Eric Flint - The Dragon Done It

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Introduction copyright 2008 by Eric Flint & Mike Resnick. "The Long and Short of It" copyright 2008 by Mike Resnick. "The Witch's Murder" copyright 2008 by Dave Freer and Eric Flint. See also acknowledgements page for further copyright information.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN 10: 1-4165-5528-5
ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-5528-5
Cover art by Bob Eggleton
First printing, March 2008
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The dragon done it / edited by Eric Flint and Mike Resnick.
p. cm.
A cross-genre collection of stories by popular writers.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5528-5 (hc)
ISBN-10: 1-4165-5528-5 (hc)
1. Detective and mystery stories, American. 2. Fantasy fiction, American. I. Flint, Eric. II. Resnick, Michael D.
PS648.D4D73 2008
813'.087208--dc22
2007051120
Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)
Printed in the United States of America

Ring of Fire series:

1632 by Eric Flint
1633 by Eric Flint & David Weber
1634: The Baltic War by Eric Flint & David Weber
Ring of Fire ed. by Eric Flint
1634: The Galileo Affair by Eric Flint & Andrew Dennis
1635: The Ram Rebellion by Eric Flint and Virginia DeMarce et al.
1635: The Cannon Law by Eric Flint & Andrew Dennis
1634: The Bavarian Crisis by Eric Flint & Virginia DeMarce
Grantville Gazette ed. by Eric Flint
Grantville Gazette II ed. by Eric Flint
Grantville Gazette III ed. by Eric Flint
Grantville Gazette IV ed. by Eric Flint
Ring of Fire II ed. by Eric Flint

Joe's World series:

The Philosophical Strangler
Forward the Mage (with Richard Roach)

Standalone titles:

Mother of Demons
Crown of Slaves (with David Weber)
The Course of Empire (with K.D. Wentworth)
Mountain Magic (with Ryk E. Spoor, David Drake & Henry Kuttner)

With Mercedes Lackey & Dave Freer:

The Shadow of the Lion This Rough Magic

With Dave Freer:

Rats, Bats & Vats The Rats, The Bats & The Ugly
Pyramid Scheme Pyramid Power

With David Drake:

The Tyrant

The Belisarius Series with David Drake:

An Oblique Approach In the Heart of Darkness
Destiny's Shield Fortune's Stroke
The Tide of Victory The Dance of Time

Edited by Eric Flint

The World Turned Upside Down (with David Drake & Jim Baen)
The Best of Jim Baen's Universe
The Best of Jim Baen's Universe II

Copyright information for The Dragon Done It

This is the first publication of "The Long and the Short of It."

"Dead Wolf in a Hat" was first published in Realms of Fantasy, October 2005'

"This Town Ain't Big Enough" was first published in Vampire Slayers, ed. By M. Greenberg and E. A. Scarborough, Cumberland House 1995.

"The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds" was first published in Knave, 1984.

"The Whistling Room" was first published in The Idler, March 1910.

"Doppelgangster" was first published in Murder by Magic, ed. Rosemary Edghill, Warner Aspect 2004.

"Claus of Death" was first published in Slipstreams, ed. John Helfers and Martin Greenberg, DAW 2006.

"McNamara's Fish" was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1963.

"Gunsel and Gretel" was first published in The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy, ed. Mike Ashley, Robinson 2001.

"Alimentary, My Dear Watson" was first published in Sherlock Holmes

in Orbit, ed. Mike Resnick and Martin Greenberg, DAW 1995.

"Fox Tails" was first published in Realms of Fantasy, June 2005.

"A Case of Identity" was first published in Analog, September 1964.

"The Case of the Skinflint's Specters" was first published in Christmas

Ghosts, ed. Mike Resnick and Martin Greenberg, DAW 1993.

"The Black Bird" was first published in New Voices in Science Fiction, ed. Mike Resnick, DAW 2003.

"The Enchanted Bunny" was first published in The Undesired Princess and the Enchanted Bunny, Baen Books 1990.

"The Adventure of the Pearly Gates" was first published in Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, ed. Mike Resnick and Martin Greenberg, DAW 1995.

"The Seventh Chapter" was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1997.

"The Detective of Dreams" was first published in Dark Forces, ed. Kirby McCauley, Viking Press 1980.

This is the first publication of "The Witch's Murder."

It was simply a fortunate confluence of events. Mike had just edited a pair of science fiction mystery anthologiesDown These Dark Spaceways and Alien Crimesfor the Science Fiction Book Club. Not too long ago Eric had edited a massive collection of Randall Garrett's beloved Lord Darcy stories, the first edition in history that puts all the stories together.

In short, both of us were thinking along the same lines: science fiction, fantasy, mystery. And it occurred to us that, to the best of our knowledge, no one has yet put together an anthology of fantasy detective stories, as opposed to science fiction mysteries. It seemed hard to believe, since there are certainly enough examples out there, going back at least to the works of Poe and to the hinted-at but never-written Sherlock Holmes tale of "The Giant Rat of Sumatra." So we got together, approached Jim Baen with the idea, and got a contractone of the very last he issued before his untimely death.

Probably the two most famous fantasy sleuths are Lord Darcy, and Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin, who appeared in 121 stories in the old Weird Tales magazine. We were very familiar with the Darcy stories, but hadn't read the Quinn stories in decades. So Eric read half of them and Mike read the other half, and we came to the unhappy conclusion that they're a little too dated and a little too clumsily written.

Having anchored the volume with one of the best Lord Darcy stories, we went a-huntingand came up with stories by such superstars as Neil Gaiman, Harry Turtledove, Gene Wolfe, and David Drake. We resurrected a story by William Hope Hodgson, recent winner of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, which was as old as the Jules de Grandin stories but read a lot better. Agatha Christie proved long ago that the detective story is not the private property of male writers, and we picked up fine stories from Esther Friesner, Tanya Huff, and Laura Resnick, then rounded out the book with another seven stories.

We then looked at what we had. We felt they were a fine batch of stories but that perhaps something was missing. Since we each had written our own series of fantasy detective tales over the years, we decided to make this an even more unique collection by writing brand-new novelettes featuring our detectives, and start and finish the book with those two brand-new stories.