I enjoy science fiction and fantasy, I enjoy mysteries, and I particularly enjoy science fiction and fantasy mysteries. For some reason, neither the people who write about SF nor the people who write about mysteries seem to write about this double-genre, so I thought I would try to write up an overview and history and highlight my favorite series. In the 1940's John Campbell, the famous science fiction and fantasy editor, questioned whether it could really be done. In the 1950's Isaac Asimov proved it could be done, and done well in science fiction. In the 1960's Randall Garrett showed it could be done well in fantasy. From a few scattered novels, SF mysteries really took off in the 1980's and now there are several hundred good-quality novels that are both SF (science fiction or fantasy) and mysteries (detective stories or police procedurals).
Much, perhaps too much, more below the squiggle: my take on what is necessary to meet the requirements of each genre, history of writing that fits both genres, favorite series.
What makes a successful science fiction or fantasy mystery?
John W. Campbell, the famous editor of Astounding Science Fiction and Unknown Worlds explained back in 1941 why it was hard to do a “classical detective story” in science fiction.
"Detective stories in science fiction are decidedly unsatisfying; they’re supposed to be a challenge for the reader to solve the case before the explanation is given. In science-fiction, they’re decidedly unfair. The locked-room mystery, for instance, might be solved by (a) the villain’s possession of an invisibility suit, (b) a fourth-dimensional penetration, (c) time-traveling, or (d) radio transportation of the murderer into and out of the locked room. Nice, neat but not fair to the reader; the author can pull anything he wants out of the hat." (Astounding, May 1941)
And of course not only can the criminal be provided with whatever miraculous tools is needed to carry out the crime, the writer can also provide the detective with whatever miraculous tool he needs to solve the crime.
Thrilling Wonder Stories published a series of short stories from 1941 – 1943 by Frank Belknap Long, later published in book form as
John Carstairs: Space Detective. They feature John Carstairs, curator of the Interplanetary Botanical Gardens in New York City, who solves crimes using extraterrestrial plants that always have just the right effects: one plant emits fumes that make suspects tell the truth, another tracks plants of a type used to commit a murder, still another forms into the shape of a criminal who stood in one place and left an “aura”, and so on.
Isaac Asimov responded to Campbell with an explanation of what science fiction writers must do to provide a satisfying mystery, principles he followed in his own path-breaking science fiction mystery, Caves of Steel, 1954.
"Ordinary mystery writers (non-science fiction variety) could be just as unfair to the readers. … They could do anything. The point was, though, that they didn’t do anything. … It seemed, then a matter to be taken obviously for granted that the same would apply to a science fiction mystery. You don’t spring new devices on the reader and solve the mystery with them. You don’t take advantage of future history to introduce ad hoc phenomena. In fact, you carefully explain all facets of the future background well in advance so the reader may have a decent chance to see the solution. The fictional detective can make use only of facts known to the reader in the present or of “facts” of the fictional future, which will be carefully explained beforehand." (“Introduction”, Asimov’s Mysteries, 1968)
The same issues arise in fantasy, where demons and other supernatural beings can be given magical powers to do anything the author wishes and detectives can be endowed with exactly the magical knowledge, ability or talisman necessary to counteract these powers. When the investigator is provided with a magical staff of truth, the investigation to determine the truth and find the guilty party is unlikely to be the focus of the story. The writer faces the challenge of creating a consistent set of rules that constrain what criminals and police or detectives can do sufficiently to allow a mystery to play out and must avoid the temptation to spring new powers on the reader as the story or the series goes on.
SF requires a consistent future or alternate world
A successful SF mystery will fully meet the criteria for both genres and that will eliminate a lot of stories with aspects of SF or aspects of a mystery. In SF, whether science fiction or fantasy, the story takes place within an internally consistent future or alternate world. In science fiction this world is either based on possible future scientific discoveries in the natural world (however unlikely such things as time travel, faster-than-light travel or mental telepathy may be) or set in an alternate universe in which one or more of these discoveries has already been made or in which a major historical event worked out differently (so that the South won the Civil War, for example). Fantasy is based on supernatural forces (magic) or supernatural beings such as ghosts, elves, demons, vampires and werewolves. The supernatural forces in fantasy SF are part of the “nature” of that alternative universe and follow consistent “laws of nature”. Naturally the boundaries between the two contain plenty of gray areas – mind reading can be portrayed as having a scientific basis or as a supernatural power, for example.
Successful science fiction and fantasy mysteries feature crimes and detection “rooted in the social structure of the fictional environment, where the motivations of both sleuth and quarry all grow out of the postulated society.” (Cele Goldsmith, Amazing Stories, January 1962). In a fully integrated SF mystery, some aspect of the nature of the alternative or future universe is an essential part of the crime and its solution.
The mystery sections of bookstores contain a great many novels that use elements of fantasy or science fiction, but fail to create a consistent alternative world, treating these elements as isolated aspects of the plot that have no effect on the larger society. Donna Andrews, author of the Turing Hopper series, in which a computer artificial intelligence becomes a detective, stays away from any broader changes in society due to the development of artificial intelligence. The many mysteries starring the detective’s cat or dog never explore the implications for society of a world in which cats or dogs may have human intelligence, telepathic powers and so on. Paranormal mysteries where the detective has psychic or telepathic powers (such as those allowing communication with her cat) or works with angels rarely consider how a world where people have such abilities would be different from our own.
Mysteries require a criminal investigation
The science fiction and fantasy sections of bookstores have a lot of stories that involve a police officer or a private investigator, but that is not enough to make a book a mystery. A mystery has a crime whose perpetrator or purpose is unknown, and a detective of some kind who engages in an investigation that turns up clues, either in the form of physical evidence or testimony, and uses his powers of reason to solve the mystery. The mystery story contains two major elements, the story of the crime and the story of the investigation, which narrows the many possible stories of the crime down to one and uncovers the “real” story of the crime. The mystery may focus on the process of generating clues, the “classical detective story” or, as in the “hard-boiled detective story” it may focus on the obstacles faced by the detective, usually some combination of “intimidation and temptation” from the perpetrators and their allies or from a corrupt system. The detective may be a police officer, a professional private investigator (licensed or not), an amateur investigator with another profession such as journalist or antique dealer, or a person accused of a crime and trying to demonstrate their innocence.
Science fiction is full of police officers who have adventures rather than assemble clues and solve crimes. The Space Patrol is a combination of Navy, Coast Guard and police force, sometimes fighting alien invaders and sometimes fighting interplanetary or interstellar piracy but rarely doing criminal investigations. In Grey Lensman, E. E. “Doc” Smith provides only a brief interlude of undercover police investigation within a melodramatic space opera when his heroic Galactic Patrol officer Kimball Kinnison passes as an asteroid miner to investigate a drug smuggling operation that is a front for invaders from another galaxy. Similarly the Time Police defend either the past or alternative timelines from interference and when they engage in some investigation it is usually a minor part of an action-adventure.
There are plenty of SF novels that feature private “investigators”, including Sherlock Holmes or people modeled in part on Sherlock Holmes, again with plenty of heroic adventures and only incidental investigation. In fantasy Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes defeats everything from vampires to Lovecraftian horrors. In science fiction Sherlock Holmes stories, he is drawn into our modern world from an alternative reality, recreated by a high powered alien life form, or stays in his own time and deals with everything from dinosaurs to alien invasions. Though using the great detective as the hero, few of these involve actual detecting.
There is a whole genre of stories, going back to the 1890s and perhaps earlier, with “occult detectives” or “supernatural sleuths”. Few if any of these are either SF or mysteries, as I define them, even though they involve private investigators and have perpetrators who are ghosts or other supernatural and malevolent forces. These stories are about people who “detect the occult” and they find, combat and block or destroy evil forces. They do not do criminal investigation to determine a guilty party and their supernatural beings are not presented as part of a systematic alternative world whose structure has implications that are essential to solving the mystery.
Mysteries and Thrillers
Mysteries also accept a certain modesty regarding the role of the investigator. When the detective determines the perpetrator and motivation for a serious crime, usually a murder, this is an important but limited accomplishment. The arrested criminal is then turned over to the criminal justice system or the information is given to the police or the private client who hired the detective for final resolution, if any. Solving a murder may prevent or cause political or diplomatic repercussions, but it will rarely save the country, or the world, or humanity or change the intergalactic balance of power. If the investigator’s work has those larger effects, the novel is usually a thriller or an action-adventure story with mystery aspects rather than a mystery.
Still, genres have large grey areas and, like anyone making generalizations about them I have to recognize that there are always exceptions and a great deal of room for argument. So now let's see what makes it through the screening and qualifies as an SF mystery.
History of Science Fiction and Fantasy Mysteries
The 1940s and 1950s: Isaac Asimov writes the first successful science fiction mysteries
The first book-length science-fiction mystery was Needle, by Hal Clement (serialized in Astounding, May & June 1949), in which an alien criminal and the pursing detective both crash-land on Earth near a tropical island. The detective works with his assistant (a teenage boy who is also the symbiotic detective’s host) to deduce who among the small number of people on the island is carrying the escapee. The story is at best a mildly engaging young adult novel.
Murder in Millennium VI (1952), by Curme Gray, is set in a far-future matriarchy where death is virtually unknown, making murder hard to grasp. Despite some ingenious ideas, the novel is plodding and in parts almost impenetrable. It springs the method of murder on the reader without establishing its possibility in advance and relies on present-day motivations that are questionable in the alternative culture described. Science fiction critic Damon Knight comments in In Search of Wonder (1967) that while “as a formal novel of detection the story is a bust… it’s a prodigious three-quarter success” in writing as someone from the far future would write, for the “contemporary” far future audience and explaining “next to nothing” to the reader of today.
The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester (serialized in Galaxy, January – March 1952), is the first high quality science fiction police procedural, but it’s not exactly a mystery. In it we follow the criminal as he commits the crime and the detective as he tries to prove that the criminal is guilty. The SF twist is that the world contains telepaths, including both the detective and one of the murderer’s accomplices, and the plot revolves not around determining who is guilty but rather around providing proof of guilt within the legal rules that limit the use of telepathy in order to protect privacy.
In Demolished Man Bester built on ideas recently used in short stories. In “Private Eye” (Astounding, January 1949) by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore) a man plans and carries out a murder knowing that modern civilization has developed technology that enables the criminal justice system to watch and listen to everything that an accused has done during the previous fifty years in order to determine whether a murder was premeditated. We watch as the “forensic sociologist” (detective) combs over the killer’s actions and we listen to the killer’s thoughts as he carefully sets up the crime and gets away with it. In Rex Graham’s “Customs Declaration” (Astounding, March 1949) a customs agent breaks up a Moon-to-Earth drug smuggling operation. The main interest of this story is its imaginative picture of people living on the Moon, while the solution to the mystery of how drugs were being smuggled past a telepath is rather weak. Replace the “replay” technology in “Private Eye” with the telepathy from “Customs Declaration”, however, and we have the basis for The Demolished Man.
With Asimov’s Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957) we finally arrive at science fiction mystery novels that succeed in both genres and in which the science fiction setting is essential to the solution to the mystery. They provide us with a traditional police detective, Lije Baley, who investigates a murder carried out by parties unknown, develops and discards theories of the crime as new information is uncovered and finally solves the crime. The science fiction setting is a future where people have produced highly intelligent robots, one of whom, Daneel Olivaw, becomes the detective’s partner. These justly acclaimed novels take place in a carefully structured future in which both the murders and their solution depend on a combination of Asimov’s famous three laws of robotics, which he had developed in earlier stories and novels, and on the social structures of the worlds on which they take place. He also wrote a number of very short mysteries solved by the clever deductions of Dr. Wendel Urth. Despite Asimov’s example, or perhaps because he did it so well, there were no further serious science fiction mystery novels for another twenty years.
The 1960s and 1970s: Randall Garrett writes the first successful fantasy mysteries
From 1959 - 1961 Randall Garrett and Laurence Janifer, writing together as Mark Phillips, collaborated on three humorous novellas in Astounding, later expanded and published as three short novels, featuring FBI Agent Ken Malone, working with a telepath who believes herself to be Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the First. The first novel, Brain Twister (1962), is an entertaining mystery. The subsequent novels are mediocre adventure stories.
Soon after, Randall Garrett wrote the first successful fantasy mysteries, featuring Lord Darcy, Chief Criminal Investigator for the Duke of Normandy, in an alternative British empire in which magic is operational. They feature careful use of the “laws” of magic in the investigations and in the portrayal of the alternate society and its history. The series began with a short story “The Eyes Have It” in the January 1964 issue of Analog (the new name for Astounding). There is one novel, Too Many Magicians (1966). The short stories were collected in Murder and Magic (1979); and Lord Darcy Investigates (1981). Michael Kurland wrote two authorized sequels, Ten Little Wizards (1988) and A Study in Sorcery (1989).
Larry Niven wrote a series of three science fiction mystery novellas (1969, 1973, 1975, collected in The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, 1976) and an illustrated novel The Patchwork Girl (1980) featuring Gil Hamilton, a member of the United Nations Police with paranormal powers. Niven also wrote a number of short science fiction mystery stories that were not part of the series and were never published together in book form. Roger Zelazny wrote a series of three novellas featuring a man without a name who worked freelance for the world’s second largest detective agency, but only the second, “Kjwall’kje’k’koothai’lll’kje’k” (1973) is an actual mystery (in My Name is Legion, 1976). Phillip K. Dick wrote several novels featuring police, only one of which could be considered a mystery. A Scanner Darkly (1977) is one of Dick’s best novels due to his vivid portrayal of drug culture and personality disintegration rather than its quality as a police procedural and it is only marginally science fiction, set in a near future where undercover police have “scramble suits” that hide their identities when reporting in.
Two fantasy mysteries were published in 1978. The Holmes-Dracula File by Fred Saberhagen features Count Dracula as an honorable person and an ally against a criminal gang, perhaps preparing the way for the profusion of vampire detectives that followed. Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula by Loren Estleman is a standard pastiche.
The 1980s: The floodgates open: Killough, Niven & Barnes, Effinger, Cook, Hughart, Adams, Asimov and more
In the 1980s several writers began sustained production of dual-genre novels, many of them excellent, including series’ that would last over many years and many volumes. The Doppelganger Gambit (1979) by Lee Killough was not only the first of a series but the first high quality science fiction police procedural novel since Asimov’s The Naked Sun more than twenty years earlier. Larry Niven teamed up with Steven Barnes to produce a series of ingenious locked room mysteries starting with Dream Park (1981) and Isaac Asimov brought back Lije Baly and Daneel Olivaw in The Robots of Dawn (1983) as well as co-editing a collection of short stories, Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space. George Alec Effinger began his fine three volume Marid Audran series with When Gravity Fails (1986). Quite a few other authors produced excellent science fiction mysteries that are not part of a series.
The output of fantasy mysteries was at least equal to the output of science fiction mysteries. Barry Hughart wrote his three superb Master Li novels, beginning with Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was (1984). Glen Cook began the humorous Garrett P.I. series, currently at 14 volumes, with Sweet Silver Blues (1987). Lee Killough began the Gareth Mikaelian series with with Blood Hunt (1987), the first and one of the best of what would become a long list of vampire police officers and detectives. Douglas Adams contributed the humorous Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and a sequel. Mercedes Lackey wrote the first and best of three Diana Tregarde mysteries, Burning Water (1989), featuring a partnership between a police detective and a practicing witch. Again, quite a few authors wrote fine fantasy mysteries that were not part of a series.
High Points Since 1990: Robert Harris, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and many others
Many fantasy mysteries have used alternate history settings, beginning with the Lord Darcy mysteries by Randall Garrett, but until the 1990s there were no realist alternative history mysteries. There are still not many, but they have been of consistently high quality. Robert Harris provided the first excellent alternate history mystery with Fatherland (1992), set in a world in which Hitler conquered Europe. The England defeated by Hitler is the setting for three mysteries by Jo Walton, beginning with Farthing (2006). Michael Chabon set The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) in a world where Jews took refuge in Alaska rather than Palestine. Providing a change from the focus on alternative outcomes to World War II were Mike Connor’s Archangel (1995) set in plague-ridden 1930s Minneapolis and Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s Arabesk triloby, beginning with Pashazade (2001), set in a modern-day Ottoman Empire.
Miriam deFord suggested that “alien penology” would be a particularly fascinating subject for science fiction, since it would require conceiving of crimes and punishments alien to our normal way of thinking. (Miriam Allen deFord, ed, “Introduction”, Space, Time & Crime, 1964.) Her own efforts were limited to some humorous short stories (“Ropes End” in Space, Time & Crime; “The Eel” in Galaxy, April 1958). The idea finally reached fruition in the superb Retrieval Artist series by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, beginning with a novella, “The Retrieval Artist” in Analog (June 2000), followed by The Disappeared (2002), and its eight sequels. They feature Miles Flint, a police detective turned private investigator, who specializes in finding and helping people who are in hiding because, although by human law they are guilty of no crime, they have been sentenced to severe punishment under various alien legal systems.
Since 1990 there have been quite a number of high quality series as well as many fine single novels. Excellent science fiction mystery series include:
Lynn S. Hightower, usually a mystery writer, wrote four SF mysteries, beginning with Alien Blues (1992), featuring human and alien homicide detectives as they develop a partnership.
Richard Paul Russo’s three Carlucci novels, beginning with Destroying Angel (1992) feature hard-boiled detectives and serial killers.
Jack McDevitt’s seven novels feature Alex Benedict, an antiques dealer. McDevitt starts with an adventure novel, A Talent for War (1989) and then uses his hero in a series of mysteries starting with Polaris (2004).
Excellent fantasy mystery series include:
Joel Rosenberg’s D’Shai (1991) and its sequel, Hour of the Octopus (1994) have a classic sword & sorcery setting.
Daniel Hood’s amusing five volume series, beginning with Fanuilh (1994), feature a former wizard’s assistant (not himself a magician) and his helper, Fanuilh, a miniature dragon.
Martin Scott’s Thraxas(1999) features a down-at-the-heels magician of limited powers who became a private investigator after losing his job on the palace guard due to excessive drinking. It's now the first in a nine book series.
Elizabeth Bear’s New Amsterdam (2010) stories bring together a vampire P.I. and a police sorcerer named Irene Garrett (her name a tribute to Randall Garrett and Irene Adler). The other stories in this series are currently only available in limited edition, small press books.
Many series start with one or two mysteries and then shift from mysteries to adventure stories.
Charlaine Harris’ best-selling Southern Vampire series began with Sookie Stackhouse as an amateur detective in Dead Until Dark (2001). She goes on to many adventures as she learns to use her telepathic powers and enters fully into the hidden world of vampires, were-beings, etc.
Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series starts with a mystery, Guilty Pleasures (1993) and continues on (and on and on) as a series of adventure novels.
Mysteries involving SF authors or conventions
There is also a small but entertaining set of mysteries that are not SF but are set at sci-fi conventions or involve sci-fi authors.
Anthony Boucher (H.H. Holmes), Rocket to the Morgue (1942, in the Sister Ursula series)
Mack Reynolds, The Case of the Little Green Men (1951)
William Marshall, Sci Fi (1981)
Sharyn McCrumb, Bimbos of the Death Sun (1987) and Zombies of the Gene Pool (1992)