With an uptick in quality in the previous two Lord Darcy short stories, I was very much looking forward to the penultimate one — also the longest, by a significant amount — continuing this trend. And, wow, was I mistaken.

If you think Freeman Wills Crofts writes boring train-centric stores, then brother stay the hell away from…

‘The Napoli Express’ (1979)

The MacGuffin recovered in ‘The Sixteen Keys’ (1976) is now being sent to Athens, I think — look, this story is execrable, and I’m barely willing to type it up, never mind pick through it in minute fashion for details which do not really matter — on the luxurious train the Napoli Express. So we meet everyone — and I do mean everyone — on that train and eventually there’s a murder and it gets solved.

God, where to start with this?

In my Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks edition shown above, this story is 69 pages long, and the murder is discovered on page 30, and in the final analysis nothing that happened in those pages is in any way helpful to solving it. Not the card games, not the excruciating detail of when and where the train will stop, not the breakdown of who sits with whom at meals, not the discussion about the differences between healers and sorcerers, not even the various interactions and apparent enmity between certain passengers — apart from knowing who is who, and we’ll get to that in due course, there’s nothing of any value in the turgid opening section which read like the worst paid-by-the-word task ever undertaken in the history — I originally typed that as ‘shitory’, which feels apt — of the genre.

Is there any merit in this opening section? Look, in fairness the analogy that the tubby Irish sorcerer Sean, er, Seamus Kilpadraeg (wink, wink) uses to describe why healing magic is a different skill to sorcery is neat, reminding me in a way of the different magic specialisms discussed in the far more entertaining and far more worthy of your time The Beanstalk Murder (2024) by P.G. Bell. Elsewhere, someone is described at one point as having their “nose buried in a book entitled The Infernal Device, an adventure novel”, which I’m taking as a reference to The Infernal Device (1978) by Michael Kurland — a reference doubly pleasing because a) Kurland would go on to write two Lord Darcy continuation novels after Randall Garrett’s death, which Garrett can’t possibly have known at this point, and b) I read The Infernal Device recently and a review is going up on this blog in July.

Other than that? No, it’s awful, and full of meandering encounters which you’re supposed to think will have some relevance later and don’t.

Plus, oh my god, there are about 683 people on the Napoli Express, and Garrett introduces someone new every couple of pages and you get passages like this:

Eventually Hauser, Boothroyd, Charpentier, the plump, nearly late Jason Quinte, and one of the two fops — the tall one with the hairline mustache, who looked as though he had been pressed into his clothes — ended up at a comer table with a deck of cards and a round of drinks. The saba game was on.

I have no idea who any of those people are, and the two fops have come out of nowhere. At one point, having described in detail an encounter between Master Seamus Kilpadraeg (wink, wink) and two men we’re told that “[h]e never saw or heard of either of them again”. So that’s great, thanks for that.

The body is then discovered in a locked cabin for which there are only two keys — one in someone’s possession at all times, the other locked away out of harm’s way — but this in no way makes the crime impossible, merely swinging the carrot of potential interest in front of your eyes before thrashing down once more with the stick of tedium (it is fitting that the victim had their head “[b]ashed in right proper,” you feel). Some interviews follow, interviews which make Hawk and Fisher look like paradigms of cross-examining virtue, and finally we find out who’s guilty and I don’t care who they were or how they were discovered, but they seemed to just think beating a man repeatedly around the head and then failing to offer false alternative explanation might have simply made every go ‘Well, clearly he tripped,’ and dust off their hands in a self-congratulatory manner.

Also, Lord Darcy is on the train in disguise. So is Master Sorcerer Sean O Lochlainn — gasp!

The sole piece of interest might charitably be considered a reference to The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) by Gaston Leroux, but since it’s a spoiler for that far more interesting tale of the French countryside I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to attempt to pluck the reference from the morass of enervating experiences encountered herein.

Jeepers, this was awful. Let’s never speak of it again.

The Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett: