I’m excited to launch a brand new cover design for The String City Mysteries, a collection of seven fantasy-noir novelettes which I self-published in 2021.
Why the new look? Frankly, I never really liked the original cover. I put it together in a hurry, with limited means at my disposal. Having subsequently created a more elaborate set of illustrations for the Stone trilogy, I decided to use my growing library of KitBash3D assets to create something with a little more oomph.
The text of the book remains unchanged, although I’ve taken the opportunity to reformat the ebook in line with my more recent self-published volumes. If you already own the Kindle edition, everything should update automatically as the changes come online.
The String City Mysteries chronicles the adventures an interdimensional detective with a nose for an unusual case … and a rather remarkable coat. The stories were first published in Realms of Fantasy magazine, then later expanded and republished as individual ebooks. Collected together for the first time in a single volume, they form the backstory to my novel String City
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Introduction to The String City Mysteries
Let me take you back to 2005. My sixth novel had just been published by HarperCollins and I was floundering around getting increasingly frustrated about what direction to take next. Sensing a certain darkness in my mood, my agent, the late Dot Lumley, casually asked me if I’d ever thought about trying my hand at short stories.
Coincidentally, I’d just finished reading a pile of short fiction anthologies, including a Dashiell Hammett collection. Feeling all noirish — and certain that Dot’s throwaway suggestion hadn’t been nearly as throwaway as it sounded — I wrote a story called The Wooden Baby, a light-hearted fantasy-noir mash-up starring an unnamed gumshoe with an uncanny ability to travel between dimensions.
To my delight, Shawna McCarthy, editor of the now sadly defunct short fiction magazine Realms of Fantasy, published not only The Wooden Baby, but also four more stories in which my nameless detective ventured ever-deeper into the strange world I was steadily building around him. In 2011, Guiseppe Granieri at 40K Books republished the first five tales and commissioned two more.
Finishing up the seventh and final story in what I was beginning to think of as The String City Mysteries, I looked back over the series and saw I’d done two unexpected things.
First, the world I’d been building had grown much larger than I’d ever intended. In The Wooden Baby, for example, the office of my gumshoe hero resides in a kind of existential wilderness and the gumshoe himself is an archetype, at times close to a cliché. By the time I got to Lifestrings of the Loving Couple, I’d established an entire metropolis within which my gumshoe plies his trade. As you read your way through this collection, you may sense this gradual expansion, none of which was planned in advance. Like Topsy, it just growed. Call it worldbuilding on the fly.
Second, I realised these seven stories, taken together, form a kind of prelude to a much bigger story still to come. You may sense this, too, as you read — the feeling of a gathering storm, of playing pieces moving incrementally into position on some cosmic gameboard.
I eventually told this final, much longer story in the novel String City, which was published in 2019 by Solaris Books. Now that’s done, the time feels right to collect the original seven stories (each of which is really long enough to be classed as a novelette) into a single volume — and here it is. In these pages you’ll find werewolves and titans, angels and zombies, murder, love and, above all, mystery.
Graham Edwards 