This October, Pyr will be publishing The Metatemporal Detective by Michael Moorcock. The cover art should ring bells of familiarity with long-time Moorcock readers.
The book will collect, for the first time, eleven tales of Sir Seaton Begg vs. Count Zenith, including the never before seen “The Flaneur of the Arcades d’Opera.” Count Zenith, a deposed count who wields a certain soul-sucking black sword, should be very familiar to fantasy readers because he is known elsewhere in the Multiverse as Elric of Melniboné.
The stories in this volume follow Seaton Begg and his constant companion, pathologist Dr. “Taffy” Sinclair, both head the secret British Home Office section of the Metatemporal Investigation Department—an organization whose function is understood only by the most high-ranking government people around the world—and a number of powerful criminals.
“Begg’s cases cover a multitude of crimes in dozens of alternate worlds, generally where transport is run by electricity, where the internal combustion engine is unknown, and where giant airships are the chief form of international carrier. He investigates the murder of English Prime Minister ‘Lady Ratchet,’ the kidnaping of the king of a country taken over by a totalitarian regime, and the death of Geli Raubel, Adolf Hitler’s mistress. Other adventures take him to a wild west where ‘the Masked Buckaroo’ is tracking down a mysterious red-eyed Apache known as the White Wolf; to 1960s’ Chicago where a girl has been killed in a sordid disco; and to an independent state of Texas controlled by neocon Christians with oily (and bloody) hands. He visits Paris, where he links up with his French colleagues of the Sûreté du Temps Perdu. In several cases the fanatical Adolf Hitler is his opponent, but his arch-enemy is the mysterious black sword wielding aristocrat known as Zenith the Albino, a drug-dependent, charismatic exile from a distant realm he once ruled.
“In each story the Metatemporal Detectives’ cases take them to worlds at once like and unlike our own, sometimes at odds with and sometimes in league with the beautiful adventuresses Mrs. Una Persson or Lady Rosie von Bek. At last Begg and Sinclair come face to face with their nemesis on the moonbeam roads which cross between the universes, where the great Eternal Balance itself is threatened with destruction and from which only the luckiest and most daring of metatemporal adventurers will return.”
These stories pay homage to Moorcock’s many literary enthusiasms for authors such as Clarence E. Mulford, Dashiell Hammett, Georges Simenon, and his boyhood hero, Sexton Blake.
In response to a question from a perhaps less-than-well-read SFScope editor (me), Pyr’s Editorial Director Lou Anders told SFScope “What’s good about this collection (aside from the original novella that ties them all together) is that a lot of these haven’t appeared in easily found sources or have been published outside genre (McSweeney’s, for instance). But what struck me seeing them all aggregated was, well, how much of an Elric book this is! It’s really more his book than Begg’s, and ties in directly with the recent Warner trilogy of Elric in our world and his thousand-year dream.”
The Metatemporal Detective will be a 370-page hardcover with a cover price of $25.00 (ISBN: 978-1-59102-596-2) with cover art by John Picacio.