(Pan Macmillan Australia)
Somewhere back in the dim dark days of my youth, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the world wasn’t ending at the hands of several hundred disparate and palpable threats, I was heavily into crime fiction.
To be more exact, the books of Agatha Christie which my father suggested would make a great transition reading option for a voracious reader bored with kids’ books but not yet ready for the really super intense grown up; he was absolutely bang on about that but somehow it didn’t translate to a love of adult crime fiction overall.
Unless recently when I suddenly found myself relishing crime fiction but with a twist – it has to be quirky or cosy or offbeat (supernatural element? Yes please? Idiosyncratic protagonist? I thought you’d never ask!) and it needs to somehow dodge too much grimness.
And yes, I know, crime is GRIM, but books like Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite somehow manages to be honest about how nasty it can be and yet doesn’t get stuck in a narrative so darkly forbidding that you feel like the victims actually got the better end of the deal.
Is that form of head-in-the-sand escapism, pretending that being murdered is actually not all that bad?
Not a bit; murder is still a terrible and final act in Murder by Memory set in a future where what appears a beautifully apportioned passenger liner is majestically sailing on interstellar winds on a seemingly pampered voyage of millennia-long indulgence for the thousands of souls on board.
Your memory-book got erased!
All the blood in my veins turned to ice, and I sat down, feeling faint.
But if my book was gone, then how was I here?
It’s aim is to usher these well-heeled souls into a centuries-long spot of getting away from it all, and you would think that maybe away from the corrupting influences of earth, that there might be a farm more benevolent, kinder mindset at work.
Alas, for better or worse, and it’s rather more of the latter naturally in Murder by Memory, a novella that packs quite the narrative punch, people keep being, well, people (yep, UGH).
Which means all manner of financial skullduggery, despite the somewhat utopian rules meant to prevent people from accruing too much wealth, power and influence on board, and yes, murder although normally it’s not too enduringly fatal in a future where you simply get a new body in which your carefully-stored consciousness is downloaded.
All simple and easy and precisely what the good souls on board the ship expect is their right as well-cared for passengers.
But what if the murderer onboard, pursued with a wittily assiduous tenacity by a very queer Dorothy Gentleman, one of the ship’s detectives, is not only killing the body but deleting the consciousness?
Things are then far more final and portentously darker and Murder by Memory takes on a whole new sinister hue where the killer must be stopped before death becomes rather more permanent that anyone is bargaining on, and the carefully constructed world of the Fairweather doesn’t feel as certain and safe anymore.
(courtesy official author site)
While the murder may be devastatingly final for some in quite no one in this brilliantly realized future can conceive, and it is absolutely as dark as it should be, what really lifts Murder by Memory is how delightfully droll and self-effacingly funny Dorothy is.
Her interrogations of people like the yarn shop owner whose beloved, Gloria Vowell, is one of the erased victims – her body is fine and dandy but her consciousness has been involuntarily written over by the shipmind with Dorothy’s (why is a lot of fun and if you’re wondering AI can get drunk) which has more than an amusing touch of the Douglas Adams about it – and a banking colleague of the lead suspect are an absolute joy to read.
Dorothy is a damn fine detective and a favourite of the ship’s mind, nicknamed “Ferry” which is how Dorothy’s consciousness came to be in Gloria’s mind in the first place, and knows precisely what she’s doing to get to the bottom of the crime at hand.
But she’s also sardonically funny and wittily dry and also, rather beautifully, touchingly tender, especially when she’s recalling the tragic loss of her great love Celia.
As protagonists go, Dorothy is as good as they get and she keeps things moving on with gusto and clever insight in a way that reminded of another finely wrought sci-fi resident sapphic detective, Pleiti from the The Investigations of Mossa and Pleiti series.
I let out a long breath. ‘And that’s why you didn’t put painkillers in my tea. Because I admired your knitting.
‘Don’t you read history? People have killed for much less. And not-killing is even easier. People do it all the time.’
Murder by Memory also benefits tremendously from the fact that the world-building by Waite is so immersively, brilliantly good.
Life aboard the Fairweather feels as natural and normal as the world around us with the mechanics of its operation, its inhabitants and the whys and wherefores of their existence making a great deal of sense, and quickly too.
Waite only has a novella in which to build a setting and unveil and solve a complicated murder mystery and she makes it all look so ridiculously easy and palpably real.
It isn’t of course and mystery novels are always a thousand kinds of complex, even those of the cosy space operatic kind like Murder by Memory but Waite makes it feel like a ship steaming for hundreds of years through space with a fully-formed society on board is the most normal and natural thing in the world.
Her creation of the society onboard which thrives on the idea that life is immortal in scope because your consciousness is stored safely away (or is it?) away in a library and can get a new host body as easily, more easily in fact, than we buy a new car or fridge, is also a thing of seamless elegance.
There’s a huge amount to like about Murder by Memory from a lively and likeable protagonist who will absolutely win your heart to memorable supporting characters and a mystery which is darkly intense but still playfully unfurled and immaculately realised world building that gives context to a lively bit of sleuthing which shows, once again, that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Not great for any sort of idealistic hopeful belief in the progressive nature of the human condition but perfect for a gripping and fun murder mystery with queer sic-fi flavourings which is precisely what Murder by Memory is.