Unqualified Offerings

Harry Connolly’s Twenty Palaces is a really good novel in a subpar package, at least in Kindle format. (I have not seen the ePub or PDF versions, available DRM-free directly from the author.) That is, it’s a great story, but a sloppy ebook.

Let’s talk about the story first. Twenty Palaces is Connolly’s fourth novel featuring Ray Lilly, the ex-con factotum of a sorceress named Annalise Powliss. Annalise Powliss kills magicians for the Twenty Palace society, with (more or less) good and sincere reason. Ray Lilly is variously her driver, muscle, advance man, investigator and decoy. Connolly’s three books from Del Rey start after the uneasy Powliss/Lilly team has formed, and end with the resolution (for good or ill – get your spoilers elsewhere) of that original tension. The books are paranormal noir, using the tropes of American hardboiled fiction to tell urban fantasy stories; or, if you prefer, using the tropes of urban fantasy to create American hardboiled fiction. Similar books include Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files and Mike Carey’s novels of the ghost-breaker Felix Castor. (Yes, I know Carey and Castor are British. Do I have to explain the Chandler-to-Deighton hardboiled-novel transmission vector in detail? Really?)

The author-published ebook, Twenty Palaces, is a prequel to the Del Rey novels, recounting the meeting of Lilly and Powliss and Ray’s initiation into “the world behind the world.” I liked it quite a bit, as much as the previous three novels, which I also liked quite a bit. Connolly does a terrific job with his portrayal of Ray Lilly fresh out of prison after a stint for auto theft: shellshocked, leery of his prospects, determinedly meek in the face of a hundred little slights and reversals. Ray Lilly wants to stay out of trouble, but he wants other things crucially more: to atone for ruining the life of a childhood friend; to gain some of the power of the world behind the world for himself; to save some people who can’t be saved.

Since it’s a prequel, you already know, in broad strokes, how it’s going to go for Ray:

But what I did know was that I was never going to be a seat-belt person. Never. I’d never have a steady job, a smart wife or a couple of kids. I’d gone too far.

Since you know, the book’s only excuses for existing can be, as a minor justification, you learned some stuff you didn’t know about the characters and the milieu of the series, and as a major justification, it made you feel something. The book passed both tests for me. Connolly’s got a nice ear for dialog and a clear eye for the excuses people make for themselves. He’s able to write hardboiled prose rather than merely mimic it (like people do when they lard their text with gaudy fake-tough similes). It’s the difference between setting the table for you and shoving wedding-cake down your throat. He draws the reader in to the suburban milieu of Ray’s childhood pals, so when people finally say the sorts of things that can’t be unsaid, it hurts.

I can’t be as kind toward Twenty Palaces as an artifact. Make no mistake: it’s a full novel, about as long as any of the previous Lilly novels. $4.99 is not an outrageous price. It’s cheaper than two of Connolly’s previous three ebook editions. And like I said, it’s well-written – it doesn’t show any lack of editorial guidance at the level of style and story. Connolly also sprang for a nice cover, by George Cotronis.

But, it’s poorly proofread. There are a lot of typos, and stray words here and there exist mid-sentence as fossils of an earlier draft. In one line, the POV character even suddenly takes the pronoun “he” rather than “I.” I don’t know if Connolly hired an outside copy-editor for Twenty Palaces; I actually hope not, given the results. The text is also, at least in the Kindle edition, set in a monospace rather than proportional font. This is a terrible choice for readers, which is why nobody professionally publishes books in monospace fonts. It’s also super-easy to control in any ebook-creation software.

I want neither to speculate on nor minimize the feelings that come from having what you know is a quality series cancelled by your publisher. And it’s reasonable to understand Twenty Palaces as a gift from Connolly to those of us who have been fans of his series. But Twenty Palaces stands right now as the most recent representation of Harry Connolly in the book market. It deserved more care in its presentation. Happily, the story is good enough to make it worth overlooking the vessel’s flaws.