Five Tuesdays in June means that I have sufficient time and space to read and write about the five remaining Lord Darcy short stories by Randall Garrett which, given that I reviewed the novel Too Many Magicians (1967) back in January, means the full canon will then be covered on The Invisible Event.

Raise a glass, it’s…

‘The Bitter End’ (1978)

Drinking in a tavern in Paris — the city is delightfully dismissed as a “crowded, noisy river port with delusions of grandeur brought on by memories of ancient glory” — Master Sorcerer Sean O Lochlainn is inconvenienced when it is realised that one of the other patrons is not reading the newspaper at their table but has, in fact, died. Initially detained as a witness, despite having not, y’know, witnessed anything, Master Sean soon finds himself upgraded to suspect when whispers of black magic are thrown around…for how else to account for the body’s pristine condition? I mean, you and I know he’s been poisoned, but intrigue’s gotta intrigue, I suppose, so Master Sean is detained and an investigation is launched by Plainclothes Sergeant-at-Arms Cougair Chasseur (who rather sounds like he pursues attractive single women over the age of 40 in his spare time, no?).

For reasons known only to the people who edited this Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks edition, this story is included before the earlier ‘The Ipswich Phial’ (1976) and so, that being the latest of the Darcy stories I’ve previously read this was a toe into the puddle of unread Darcy material for me. There’s some fun here, like a test to see whether someone has the Talent to practice magic by putting a spell on a location and seeing if the people who enter it react:

“Imagine a room full of people, each one with a different kind of noisemaker — a rattle, a drum, a horn, a ball of stiff paper to crackle, a hissing through the teeth, every sort of distracting noise you can imagine. What would you do if you had to think?”

“Put my fingers in my ears, I should imagine,” Lord Darcy had replied.

“Exactly, me lord. And there’s not a Talented person alive who wouldn’t do the psychic equivalent of just that, if that distraction spell were cast on him. A person with little or no Talent just becomes distracted and loses his train of thought. He hasn’t the least notion that it came from outside his own mind. A person with a good, but untrained Talent will recognize the spell for what it is, but won’t know what to do about it. A person with a trained Talent will block it instantly.”

I know Master Sean likens it to being no more subtle than “coming up behind a person who is pretending deafness and shouting ‘Boo!‘ in his ear,” but I enjoy the way Garrett thinks about the wider world of his magic and this is another good example of the richness in his milieu. Equally, the spell which our killer casts to enable the murder to take place is given life inside the universe, not just allowed to exist because it’s a something Garrett needs to make the murder work.

There’s also some excellent writing, though I still can’t get over how huge the wands are, which I’m now incapable as imagining anything other than Garrett compensating for something:

That wand was not a glossy black. It was not even a dull, flat black. It was a fathomless black, like the endless night between the stars. It did not merely fail to reflect the light that fell upon it, it seemed to absorb light as though it were somehow reaching for it.

Also — hey! — this shares a common plot point of sorts with my own modest effort in the genre, The Read Death Murders (2022). Who knew Garrett kept such august company?

The complications here are minor, and the route to our villain fairly straightforward, meaning that at times the extended duration of this can get a little tiresome, but then we’re very much in the era of writing that was much more here for the alternate history and world-building than original plotting, of which there is very little.

And, ye gods, preserve me from phonetically-rendered Scotsmen:

Chief Darryl grinned but shook his head. “Nae; ’tisna that. Ah was oop a’ the nicht last nicht wi’ the Pemberton robbery; nae sleep this mornin’ because o’ the Neinboller swindlin’ case; oop a’ the afternoon wi’ the Duval gassing. Ah try tae get soom sleep o’ the evenin’, and Ah find that a routine death in a bar has snowballed as if it were rollin’ down the Matterhorn. Nae, lads, ’tis nae a guid evenin’. But ’tis guid tae see yer lairdship.”

All told, this is a pretty darn solid Silver Age mystery that shows how the priorities of the genre had shifted by this era, making perhaps less merry with complications than the earlier Darcy tales and more interested in establishing the very grit beneath the nails which would allow this setting and its trappings to cement itself. This might indeed be my very favourite of the stories to date, and it is regretful that I previously abandoned the series before getting to it. Although, that said, I have fond memories of ‘The Ipswich Phial’, so let’s come back next week and see how that stands up to scrutiny.

The Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett: