Upon first encounter, some 15 years ago, I left four of Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy stories unread for reasons which now elude me; and those reasons seem even more elusive when you realise that the last one I did read was possibly the strongest of the lot.

A dead body on the beach, no footprints nearby, and we’ve lost…

‘The Ipswich Phial’ (1976)

Visiting the French village of St.-Matthew’s-Church, the lady known as Mistress Jizelle is walking on the beach one day when she encounters a body. Returning to summon witnesses, they approach the body by a different route so that others may see the state of affairs: the body rests on the sand with no footprints, not even its own, to account for its presence in the middle of the beach, and yet the man clearly lay there for several hours and has been shot through the head for good measure.

Elsewhere, much kerfuffle is being caused in the higher ranks of Garrett’s caste system following the theft of an item known only as the Ipswich Phial, so named as it came from the labs which do most of the research into the formalised system of magic that exists in this world. Suspicion for the theft has fallen on the Polish Secret Service, known as the Serka, who are…

…probably the most powerful, most ruthless instrument of government on the face of the Earth today. Its agents, many of them Talented sorcerers, infest every country in Europe, most especially the Anglo-French Empire.

Fortunately, King’s man Noel Standish was able to get a psychic lock on the thief — the world-building here, in which a man may seize someone psychically and yet remain invisible to them is another of the wonderful fillips in Garrett’s mis en scene…

“[L]et’s suppose a man could make himself perfectly transparent — ‘invisible,’ in other words. The poor lad would have to be very careful, eh? In soft ground or in snow, he’ll leave footprints; in a crowd, he may brush up against someone. Can you imagine what it would be like if you grabbed such a man? There you’ve got an armful of air that feels fleshy, smells sweaty, sounds excited, and would taste salty if you cared to try the experiment. You’ll admit that such an object would be suspect?”

…and shows again why these flights of detectival imagination are so popular still — and trace him to St.-Matthew’s-Church. And, wouldn’t you know it, master sorcerer Sean O Lochlainn happens to be in the area on other business…

This is the longest of the Lord Darcy shorts yet, and it flies by in half the time of the others, not least because Garrett seems to be having fun for a change. Gone is the stuffy pomp-and-circumstance of the earlier tales, replaced with delightful expressions such as a man running away from the dead body “like a turpentined ostrich” (no, I don’t know what it means, either) and the anonymous spy who stole the eponymous MacGuffin being complimented as “a shrewd biscuit”. Equally, see the annual festival which has brought Master Sean to St.-Matthew’s-Church described thus:

For nine days, the village would be full of strangers going about their hectic business, disrupting the peace of the local inhabitants, bringing with them a strange sort of excitement. Then they would go, leaving behind acres of ugly rubbish and bushels of beautiful cash.

And if master Sean’s reaction upon finding his belongings searched doesn’t raise a smile, then, well, I fear you’re in the wrong universe.

If it goes a little James Bond in the closing stages, with Darcy able to resist the enemy and plant a false lead much to the amazed disgust of some of his peers (“Some work vertically, some horizontally.”), Garrett at least remembers the tenets of his universe while reaching for this new sort of populism. The discussion of relevancy of guns and bullets versus guns and their operators is steeped in Garrett’s intelligent considerations, and if it’s a little convenient that Darcy is able “to leap from an unwarranted assumption to a foregone conclusion” given a bit of hand-wavey look-I-don’t-have-the-time-to-draw-a-rigorous-chain-of-inference, it’s still pleasing to see the patterns drawn and have the explanation reached.

Interesting from a genre perspective, too, are the scenes in which the stars and moon vanish from the sky, as it’s to be wondered if this might have planted a seed of an idea in the mind of one M. Paul Halter, who provided a rational explanation — for the vanishing of a skyful of stars, at least — 45 years later in ‘The Celestial Thief’ (2021). I mean, maybe it’s a coincidence, but I love the idea of a young Halter reading this story and just setting that little nugget aside to work on for a decade or two before being able to provide an explanation which pleased him.

Having enjoyed the novel Too Many Magicians (1967) less when revisiting it for this volume, I reread ‘The Ipswich Phial’ and wonder precisely what Younger Jim wanted from this series that he dismounted it at this point. Three stories remain; what delights might be contained therein?

~

The Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett:

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)