Well, the penultimate Lord Darcy story was fucking awful, so the final one has to end things on a more positive note, right? Right?

When you get to the end, I suppose it sets one thinking about the beginning, and so it seems for Garrett as we enter…

‘The Spell of War’ (1979)

In contrast to the other stories in this canon, ‘The Spell of War’ is not built around some baffling problem and the intelligent unpicking thereof. There is detection of sort within this, and sorcery plays a part, too, but both are very minor elements in the broader intent, which is much more about the terror of war than anything close to the measured ratiocination of the earlier Lord Darcy stories.

The tale opens with two young men in a trench in the midst of an artillery bombardment, and is only ever really about one thing: the need to get the company they’re part of to safety as violence rages around them.

Staying low and moving fast, the two men performed that maneuver known to the science of military tactics as Getting The Hell Out. In the 25 yards they had to move, several more bullets came close, but none hit anything but earth.

It soon becomes clear that one of these men is Lieutenant Darcy, son of Colonel Lord Darcy who, having been shot earlier in the conflict, is not expected to live to see the year out. Given the forward-moving chronology of the previous stories, I initially assumed, then, that this Darcy was the son of the investigator we had followed through nine previous tales and one novel, and that Garrett had, in his final story, decided that a leap into the future was in order to assure us that the Darcy name and talent for clear thinking would be preserved.

But then a fat Irish sorcerer comes barrelling into a foxhole, and the chances of the swain of both Lord Darcy and Sean O Lochlainn bumping into each other without recognition in the middle of whatever war those damn sinister Poles — this is not a personal animus, the Polish have been the Darcy-canon villains for a few stories now — had initiated seemed too far-flung for reason, and thus this must be a prequel and this is how the characters met. It’s a neat idea, and ones that’s well-explored without leaning too heavily on a sort of wink-wink awareness that these two men are going to go on and have many adventures together. Indeed, the concept of approaching Darcy’s intelligence and Sean’s mastery of sorcery through this sort of genre-adjacent tales is such a good one that it is to be lamented that no more stories featuring the pair came from Garrett’s pen.

Garrett writes well about the sheer disorientation of war, and the panic the men in the trenches feel as enemy soldiers approach them out of the mist — with the big guns ensuring there’s nowhere to flee to — is superbly communicated. These different ideas are folded into each other well, as the use of magic is applied here in a much more active sense than elsewhere (generally, Master Sean would be all magical after the event of a crime, whereas here there’s very much an urgency to seeing the magic done in real time).

Intelligently, Garrett doesn’t even try to keep this on the same sort of footing at the previous stories, embracing the theatre of war and its associated tropes wholeheartedly, all the way from a hidden sniper down to a cowardly (or idiotic) commanding officer who has lost his nerve and whose terrible decision-making is going to see plenty of men needlessly lose their lives. This enables a few seeds of the Once and Future Darcy to be sown, but never in a way that’s nodding too heavily at the camera. His respect for seniority, for one thing, in how he does not contradict his clearly wrong senior — when you see little things like this, it makes perfect sense that the Lord Darcy we know would have spent time in the military.

Without saying anything, the lieutenant went over to where the late captain had dropped his pack. He opened it and took out the little collapsing periscope. Then he climbed up the slope of the ravine wall and eased the upper end of the periscope over the top. The captain had carried the device because regulations said he should, but he never used it because he thought it a coward’s gadget. Lieutenant Darcy believed there was a difference between caution and cowardice.

The benefit of being so fully enmeshed in the maw of war is that there are a couple of very clever ideas here which are slid past you so that a little intelligence can be applied in the latter stages, fulfilling the expectations of some clever reveal as these stories have provided previously. I love this, it’s very much the thing that I value so highly in the genre — hell, it’s the reason behind the name of this blog — and while I had enjoyed the story on its own terms, this additional ingredient in the latter stages made this departure from the norm all the more enjoyable.

Having, at times, lost a little patience with the Darcy corpus in this undertaking, ‘The Spell of War’ very much made me wish that Garrett had gone on to write another ten of these using this approach. I know there are two continuation novels by Michael Kurland, but, for all Kurland’s talents as a writer, I can’t believe either of them will take this sort of sideways, crabwise approach to the genre staples, and that’s a shame. This new perspective on an old way of doing things really does enhance the milieu, the characters, and the canon overall, and Garrett is to be commended for the foresight it would have taken to write this. Lovely for the finish to leave me wanting more.

~

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)