‘The Fox Valley Murders’: A hit combination of nostalgia and evocative descriptions of locales

During what was, perhaps, the only Dungeons and Dragons session I have ever participated in, a friend of mine made a pitch for me to jump on the science-and-fantasy fiction bandwagon. The said friend introduced me to the “Dying Earth” subgenre, which also happens to be a common theme and setting in Dungeons and Dragons games. It has a long lineage, featuring works from Mary Shelley and HG Wells to those by Gene Wolfe, but my friend particularly recommended stories and novels by Jack Vance. As it turns out, the subgenre is named as a tribute to Vance and his Dying Earth series (1950–1984).

I never did explore the “Dying Earth” subgenre or Vance’s series. My loyalty and devotion to crime fiction proved to be far stronger – and a cursory dive into Vance’s bibliography showed that he wrote and published a number of crime and mystery fiction works, including a few under the Ellery Queen pseudonym. Last year, on a whim, I decided to read what sounded like one of the more interesting titles in his oeuvre – The Fox Valley Murders (1966). It is safe to say that I hit the jackpot in my first encounter with Vance’s works.

Lived experiences of authors loom large over...

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