A review by pedanther
He Do the Time Police in Different Voices by David Langford

lighthearted medium-paced

3.25

A collection of parodies and pastiches from a career spanning more than three decades - and it has to be said that some of them have not aged well. The early ones, grouped together, show a marked tendency toward people getting hilariously drunk and male leads checking out the female lead's prominent features, which is only sometimes justifiable as an exaggeration of elements present in the works being parodied. There's one story in particular, originally published in 1984, that leans on stereotypes we now recognise as homophobic and transphobic to such an extent that I'm kind of surprised to find it being reprinted in 2015, even allowing for a desire for completeness of collection.

There are some good works in here; on the whole, my experience was that the more successful were the short parodies that didn't outstay their welcome, and the longer pastiches that were trying for some degree of being a worthwhile story in their own right. Several of the more successful pastiches are detective stories, including the Father Brown story "The Spear of the Sun" and the Sherlock Holmes story "The Repulsive Story of the Red Leech"; perhaps the form imparts some extra degree of discipline. The Lovecraftian pastiche, "Out of Space, Out of Time", is also not bad, though the title makes it sound more parodic than it actually is and it suffers a bit from being more interested in its Big Idea than in the plot and characters. The collection ends strong with the Nero Wolfe parody "If Looks Could Kill", which is both a reasonably satisfying mystery and genuinely funny, allowing me to part on good terms with a collection that, by that point, I was pretty glad to be moving on from.
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