Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.
London, 1603. Ben Jonson, playwright, poet, satirist . . . detective? Someone is murdering choir boys and Jonson, in the way that only Greer Gilman could write him — "Fie, poetastery." — is compelled to investigate.
Industry Reviews
“Exceptional. . . . It’s a historical crime story, with a frisson of the fantastical bubbling at its edges. The hero is Ben Jonson, drawn some-what against his will to investigating the murder of a boy actor. . . . Jonson’s investigation, and eventual action against Oxford, with the help of another boy actor, is nicely told, with plenty of period atmosphere that rang utterly true to me (no expert, mind you). But, as we expect from Gilman, the real payoff is the prose. Gilman here is mimicking Elizabethan English, and as such I found the writing a bit more readily comprehensible than the remarkable but somewhat difficult prose of her Cloud stories. It’s also very funny at times, especially during Jonson’s conversation with Robin Armin, the actor who played the comic parts in Shakespeare’s later plays.”
—Rich Horton, Locus
“A brilliant, small, dense piece of work from a writer playing to great effect with a fascinating set of historical figures. The dualistic structure — a sort of two-faced narrative, a coin-flip of a story — lingers with me, the frightful mystery and the underlying presence in it alike. I wholeheartedly recommend investing some time and effort giving it a read, or two.”
—Brit Mandelo, Tor.com
“What is a story but the dance of words ? Greer Gilman’s language is always demanding : even short declarative sentences resonate with layers of meaning. The longer cadences are nimble, tricky on the tongue and in that place in the brain where deliberate allusions float like wisps of smoke on a winter morning or snap as flags in a furious gale. It is hugely ambitious to encode so much of the Elizabethan theater into a murder mystery staged upon the hinge of the modern world. That Gilman accomplishes this tale within the space of fifty-two pages is brilliant, contrarian, and wholly admirable.”
— Henry Wessells, The Endless Bookshelf, “The Best Book of 2013?"
“This goes well beyond mere meticulous research. Gilman pulls us into the milieu with an intense immediacy, as if she had just stepped out of the Globe’s tiring-room . . . But the real richness here is the language. It is not Shakespeare’s language, not Jonson’s, but Gilman’s own unique and inimitable wordcraft . . . This is to savor.”
—Lois Tilton, Locus
“A jewel of a novella.”
—Strange Horizons
“A delight. Greer Gilman’s Cry Murder! in a Small Voice is a highly original, thought-provoking and beautifully polished tale; a short story written in a chewy, glistening Jacobethan prose which is entirely the author’s invention.”
—Oxfraud
