The Great Discworld Retrospective No. 19: Feet Of Clay

This 19th Discworld novel begins with some golems building a king for themselves and Commander Vimes creating a coat of arms for himself, as befits a man who has recently married into the aristocracy.

It gets progressively less normal after that.

Feet Of clay is the 19^th Discworld novel and the third Watch novel.

As you might hope a police procedural set in a fantasy world would do, it mixes genres quite interestingly. I came quite late to procedural novels, having been easily frustrated and annoyed by mysteries as a child and youth, but when Feet Of Clay was released I had largely overcome such snobbery. This was due to me realising that I was terrible at logic puzzles and mysteries and deciding instead to just roll with the story as it unfolded. This was a decision made for me by the Sherlock Holmes stories where, as it was just impossible to compete with a know-it-all like Holmes, I just waited for him to reveal his methods of deducing the culprit.

At any rate, by the time Feet Of Clay was published I had become a little more familiar with the genre. Part of that was me starting to read a little more widely than genre fiction and classic literature. There was also the increased popularity of police thrillers at the movies, courtesy of the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard movies, although the success of The Silence Of The Lambs also made them a lot more respectable. But detective novels, while always popular, were also going through a bit of a renaissance at the time: Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski series was going gangbusters, as were the novels of Patricia Cornwall and dozens of other writers. There was a lot of specialisation happening in detective fiction: courtesy of Quincy M. E., we were being educated that crimes could be solved more easily because of technology, while the infant science of DNA testing was managing to solve a lot of cases that had hitherto been classed as “unsolvable.” This was largely because computer technology was creating an illusion that crimes were becoming easier to solve, when they merely sped up a lot of the paperwork that had to be done in the service of law enforcement. Of course, there was always room for a copper or private dick to stroll those mean streets and interrogate their sources for information, but detective work – in fiction, at least – was becoming a more “white-collar” profession.

Even on the Discworld the investigators of crime were becoming more adept at finding ways to solve crimes, despite Vimes’s sneery disdain for “clues.”

In Feet Of Clay, we meet one of the latest recruits to the Ankh-Morpork City Watch: Cheery Littlebottom, who has a knack for what we would recognise as forensics. Cheery is also hiding a secret about their gender, although she does let down some barriers about that as time passes and she becomes more confident in herself and her new surroundings…

But Vimes eventually comes to trust Cheery and relies upon her knowledge of science/alchemy to help solve the latest crime. Which is just as well because he not only has to deal with his impending induction into the ranks of the nobility – or “nobs” as he prefers – but he is about to lose one of his most long-serving colleagues: Sergeant Fred Colon has seen all the changes being enacted in his beloved Watch in recent years and decided that it’s time for him to retire. Keen fans of the genre will already have an inkling as to what is supposed to be the fate of someone uttering the “R” word in a police procedural, but Colon has already pre-empted a lot of that.

See, he wants a quiet life, so he and Mrs Colon will be upping stumps to a more rural environment…

That’s right: Colon has already bought the farm.

But if Colon leaves, that leaves an empty space on the beat next to his partner-in-crime-prevention, Nobby Nobbs.

Nobby, though, has been invited to join the ranks of the other “nobs” as the apparently lost heir to the Earldom of Ankh. But this is also part of the plot: a shadowy cabal of vested interests don’t like what the Patrician, the supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, has been doing in elevating commoners to positions of authority, so they come up with a plan to depose him: Nobby and the golems (which might be the name of my new punk band) are pawns in that plan…

I’ve gone into quite a lot of details for the plot of this one, as well as the background, and there is a reason for it: Feet Of Clay is a delight. It’s hilarious and fast-paced and comes with a genuine mystery at its core. And it takes some delicious swipes at our favourite detective and thriller cliches.

It starts early, with Vimes interviewing Cheery about her new job: she gets partnered with Sergeant Detritus who, as we learned in Men At Arms, is now a trusted member of the force. Cheery doesn’t know what to make of Detritus: when she meets him he is being questioned about an attack on a suspected drug dealer, who may or may not have deserved being beaten up. It’s a sequence that hasn’t aged well in today’s world, unfortunately, but it does pair naïve rookie Cheery with a more seasoned and cynical professional. It continues shortly afterwards when Vimes heads off to the Royal College of Heralds to learn about his new coat of arms – and a little about his own ancestry, as well…

At the college he is introduced to Dragon King Of Arms, who proceeds to give him a lecture and introduction to the world of heraldic symbols, many of which are really awful puns. This scene is a direct steal from Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, wherein Bond meets Sable Basilisk, a similarly knowledgeable character, though infinitely more charming.

Like The Colour Of Magic, Moving Pictures, Soul Music and Maskerade before it (to name but four), there are a wealth of hilarious gags referencing the chosen genre for those with a will to find them. I won’t go into too much more detail about them because I don’t really like spoilers, but there’s a lot to enjoy here if you want to dig a little deeper.

There’s also a rather grim commentary on the value of a life, human or otherwise, and how we go about determining that value (and why we shouldn’t) as Vimes, Carrot and Cheery go about their investigations into the plot to depose the Patrician.

It all ends quite satisfactorily, but I would advise readers to set aside an uninterrupted amount of time as the last third of the book will want to be read all in one sitting as it becomes quite frenetic and gripping for all concerned.

I never expected to enjoy this novel. As I said all the way back at the beginning, I’m terrible at puzzles and mysteries, so even the idea of Vimes and co being involved in a murder case should have been enough to send me packing.

But what had really changed was my attitude towards procedurals.

Since Men At Arms, things had been changing in my reading: I’d started to appreciate crime fiction a lot more. Part of that had been the genre-blending that some novels had done before that one: Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat frequently went up against the police and military in his capers; and Simon Green’s Hawk And Fisher novels successfully meshed the feel of a hardboiled detective yarn with sword and sorcery, frequently with a tongue inserted inside the cheek region.

And my wife was (and still is) a big fan of procedurals and true crime (we would frequently watch an episode of CSI or Law And Order and, while the credits were rolling she’d say something like, “Yeah, that was good, but in the case it was based on…”) and she was slowly making me a fan as well. We would pore over crime novels together and while I never enjoyed them as much as she did (although I do still love the work of John Sandford and Janet Evanovich), I did come to recognise the literary and, just as importantly, the entertainment value of them. But I could never get into true crime as much as she did: I prefer my horrors to be kept at an arms length, thanks very much.

The Watch novels were a way of us meeting halfway with our tastes and making me appreciate another genre a little more. Feet Of Clay was where I finally admitted that I did enjoy a good detective yarn, and that while I might be a rubbish detective, I could manage to not be completely surprised at who the culprit really turned out to be.

Coming Up Next: Death takes another holiday and looks into who’s been naughty and nice in Hogfather.