Review: Sign of the Unicorn

Sign of the Unicorn by Roger Zelazny
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Part of what makes Zelazny memorable is that, in Nine Princes in Amber and The Guns of Avalon at least, he marries the fantasy genre to noir. We get a narrator embroiled in a world rife with evil – a kind of “mean streets of Avalon” – and then we follow him as he makes choices that are only contingently moral.

In Sign of the Unicorn, though, he’s marrying fantasy to what I’ve heard called “the cozy.” That is, this is less about finding a way to bridge to Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler than it is to finding one to Agatha Christie. This is, in other words, a ‘locked room’ mystery set in a fantasy world. Someone has killed one of the princes of Amber, and we know it had to be another of the princes. That means Corwin has to play detective in the narrow sense of the word.

Zelazny still has the chops to pull it off, and this remains a fun and quick work, but I’m experiencing that wistful feeling that this isn’t quite as good as I remember it.

I’m going to keep going, not just forensically to see if it gets better or worse, but because the whole of the narrative still grabs me. I still believe there is something more appealing in this more innocent way of publishing the genre. Maybe the first Amber books would get printed today as a single door-stopper, but this reminds me of the joy of being 12 years old and scanning the shelves at the Granville Times bookstore – the shelf of thin new paperbacks below the stair that shot back upstairs. I never knew then what I would find, and it was always exciting when something I was following – some series I’d already begun – spun out a new one.


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