JOE ABERCROMBIE'S SHARP ENDS

Sharp Ends is a collection of short stories from a writer who has become one of my firm favourites since I reviewed Heroes here back in 2011. As promised, I read through the First Law trilogy, and Best Served Cold, set in the same world, and probably should have expressed my admiration of them in print somewhere. Sharp Ends comes as a welcome reminder that Abercrombie is more than just a fine fantasy writer, he is a fine writer.

The collection takes place over a 26 year period, and begins in somewhat familiar territory. Two of the first three tales are effective snapshots of the nature of the two sides in the First Law civil war, 'A Beautiful Bastard' providing a microcosm of the effete stratifications of the Union, and 'The Fool Jobs' featuring Curden Craw amidst the harsh world of the fighters from the North. But the story between those two is something different,'Small Kindnesses' bringing together the skilled thief Shevedieh and Javle, the Lioness of Hoskopp.

Their stories are dotted throughout the collection, as if they were a pair moving through this world without taking sides, and surviving on one's wits and the other's prowess. Their final tale, and the book's penultimate, 'Tough Times All Over', starts some 19 years after their first appearance; Shev remains bewitched by the highly untrustworthy Carcolf, and Javle still hasn't resolved her pursuit by the High Priestess of Thond (her mother, as it turned out in an earlier tale). It's a portmanteau story, as a document gets stolen and re-stolen again and again, but it's both amusing and touching, and very well structured within its fast-paced rollicking. I wouldn't hesitate to nominate it for a CWA short-story Dagger next year.

In Shev, the tricky thief constantly getting herself into predicaments and Javle, the warrior armed with the Father of Swords who rarely over-thinks things, Abercrombie has created a female version of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and I don't make this comparison lightly. Leiber is the one outlier of the great talents of sword & sorcery fiction, and probably the hardest to equal, and Abercrombie has equalled the master here.

I say Leiber is an outlier in sword and sorcery because Robert E Howard spawned many imitators, John Jakes and Karl Edward Wagner being the best. Howard's popularity came off the back of the Tolkein revival in the mid 1960s, and eventually writers would move beyond the lone barbarian format to the more Tolkienian bigger one of whole worlds colliding on a bigger stage. When I wrote about Heroes I compared Abercrombie to the best of those writers, George RR Martin, who needs no further introduction, and Glen Cook whose novels of the Black Company are massively under-appreciated but whose trimmed-down style melds perfectly the bigger scale of kingdoms warring and the tighter focus on the men doing the fighting, the kind of scale that Abercrombie has made his own, with prose lean like Cook's but much more layered. Interestingly, Cook also wrote a series more in the Leiber vein, the hard-boiled sorcery Garrett, PI novels.

But what makes Abercrombie stand out is his range, and that is driven home by the story that follows 'Tough Times All Over' and closes Sharp Ends. 'Made A Monster' is a portrait in exhaustion. Bethod is the most powerful Chieftan in the North, but he's tired of war and dreams of peace, among the Northmen and then perhaps with the Union. First he has to deal with Rattleneck, a rebel chief who has sworn to have Bethod's head. Bethod believes he has leverage; Rattleneck's son has been captured alive, and he can use the boy to win over the father. But he has been captured by Logen Ninefingers, the most fearsome warrior in the North, 'blood-drunk and murder-proud' as one character describes him, and Bethod needs to persuade Ninefingers to give up his captive.

Readers familiar with the First Law series will recognise the characters, but those who are not will understand them immediately. Abercrombie has the ability to create a mood that hangs over the story and the characters, and the beauty of his longer fiction is that he's able to keep doing it in scene after scene regardless of the changes. The story's ending is a surprise, though it seems in retrospect inevitable; it is one of overwhelming sadness. And it picks up added resonance when the reader realises that it is the only story in the book set out of chronological sequence; it occurs just four years after the first one, meaning everything that has followed in this wonderful book has been affected by the tragedy of that final tale, and the title of the book takes on another deeper meaning. It is, like Abercrombie's writing, deceptively simple. It is fine writing, in any genre.

SHARP ENDS by Joe Abercrombie

Orion Books, £18.99 ISBN 9780575104679

BEFORE SUPERMAN THERE WERE THE KENTS

Almost four decades ago, John Jakes, a writer best-known for his Brak the Barbarian series, which was arguably the best of the sword and sorcery series that followed the 1960s Conan revival, hit the big-time with his 'American Bicentennial' series of historical novels. The family at the centre of that saga were called Kent, and that came back to me as I read The Kents, because this comic-book historical saga, which I encountered in a library in Waikanae New Zealand, tells how family who adopted Superman came to settle in Smallville, Kansas before their strange visitor from another planet fell to earth, and very much follows that historical framework.

These Kents move out to Kansas before the Civil War, part of the effort to keep the territory free of slavery. The focus is on the two sons, Nate, who remains true to their father's dream, and Jeb, who falls in with the pro-slavery Missourians. As such, the focus of the saga remains tight, which is an advantage over the multi-volume sprawl of Jakes' original, but much of it follows the same pattern: intra-family conflict, an unresolved love story between antagonistic groups (Nate loves a woman who's half-Indian), and of course the addition of famous historical figures, in both meaningful roles (for example, Nate's woman is originally partnered with his friend Bill Hickock, and Jeb rides with Quantrill, Anderson, and the James gang) and as walk-ons (John Wilkes Booth has a meaningful one). The Kansas-Missouri border conflicts, stretching on both sides of the Civil War, have been fruitful territory for any number of novels, and there is plenty of material on which to draw.

The story is framed by a manuscript device -- Pa Kent has found letters and journals buried on the Kent property—which is clunky at times. In fact, the framing echoes the story itself, which sometimes lumbers along as if ticking the boxes, with neither the historical sweep of Jakes nor his dynamism. There are a number of Superman references dropped in, not least the 'S' symbol being something handed down from his Iroquois ancestors. Writer John Ostrander eventually resolves his stories in a moment of high but successful melodrama, which works even better as we learn at that point that none of Jeb's letters to his sister back in Ohio, through which we have been following him, were never sent. It's a nice touch to what becomes a compulsive story. I've enjoyed other Tim Truman projects in the same vein more than this one; here Michael Bair's inking gives a hint of Frank Robbins to Truman's usually more defined pencils. His Jonah Hex (another cameo player in the story), seems strangely one-dimensional. Tom Mandrake picked up the final four issues from Truman and is just as interesting.

Published in 1999 and collected as a book in 2000, this might be seen as DC's millennial answer to Jakes' bi-centennial series. But if a western about Superman's family's origins seems a slight idea, its execution makes it an impressive mini-series.

The Kents, written by John Ostrander,
pencils by Tim Truman and Tom Mandrake, inks by Michael Bair
DC, 2000 $19.95 ISBN 1563895137