Helloooo!!

This week I reviewed the really really good SF mystery Universal Language - The Airlocked Room Mystery by Tim Major Mars, robots and one of the best detective narrator voices I’ve heard in a while. Tim kindly agreed to answer a few questions about the story and what else to look forward to this year

How do you like to booktempt Universal Language?

That’s a lovely phrase, one I haven’t heard before – ‘booktempt’ describes a great deal of my life, I suspect, as a reader and as a writer. In fact, it’s apt, because writing Universal Language was a big indulgence, a temptation I couldn’t resist. It’s a classic, complex locked-room mystery with an impossible murder! And it’s set on Mars! And it has robots! And alien crabs filled with diamonds, and shared dreams of sandstorms, and smugglers, and…

So there you go: if any of that mishmash appeals to any potential reader, then we’re on roughly the same wavelength, and hopefully there’ll be little room for disappointment.

Abbey has an unusual voice as we are so used to noir detectives giving a voiceover. What was the inspiration for her?

I wrote an SF novella called Blighters several years ago, which featured an idiosyncratic first-person narrator called Becky Stone, a character I really enjoyed writing. I think I’d been looking for an opportunity to use a similar setup in another book. As with the indulgence of jamming together influences – mystery writers such as John Dickson Carr, and SF giants Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury – I allowed myself to throw everything that appealed to me into the mix. But I think the results are actually pretty consistent, and far less of a hotchpotch than it might sound. It seems one of those writing secrets that becomes obvious after the fact: write what you love. Or, in this case, write what you love, all jumbled together in a big pile.

The very clear image of Abbey Oma that I had in mind throughout the writing process was of Gwendoline Christie, who played Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones. She’s such a phenomenal presence that I imagine that lots of writings are mentally ‘casting’ her in novels at the moment. I loved writing Abbey, and the fun challenge of presenting a murder mystery as a sort of shaggy dog tale, recounted after its conclusion by a charismatic raconteur.

Did you always know this would be on Mars? What’s the appeal of this planet?

Oh, Mars… I love Mars. I love Ray Bradbury’s vision of Mars in his Martian Chronicles, specifically, but also Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars, or the version in Robinson Crusoe on Mars, for example… any depiction that’s idiosyncratic. I suspect that the reason that Mars figures so centrally in our shared imagination is that it’s close enough and knowable enough for us to picture setting up new lives there – a new New World – and yet it’s far less knowable than the dusty, dry Moon. Once we send astronauts to Mars, we’ll no doubt have to pick a new planet to project our dreams onto.

I’ve written lots of short stories set on Mars – stories that share the same context, and even some characters, with Universal Language, though they’re all independent of one another. I’ve enjoyed adding to this setting over years, little by little. I’m not sure anybody’s really noticed, but I think the stories are richer for returning to this world again and again. So, the short answer: when I came up with the concept of an airlocked room mystery, giggling over its possibilities, my existing template of Mars seemed the ideal setting for the idea.

What is your favourite SF mystery?

Claire North’s incredible The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August absolutely counts as a mystery, I think, and it’s utterly wonderful. The meticulous planning that would have been required to construct its time-looped plot is mind-boggling, and yet it also remains characterful and warm throughout.

In plotting a mystery how important is knowing how everything must come together at the end or was it a voyage of discovery?

Good question! I’ve had to check my notes to figure out how much I knew about the outcome right at the beginning, and the answer is: nothing at all – though I had a very clear idea about the circumstances of the finding of the body. I loved the idea of a dead body found in a room that was not only locked, but also airlocked, preventing any human from committing the deed, but with a robot standing over it – the sole suspect – whose programming prevents it from harming humans. But I’m talking about the beginning of the planning process. Before I began writing the first draft, I had the whole thing planned out fairly meticulously. I’m sure it’d be possible to wing it, but with a mystery that would seem like making a lot of additional work for yourself, such as the seeding of clues once you’d decided what those clues needed to be… (I took this approach with my first novel, itself a sort of mystery, and I can tell you, it involved a lot of drafts.)

What else can we look forward from you and where can we find out more?

My Sherlock Holmes novel, The Back to Front Murder, published by Titan Books in August 2021 and available for pre-order now, and there’ll be another Holmes novel due in 2022. You can find out about all my books and short stories at my website, www.cosycatastrophes.com

If there was one book not your own that you wish you could get everyone else to read what would it be?

I love talking about books more than anything in the world, and yet this sort of question still makes my mind go blank… The question suggests a book that most people are unlikely to have read, I suppose, and given the context, the first thing that comes to mind is Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room. It’s the most perfect locked-room mystery I’ve read, and while any mystery afficionado will certainly have come across it, it doesn’t seem a novel that’s much read the days in Britain, at least. It could only be improved by being set on Mars.