Fantasy is so often associated with knights and royals that books centered around criminals can feel deliciously transgressive, despite a long tradition. From the antics of Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser to Bilbo Baggins’s stint as a burglar in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” crime fiction is great fun when combined with the speculative. You can keep your epic heroes: I want to follow the slickster who’s greasing palms, staging jailbreaks and smuggling faerie wine while the fate of the world hangs in the balance.
Fantasy crimes, cons and heists offer specific pleasures above and beyond the vicarious thrill of a well-executed job. For one, they usually require a team of flawed, charismatic antiheroes, each with their own shifting loyalties and twisty back stories. The team offers the additional pleasure of expertise: It’s fun to watch someone be very good at what they do, even if what they do isn’t in the service of goodness.
Then there’s the meticulous world-building. If you’re going to spend time in a realm’s underbelly, its magic systems and social structures need to be delineated clearly enough for the reader to puzzle through the loopholes along with the crooks.
And just as mystery readers test their cleverness by cracking a case alongside a literary detective, readers of fantasy thrillers can prove theirs by guessing how the miscreants will outwit the authorities and get away scot free. That’s a game I love to set up as a writer, and to play along with as a reader. Here are some of the books that pull off seemingly impossible heists with panache — and a little magic.
The Blacktongue Thief
by Christopher Buehlman
Kinch Na Shannack is already deep in debt to the Takers Guild for educating him in the ways of thievery when he makes an ill-advised attempt to rob Galva, a knight and veteran of the goblin wars. The Guild gives him one last opportunity to pay off his debt or die trying: He must accompany Galva on her quest to find her lost queen, navigating a world of witches, flesh-eating goblins and assassins that can fold themselves up to hide inside cats. Come for the wildly original world-building; stay for the romp.
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