Perhaps two decades a go, I read some, but not all, of the Lord Darcy series of stories by Randall Garrett, in which detection is augmented with magic. And I’ve been telling people they’re good ever since. So for Tuesdays this, and another as-yet-undetermined future, month let’s take this Fantasy Masterworks volume of the complete stories — 10 shorts, and the novel Too Many Magicians (1967) — and see how they stand up.

The contents, then, are:

1. ‘The Eyes Have It’ (1964)
2. ‘A Case of Identity’ (1964)
3. ‘The Muddle of the Woad’ (1965)
4. Too Many Magicians (1967)
5. ‘A Stretch of the Imagination’ (1973)
6. ‘A Matter of Gravity’ (1974)
7. ‘The Bitter End’ (1978)
8. ‘The Ipswich Phial’ (1976)
9. ‘The Sixteen Keys’ (1976)
10. ‘The Napoli Express’ (1979)
11. ‘The Spell of War’ (1979)

And today:

‘The Eyes Have It’ (1964)

What’s especially pleasing about ‘The Eyes Have It’ (1964) as the first Darcy story, is how light Garrett’s touch is with his alternate history. We’re somewhere in a version of events in which the Catholic Church holds huge sway over an empire composed of England, France, as-yet-untold regions of Europe, and the Americas. King John oversees things, and the hierarchical social structures of the Plantagenet age have been maintained. When Edouard, Count D’Evreux is found shot dead in his bed one morning, investigator to the rich and powerful Lord Darcy is dispatched to get to the bottom of things.

So far, so classically detectival.

Part of the fun, then, is derived from the steady realisation that it is not the physical presence of people in the Count’s room that may cause a problem where detection is concerned — Sherlock Holmes would grip his temples and lament ruined footprints or disturbed ash traces — but instead what ever metaphysical things may have gone on while the body was being viewed:

The priest said: “At 8:15, Sir Pierre and I went in. I wished to view the body. We touched nothing. We left at 8:20.”

Master Sean O Lochlainn looked agitated. “Er…excuse me, Reverend Sir. You didn’t give him Holy Unction, I hope?”

“No,” said Father Bright. “I thought it would be better to delay that until after the authorities had seen the…er…scene of the crime. I wouldn’t want to make the gathering of evidence any more difficult than necessary.”

“Quite right,” murmured Lord Darcy.

“No blessings, I trust, Reverend Sir?” Master Sean persisted. “No exorcisms or–“

“Nothing,” Father Bright interrupted somewhat testily. “I believe I crossed myself when I saw the body, but nothing more.”

“Crossed yourself, sir. Nothing else?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s all right, then. Sorry to be so persistent, Reverend Sir, but any miasma of evil that may be left around is a very important clue, and it shouldn’t be dispersed until it’s been checked, you see.”

My concern when I initially read these stories was that the detection would be purely down to someone waving a wand and allakazam we know that the murderer was five-foot-eight, had blue hair, walked with a limp, and therefore must have been the milkmaid. But the utilisation by Darcy’s assistant conjuror Sean O Lochlainn — he’s referred to as being “tubby” twice in this story alone, a repeating refrain — relies on concepts such as “Relevancy” to determine here that the bullet taken from D’Evreux’s chest does indeed come from the gun found conveniently near the scene.

When it comes to those links being strengthened, however, there’s decidedly more of the human equation of logic required rather than magic doing all the heavy lifting.

Lord Darcy’s handsome face scowled. “Let’s not jump to any hasty conclusions, my good Sean. There is no evidence whatever that he was killed by a woman.”

“Would a man be wearing that gown, me lord?”

“Possibly,” said Lord Darcy. “But who says that anyone was wearing it when the button was removed?”

“Oh.” Master Sean subsided into silence.

The concept of Relevancy is well-explained, too, so that it is made clear to the reader how a murder cannot simply be committed by a practitioner of magic moving things with their mind and thus ‘firing’ a bullet into someone remotely. Indeed, Garrett is to be commended at this early stage for laying down the rules of his magical operation clearly, so that even the concept which gives the story its title (the first of many titular puns, showing that Garrett is trying to enjoy himself) can’t simply be pulled out time and again and thus render Darcy’s logical reasoning irrelevant.

It’s interesting how much Garrett relies on that which is broadly familiar to the average reader so that the historical details of his universe can slip by almost unnoticed without being crucial to understanding the details of the story, the setting, the murder, or the solution. You already broadly possess a sense of castles, the feudal system, the notion of peasantry, and the idea that some people are of noble birth…so you’ll be fine navigating this. If you’ve ever been in an old castle that might help, but Garrett’s communication of the concrete physical geography of his scene is marshalled well, and so the reader of history, the reader of SF, and the reader of classical detection will come away from this all equally satisfied.

His touch is light, too, with the things that are specific rather than general (“You, as a representative of the Church, will have to be the arresting officer.”), and again I love how much he trusts the average reader to simply follow this, and the series of closing revelations that put a twist on what we’ve been led to believe happened, showing Darcy as a human being as well as a reasoning engine. It’s true that little in this opening story establishes Darcy as much of a character beyond his being the one to ferret out the truth, but given that I have some experience of trying to communicate an alternate history in the process of telling a detective story I have a newfound respect for the world being so lightly and clearly drawn: better that than a vigorous portrait of the central presence, with everything else a blur around him.

This first revisit, then, finds me, if anything, even more deeply mired in respect for what Garrett achieved with these stories. It’s not the strongest detection you’ll ever encounter, but as an opening salvo which dares to try something a little uncommon with the detection genre there’s a lot here to celebrate. Here’s looking forward to more Darcy and Chums in the weeks ahead.