Peter Dickinson categorizes his special brand of mystery as science fiction with far more fiction than science. When he imagines the closed world of a classic detective story, he tries to invent it as if it were an alien planet. The result is a tendency toward the grotesque in characterization, what he calls "a twist" that sets his fictive creations "apart from the outside world." At times this sense of the grotesque carries over into setting and crime, such as a corpse pickled in a solution of vodka and brandy or an antler prong used as a murder weapon, thrust through the eye. Although Dickinson's early works feature more science-oriented, original, and bizarre plot elements, his later works continue to explore otherworldliness in everyday people and situations. Dickinson approaches mystery writing in a manner that parallels both William Wordsworth's and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's roles in Lyrical Ballads (1798) by...