Swords of Haven – Simon R. Green

Roc, 3 individual novellas, copyright 1990, 1991, and 1991

Printed 1999, 540 pages

ISBN: 0-451-45750-1

Read January 2013, at age 34

First time read

What it is:  A set of three police procedurals set in someone’s D&D campaign (or something like it).  The individual novellas are Hawk & Fisher, Winner Take All, and The God Killer.  There are three more, included in the omnibus Guards of Haven.

From the back cover:

Now in one volume, the first three action-packed adventures of Hawk & Fisher, from Simon R. Green, the New York Times bestselling author of the Deathstalker series…

They’re lovers.  They’re partners.  They’re cops.

They’re the battle-scarred crimebusters of a never-ending urban war… Hawk rules the streets by battle-axe.  Fisher cracks down on outlaws with sword and dagger.  Their merciless beat is the sinister city misnamed Haven – a dark and violent town overrun with spell-casters, demons, and thieves.   A place where money will buy anything… except justice.

  

My reactions below the break:  (spoilers, as usual)

This was not a good book.  Let’s just get that out of the way, right at the beginning.  It was really, really, bad.  Despite that, it was fairly fun.  Let’s see if I can explain it in a way that makes sense.

The books were early books by Simon R. Green, and the show a LOT of growing pains – I’ve read the Deathstalker series, and it was much, much better written than these.  I think I could forgive that in the original printings, but reprinting in an omnibus?  Really?

The characters could easily be separated into named characters, who had various talents and personalities, and faceless mooks, who didn't.  The mooks were just there to be killed.  The named characters (with exceptions, of course) tended toward a tiny bit of back-story and one characteristic.  Overall, it didn't tend toward realism in the slightest.  It felt quite a bit like a D&D campaign, actually.

The main characters… There was Hawk, and there was Fisher.  Both of them got described essentially identically in the beginning of each novella – seriously, the author plagiarized himself – and a major, major problem of the book was that there were two of them.  They were the same character, with the same voice, and the viewpoint hopped between their heads with no warning or consistency.  As a result, the whole felt like one character with two bodies – one male with an axe and one female with a sword.  The descriptions were different, but… they were the same person.   Oh, and they were both guard captains, but they weren't actually superior to anyone.  If the viewpoint had stayed focused on one of them, it might have worked, but I think at least one of the characters needed to be changed for the story to function as planned.

Further, they were supposed to be married, and yet it seemed like they had never talked about anything, so half the book was “so tell me about this major life-changing thing that happened to you last year that may have some bearing on what we’re currently doing, because you've never said anything before” exposition.

Which brings me to the exposition.  It was very clumsy, and mostly consisted of two characters who both knew (or should have known) the entirety of the conversation having chats.  Bad, bad, bad!  It was the worst kind of “as you know, Bob…” exposition I've run into, and it ran throughout the entire book.  The only thing that matched the clumsiness of the exposition was the plotting.

The plotting was…  Well, there were interesting choices made.  Here’s where it again felt like a D&D campaign, especially the second and third novellas.  The first one was basically dinner and a murder.  The other two were go here, fight him, get a clue so go there, fight them, get another clue, fight lots of people, find the bad guy, fight him...  The plotting tended toward the tortured and obvious and somewhat entertaining.

So essentially, despite the terrible exposition, clumsy plot advancement, and poorly thought-out characters, the stories were surprisingly readable.  The setting was interesting, - sort of a urban fantasy, when it used to mean something more along the lines of Lankhmar than Dresden Files.  The pacing was good as well.    So, there you have it.  Surprisingly good, for being so terrible.

Rating: 2

Other Opinions:

SF site

He’s a big fan of the books.   Interesting.

The other reviews I found weren't as well written, but were all generally positive.  Maybe it’s just me.