China Miéville is one of those writers, like Neil Gaiman, whose can string together words like an Istari wields magic — that is, with the skill of a demigod. I’ve only seen the smooth-headed scribe once, at Comic-con five or six years ago, before he had become a fantasy fiction sex symbol, and when this fresh-faced brit handed me a free copy of Perdido Street Station , I almost wrote it off as another piece of unsolicited swag to toss in the bin back at the hotel. Thank goodness I didn’t follow that impulse, as that novel was a revelation! Very good stuff for fans of weird and urban fantasy (albeit decidedly more mature than Labyrinth).

Anyway, today sees the release of his newest book – The City & The City (which is my next Kindle download, unless I can score a library copy –didn’t plan ahead…). Timed with this release, Mieville discusses the crime novel genre at John Scalzi’s Whatever blog. It’s absolutely a must read for fans of mystery and fantasy or anyone who likes hearing brilliant writers talk about their craft. Here’s an exerpt:

…detective novels are not novels of detection, still less of revelation, still less of solution. Those are all necessary, but not only are they insufficient, but they are in certain ways regrettable. These are novels of potentiality. Quantum narratives. Their power isn’t in their final acts, but in the profusion of superpositions before them, the could-bes, what-ifs and never-knows. Until that final chapter, each of those is as real and true as all the others, jostling realities all dreamed up by the crime, none trapped in vulgar facticity. That’s why the most important sentence in a murder mystery isn’t the one starting ‘The murderer is…’ – which no matter how necessary and fabulously executed is an act of unspeakable narrative winnowing – but is the snarled expostulation halfway through: ‘Everyone’s a suspect.’ Quite. When all those suspects become one certainty, it’s a collapse, and a let-down. How can it not be? We’ve been banished from an Eden of oscillation.

Oh, you Brit writers of the fantastic with your haunting eyes, fancy jewelry and abilty to sum up genres in a perfect paragraph.

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