Like the two earlier stories, it begins as a kind of procedural, as Fatma – now saddled with a junior partner she doesn’t want – investigates the gruesome mass murder of a group of mostly British wannabes calling themselves the Hermetic Brotherhood of Al-Jahiz and supposedly dedicated to “uncovering the wisdom” of the missing wizard. In this one we learn that Egypt is also well in advance of England in terms of women’s suffrage and social equity.Īll these characters are back onstage in A Master of Djinn, Clark’s first full-length novel set in this colorful world, in which a Soudanese mystic named al-Jahiz had, 40 years earlier, somehow ruptured the membrane separating the world of djinn from our world, and then disappeared. In Clark’s followup, the Nebula-winning The Haunting of Tram Car 015, the main investigators – again working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities – are Senior Agent Hamed al-Nasr and his new partner Agent Onsi, giving the tale a familiar veteran cop-and-sharp-newbie overtone.

The Ottomans and the British are long gone, and Cairo is one of the world’s great modern metropolises. Djèlí Clark seemed to have figured this out when he introduced us to his alternate 1912 Cairo in “A Dead Djinn in Cairo” in 2016, with its dandy-ish investigator Fatma el-Sha’arawi, her partly supernatural lover Siti, and an advanced, steampunkish Cairo featuring airships, clockwork trams, and automata (rather wonderfully called boilerplate eunuchs) – along with various troublemaking djinns, ghuls, sorcerers, and ifrits.

The idea by itself doesn’t have much air left in it, so the way to make it work is to relegate it mostly to background, and to focus on the setting: the particular kinds of magic involved, and, more importantly, the kind of world that it engenders. The notion of magic returning to the world has been a familiar trope for so long that it’s nearly become part of the performance repertoire of fantasy writers, like locked-room murders for mystery writers or alien invasions for SF.

A master of djinn