And so, a new-to-me story from Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy oeuvre, since I definitely didn’t read these last three in this collection at first encounter (no, I’m not sure why).

When is a locked room mystery not a locked room mystery? I present you…

‘The Sixteen Keys’ (1976)

On his estate in the French countryside, the diplomat Lord Vauxhall is found dead in his summer cottage with nary a mark upon him. To add to the confoundment, the door to the cottage is locked from the inside — it must be, since, due to a spell put upon them, no-one else could operate the locks on any of the doors in the dwelling — Vauxhall’s body appears to have aged several decades in the half and hour since his death, and an important document has gone missing but must be somewhere in the vicinity…always assuming the assassin hasn’t taken it with them. Sounds like a case for Lord Darcy!

Fortunately, Darcy is nearby, lounging at home in “one of his favorite dressing gowns” (since you asked, “the crimson silk” one), and he and Master Sean O Lochlainn can be rustle up and hustled out to Vauxhall’s pile tout de suite. Confusingly, given the presence of a master sorcerer, it is also requested that journeyman Torquin Scoll be brought along, and his presence reveals another of the lovely little ruffles that Garrett works into this magical milieu: since Scoll alone made the locks, and put a spell on the keys so that they would only work when used by Vauxhall himself, only Scoll has the know-how to open first the door to the cottage itself and then the other fifteen doors within which are also all locked.

With a battalion of men dispersed over the grounds in the hope of finding whatever important papers the powers that be wish to remain tight-lipped about, can Darcy make sense of the scene in front of them? Well, of course he can, but will it make sense to the reader?

If the plot here is a little flimsy, about which more in due course, there can be no doubt that Garrett must be at his narrative peak in this era of the Lord Darcy stories from his atmosphere-establishing asides…

It had been one of those warm late spring days when no air moves and nothing else wants to.

…to his delicate reflections in the face of mortality…

There is something about death which fascinates all human beings, and something about horror which seems even more deeply fascinating. The thing which lay on the floor in front of the big cold fireplace, illuminated brightly by the mantled gas lamps in the wall brackets, embodied both.

…to the casual way he builds his characters up while also tearing them down:

“[Scoll is] a nut on locks. Absolutely dotes on ’em, me lord. Couldn’t cast a simple preservative spell over a prune, he couldn’t — but give him a simple padlock, and he’ll have it singing the Imperial Anthem in four-part harmony in five minutes.”

There’s a calm confidence about this universe now, unequivocally under Garrett’s control, which speaks of a man who is very secure in what he is writing about. From the casual and knowing references of Number 055 of the Serka to how the French drink “ouiskie” and the apt manner in which Vauxhall’s ageing is explained — infuriating if used elsewhere, but here given some genuine balance and thought so that, while not the ingenious conceit you might have hoped for at first, at least there is an element of veracity about it.

Plot-wise, well, the much-discussed plan of the dwelling would be exceptionally helpful to make the explanation clear, and a few notations on the diagram would be very helpful in explaining exactly what happened. The mathematician in me wants to appreciate that Garrett has essentially repurposed the Bridges of Königsberg problem and turned it into the basis of logical deduction for a mystery story, but he’s half-assed the explanation so that the crucial realisation, even when it’s explained to the reader, feels somewhat hard to grasp.

As much as I want to celebrate the fusion of formal logic with inductive reasoning from a narrative perspective — this reminds me that I’ve reviewed something on this blog which claimed to use Pythagoras’ theorem to explain something about sight-lines or a shooting or something, and similarly bungled it — I’m afraid that the two need to be mesh together a lot more assiduously than this. It reminded me of the explanation for the locked door in The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934) by Ellery Queen in that it’s doubtless ingenious but you really do need a diagram to follow it…and not just in that lazy ‘Oh, my brain doesn’t work when I have to picture things’ way, but, like, actually because it makes no sense otherwise.

Still, my second experience of a new-to-me Lord Darcy story of 2026 is again a fairly positive one. Next up, ‘The Napoli Express’ (1979), which is the longest of the shorts by some distance, so let’s hope Garrett remains in command of his narrative faculties there still. Find out next week!

The Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett: