Humans: So prone to homicide! No murders have as yet occurred in any of our space facilities—that we know of, anyway—but given enough time and an expanding pool of potential perpetrators, it stands to reason that murder victims would start turning up sooner or later. As will the poor saps stuck with the unrewarding job of working out who did what to who, why, and what, if anything, can be done about it.
For your delectation, here are five space-based murder mysteries.
Media Man by Joan Vinge (novella first published in Analog, 1976)
A system-wide civil war reduced the Heaven System to ruins, leaving just a handful of survivors. The Demarchy was lucky. Facing a long, slow decline rather than the abrupt extinction enjoyed by most of Heaven’s inhabitants, the Demarchy provides a luxurious existence for its Demarchs and a miserable one for the other ninety-nine percent.
Spaceship pilot Mythili Fukinuki and Media Man (read: paid shill) Chaim Dartagnan accompany the spoiled Demarch Siamang on what is ostensibly a rescue mission to retrieve marooned space coot Olefin from Planet Two. Demarchs in general and Siamang in particular never do anything for free; the true purpose of the expedition is to further enrich Siamang.
When Siamang, never one for self-control, impulsively murders Olefin in a fit of pique, Fukinuki equally impulsively assures the untouchable oligarch that she will alert the authorities to the crime as soon as the expedition returns to the Demarchy. This bold plan requires the pilot to survive long enough to return to the Demarchy. Unfortunately for her, not only is Dartagnan a boot-licking craven lacky, he’s also a pilot. This means that Fukinuki is entirely surplus to requirements and her life expectancy is accordingly quite low…which is bad news for the budding romance between Dartagnan and Fukinuki.
***
“The Barbie Murders” by John Varley (1978)
From one point of view, the Moon is a wonderland, with a thriving civilization commanding impressively advanced technology. From another point of view, it’s a hellscape populated by stressed-out people coping with future shock in a number of maladaptive ways. Thus, Moon cop Anna-Louise Bach is assured full employment dealing with tomorrow’s crimes.
Bach has had to deal with nuclear terrorism in the past. Compared to that, simple homicide is a welcome relief. Or it would be, if the victim and killer did not come from an insular cult whose members are identical. As bodies accumulate, Bach struggles to distinguish between murdered and murderer in a community to whom the concept of individual identity is anathema.
[Note for younger readers: no, we didn’t have DNA-testing back in the 1970s when this was written, and apparently neither did Bach’s future.]
***
Murder in Space written by Wesley Ferguson, directed by Steven Hilliard Stern (1985)
In this Reagan-era CTV (Canadian Television Network) offering, the spacecraft Conestoga and its international crew are returning from Mars to Earth. Before they reach the home world, an explosion rocks the ship. Shortly thereafter, crew corpses start to turn up. All clues point to murder!
The good news: the killer has to be one of the rapidly dwindling number of people on board the Conestoga. In theory, the authorities could simply wait until only the killer or killers remained and then arrest them for homicide. In practice, however, almost everyone, save perhaps for the killer or killers themselves, would prefer for the murderer to be caught while some of the potential victims are still alive.
In an interesting twist, home viewers of this televised space saga competed to solve the mystery, with audience participation encouraged by substantial cash prizes.
***
Places in the Darkness by Christopher Brookmyre (2017)
230,000 kilometres above the Earth’s surface, Ciudad de Cielo is filled with almost every vice and foible known to humanity. This is a paradise for bent private cop Nicola “Nikki Fixx” Freeman, because it offers many ways for a high-ranking Seguridad officer to siphon off some extra wealth for herself. The system works, as long as nobody gets too greedy and everyone remembers that there are limits to the crimes to which the authorities can turn a blind eye.
Murder is bad enough. A dead criminal’s flayed, dismembered body is far worse, because not only does it suggest that some ambitious would-be crime lord is greedy enough to set aside conventional limits on competition, but because it could be just the cause célèbre that squeaky-clean criminologist Dr. Alice Blake needs to justify a thorough purge of Ciudad de Cielo’s criminal element. And Nikki is very high on Blake’s purge list.
In fact, there’s more going on than a simple gang war and both crooked cop and idealist investigator will be hard put to survive it…
***
“Waiting on a Bright Moon” by Neon Yang (2017)
Had she not been a lesbian, Ansible Xin might have been a starmage. She’s too valuable to summarily execute for her forbidden sexual orientation; instead, Xin is stripped of her name and consigned to endless drudgery as a living communications device on Eighth Colony.
Survival under the autocratic Authority means quiet submission. Thus, when a murdered corpse appears on the threshold of an interstellar portal, Xin does not set out, à la Miss Marple, to solve the mystery. Yet this may not suffice to preserve Xin’s life. The Authority is very keen on doling out death penalties on slender pretexts. Clear, provable guilt need not be a factor—Ansible Ren, for example, is executed simply to eliminate the slight possibility that she was tangentially implicated. Bad news for Xin, because Ren was her lover, which could serve as reason enough to liquidate Xin as well.
The standard solution in cases like this is for the accused to catch a killer and so clear their name. The Authority is above such petty concerns as actual guilt. This leaves Xin with a more ambitious option: to mount a revolution against a corrupt, merciless state.
***
No doubt many of you are even now reaching for your keyboards to point out the hundreds of space mysteries and murders I didn’t mention in this five-item piece. The comments are, as ever, below!
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF(where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
I’m going to jump right in and add all of Larry Niven’s Gil Hamilton stories before anyone else does. So there.
And, as long as I’m here, I’ll add Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, in which he introduces Elijah Bailey and R Daneel Olivaw in the first of his robot novels. It was followed by The Naked Sun, and then, much later, by other, mostly less impressive, robot novels.
Also Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty and The Ark by Patrick Tomlinson are excellent murder-mysteries set in space
Six Wakes begins with the characters discovering they’ve been murdered. Or at least versions of themselves have been murdered.
On a similar note, John Varley’s The Phantom of Kansas features a protagonist increasingly annoyed that someone keeps murdering them.
Barney Cohen’s Blood on Moon (sequel to The Taking of Satcon Station) features the first mass murder on the Moon. Alas, detective Asher Bockhorn spends most of the book chasing an irrelevant side-plot, leaving the actual murder case he was supposed to be solving to someone else. For some reason, this was the final Asher Bockhorn novel.
I’ve always been a fan of Timothy Zahn’s The Icarus Hunt. It’s a fun read, and intentionally calls back to a different era of writing.
A borderline case: The Third Claw of God by Adam-Troy Castro. The murder happens on a space elevator, somewhere between space and ground.
Only two Gil stories are actually set in space (I think) – The Patchwork Girl (1980) and The Woman in Del Rey Crater (1995)
Likewise, Elijah Bailey is planet-bound for his detective work – except for a short story “Mirror Image”
I know it’s not readily “approachable” without immersing yourself into the larger series, but I feel like Cherryh’s Cyteen deserves a mention here.
One obvious choice from TV: the BBC series Star Cops. (Which, if you haven’t seen it, is a lot more intelligent than the title makes it sound.)
The e-book reissues of Hugh Walters’s old UNEXA juveniles are still rolling out, and the next ones up are the two where the series went detective-y for a bit: Tony Hale, Space Detective and Murder on Mars.
@8 The mystery of who killed Ariane Emory Senior continues and is somewhat solved in Regenesis, the follow-up to Cyteen. Good, twisty story that comes apart at the seams in the best possible ways.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s “Retrieval Artist” series includes at least one murder mystery, on the moon: Extremes. (Although you can read it without reading any others, it’s the second book and third story in the series. Read the novella “The Retrieval Artist” first for a great introduction to the main character and then read the first novel The Disappeared which introduces the rest of the main characters and background in the series.)
Olefin? Apparently so. Well, well.
It may refer to an ill-advised dietary habit? * I don’t know if the other names are hidden jokes, but casual checking indicates that Dartagnan is not a current real name, and one of the others, meaning no additional disrespect, could be a female role in a James Bond film.
* I’ve wrestled on your behalf with the terms olefin, paraffin, and kerosene, all of which seem to refer to more than one substance, most of which are extremely unfit for human consumption. This doesn’t stop drinking paraffin from being a recurring alcoholism joke in Britain, but one that is self-limiting.
I would include C. J. Cherryh’s Heavy Time as a murder mystery, albeit one with a lot of extra complications.
@12 I think the name Dartagnan refers to D’Artagnan, one of the main characters in Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers
I’ll throw in plugs for One Way and No Way, both by S.J. Morden. The first is basically And Then There Were None (Ten Little Indians) on Mars, and the second also takes place on the Red Planet and involves a murder mystery. (Sorry for the roundabout phrasing, but Spoilers.)
AndyLove@7: Yeah, you’re right, but I don’t know that the criteria were that strict.
@0: are the Barbies surgically altered, or clones made to a pattern? It’s been long enough since I’ve read any Varley that I’ve forgotten whether (e.g.) gender changes are done by transferring a brain to a new body — which would answer the DNA complaint.
I liked Places in the Darkness — which is something I haven’t said about the single genre works of a number of mundane writers I like. (Laurie Marks bears unmentioning.) He thinks a rotating space station can stop on a dime — but so does Bear in her latest (Machine).
Bester’s 1950’s novels are worth noting, but not quite on the topic; The Demolished Man is a procedural (we see the murder happening — the problem is for the police to prove it), and in The Stars My Destination the would-have-been victim spends much of the book trying to find out who left him to die.
The Barbies are surgically altered to fit very narrow criteria.
nylter1 @@@@@ 10. – yep, and I assume that the larger self-contained story in the pair of novels is possibly okay as a stand-along story, but I would think that the overall Alliance-Union universe is so dense and multi-layered than I think that someone coming to Cyteen first (without any exposure to the other books) might be overwhelmed. I read them all more or less in sequence so I can’t say from my own experience, but the saga is certainly daunting.
@7, @16: I don’t think James wants to be comments policeman or for me to be but… if the surface of the Moon counts as “murder in space”, then presumably other planets do, too. Anywhere but this one.
@17: In a certain James Bond film, it’s established that if you hit the brakes hard on a rotating space station, a lot of stuff on it breaks – will that do? It’s James Bond so people certainly get murdered and maybe even in space, I don’t precisely remember. Someone goes out an airlock without a suit or intending to, but does it count as murder, if one or both sides are legally licensed to kill?
There’s a famous SF mystery from the 1950s whose title I always forget (having never seen a copy). The author took the bold step of not explaining any detail of his future world that an inhabitant of that world would not need explained. Consequently, it was pretty incomprehensible.
@21: I think that’s Murder in Millennium VI, by Curme Gray.
It is! Thank you.
@22 I’ll add my thanks too. I was trying to remember that one a few months back (I got it via interlibrary loan years ago, but didn’t finish it) but was stymied by not being able to recall any details.
Can I maybe mention my own Hugo-shortlisted novel Glasshouse from 2006, a first-person present-tense narrative with the less than ubiquitous oddity that the narrator murders themselves two thirds of the way through the book? (Then carries on with the story because, uh, no spoilers here.)
A little known gem: “Death of a Clone” by Alex Thomson.
It’s essentially an hommage to Agatha Christie novels.
It’s been a very long time since I read them, but I believe the Magnus Ridolph stories by Jack Vance belong here.
@9 You beat me to Star Cops. It is available on Youtube: Star Cops S01 E01 An Instinct for Murder
It is set seven years from now.
@21: In skillful hands it can be done; Robert Heinlein, in particular, was very adept at pulling this trick off, avoiding awkward exposition to instead build up, over the course of a story, the granular details of a future world by way of off-hand references and throwaway remarks by the characters.
On the topic of murder mysteries in space I would recommend Gunpowder Moon by David Pedreira, a murder mystery/political thriller set on a lunar mining colony swept up in the gamesmanship of an escalating international crisis and the pending threat of a Sino-American war waged over access to the moons’ resources.
@16: Sorry for the nitpicking…
I’m surprised no one has mentioned “The Cold Equations” byTom Godwin yet. *wink*
I seem to remember a mass market series that involved cope with police dogs on a space station, possibly in the 1980s or 1990s. Does anyone remember this? And did they solve murders in space?
@29 Heinlein was a master of inclueing without resorting to data dumps, “As you know, Bob” speeches, or excerpts from the Encyclopedia Galactica. (Except when he felt like it. :-) Starship Troopers has literal lectures, and Lorenzo Smythe and Manny O’Kelly-Davis are happy to talk to the reader directly.) But he made sure to get the information that the reader needed to know in there *somewhere*. And he certainly wasn’t above providing a youth, outsider, new recruit, or other naif to ask basic questions if he couldn’t just have the door dilate in the background.
While it’s been a while since I read it, Curme Gray was more like a modern mystery writer not bothering to explain what “police” are or what a “phone” does at all, because not only do the characters all know, but so does the reader. While I plan to give it another go someday, I think the process was more interesting than successful– but I may just not have read far enough or closely enough to be fully immersed in the world.
@20: @17: In a certain James Bond film, it’s established that if you hit the brakes hard on a rotating space station, a lot of stuff on it breaks – will that do? First off, what brakes? Heinlein described a station being spun up by rockets; a mass counter-rotating at high speed would also cause spin and be brakable, but ISTM it would be hazardous by comparison — I can imagine using one for trim but not to spin up from scratch, so stopping it wouldn’t do much. And braking abruptly might cause damage, but it wouldn’t give instant effectively-zero gravity, which features in at least one of the books I cited.
A few hours for things to percolate gives an example aligned with the examples: The Deadly Silents, by Lee Killough. A squad of Earth police go to a planet where the indigenes are all telepathic — except some now aren’t, leading to frictions the locals don’t know how to cope with. Then an officer winds up dead…. Killough also did the officers-Brill&Maxwell novels, but those were set in the US midwest (KC maybe?, as IIRC were her Aventine stories (which IIRC include at least one murder); anyone with a clearer memory of these should please speak up.
More space opera than mystery: Duane and Morwood’s three “Space Cops” books, from the 80s.
I believe Aventine is an artists’ colony on a distant world, one that caters to the unlovable rich.
Katharine Kerr’s Polar City Blues is a murder mystery set in a human colony in the small habitable polar zone of a hot desert planet. It includes high-stakes politics, weird alien phenomena, and baseball. It is perfect.
P J Evans wrote:
More space opera than mystery: Duane and Morwood’s three “Space Cops” books, from the 80s.
I wonder if that’s the series I was thinking of — but without space K9 dogs? Although there might have been another series with space dogs that I was melding with that one.
Then there’s the Star Svensdotter science fictionseries by Dana Stabenow, who is more famous for her Alaska-set Kate Shugak mystery series. There may be space dogs in that one?
Looking for “Dogs in space” online tends to find Soviet documentary and a film about a fictional Australian rock band, but “Voyage of the Dogs” turns up; going by reviews, it does have a mystery, and another interpretation of the “B” Ark. ;-)
“Inherit The Stars” by Hogan, before he went of the deep end, has a dead body on the moon and is fully consumed by the question of “How did he get there 50,000 years ago.” Technically not a murder, but definitely a Mystery.
See also “Hostile Takeover” by Susan Shwartz. More of a “corporate thriller” than a murder mystery, there are still significant threats of attempted murder in this story of a forensic accountant sent to audit a corporate mining operation in the asteroid belt.
39: Also his first novel.
@20 IMHO If you are licensed to kill, you are still committing the act of murder – you just are immune to legal consequences from doing so.
I’m surprised no one mention that episode of the popular SciFi series, CSI. (Look, if any police force had a tenth of the stuff the various CSI labs had, solving crimes would be a cinch.) There was that episode where they found a body that had been frozen and then dropped from a great height in the desert. Turns out Mr. Body was dropped from a suborbital flight out of Las Vegas…
Was Piper’s story Naudsonce a murder mystery?
On a more recent note, there’s Aliette de Bodard’s very enjoyable ‘The Tea Master and the Detective’, in which a gender-flipped Sherlock Holmes analog pairs up with her Watson (a war-damaged starship Mind) to investigate a potential murder in space.
Well, this is sort of space based. It’s on a planet and a space station and both require that you have external breathing apparatus when not indoors. There’s a death that is suspected to be murder mostly because that would be a great way to remove an investigator that no one wants to have around doing his investigating.
Komarr is the 11th book in Lois McMasters Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan saga. Actually, there are various mysteries in all of the books and more than a few are involving murders. And of course, there is a lot of space to go around.
One of the Murder Bot stories is also a murder mystery but I can’t remember which one. You should read them all because: Murder Bot.
My very first Blake 7 episode was Mission to Destiny in which Avon makes like Sherlock Holmes deducing who is killing off the crew of a disabled ship. Would the TOS episode Conscience of the King count?
@42,
Morally, yes, it does count as murder, but murder also has a legal definition; Bond’s license means, as far as British law is concerned he literally can’t commit murder when he’s acting on behalf of his nefarious employer. Exempting members of security services (especially internal security services) from moral constraint isn’t all that uncommon.
Bond meets CSI would be an interesting mash-up; 007 facing lethal injection in Alabama could certainly provide some drama.
—-
Isn’t a murder a major plot point of Reynolds’ The Prefect (vt Aurora Rising)?
Poul Anderson’s duel on Syrtis features a well-armed game hunter looking to pot a wild Martian.
It’s no “Pistols for two, breakfast for one,” type of duel..
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32436/32436-h/32436-h.htm
Vessel by Lisa A. Nichols should absolutely be on this list.
Also “The Relentless Moon” by Mary Robinette Kowal could be on this list, it’s the third book in the Lady Astronaut series.
Marooned in Realtime is a 1986 murder mystery and time-travel science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge, about a small, time-displaced group of people who may be the only survivors of a technological singularity or alien invasion. It is the sequel to the novel The Peace War and the novella The Ungoverned.
jack glass: the story of a murderer by adam roberts
This narrative, which I hereby doctorwatson for your benefit, o reader, concerns the greatest mystery of our time. Of course I’m talking about McAuley’s alleged ‘discovery’ of a method of travelling faster than light, and about the murders and betrayals and violence this discovery has occasioned.
That Joan Vinge collection is absolutely excellent – I was very lucky to have picked it up.
On the topic – there’s a very early John Brunner story – “Puzzle for Spacemen”. It’s good. And it’s from his earliest collection – No Future In It – which is great as well, particularly given how early it is, and how his distinctly left-wing viewpoint already comes right through.
I second The Third Claw of God by Adam-Troy Castro as a good choice.
(In case no one already mentioned this) “The Barbie Murders” can be found in “The John Varley Reader” http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?799681
Alas, that particular collection lacks “Bagatelle”, another fine Anna-Louise Bach story.
goddessimho @@@@@ 46: a good point. ISTM that Diplomatic Immunity also fits, being on a space station; IIRC it starts with a suspected murder and gets more tangled from there.
Let’s see, Diplomatic Immunity has four murders, three before the book opens, piracy, sabotage, attempted murders, a hostage crisis… Is that all?
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Anthony Ryan’s Slab City Blues.
@52, russellmz, Adam Roberts’ Jack Glass also has space murder mysteries in it, as a mass murderer is trapped within a tiny asteroid prison with other convicts and they start to die. Then a second completely unrelated murder occurs in space. Who is guilty of what?
I believe Robert Sawyer’s Red Planet Blues would qualify. P.I. investigating a murder on Mars.
F. Paul Wilson’s Wheels within Wheels is an excellent sf murder mystery, and part of his LaNgue Federation trilogy (which includes Healer and An Enemy of the State). Also Wheels, the very first Prometheus Award winner in the late 1970s, is notable and unusual for its rare and sophisticated focus on economics and market systems and how they can be used (or misused).
Check out review-essay appreciations of Wilson’s Wheels within Wheels and his other two novels at the LFS website: http://www.lfs.org
Here is a direct link to the Wheels within Wheels appreciation:
http://lfs.org/blog/40th-anniversary-prometheus-celebration-an-appreciation-of-f-paul-wilsons-wheels-within-wheels-the-first-award-winner-in-1979/
Would Artemis by Andy Weir count?
I simply can’t believe that Michael Cassutt’s Red Moon and Missing Man haven’t been mentioned.
Cassutt, in addition to being a great TV writer and novelist, is one of the foremost American experts on the Soviet space program. He authored multiple editions of Who’s Who in Space — a project for which he interviewed dozens of astronauts and cosmonauts — and he even worked with Deke Slayton on his memoirs.
And he wrote TWO space-based murder mysteries. Red Moon is a whodunit set within the mid-1960s Soviet space program. Missing Man is about a murder within NASA. They’re both great (as is the sequel to Missing Man, Tango Midnight) and written by somebody who really, really knows what he’s talking about.
Ah, but my heart will always belong to the greatest space murder-mystery of all, James P. Hogan’s 1977 Inherit the Stars… Nothing quite as good a hook as a phone call between just-post-cold-war Russian and US moon bases going “Wait, are you missing someone? No? But we’re not missing someone – so…. who the hell does this corpse belong to???”
@43,
…and if forensic “science” was actually as reliable as they seem to think it is. A real analysis of a lot of the forensic “science” results found, for example, that forensic “scientists” couldn’t reliable tell human hair from dog hair, while testifying that a given hair came from a specific person, while other investigations found that blood spatter and bite mark analysis occasionally rose to the level of marginally valid.
Inherit the Stars is the single best science fiction cover ever and the story was pretty good too. Introduced me to the good Hogan books. And if Artemis makes the list, and I think it does, the LAST eight books CURRENTLY in the Retrieval Artist series is a LOOOOONG way, but wonderful each and every step, to get a massive murder plot stopped dead cold. Rusch gives you the nitty, gritty Lunar life, murders and all. HIGHLY recommended.
Sawyer is the big idea guy who works the idea to the bone. Red Planet Blues is a perfect murder mystery and so is the murder in the Hominids series that drives the first and second books in the Trilogy. If I wasn’t reading so much Rusch these days (happy, happy), I would have gone the same two as @1,@2 NomadUK, ‘cept it would have been Asimov, then Niven. I THINK Asimov once wrote that he considered the SF Murder Mystery to be the single most difficult writing challenge a writer could take on. Simply setting up the worldbuilding part and the rules, so that a rabbit out of a hat doesn’t end up being the solution. Or words to that effect. But Asimov, mystery, wherever. First thought.
Star Cops was truly enjoyable for a show that featured a mostly humourless old man, long over the hill, dealing with desperados. David Calder was great. And as others have mentioned too, Blake’s 7 had more than a few murders and who-dunnits. Each of those two shows were a product of their times, SOME special effects, but mostly just great acting.
Lastly, outside of the first novelette, the MurderBots hardly qualify as who-dunnits since we KNOW who-dunnit. That aside, the industry standard currently for series short-form fiction. (and yes, the difference between novelette and novella does blur for me).
Wonderful topic with so many books I NEED to encounter. Thanks all for your suggestions.