The part where they go to the manor is the one that stands out clearly to me as needing more fucked up weird things, there should have been some kind of magic sculpture there or a steampunk maid or something.)

Of all the stuff that I had forgotten about, my favorite was the necromancy lobbyist, a guy who just really believed that necromancy should be legal, but was supposedly not a necromancer himself. So he’s just talking about like regulatory schemes and social mores, and this is funny. I’m glad he wasn’t a bad guy in the end, for some reason I thought he was going to be involved in the plot in a more critical way. Instead, he’s just a happy little academic.

Conclusion

Fun to reread, and no, I would say not an artistic failure. Definitely feels like it wants a second mystery to follow after it. I believe The Case of the Slaughterhouse Prophet is approximately half written, which with editing work means only a quarter written, but again, the numbers mean that there’s just no way that I can justify that as anything but a labor of love.

I wouldn’t say that this is the best thing I’ve ever written, but I think it compares favorably to the other mid-length stuff. Definitely would have been stronger with a thematic core, and with more cohesion between protagonist and plot, but I also think that’s fine.

I guess, having read it after nearly a decade, I’m feeling weirdly defensive about it for no particular reason. It might have been one thing if it had just not sold, that’s partly just down to the lack of marketing and also the market for novellas being bad. But it also scored poorly in terms of ratings, and on top of that, never got enough reviews for me to get a picture of what was not hitting right, which leaves me grappling in the dark.

So I’d say that I learned approximately nothing from this, except that I had some more ideas for a Weird West kind of story, if I ever end up writing one of those.