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Ian Tregillis's Something More Than Night is a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler inspired murder mystery set in Thomas Aquinas's vision of Heaven. It's a noir detective story starring fallen angels, the heavenly choir, nightclub stigmatics, a priest with a dirty secret, a femme fatale, and the Voice of God.
Somebody has murdered the angel Gabriel. Worse, the Jericho Trumpet has gone missing, putting Heaven on the brink of a truly cosmic crisis. But the twisty plot that unfolds from the murder investigation leads to something much bigger: a con job one billion years in the making.
Because this is no mere murder. A small band of angels has decided to break out of heaven, but they need a human patsy to make their plan work.
Much of the story is told from the point of view of Bayliss, a cynical fallen angel who has modeled himself on Philip Marlowe. The yarn he spins follows the progression of a Marlowe novel—the mysterious dame who needs his help, getting grilled by the bulls, finding a stiff, getting slipped a mickey.
Angels and gunsels, dames with eyes like fire, and a grand maguffin, Something More Than Night is a murder mystery for the cosmos.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2013
- Sales Rank: #403270 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-12-03
- Released on: 2013-12-03
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
“Superlatives seem superfluous. Instead...wow. Just-wow.” ―Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
IAN TREGILLIS is the author of a triptych of alternate history series, Bitter Seeds, The Coldest War and Necessary Evil. He lives near Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he works as a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In addition, he is a member of the George R. R. Martin Wild Cards writing collective.
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Wonderful, razor tight combination of noir and SF
By Steven Halter
"Something More Than Night" by Ian Tregillis is a wonderful, razor tight combination of noir and physics-both meta and quantum.
When Ian first posted the idea for the novel on his blog in February of 2012, I thought it sounded great as I am very much a fan of Chandler and my expectations were high. I was not let down at all. The book is fantastic; the writing is lovely.
We begin with the death of the angel Gabriel. Gabriel was one of the Seraphim and was very dead as his reentry set the sky aglow and drifting bits cause an odd snow in Australia. Bayliss, one of our narrators notes this and reminisces about Gabriel that:
" He wasn’t just lovely, he was the kind of lovely that could make a bishop stomp his miter and curse a long blue streak on Easter Sunday."
Bayliss is also an angel although he has bummed about on Earth and has adopted the mannerisms of a hard-boiled detective. Hard boiled, but like the best of them, he seems to have a soft spot for women in a tight fix and a desire for knight-errantry. That and a touch of rye in his coffee.
During the light show of Gabriel's fall, Bayliss clues us in to why the humans moving around him with downcast eyes aren't noticing much:
"But nobody looks up anymore. That stopped soon after the last satellites died. In the minds of most monkeys, thirty years of meteor showers was weak tea compared to the loss of decent long-term weather forecasts."
This also gives us a nice piece of world-building. The story happens in the not too distant future (50 or so years I would guess) and there has been a war that destroyed the satellites and prevents any new ones from the debris layer. From the early blurbs I was expecting the noir, the angels and the mystery, but Tregillis also mixes the fantasy elements with a strong dose of physics and math:
"The light of a distant quasar twinkled with chromatic aberration as the fine-structure constant gave him a farewell salute from the twenty-first decimal place."
So, is the book fantasy or SF? I would have to go with a lovely confluence of the two.
With Gabriel gone, Bayliss starts trailing "a mugg with a bit of high-class fluff on his arm." The "fluff" is Molly, who will be our second narrative voice and will also turn out to not be so fluffy:
"Curls like brushed copper fluttered beneath the brim of her cloche. Her stride was firm and purposeful, like that of a CEO or dominatrix, moving without hesitation on the slick snow-dusted paving stones. She walked like the world was made of red carpet."
Molly turns into a strong independent voice through the course of the book. This is a departure from the classic noir line where the woman is usually there for the detective to react to or react for. Indeed, it's a departure even from the majority of modern fiction. I addition to being a sharp operator in her own right, Molly is fully fleshed out as a character. She makes mistakes but then she takes action for those mistakes, Nothing passive about Molly.
As the novel progresses, Bayliss operates on Earth and in the meta space of the Pleroma where the angels male their homes out of their own desires. At one point he cases Gabriel's joint and encounters some visitors. A classic noir scene, but not a classic location:
"The newcomers were rummaging Gabby’s collection of sonnets; he’d liked to carve them into the crusts of neutron stars. Next they’d be cutting the mattress apart and pouring out the coffee cans. There were two of them. Each girded the heavens with diaphanous wings more transparent than a rich widow’s grief."
This juxtaposition of classic elements and complete originals continues through the story. In addition to the little details, you'll encounter this lovely structure in the overall plot. Surprises aplenty, but I won't say much about those.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
urban fantasy/hardboiled detective mash-up that works
By Sneaky Burrito
I've never read anything by Ian Trigellis before, so I didn't have any expectations going into this book. But I went through a stage in my life when I was really into hardboiled detective novels (read a ton of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett) and film noir. I still have a soft spot for that stuff, and that's what drew me to this book. (Well, that, and I've also started reading a bit more urban fantasy lately, so this was a great combination for me.)
Something More than Night is set in Thomas Aquinas's vision of Heaven, or so the book description says. I will admit to not having had any exposure to the writings of Aquinas (which I understand were extensive), so I can't comment on the accuracy of the depiction (for a quick primer, Google "Christian angelic hierarchy" and click on the Wikipedia link that comes up). I had a little trouble keeping all the different classes of celestial beings at first, but I was able to sort it out by the end, and everything seemed internally consistent within the milieu of the story. Many of the angels in this book turn out not to be particularly nice "people" and there appear to be different factions among them, which provides for a bit of tension.
From what I can tell, this book is set in Earth's not-too-distant future (at least the parts that occur in the mundane world). The cities and countries are the same (we visit Australia, Minneapolis, and Chicago, for example). Satellite communications have largely (or completely) broken down, but people are still traveling, still taking part in recognizable activities (environmental remediation, archiving paper books electronically, etc.). I thought Bayliss's visit to a retirement/nursing home was particularly interesting. I tend to have a vision of the elderly that's something like my own grandparents -- but in a couple of decades, the populations of retirement homes will go from people who remember the Great Depression to baby boomers to people who are even younger these days. Thus, when I read about a man in a Ramones t-shirt at this place, it helped set the time period but also made me think about aging and population change.
The book switches back and forth between two points of view. Bayliss is an angel of indeterminate type; he lives like a Philip Marlowe-type character straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel. The chain smoking, the hat, the slang and patterns of speech -- everything. I thought Bayliss's sections (told in the first person) were a lot of fun to read. For me, personally, it would be quite difficult to write this way, because it's too far from the way I normally write or think. But Trigellis does a remarkable job of establishing the character and having Bayliss stay "in character" throughout. Bayliss spends a lot of time among humans (most angels don't).
At the beginning of the book, the archangel Gabriel has been murdered. Bayliss has been tasked with finding a new member of the angelic choir to take Gabriel's place. He's the sort to do the job that's given to him without asking a lot of questions about who hired him or why. And what he has to do is find -- and arrange the death of -- a human, who will then be elevated in status. Through a series of accidents, someone other than Bayliss's initial choice dies when she's hit by a train (not really a spoiler as it happens quite early in the book). This is Molly, and she's the other POV character, although her sections are written in the third person (and in a "non-noir" type of language). As might be expected of someone of her background, she retains a lot of ties to the human world (a brother, an old lover, etc.). At first, she has a great deal of trouble adjusting to the new reality of her existence. She causes a lot of damage and attracts precisely the wrong sort of attention early on.
Bayliss and Molly work together to solve the mystery of Gabriel's murder. I've read a handful of contemporary mysteries in the past year and am used to looking out for clues, red herrings, etc. I was reading along in this book and I was having trouble figuring things out. There were a couple of events in the book that I thought were a bit too convenient at first (the Archangel Uriel rescues Bayliss just in the nick of time, and Molly learns how to use all her angelic powers in an instant after an encounter with a Virtue, just to name a few). But by the end of the book, you learn information that puts these events in context and you realize that Trigellis WAS dropping clues, all along (and not just the ones I've mentioned). At any rate, the mystery part is done well.
To sum up so far: I thought the writing style was great (and fun to read, especially Bayliss's parts), I thought Trigellis chose an interesting setting and stayed true to it, and I thought the mystery aspect was clever.
Trigellis is a physicist and there are some fun asides about science in this book. They work especially well considering how Trigellis has established heavenly support for the laws of physics in the human world (I won't get into that here, but it's established fairly early in the book). A couple that I remember: one character splits water into hydrogen and oxygen when angry, and another character uses the properties of matter to separate coffee grounds from some soul/memory fragments that have been hidden in the coffee can. Being someone with a science background, myself, I appreciated these little bits. But they didn't dominate, so if you're not so scientifically-inclined, you won't miss much.
As far as character development goes, Molly and Bayliss both have depth, although you see it in Molly all along and you don't realize it about Bayliss, necessarily, until a big revelation close to the end of the book. Molly struggles to form and maintain human relationships despite her changed nature. She struggles to gain control of her newly-acquired powers and senses. You learn about her past, her family, her strengths and weaknesses, her hopes and fears. Bayliss is a bit of a puzzle and something of a stock character for much of the book. Suffice it to say, there's a reason for what he does. Molly is definitely more relatable, I'd say, but that makes sense. She was a normal human until just recently. Bayliss never was.
Pacing was also good, for the most part. There are, perhaps, a few too many moments right after Molly's death where she spends time reflecting on her life and reliving her past. It makes sense that a person would do that, and the action in her sections does pick up later on.
A few things didn't work quite as well for me. There's a character named Anne who becomes important later on; she opens up to Molly (a complete stranger) too quickly for my taste, especially considering the personal nature of what they're discussing. Also, the ending was not a strong point for me. I thought the solution to the mystery went well, but what I didn't care for as much was what happened afterwards. A bit too much of a storybook feel to it, I guess. Not sure how I would have done it differently, and certainly don't want to give anything away here.
Finally, this book is a standalone. While I would like to see more from Trigellis in this setting, I don't see that happening because of how this book ended. It's also a fairly short book, at just over 300 pages. In the end, I enjoyed the reading experience quite a bit and plan to seek out some of Ian Trigellis's earlier works. This is probably a 4.5 star book for me, so I'll round up to 5.
Review copy provided by the publisher. Also reviewed for the Best Fantasy Books blog.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting concepts, unsatisfynig book
By Matthew T. Smith
Ian Tregillis is an obviously intelligent and very imaginative author with a broad spectrum of knowledge. This intelligence and imagination is on display in this novel, which incorporates theology, physics, and numerous literary genres, such as mystery and speculative fiction, without feeling overly disjointed as a whole. Yet, while his many ideas are interesting, I eventually found this story tedious and I was more annoyed than enlightened by its end. None of his characters were particularly engaging. One of his main characters perpetually speaks and acts in a jarring Philip Marlowe trope and, while its use is explained in an interesting way around the denouement, putting up with all of it is still exhausting. Certain plot threads also conclude with the incorporation of theological/quantum physical mechanisms that are not adequately explained when he does his initial world building, creating a feeling that the story comes to its end by the arbitrary use of deus ex machina tricks. All that being said, this book is an interesting read for those who enjoy topics such as theology and sci-fi and do not mind such drawbacks as mentioned.
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