Weekly Short Story: Cold Spell by Donna Andrews

Departing a bit from my pattern of reviewing mainly older short stories from many decades ago, I picked the 2004 tale Cold Spell, written by Donna Andrews and appearing in the anthology Powers of Detection: Stories of Mystery & Fantasy (Ace Books).  The setting is in imaginary fantasy land ruled by a duke who has a murder mystery to solve.  Already predisposed to suspicion about the magicians under his domain, he is on the verge of banning all magicians after a prisoner of his dies of a stabbing wound that seems completely inexplicable other than from magic.  Master Justinian, the most powerful mage known, is summoned to the duke by means of an bluntly disrespectful character named Reg...Justinian takes along his spunky apprentice Gwynn as he travels to the castle.  While the magician tries to figure out what happened, he sends his aide with Reg to tend to a different problem elsewhere in the castle.  Gwynn then pieces together all of the phenomena they had been experiencing and solves the puzzle...

I really enjoyed Cold Spell, especially the humor spread throughout it.  It has to be tough to develop characters' personalities in such a short span (it's only 21 pages), but I got to like both Justinian and Gwynn (and even Reg to a degree).  The only problem I have with it has to do with the combination of three factors: the story's brevity, the magic and the rules the author assigns it in the story, and that it is in the final analysis a mystery narrative...

One of the cardinal rules of mystery fiction is to present information early enough in the story that can at least give the reader some substantial clues to solve it.  In stories about magic, each author brings to their work their own rules by which it is governed.  But because Cold Spell was so short, Donna Andrews would have had to spell out one of her rules that was crucial to explaining the mystery: had she done that, it might have been too easy to solve.  But by presenting her rule at the end, it came close to violating that earlier-stated principle of letting the reader in on trying to solve it.  Oh well, maybe this means that the best mysteries should be based on real-life situations, and if there is one in a fantasy world with magic, then the story might just need to be a little longer.  That having been said, I still recommend Cold Spell...