Five novellas
A Flush of Shadows marks Kate Wilhelm’s staking out of an unusual fictional territory.
Crime novels with paranormal elements usually occupy a niche somewhere between horror and crime, depending on the amount of splatter, Charlie Huston’s Joe Pitt novels about a vampire PI being a perfect example.
However, the paranormal elements of the stories in A Flush of Shadows are much more covert, being very much in the shadows of three of the stories, while two are straightforward crime stories.
‘With Thimbles, Forks, and Hope’ is the oldest and most overtly science-fictional of the five novellas, appearing as it did in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1981, just as Wilhelm was starting to move from straightforward SF to mystery/SF on her way to straightforward mysteries such as Best Defense, and tells how Charlie is asked to stop a man seemingly intent on suicide from committing the act. With Wilhelm just finding her feet in this niche, so to speak, it is the least assured of all the stories here.
Sister Angel appeared in Omni two years later, and by this time Charlie has retired from the Fire Department, as he and Constance are asked by a woman to investigate a preacher whom she believes has an unhealthy influence over her heiress cousin.
All For One is one of the two straightforward crime novellas, but is marked by Wilhelm’s trademark attention to character (her characterization is probably amongst the best in the science fiction field) and features a lovely ambiguity in the title.
The Gorgon Field also appeared in Asimovs in 1985, was a Nebula Award finalist in the novella category, and is without doubt the best story in the book. Once again, a [young] relative fears that her father is going to make an inappropriate bequest (the relationship between parents and children, particularly between fathers and daughters is at the heart of four of the five stories in the book) and begs Constance and Charlie to visit him at his private resort in Colorado, where they discover that the land itself can have power. The Gorgon Field is worth the price of the book on its own.
Torch Song is the last and longest story in the book, and is one of the two original stories, neither of which has any clear speculative element – although there hints that Constance’s feminine intuition may be very, very close to psychic powers, Wilhelm underwrites this so beautifully that it’s hard to be sure. This time Charlie himself and their daughter are the targets for a killer bent on revenge. This story is much more specific – mentioning dates for example – than the earlier one, s, much more in the real world, and introducing Charlie’s daughter, albeit off-stage.
‘Torch Song’ ends a collection that’s a fascinating journey in its own right, from a hybrid of SF and crime, to pure criminology.
