ichard A. Lupoff's Claremont Tales II—a
follow-up to his 2001 short fiction collection, Claremont Tales—is, like its predecessor, not so much a "greatest hits" as it is a mosaic of a book, a cross-section spanning nearly all of a decades-long career in storytelling.
In a previously unpublished story, "Green Ice," Lupoff's reserved and resourceful Japanese-Martian detective, Ino Hajimi, returns for another eerie tale of interplanetary mystery. Also in this volume are another pair of Lovecraft-inspired tales ("The Devil's Hop Yard" and "The Turret"), as are more of Lupoff's ventures into individuals' experiences of space-time or "reality" quite out of the norm ("31.12.99" and "A Freeway for Draculas").
In "The Heyworth Fragment," a university community contemplates the possible origins and meanings of a terribly strange and mysterious reel of film. In the world of "Jubilee," the Roman Empire never fell, which is not to say that there are not those who would see Caesar killed and his global and extra-terrestrial dominance buried. "The Adventures of the Boulevard Assassin" has Lupoff telling a Sherlock Holmes story as if it were written by Jack Kerouac, while "Stream of Consciousness" tells of one man's astronomical considerations of the end of the world during an extended, late-night trip to the toilet.
Claremont Tales II also contains a number of "straight" crime-mystery stories: the hardboiled "You Don't Know Me, Charlie," a Hobart Lindsay/Marvia Plum tale ("Old Folks at Home"), an historical fiction involving the Duke and Duchess of Windsor ("News from New Providence") and "What Ever Happened to Nick Neptune?", a story about the high stakes of being a collector of adventure magazines.
A hearty meal for the story-hungry
One of the topics Lupoff tackles in his foreward to Claremont Tales II is that of the categorization of fiction for the marketplace, the "labeling" of authors' work(s) for what are largely marketing purposes. And while he's not prepared to write such labels off altogether, he can't help but wonder about the problems of pigeonholing an author like himself, who writes everything from science fiction to (as he himself categorizes them) "crime/mystery/detective stories" to "fantasy and/or horror stories" to "mainstream stories." Lupoff's answer to this quandary? That readers should simply try to enjoy his stories and, at least, form their own opinions about them.
Lupoff's lifelong love and respect for storytelling are evident in all of the works of short fiction in this volume, as is his sense of humor. The introductory paragraphs he introduces each story with are interesting little insights into the circumstances of the individual works' compositions and their publication histories. The overall effect is a miniature history of the various genres he's written for over the years.
A number of the stories in Claremont Tales II are homages to various writers (be they Dashiell Hammett or Ramsey Campbell), some of which work, some of which don't, really, as stories in their own right. Even this, though, is a testament to the deep commitment to a certain kind of diversity Lupoff exhibits. On a similar note, it takes a certain amount of courage for an author to publish a bit of writing that's been sitting in a file cabinet for 30-odd years—for sometimes these prove to be hidden treasures and sometimes they don't, though Lupoff's confidence in himself and in his craft don't seem terribly shaken by this possibility.
Some of the tales in this collection are truly engrossing, though a number of them, sadly, seem to end just as they're getting started—the drop from climax to denouement is often a particularly steep one (even for short stories). And even if some of this book's works fall somewhat short of their potential, the ambiguity that Lupoff intentionally builds into many of them does catalyze the mind, which is no small accomplishment.
