The Mister Trophy

Frank Tuttle, I have a bone to pick with you. You need to put caution labels on your books:
"DANGER: CAN CAUSE UNCONTROLLED LAUGHTER IN PUBLIC."
I made the foolish decision to start The Mister Trophy while on the subway. I really did manage to stifle my mirth to those almost silent single sniffs of amusement, but the rest of the passengers started giving me worried looks. If I'd put a cap on the ground, they probably would have made charitable donations to the crazy girl smirking to herself. As it was, a child pointed at me and started whispering to his mother, and they promptly got out at the next stop. I could have tried to explain that it was all due to lines like, [A troll, after attack by vampires] "Mister Jones...he is sorry. He show more meant to leave the half-dead creature able to answer to you for the insult to your house, but he fears he squashed it." but I'm not sure it would have helped.

The Mister Trophy introduces us to Markhat's world, where a recent war between humans and trolls was won via vampire intervention on the humans' side; since then, the vampires appear to rule the human cities. As Markhat says, "They won the War for us and promised to behave...They stay in their houses from sunup to sundown. We stay in ours after curfew. They don't break into our bedrooms at night and we don't spend our lunch breaks putting stakes between their ribs. It's worked so far." Of course, when three Trolls stop by Markhat's office and hire him to retrieve the head of one of their ancestors from the trophy wall of a powerful vampire family, the sewer hits the windmill. Markhat has been hired because, as one of the Trolls informs him, if one of them went to talk to the vampires directly, "'I would be honor-bound to slay all of the Haverlocks and a certain number of their kin. That would be--' the translator halted, struggling for words '--time consuming.'" And as time is money, clearly putting a very fragile, squishy human right in the middle of the struggle between two implacable supernatural species will be the best way to clear it all up.

The Mister Trophy is very short--it's about the length of a standard short story--but a lot of fun. The writing is terse, with staccato sentences liberally mixed with comic dialogue. The writing is both breezy and efficient; despite having zero background on any of the characters, they felt very much alive to me. The entertaining mixture of hardboiled detective and full-fantasy world is reminiscent of Cook's Garrett (Sweet Silver Blues) and Bledsoe's Eddie Lacrosse (The Sword-Edged Blonde), but I found Markhat far more appealing than either. At the same time, I think the story could be improved by being fleshed out to a full novel. The basic plot feels a little disjointed, as the motivations of the various characters, as well as the consequences of their actions, are left mainly unexplained. hover for spoiler At other times, Markhat simultaneously tells us the rules of the world while explaining how they were broken. hover for spoiler Like the Garret PI books, the plot also depends rather heavily on coincidence and deus ex machina, and a more fleshed-out plot might remove some of the sense of contrivance. All the same, the tidbits of worldbuilding we get are fascinating; like Garrett, Markhat is an ex-marine in a vicious war only recently ended. The regent of the kingdom appears to be hated by his subjects, and vampires hold power over human behaviour. Markhat's mysterious ally, Mama Hog, is entertaining enough that I'd like to see more of her, and I found Markhat himself sympathetic, engaging, and often hilarious. His delivery of lines is constantly amusing; for example, take the start of their desperate venture:

'We must go forth as one,' boomed Mister Smith.
'Our cause is just,' said Mister Chin.
'Our hearts are brave,' said Mister Jones.
'My ass is wet,' I said.

I have a feeling I'm going to spend quite a few more subway rides vainly attempting to hold back snorts of laughter. If I get locked into McLean on a 72-hour hold, I'm definitely blaming these books. I suppose it won't be too bad if they let me have my kindle in the psych ward. show less

According to this page, this is the first story in Frank Tuttle's Markhat series. I became aware of this series when one of Tuttle's works (The Broken Bell?) popped up on Samhain's new releases page and set off my "ooh pretty" reaction. The excerpt sounded good and reminded me a little of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. I passed it by when I noticed that it was a later book in a series that sounded like it might need to be read in order, although I did add Tuttle's books to my ARe wishlist. When a good sale came up, I took a chance and bought the whole series. Some, like this story, weren't available through ARe, so I ended up buying this direct through Samhain.

I was right when I said that this series seemed very much like Jim Butcher's show more Dresden Files. There's a similar level of snark, both series star a private eye who is resourceful but in over his head, and both series have a lot of fantasy elements. I'm not sure if Markhat has any magical abilities, but so far the answer seems to be “no.” However, he knows at least one person who can give him a bit of magical help.

I found this particular story to be way too short – I wanted to know more about Markhat and his world – but there was enough there for me to be glad that I already own the rest of the series, or at least what's been published so far. This story doesn't reveal much about Markhat other than that he has no family and apparently very few friends and that he fought in the war that took place between the Trolls and the humans. The interesting part, to me, was that, although the vampires fought for the humans during the war, in this story it was the Trolls who were Markhat's allies, while the vampires were the ones he had to be most wary of. The Trolls, while a bit freaky, were still the more trustworthy beings.

The story was fairly simple (a good thing, considering how short it was), but interesting. Considering how it ended, I'm hoping that the Trolls pop up in one of the later books/stories. Markhat seems to be one of those characters who is probably perpetually short on funds but rich in not-quite-comfortable alliances. I love characters like that.

Unfortunately, Samhain charges rather a lot for its short works – this story sells for $2.50 and, like I said, isn't available via ARe, so you can't count on a future sale there to reduce the price. However, it's a good story, and I don't feel that the money I spent was a waste. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series and will hopefully be able to give my input on how easy it would be for a newbie to start with one of the later works.

(Original review, with read-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

I picked this up as a free e-book, and read it without any other information. I found it very confusing and somewhat pointless. My guess was that it was some kind of prequel to another story, giving some background for the major conflict. When I came to enter it here, I saw that it is #2 in a series. Maybe it would have helped to read #1 first.

I didn't feel particularly lost regarding who the characters are, even though there is almost no explanation. One of the benefits of working in a clearly defined genre is that you have conventions to do some of the work for you. This is noir, albeit set in an alternate world with vampires and trolls, so we have the hard-bitten, wise-cracking detective, the quirky neighborhood characters, the crime show more bosses, stool pigeons, etc. The plot was easy to follow.

My complaint is more that at the end I thought, so what? The plot maguffin moved from A to B. I don't really care, and it makes no difference. From what I could tell, Finder Markhat (the protagonist, see above for defining traits) was no different at the end than he had been at the beginning. If this is a prequel, setting things up for the really significant conflict to come, that makes sense, but here, it just makes the book feel like a waste of time.

Since the other reviews are all high, I'll assume that there is something here I'm missing. However, I'm not interested enough to figure out what it is. show less

very easy to read but so short its only 45 pages long.