Murder on the Titania & Other Steam-Powered Adventures (2018)
Written by: Alex Acks
Genre: Steampunk
Kindle pages: 257
Publisher: Queen of Swords Press
Why I chose it: One of my favorite formats of fiction writing is the same-character short story collection. There’s something wonderful about those to me. I get a whole slew of stories that gives me lots of adventures (they’re often adventures) and still gets all the benefits of telling a novel-length story—character depth, world-building, rising stakes.
Sarah Monette’s The Bone Key is an excellent example of this type of collection: a series of occult cases centered on her protagonist Kyle Murchison Booth. Another good example (though with a surprisingly porny start) is KJ Charles’ The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal, which starts off lightweight and ends up decidedly not. You know those characters blood and bone by the time you’re through with their collection.
This is all lead up to saying that I was interested in Alex Acks’ Murder on the Titania when the super-vivid cover came across my Facebook feed, but when I realized it was a collection of stories about a roguish piratical character called Captain Ramos, I was ready to buy. Especially since it was released on my birthday. It had to be A Sign.
That it was steampunk didn’t hurt. It’s not that I love steampunk in and of itself—I find that steampunk often has lingering Imperial issues and class issues, etc.,–but that steampunk as a genre often stands in for “adventure” stories, which I do dearly love.
The Premise:
Captain Marta Ramos, the most notorious pirate in the Duchy of Denver, has her hands full between fascinating murder mysteries, the delectable and devious Delilah Nimowitz, Colonel Geoffrey Douglas (the Duke of Denver’s new head of security), a spot of airship engineering and her usual activities: piracy, banditry and burglary. Not to mention the horror of high society tea parties. In contrast, Simms, her second in command, longs only for a quiet life, filled with tasty sausages and fewer explosions. Or does he? Join Captain Ramos, Simms and their crew as they negotiate the perils of air, land and drawing room in a series of fast-paced adventures in a North America that never was.
Murder on the Titania and Other Steam-Powered Adventures includes 4 novellas and a short story about piracy, banditry, burglary, jail-breaking, several brilliant bits of detective work and all manner of otherwise lawless hijinks performed by the valiant Captain Ramos and her crew.
Murder on the Titania: Colonel Geoffrey Douglas, the Duke of Denver’s new head of security, is drawn into a high society murder mystery on the Airship Titania. None of the passengers are quite what they seem, including the mysterious young woman who always turns up where she is least expected.
The Curious Case of Clementine Nimowitz (and Her Exceedingly Tiny Dog):
A simple burglary goes horribly awry when Captain Ramos and Simms stumble across a dead body, a small dog and the deceased’s heirs, the noisome Morris and the rather too interesting Delilah.The Jade Tiger: a mysterious woman enlists Captain Ramos’s aid in getting her revenge on her former employer and Captain Ramos finds herself doing an unintentional good deed.
The Ugly Tin Orrery: Captain Ramos and her crew embark on what appears to be a perfectly ordinary train robbery, only to be drawn into the Duke of Denver’s political machinations via a strange metal artifact. Throw in a spot of jail breaking and an encounter with the lovely Delilah, and it’s all in a day’s work for Captain Ramos and Simms.
The Flying Turk: The Airship Titania is entering a new era and welcoming its first automaton pilot. Or, perhaps not. Captain Ramos and Simms are back aboard the Titania for a heady mix of murder, robbery, peeved scientists and oblivious peers, with a spot of engineering thrown in.
Look right there. Hijinks. I do like that word. Explosions and tea parties and sausages and airships and this seems right in line with Gail Carriger’s oeuvre, which is pretty much a romping good time.
Some spoilers
Discussion: So how did Murder on the Titania measure up for me?
I don’t think this is a perfect collection in the grand scheme of things. It’s a little on the short side, and there were a lot of nagging things that bothered me.
The world-building seemed sparse. North America has been divided into a group of quarrelsome/warring Duchies; there are railways and airships, and apparently some sort of zombie plague that requires you to kill your dead very dead indeed or face reanimation. But that’s really all I got out of it. Enough to go on with, but not enough to really breathe life into this world.
There are four novellas here and a short story, and sadly, the last story in the book is the least of the stories, which is never the way to end a book. “Murder on the Titania” opens on the Duke of Denver’s airship, the Titania, so it would seem an easy choice to put the other story set on the Titania at the end, to show how things have changed. The problem is that for anyone familiar with history of automata, “The Flying Turk” of the final story reveals its primary secret in the title. So watching Marta unravel the mystery is more a meh than anything else. And the stakes are low; she and Simms have their escape route planned from page one, so… if the airship piloted by this supposedly fully-automated Flying Turk, crashes, no skin off their nose.
The story before—“The Ugly Tin Orrery” was much more satisfactory, and in rereads, I’ll undoubtedly stop there. It has real stakes, a real mystery, and pits Marta Ramos against her old adversary, the upright and uptight Colonel Geoffrey Douglas.
This collection skipped around a little too much and left awkward spaces for me to stumble over. While Feximal, mentioned above, spans a wide array of years, and introduces a lot of characters, I didn’t feel like I constantly had missed something in their lives. Here, I felt like there were other in-between stories alluded to, but not provided, and that kind of nagged at me. The Colonel, for example, goes from a one-time antagonist in the first story to a long-time foe who she’s escaped from repeatedly, so much so that she’s familiar with his prisons, his offices, and the key tenets of his personality. In the fraught circumstances of “The Ugly Tin Orrery,” she can figure out not only how to escape him, but how to help him, even though he won’t directly ask it of her. That’s a whole lot of relationship under the bridge that I just never saw.
Ditto Delilah. I really wanted more Delilah.
So those are the complaints. Scanty world-building, a poor choice of ending story, and too many gaps in the narrative.
But! That doesn’t cover all the delightful things this slim collection offered.
Marta Ramos is just plain fun. She’s the charming rogue we all love. I loved that she was smart, and clever, and unflappable… but not infallible. Terry Pratchett always had a turn of phrase that I loved: that Granny Weatherwax (and others) could happen to someone. Like they were forces of nature that just bowled others over. Marta is very much a happening type of character, and I loved that.
Simms, her long-suffering second, is a hoot. I would read lots of pages of the Marta and Simms show.
Delilah is great as the femme-fatale version of Marta. Equally clever, equally determined, a charming rogue in her own right, and maybe the only person we see ruffle Marta’s feathers in this collection. In case you couldn’t tell… I really enjoyed Delilah’s character.
Acks’ writing style is breezy and light, one of those writing styles where it’s easier to keep reading than find a place to set the book down. Acks isn’t trying for full authenticity of period tone and that was just fine by me. It worked well with these unconventional characters.
While the world-building in the macro was often unclear, each individual scene was well-drawn and evocative.
I thought three of the five presented stories were excellent, delivering on their promise of fun and steampunk adventure. And all the stories were compulsively readable. “The Flying Turk” still had great moments between Marta and Simms and Marta and a rather hapless group of air sailors.
In Conclusion: In the end, my best metric for whether I enjoyed a book (or collection of stories) or not is found in the answer: Would I buy another book about these people, given the opportunity?
In this case, yes. Hell, yes. Tomorrow if possible.
Especially if there’s more Delilah.
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