alobear | A Phule and His Money Review

The first two Phule books by Robert Asprin have been firm favourites of mine for ten years, but I wasn't aware there were any more. After looking for new releases in the Phule series for a couple of years, I gave up. As it turns out, I should have persevered, since there was only a three-year break between books two and three.

However, in that time, Asprin picked up a co-author and apparently forgot some of the pertinent details about his characters.

The writing is just as good and the plotline is just as silly, but there are niggling inconsistencies that are affecting my renewed enjoyment in the series.

Several of the characters names are spelt wrong (they've changed the villain's nickname from the strong and masculine "Max" to the rather weaker and extremely uncharacteristic "Maxie", for instance), some of them have lost their distinctive accents and two of them have even been mixed up.

Now, it could be said that such minor details are fairly unimportant, but the characterisations in the first two books are very precise and have specifically stated reasons for being as they are. It just seems a shame that an author who obviously used to take such pride in attention to detail couldn't be bothered to do research into his own body of work in order to get subsequent volumes right.

After all, they're not long books and it wouldn't have taken much effort to make a database of all the basics.

Still, I have discovered there are more books in one of my favourite series, and the overall style and plot have remaained intact, so I can't really complain!