Vampire Detectives
Review by Evelyn C. Leeper, submitted on 29-Mar-2002

VAMPIRE DETECTIVES by Martin H. Greenberg
DAW, ISBN 0-88677-626-0,
1995, 316pp, US$4.99
A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper
Copyright 1995 Evelyn C. Leeper

How, one might ask, can you have nineteen stories about vampire detectives without having them get a bit repetitious? The answer is that you can't and so what you have here are nineteen stories, SOME of which are about vampire detectives and some of which are about regular detectives hunting vampires. (Well, I suppose the English language allows the latter to be called "vampire detectives," much as Ace Ventura was a "pet detective." Still, this is a little like having an anthology called NURSE STORIES which is half stories about nurses and half stories about bull-fighting written by nurses.) For that matter, a couple are not about detectives or detection at all.

Reading these, I have to say that perhaps the specialized anthology has gotten too specialized. Or perhaps Greenberg really does need a co-editor to oversee the artistic end of things. (Okay, so some may quibble about the juxtaposition of the word "artistic" and the concept "vampire detectives.") But I found these stories basically boring, and this time I cannot attribute that to having read too many at one sitting, since I spread this out over a couple of weeks.

Not surprisingly, the best of the batch is Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg's "Girl's Night Out." I hope someone publishes a collection of Malzberg's recent short fiction, much of which has been scattered around in anthologies of wildly varying quality. A few, notably William Sanders's "The Count's Mailbox" and Gary Alan Ruse's "Night Tidings," are extremely derivative. (I can't believe that Ruse used such an obvious gimmick from Conan Doyle.) But even the rest are pretty much your basic modern vampire story, with maybe one twist here or one unusual updating there, but on the whole uninteresting. Maybe dyed-in-the-wool (died-in-the-blood?) vampire fans might like them, but the average reader can safely give this collection a miss.

%B Vampire Detectives
%E Martin H. Greenberg
%C New York
%D April 1995
%I DAW
%O paperback, US$4.99
%G ISBN 0-88677-626-0
%P 316pp