On My Shelves: A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark

Marley Jacob is a wealthy old woman, known for her charity and eccentricity, a lawyer who no longer needs to practice but who has various unusual clients. She also has a nephew whom everyone – even, with sadness and regret, Marley – dislikes. Aloysius is the classic self-centered, unconsciously arrogant man who has literally never looked at himself in the mirror of the soul.

Or rather, Aloysius was that sort of man, and Marley Jacob had such a nephew. Aloysius was murdered, found drained of his blood over a storm grate, and Marley suspects that not all of the blood actually drained into the grate…

A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark is an absolutely delightful urban fantasy by Harry Connolly, author of the Twenty Palaces series, the pulp action thriller King Khan, and more recently The Great Way fantasy trilogy. I've mentioned before that the Twenty Palaces books were about as dark as I care to read, but this novel, like King Khan, was a far more fun read.

The main characters are Aunt Marley and her surviving nephew, Albert, and their investigation of Aloysius' death will turn out – naturally – to involve something far more than just the death of an obliviously arrogant man.

Marley is a magician, a witch, call her what you might, one who uses magic. But in this world Connolly has created a very clever description of magic; it is a thing that isn't real, but "not real" in the way that mercy and kindness (and hate) are not real, things that aren't part of the solid measurable world. Mostly she uses her magic in very clever, subtle ways, such as handing someone an object they want, yet having the object remain in Marley's hands. But, just as anger and courage have changed the course of history, Marley's power is more than capable of powerful effects indeed.

One very deliberately unusual feature of A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark is that not only is the main character an old woman (though with a strong and capable veteran nephew as her deuteragonist), but also she is utterly opposed to violence – not because she is incapable of it, but because she was all too capable of it when younger. Marley seeks peaceful solutions to conflicts, even when such solutions seem impossible – and she is generally right to do so.

That "generally right" bit is more significant than usual. The biggest single manifestation of "magic" is a sense of "rightness" – of how to make the right choice, even if you have no idea why, for instance, you have suddenly decided to turn left instead of right at that intersection and head to a building you've never been to, or chosen to answer a ringing telephone that isn't yours.

Speaking as an author, this is one of the most clever MacGuffins I've ever seen, ranking up there with the genius who came up with The Doctor's "regeneration" power. Here's a power that can be used to guide the plot pretty much without limit, basically "the Force tells me so". It allows the author to send his characters wherever they have to go, even into perilous situations, with perfect justification, and – even better – without knowledge, so that they can be surprised, startled, even terrified by what follows.

What makes the novel really clever, though, is that while Connolly makes great use of this MacGuffin, it never feels forced. I never had a feeling that I was just watching Marley's sense of "the right thing" drag the plot from point to point; it was all a natural progression from start to finish. This takes skill when you've invented such a wonderfully flexible and powerful narrative tool; there's so much temptation out there to use it to smooth over those annoying plot problems.

Instead, Harry Connolly gives us a smoothly-plotted mystery with many threads that Marley and Albert have to slowly gather together in order to discover the connection between Aloysius' death and a secret that threatens the entire city of Seattle.

I won't spoiler the actual plot any more; it's too much fun to watch it play out. I will say though that I thought the Godzilla reference was so beautifully done I read it three times.

A Key, an Egg, an Unfortunate Remark: a really wonderful book. Go out and buy it!