The Constantine Affliction by T. Aaron Payton (Night Shade Books, 2012) is a steampunk detective story, set in an alternate London where a sexually transmitted disease has recently begun spreading, killing many and changing the sex of the survivors. This is central to the plot, but not in the way that it would be in a story that’s solidly in the TG fiction subgenre; none of the viewpoint characters are transformed, though a couple of major supporting characters were transformed in the backstory, and one other is transformed in the course of the story, though not onstage.

The story begins with Adam, Victor Frankenstein’s monster himself, attempting to revive the reasonably fresh corpse of a murdered woman. It’s one more failed experiment of many, a mindless zombie instead of the rational creature he’s been hoping for.

Then Pembroke “Pimm” Halliday, a sort of alcoholic Lord Peter Wimsey, is hired — or rather blackmailed — by a master criminal, Abel Value, who wants him to figure out who has been murdering his low-class human prostitutes and dumping their bodies on the doorsteps of his high-class clockwork-woman bordellos. Meanwhile, Eleanor Skyler, a female journalist who writes under the gender-ambiguous byline of E. Skye, is investigating the clockwork bordellos, and stumbles on a secret more dangerous than the mere scandal she was looking for.

Pimm and Skye meet, of course, and continue their investigations together; and of course the murder of the prostitutes turns out to be connected with Adam’s researches, the “Constantine Affliction,” political intrigue and treason. The story as a whole is fast-paced and great fun, and a fair bit deeper, philosophically and poetically, than one expects from a fast-moving adventure story, though not as deep as many of the author’s short stories.

From the point of view of gender, the most interesting aspect of the book is the supporting character of Freddy, or Winnie — Winifred Halliday, née Frederick, Pimm’s long-time best friend and for some years now his wife. The law doesn’t recognize transformations, primarily to protect stability of inheritances; so Winnie is still legally male and, if her original identity were generally known, her and Pimm’s marriage would be annulled and there’d be a terrible scandal with both their families (Freddy’s family thinks she ran off to America after her transformation). Winnie has adapted to her transformation better than most victims of the Affliction, many of whom are trying to disguise themselves as male to prevent anyone from finding out about their change, or have locked themselves away and interact with the world only through servants. But she’s still attracted to women, and her nominal marriage to Pimm is a convenient arrangement for both of them, to give her more respectability and freedom than she’d have living in her parents' house, and to get his parents to stop trying to arrange a marriage for him. She’s an inventor, though she modestly calls herself a mere tinkerer — she supplies Pimm with spiffy period-appropriate James Bond-gear. (Some heroes carry a sword-cane; Pimm has a taser-cane.) She’s tough, smart, funny, feminine without being girly — probably the best thing about this book; if I have any complaint it’s that she doesn’t have a larger role and some viewpoint scenes. But it makes sense that she’s a supporting character; she’s already come to terms with the big upheaval in her life, and she doesn’t change in the course of the story nearly as much as Pimm, Skye or Adam.

T. Aaron Payton is a pen name of Tim Pratt, who writes the most amazing short stories under his own name, and novels under several different pen names for various genres. This is the first of his novels I’ve read, but it won’t be the last.

The novel is subtitled “A Pimm and Skye Adventure,” implying possible further books about these characters, but since Night Shade Books went out of business shortly after publishing the first, I fear the odds of that are slim. Copies of this one still seem to be readily available both used and new, though.

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Three of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format.

Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon