In the March issue of Locus Magazine, Gardner Dozois has reviewed "Prisoner of Pandarius," the Raffalon story in In the January/February Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, saying, "Matthew Hughes offers us another highly entertaining adventure of Raffalon the Thief, Prisoner of Pandarius. The major influence on Hughes is clearly Jack Vance, and these Raffalon tales are about as close as you're going to get these days to one of Vance's stories of the misadventures of Cugel the Clever, now that Vance is gone. However, unlike Cugel , who was nowhere near as clever as he believed himself to be, Raffalon actually is clever and is a highly competent thief - but is consistently dogged by terrible luck, which continues to hamper him here as he struggles to pull off a complicated and dangerous heist."

I saw the review on the Jack Vance Message Board, a good meeting place for Vance Fans. It was posted by my old friend and Official First Fan, Mike Berro. Here's what I posted in reply:

Some of my best stories are never reviewed by Gardner, because they appear in anthologies that he's co-edited with George Martin -- including the original Raffalon tale, "The Inn of the Seven Blessings," which I wrote when Gardner asked me to send something to him for the big cross-genre antho, Rogues. That first story showed Raff near the end of his career, starving in a forest after being unable even to lift a chicken from a farmer's coop. He's very down on his luck (Gardner's right: he's smart but unlucky -- much like me).

After the story was accepted for the antho, I decided Raffalon was too good a character to drop, so I started writing adventures from when he was in his prime. I've since sold six more, including the one Gardner's reviewing, to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I figure to do another couple, which will give me enough for a collection, then I'll self-publish them as an ebook and POD paperback.