Steven Brust has set a difficult challenge for himself: his Vlad Taltos series, his best-known work and arguably his magnum opus, currently extends to ten books - slim volumes of 200 pages each, admittedly, as opposed to bloated Wheel of Time-sized bricks, admittedly, but that's still an impressive amount of wordage. The series is supposed to - once it's finished - comprise nineteen volumes. A 3800 page fantasy series has got to be tough reading, right?

Well, I've just finished reading the first thousand-or-so pages of the story - the first five novels, in other words - and it's looking good so far. Brust strives to make each book as standalone as possible - while you don't need to have read any of the other books in the series to enjoy the others, reading them in order of publication (which also happens to be the order in which they are compiled) is perhaps the best way to experience them. I say "order of publication" because assigning a strict chronological order to the stories is difficult - for example, Taltos, the fourth volume, is the earliest story in the timeline.

On the other hand, this hopping about the timeline isn't random or pointless. There is no reason to learn the details of Taltos' formative experiences or his jaunt down the Paths of the Dead until book four, because for the first three books they are just background colour: come book five, however, the favours owed from that experience come back to haunt Vlad in a big way, when a goddess hires him to assassinate a king.

About that. The Vlad Taltos series is incredibly cynical; it's the sort of places where even divinities sometimes hand over large amount of cash to have people done away with by grubby hitmen like Vlad. Given that all the stories are narrated by Vlad himself, it could be an upshot of his own ugly attitude. Vlad is a human being whose family used to be part of the human minority in the Dragaeran Empire, whose inhabitants are, we eventually find out, elves - haughty, sorcerous human-like entities with monstrously long lifespans and a horrible attitude. I say "used to be" because Vlad's father had the bright idea of purchasing a title in House Jhereg - the only one of the seventeen Houses of Dragaera you can buy titles in, and the only one which will even consider extending a title to a human being. This leaves Vlad in the position of not being accepted in Dragaeran society (because he's a human and a Jhereg) and not accepted in human society (because he's got a Dragaeran title). As such, few career options are open to him, and he ends up becoming part of House Jhereg's vast organised crime network.

As such, Vlad ends up being a cross between the Gray Mouser (of fantasy pioneer Fritz Leiber's stories) and Tony Soprano, trying to balance the management of his crime network with his marriage, his friendship with those few Dragaerans he is friendly with, his family ties with his grandfather, and the occasional quest. As well as being a skilled assassin, Vlad has learned both wizardry (associated with the Dragaerans) and witchcraft (associated with humanity), which makes him both extremely dangerous and entirely capable of explaining to us readers all the magical stuff that happens to him.

So far, so badass. Vlad must be insufferable, right? Not really. He is competant and skilled, but Brust never falls into the trap of thinking that Vlad is totally kewl. Vlad is occasionally a dick and is frequently vulnerable, fallible, and just plain in the wrong. There are several occasions where Vlad almost dies without even a chance to react, were it not for the actions of one of his underlings. And while Vlad offers us a good many excuses and explanations as to why he does the terrible things he does, they aren't always meant to be convincing - to us or to Vlad.

The one criticism which might be levelled against Vlad is that - like most of the other characters in the series - he's a guy with essentially modern values, thought patterns, philosophies and patterns of speech plonked in a fantasy setting. On the other hand, Brust - like his 1980s contemporary, Glen Cook - manages to pull this off very well. It takes a brave author to admit that they aren't up to the task of creating characters who fit the imaginary cultures they have devised, and Brust's method of simply not trying to get into a non-modern mindset and just writing the characters as well as he can, rather than theeing and thouing in a poor imitation of olde style talking is refreshing. And really, the same accusation could be levelled at Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, the most obvious influences on the series. At its best, the Vlad Taltos series - with prose style cribbed from Hammett, sword and sorcery inherited from Leiber - is a throwback to the pulp fantasy era of the 1930s, and wouldn't have looked out of place serialised alongside Conan stories in Weird Tales. That said, its moral sensibilities might make it more comfortable alongside Elric stories from the 1960s - after all, Vlad seems to be a response to the mercenary attitude of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, just as much as Elric was a counterpoint to the macho qualities of Conan.

The first three books in the series - Jhereg, Yendi and Teckla - are compiled in The Book of Jhereg, and mainly resemble Dashiell Hammett gangland mysteries fused with Fritz Leiber adventures, swordplay and magic. The Book of Taltos compiles book four - Taltos, the prequel, and book five, Phoenix. Throughout these five stories, Vlad is a suitably sympathetic and morally complex character. For the first few books he is a terrible person because the society has been born into has simply given him no other choice. By the end of Phoenix, the fifth book in the series Vlad might be on his way to becoming a better person - although he's had to do some pretty disgusting things in order to give himself that option. It remains to be seen where he goes from there: expect more reviews on Ferretbrain when I read some more of the compilation volumes. But these first five pieces offer, within themselves, a reasonably complete and satisfying story. Perhaps everything goes to shit in book six, or seven, or thirteen, but I'd recommend the first five books to anyone.