Johannes Cabal the Detective

The second novel in Jonathan L. Howard's Johannes Cabal series. Johannes Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, is in a prison in the fictional Eastern European country of Mirkavia after attempting to steal a rare necromantic text. A plot is hatched by his jailor to exploit Cabal's talents, and Cabal soon uses the opportunity to escape in disguise aboard an aeroship leaving the country. However, while Cabal is still a wanted man in Mirkavia, what is on board the aeroship proves to be every bit as dangerous as it soon becomes clear that, in addition to a face Cabal never thought or hoped to see again, a killer is on board-and Cabal's efforts to find them is hampered by his disguise. Complications abound and soon even Cabal might be out of his depth.

Also included in the novel, as a sort of epilogue, is "The Tomb of Umtark Ktharl" which is framed as the story of an amateur spy in a private men's club telling his own adventure-in which he meets a certain necromancer.

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Johannes Cabal the Detective has examples of:

• Battle Discretion Shot: Of a sort. We see the beginning of the Marechal v. Cabal duel, but the story skips ahead to Cabal escaping victorious. The details of his win are revealed later in a terrifically short chapter.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Arguably, Leonie and Cabal. The two of them reluctantly respect and admire each other and when they're not contemplating killing or trying to have the other person arrested, they do make a pretty good team. There's also the fact that the two of them are forced to act as though they are besotted with each other in order to conceal Cabal's true identity, so in the eyes of nearly everyone on the Princess Hortense they are the Official Couple. Moreover, Leonie happens to resemble Cabal's Lost Lenore, further complicating things.
• Berserk Button: Cabal doesn't lose his temper over it, but he does not like doctors and, worse yet, having people assume he is a doctor. When a chemist does so, Cabal gives him a murderous look.
• Brits Love Tea: Englishwoman Leonie is quite fond of tea, as does Cabal, who while German born, grew up in England.
• Came Back Wrong: Johannes is forced to reanimate Emperor Antrobus II to hide his death. His public address quickly lapses into a rant about brain-eating, and Johannes makes a discreet exit just as the Antrobus-zombie loses every pretense of reason and tries to chow down on the nearest person.
• Catapult Nightmare: Defied by Cabal, who (awoken by a commotion in the next room and a knock on his door) knows that sitting bolt upright just alerts whatever's after him that he's awake.
• Chaste Hero: "Hero" is generous, but Johannes Cabal doesn't even notice when the resident Femme Fatale is making a pass at him and just thinks that she has an unnatural fascination with the macabre. This amuses Leonie Barrow to no end.

  Leonie: Your look of gormless incomprehension as the tigress circled you will keep me amused for many years to come, I'm sure.

• Combat Pragmatist: Cabal cheats at a duel in order to beat Count Marechal and escape.
• Conscience Makes You Go Back: Much to Cabal's irritation when he realizes that while he may be a criminal mastermind, he still would rather be on the side of humanity than with genuinely evil, opportunistic leeches like Moretti or Marechal which is what prompts him to go back to the aeroship.
• The Conspiracy: There is a plot aboard the Princess Hortense, with many people involved from those on location to high levels of the Mirkavian government.
• Conspiracy Kitchen Sink: Mirkarvia, and all its neighboring countries. The Princess Hortense would count as well.
• Cool Airship: The Princess Hortense is the aerial version of a luxury passenger liner, accommodating various high-society guests in great comfort. It's also a top-of-the-line warship underneath the paint.
• Cool Plane: The entomopters are jets with a pair of rapidly beating wings similar to Dune's ornithopters. Of the few diagrams in the novel, one of them features the CI-880 Ghepardo fighter-interceptor entomopter which packs a fairly potent punch with twin 15mm Martello "mini-cannons" and the 60mm Zeus rocket launcher which can be swapped out for some heavy bombs.
• Crazy-Prepared: Cabal, who carries a gun, a switchblade knife, and a cane sword concealing a 3-foot steel blade.
• Daddy's Little Villain: Lady Ninuka is the daughter of Count Marechal, and shares her parent's sociopathy.
• Doomed Moral Victor: Colonel Konstantin refuses to go along with the Count Marechal's new regime as it offends his sense of honor. Marechal does not respond well.
• Dye or Die: Subverted. Cabal plans to dye his distinctive blond hair brown in order to escape law enforcement, with the narration giving a description of how he makes an easily removed dye from scratch without any obvious purchase trail, but never gets quite that far.
• Enemy Mine: Leonie chooses to ally herself with a sociopath like Cabal because the murders on the Princess Hortense and the machinations of the Mirkarvian government are a greater threat. In her words:
  Set a monster to catch a monster, Cabal.
• Femme Fatale: Lady Ninuka uses seduction as her primary weapon but she's quite comfortable with death and violence as well.
• Frame-Up: Cabal frames Leonie as a Necromancer in order to distract Senzan authorities while he makes yet another escape. Unfortunately for him Leonie gets out rather quickly and when she finds him again, she is far from happy.
• Genre Shift: Unlike the first novel and most of the other Cabal tales, this book is primarily mystery adventure with a dash of Diesel Punk, ending on a note of Indiana Jones.
• Hand Cannon: Cabal's handgun is big enough to be a reliable response to many supernatural threats, never mind an ordinary human body.

  Cabal: A gun is a tool for killing. It isn't an enterprise that calls for subtlety, only certainty.

• Hero Antagonist: Leonie Barrow is this, but in a very minor way being a secondary antagonist: she wants to turn Cabal in to Senzan authorities but first, she and Cabal have to survive the aeroship voyage. Her refusal to just out Cabal as a necromancer (tantamount to killing him) makes her a much lesser threat than the Mirkavians.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Cabal has a very difficult time figuring out how a murderer or group of murderers managed to kill two people and evade the attention of the airship's crew, until he realizes the captain and crew were behind the killings all along.
• Hindenburg Incendiary Principle: The plot takes place aboard a luxury Zeppelin which naturally ends up crashing (due to sabotage), with few survivors.
• Honor Before Reason: Cabal calls Leonie this when she decides to return to the Princess Hortense to finish the investigation because it's the right thing to do, despite Cabal telling her that it will most likely end in her getting killed as well.
• Humans Are Bastards:

  Humanity is a despicable mass, Herr Zoruk, and ill-suited to the compassion of romantics.

• Infraction Distraction: The Senzan authorities are convinced that the Mirkavian government is using the Princess Hortense to smuggle weapons to an allied nation to be used in a latter joint attack, so their customs agents spend a very long time poking through the unusually large amount of cargo contained in the airship. To their chagrin, they find nothing in their exhaustive search. By focusing on the cargo, they fail to notice that the Princess Hortense is actually a warship, not a passenger liner; the plan is simply to arm it later.
• Interrogating the Dead: Johannes temporarily reanimates a murder victim to question for information about the murderer. It's doubly gruesome for Leonie to watch because it only provides a brief imitation of life that slowly leaks out of the body, taking the panicked and increasingly incoherent soul with it.
• Locked Room Mystery: Cabal soon deduces that the first man to die, DeGarre, did not commit suicide as it appears, but that only raises more questions as the room was locked.
• Long List: When trying to explain to Cabal what Orfilia's interest in him is, Leonine goes for an exhaustive list. Its only the last one, a technical term, that seems to get Cabal's attention.

  Leonie: She's a bike. A tart. A slut. She'll be buried in a Y-shaped coffin. A baggage. A hussy. She's the good time that was had by all. A wanton floozy. A nymphomaniac.

• MacGyvering: A simple trip to the local drug store and Cabal can create hair dye, reagents to revive the dead, and time bombs.
• Mid-Sentence Mind Warp: Johannes is forced by Mirkarvian officials to reanimate the late dictator for a Balcony Speech and keep him relatively normal until he can inspire the spectators to war. The effect starts to wear off mid-speech, starting with the higher brain functions, so the dictator's bombast abruptly segues into a rant about eating brains. Johannes discreetly escapes as the zombie starts trying to make good on its words.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: Roborovski, the engineer who had designed the Princess Hortense and was supposed to help furnish it in Katamenia, says this trope's name but rejects it in light of the story's plot, deciding to head for Senza and ask for political asylum.

  My country right or wrong... They killed my country when they killed DeGarre for the sake of convenience. They killed it when poor old Konstantin was put down like a dog for saying what was right. I'll go home one of these days, but not while it's being run by butchers like Marechal and and the crooks that backed him.

• Noodle Incident: "Cabal could not have been more horrified if she'd pulled off her face to reveal a gaping chasm of eternal night from which glistening tentacles coiled and groped. That had already happened to him once in his life and he wasn't keen to repeat the experience".
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Implied with Cacon, who is revealed to actually be a Senzan agent, and attracts Cabal's attention prior to The Reveal with an out-of-character display of intelligence. Also, the seemingly harmless Harlmann turns out to actually be a con artist/professional criminal.
• One Bullet Left: A variation as both the hero and the villain only have one bullet, as Cabal and Marechal are both firing revolvers in a tilting aeroship until they find themselves out of cover and with a moment's stability.
• Oop North: Its noted (though not displayed in the spelling) that Leonine is from Northwest England and thus has a distinct accent.
• Phenotype Stereotype: Cabal invents a temporary hair dye for himself after noting that his blonde-ness makes it hard to go unnoticed when trying to escape a foreign country. He plans both to turn his hair brown and play up his native Hessen accent.
• Photographic Memory: Allows the slightly obsessive-compulsive Cabal to realize that one piece of carpet is out of place.
• Plot-Sensitive Snooping Skills: Cabal's razor sharp intellect fails him with regards to the wiles of the opposite sex so when Lady Ninuka tries to put the moves on him he is completely lost. Leonie has to spell it out for him before he realizes it. Conversely, when Leonie first approaches him, before he recognizes her he worries that he might be in the middle of getting "picked up", despite it being the furthest thing from her intentions.
• Precision F-Strike: When talking to Cabal Leonine finally realizes how damaged he is and simply asks him "How did you ever become so very fucked up?" Cabal isn't even insulted, and notably doesn't have an answer.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Colonel Konstantin, an Old Soldier who strongly believes in the older traditional values of Mirkarvia instead of the Machiavellian nightmare it has become, lets Marechal have it just before the climax of the story. It gets him killed but is no less powerful.

  Konstantin: And what of me, sir? What part have I in this plan?
  Marechal: You? You'll be a soldier about it and maintain secrecy. Believe me, Colonel, you were never considered a potential leak. Your record speaks for itself. I know that you are a true son of Mirkarvia.
  Konstantin: I have always tried to be so. By the values of the first empire of the Erzich Dynasty, I have always stood. In its every hour of need back through five hundred years, Mirkarvia has always known it could depend on the Konstantins to fight and bleed and die for her.
  Marechal: Yes, quite so. I think that's what I just said, except more briefly.
  Konstantin: You, sir, are not Mirkarvia. You, sir, are a jumped-up jackanapes who plays politics with the lives of our citizenry, tramples our honour beneath boots that have never seen a battlefield, and whores us out to a cesspit of barbarism like Katamenia as if we were nothing but mercenaries! You, sir, are a disgrace to your uniform and your title, both of which, it gives me no pleasure to remind you, were bought for you by your father. And he was a self-serving bastard, too.
  Marechal: I cannot count on you to keep this business secret, Colonel? Even though it is for your own country?
  Konstantin: My own country? This is all your doing, Marechal; do not besmirch my country's name with your dishonourable filth.

• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Cabal leaves Mirkarvia in a state of civil war. Both figuratively, and literally.
• Ruritania: Mirkavia and its neighbors. In fact Ruritania is actually mentioned in a throwaway line.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Umtak Ktharl's tomb is somewhat misnamed-as he seems somewhat immortal. Instead he was imprisoned in stone and water-for seven hundred years a stream washed over him, a baptism of sorts that did absolutely nothing to wash away his evil.
• Shout-Out:
  • Marechal and Cabal have a discussion about guns (where Cabal's Hand Cannon quote comes in) and Marechal utters the famous line 'guns don't kill people. People kill people.' Ever the pragmatist, Cabal replies that guns make it so much easier.
  • When Cabal suggests re-animating a corpse for information, Leonine is disgusted and says he must be joking. Cabal says "I never joke about my work".
  • Cabal's experiments are noted as being able to make Victor Frankenstein frown.
  • Cabal's whole adventure started because he was prevented from stealing a necromantic text by a large library guard dog-which is a reference to "The Dunwich Horror" by Lovecraft, in which Wilbur Whateley is killed by a library guard dog while trying to steal a copy of The Necronomicon.
  • The narration mentions "the curious case of the defenestrated DeGarre" and "the adventure of the ersatz civil servant" both of which sound like titles to Sherlock Holmes stories, and it's mentioned that solving cases rarely depends on encyclopedic knowledge of tobacco ash, something Holmes published a monograph on.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Count Marechal is certainly a dangerous, ambitious aristocrat who isn't afraid of making morally bankrupt decisions and taking lives to raise Mirkarvia up to a former glory from centuries ago. However, he has a bad temper and he's not nearly as clever as he thinks himself to be. Cabal, the same necromancer he wanted to have raise the recently deceased emperor back into a semi-alive puppet, repeatedly outwits him through the book.
• Soapbox Sadie: Zoruk is a young poet type who rails against the horrors of war machines.
• Spy Versus Spy: Pretty much everyone aboard the Princess Hortense except for Zoruk, De Garre, Leonie and Miss Ambersleigh has an secret identity, mission, or at least an ulterior motive. The first two end up dead as a result of the multiple conspiracies taking place.
• A Tankard of Moose Urine: Subverted. Johannes expects the dark, slightly viscous beer he is served in Mirkarvia to be another way for the locals to show off their Testosterone Poisoning, but while it is brewed strong (20 proof, which is roughly 10% abv, or double the strength of most beers and on par with many light wines), smells worryingly like coagulated dragon blood and only comes in massive steins, the actual flavor is very pleasant.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Leonie Barrow and Cabal are pretty much forced to do this in order to unravel the conspiracy on the aeroship even while trying to outmaneuver each other.
• Testosterone Poisoning: Mirkarvian patriotism and mores are expressed variously in extreme jingoism and a love of unpleasant cuisines they consider "masculine". Their soup is oxtail with what Cabal suggests is boiled bull blood (with croutons); their men drink wine in massive wide-mouth glasses (the women get flutes) or, failing that, massive steins of high-proof beer; and Count Marechal is seen drinking a glass of something that resembles de-icing fluid.
• Took a Level in Badass: Leonie Barrow goes from the sweet Girl Next Door in The Necromancer to a Badass Bookworm studying criminal psychology, is a capable investigator and who can match wits with Johannes Cabal himself.
• Upbringing Makes the Hero: The reason why Leonie pursues justice and law in contrast to Cabal's self-interested chaotic nature:

  Leonie: To answer your question, because it's the right thing to do.
  Cabal: What your father would do, you mean.
  Leonie: It's the same thing. It usually is.

• Weapon-Based Characterization: Cabal and Marechal engage in a fencing duel near the beginning of the story. Cabal, a cold, logical man who prefers to keep a low profile, wields a Sword Cane more durable than the average type, while Marechal, an ambitious aristocrat with a nasty temper, swings about a cavalryman's saber which he dubs "a man's weapon."
• Would Hit a Girl: Several times, Cabal considers assaulting, even killing Leonie Barrow for the sake of maintaining his cover or out of self-preservation. He refrains for purely pragmatic reasons but later kills a female assassin without a second's hesitation.
• Zeppelins from Another World: The aeroship Cabal is on isn't like a dirigible full of lighter than air gas. Instead it uses gyroscopic levitators and magneto-etheric line guides to 'pull' itself through the air along the earth's own magnetic fields.

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