Michael Reaves created Kamus (one would imagine it rhymes with "shamus") of Kadizhar, the only private eye on the planet Ja-Lur, AKA Darkworld, where magic works but technology doesn't. Think Humphrey Bogart in trench coat and slouch hat (Kamus supposedly owns Bogie's own accouterments) but with a sword in one hand, a wand in the other, and necromantic power. Definitely set somewhere left of serious space opera/sword and sorcery. (Is that oxymoronic?) Reaves' introduced it all in DARKWORLD DETECTIVE (1982) which is either a novel with four parts or four separate stories: "The Big Spell", "The Maltese Vulcan", "The Man with the Golden Raygun", and "Murder on the Galactic Express." Det the picture?
The character and world were sharecropped out to John Shirley for what would become the novel KAMUS OF KADIZHAR: THE BLACK HOLE OF CARCOSA (St Martin's Press, 1988). If more books in the series were planned, they never materialized. This one hilarious satire may have been enough. (Although mentions of places like Hardcore, the punk planet, make one wish for a few more Kamus adventures in this whacked out cosmos.)
Kamus confronts several nasties including: Hojas, a giant megalomaniac head whose powers are derived from some twisted black hole physics from the planet Carcosa; Sartoris, a Reaganesque sorcerer, and the Outfit, a Big Business Mafia (with interests in fossil-based fuels...) Our hero gets it on with Andalaya (Hojas' sister) and eventually meets up with J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, the Rev. Ivan Stang, The Fightin' Jesus -- Church of the SubGenius icons -- who help him defeat the bad guys and save Ja-Lur from the superimposition of the worst of Earth Kulture (fast food, drive-in everything, asphalt, mini-malls, etc.).
You have to read this one for yourself. It is really is beyond description.
Glad you asked. Carcosa is a city somehow involved in the Hastur Cycle. Hastur stories streams started with Robert W. Chambers and Ambrose Bierce on one side and Arthur Machen on the other. The streams converged in H. P. Lovecraft's "The Whisperer in Darkness." Carcosa itself is a city with four singularities:
- The first singularity is that it appeared over night.
Carcosa, in Shirley's novel, is "a planet in the forty-third Galactic quadrant, notorious for irresponsible experiments with quantum singularities taken from an exploded black hole in a contiguous star system...A quantum singularity is basically a small black hole."
Get it?
- The second singularity was that one could not tell whether the city sat upon the waters, or beyond them on the invisible other shore.
- The third singularity was that when the moon rose, the towers of the city appeared to be behind it, not in front of it.
- And the fourth singularity was that as soon as one looked upon the city, one knew what its name was.
