Sweet Like Justice

Murder and Magic (Lord Darcy, volume 2)

By Randall Garrett

9 Feb, 2025

**Because My Tears Are Delicious To You**

16 comments

Support me with a Patreon monthly subscription! — 9 Feb, 2025

**Because My Tears Are Delicious To You**

16 comments

1979’s Murder and Magic collects four of Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy alternate-universe fantasy mysteries.

As a surprising number of characters find cause to ponder, Richard the Lionhearted’s change of heart following his near-death on the battlefield led to eight centuries of success for the Plantagenets. Another consequence was the codification of magic, which led to a powerful Angevin Empire spanning France and England, a New World dominated by the Angevins, and a Europe torn between the noble Angevins and the expansionistic Poles.

Humans of our technological, scientific 1964, as well as humans in Garrett’s feudal, magical 1964, display all of the usual human vices. When these lead to murder, it is the task of investigators like Lord Darcy to uncover the villains. And perhaps to see justice done.

The reason I say “perhaps” is because Lord Darcy is not above allowing a killer to go free, if the killer had (in Lord Darcy’s opinion) a good reason for murder. I wonder if I could write a Reactor piece about detectives who let the miscreants go free… Well, no, because every work mentioned would thus be spoilered. Sigh.

Focused as they are on the Angevin Empire, the stories don’t go into much detail about the Kingdom of Poland. Is Poland a surprisingly successful descendent of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth? An entirely different kingdom that rose instead of Poland-Lithuania? I don’t know¹.

Discerning readers, having checked ISFDB as they do before tackling a new collection, will notice that all four of these pieces first appeared in Analog Science Fact -> Science Fiction. But surely, these are all fantasy, what with the magic and the Plantagenets who are not self-sabotaging nincompoops! How could they appear in a magazine of “Science Fact -> Science Fiction”? Because editor Campbell was a raging kook and all one had to do to turn fantasy into SF was to claim the magic was really psionics². Note that McCaffrey’s Pern stories were also featured in Analog.

Also, the Lord Darcy stories feature eugenics, another of Campbell’s idée fixes. The ability to use magic is a genetic trait and as such unevenly distributed. Master Sean can credit his knack for magic for having prudently selected Celtic ancestors. Of course, Master Sean is still just a second banana, the forensic examiner to Lord Darcy’s insightful detective.

The stories in this collection are almost cozy, Miss Marple with magic. There is Good and Bad, Lord Darcy is never confused as to which is which, and in the end, Good invariably wins. Killers delight in extraordinarily contrived schemes, perfect for unravelling by a detective willing to pull on loose threads. The moment Poland realizes that it’s possible to murder people by hitting them with a‑brick, Lord Darcy’s job is going to get much harder.

I wanted to read something that would not require too much thought, a minor confection to fill a few hours. The Lord Darcy stories are just that.

Murder and Magic is available here (JABberwocky Literary Agency), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

Almost all of the contents of Murder and Magic are contained (along with all of the other Lord Darcy stories written by Garrett himself) here (Bookshop UK).

The reason I specify “by Garret” is because Michael Kurland wrote two Lord Darcy novels: Ten Little Wizards (1988) and A Study in Sorcery (1989). Books that I happen to own and which may pop up in a review someday.

Now as for the individual stories themselves…

The Eyes Have It • [Lord Darcy] • (1964) • novelette

That someone saw fit to murder Count D’Evreux is no great surprise. An enthusiastic connoisseur of vice in many forms, the Count was no doubt destined for a bad end and an eternity roasting in Hell. Nevertheless, it’s still murder even when the victim was an utter cad. It’s up to Lord Darcy and his faithful companion, Master Sean O Lochlainn, Sorcerer, to work out who killed him and to deliver appropriate justice.

This plot has a surprisingly perverse twist for a story that had to get by Kay Tarrant.

The title references an old superstition, that the image of a murder can be fixed in the victim’s eyes. In the Lord Darcy stories, many old superstitions turn out to have a firm basis in fact.

A Case of Identity • [Lord Darcy] • (1964) • novella

To where has the fit-prone Marquis of Cherbourg vanished? Has this anything to do with the alarming rate at which ships are vanishing mid-Atlantic? And what, if any, role does perfidious Poland play in the matter?

It’s a pretty reliable rule of thumb that everything can be blamed on Poland. Poland is incredibly energetic.

The Muddle of the Woad • [Lord Darcy] • (1965) • novella

A corpse in a coffin should be no surprise. In this case, however, it’s Lord Camberton’s blue-dyed corpse in a coffin intended for the Duke of Kent. Was Camberton woad-dyed to serve some dark purpose of the pagan Holy Society of Ancient Albion? It’s up to Lord Darcy to find out!

Unsurprisingly, the Angevins don’t do religious freedom, which makes me wonder if any Jews or Muslims ever appeared in the Lord Darcy stories. In this story, the would-be Druids seem like harmless eccentrics… as long as you don’t look too closely at what they would do if they were ever in charge.

“A Stretch of the Imagination” • [Lord Darcy] • (1973) • short story

Did publisher Lord Arlen commit suicide, as it appears he did? Or is the “suicide” a cunningly disguised murder?

Was this a dig at a specific publisher or publishers in general?

1: This is where I would turn to GURPS Lord Darcy, except as far as I know Steve Jackson Games never published a Lord Darcy sourcebook for their GURPS tabletop roleplaying game.

2: There’s also a reference to New England’s murderous “red barbarians,” which might seem out of keeping with the rather more glowing portrayal of Lord John Quetzal of Mechicoe in Too Many Magicians… but only if you were not acquainted with Campbell’s particular take on comparative cultural development in the New World.

Comments

Joseph Major

Garrett probably didn't know it, but there is a noble line descended from Moctezuma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Moctezuma_de_Tultengo

Carl Fink

You seem to be equating "Acknowledging that genetics is a thing" with "eugenics". I hope I'm misinterpreting.

As for the ReacTor essay ... you could put "spoilers" in the title, couldn't you? Some people don't mind being spoiled. Brandon Sanderson says it's a majority, in fact.

Vicki RosenzweigCarl Fink

More people mind spoilers in detective/mystery novels than in other genres, though, because of different reading protocols. If you're reading an SF book for the world-building, it may matter less that you know the outcome of the big space battle, for example. One of the two things I remember offhand from the Lord D'arcy stories is a major spoiler, but the other is a scene in which an educated magical healer looks down on hedge magicians who treat wounds with a piece of moldy bread.

TimVicki Rosenzweig

And treat heart disease with foxglove, which has no symbolic shape or color relevance at all.

Patrick MilleCarl Fink

I say Brandon Sanderson can suck an egg.

JimcatCarl Fink

I am firmly on Team Sanderson in this matter.

Ross TenEyck-McDowell

Jewish and Muslim magicians are glancingly mentioned in an aside in Too Many Magicians.

Tim

"detail about the Kingdom of Poland": I think it's mentioned somewhere that the court language of Poland is Brandenberg German. From that bone fragment, I build a dinosaur: that Poland is the bally Hun. Prussia in our timeline was a duchy, a fief of Poland founded when the head of the Teutonic Knights went Protestant. I figure it was secularized some other way, dukes got themselves elected king of Poland, & they broke the power of the Polish nobility & ended the liberum veto.

Robert CarnegieTim

Then again, "Poland" also is that world's Cold War "enemy", as I take it. Many spies and much mischief but not outright war, at the moment, as far as I remember.

Roy Brander

Read it again last fall, enjoyed it as the light thing I needed. (Remember last fall? Granted, things are uglier now, but last fall was the first ugly in a while.) Gave it to my brother, in care for strokes, barely able to speak a word. I wasn't sure if he was able to read at all, and he was absolutely faking every capability he could, saying he could do stuff he couldn't. After leaving it for a few days, I remarked, "I liked that last one where the body was stained some colour", and he stuttered out "Blue", and I knew he was actually reading. Not a relevant story, but you happening to review it just months later, woke me up this morning.

Chakay Firepaw

It wouldn't be that hard to tweak things to make Poland the great power of eastern Europe.

Perhaps they got a more solid victory in the Polish-Russian war in the early 17th century, leading to greater territorial gains and a Tsar more open to Polish influence. Then snowball from there.

Michael IChakay Firepaw

There isn't a unified Russia in the Lord Darcy stories. There is a coalition of Russian states that stopped Poland from expanding any further eastward.

Chakay FirepawMichael I

That was just one point you could make a relatively easy change to swing things. If you want there to never be a Russia, you can tweak one or more of the Muscovite-Lithuanian wars.

Mcannon

The Lord Darcy stories are certainly pleasant entertainments, but even when I first read them in my callow youth I found their world-building to be rather unconvincing.

For example serfdom appears to no longer exist, so presumably the Black Death still occurred and helped to end Feudalism; but otherwise the power of the Aristocracy and Monarchy appears unchanged from the 12 Century. Would the absence of a King John and the signing of Magna Carta at Runnymede really have meant there was no gradual progress towards modern parliamentary democracy? Why is Catholicism still so dominant? I believe the printing press exists in Darcy’s world, but why didn’t it help foster the spread of new and dissenting views that helped bring about both the Reformation and such concepts as human rights and democracy? That’s probably just scratching the surface of the world’s implausibility.

I suspect that in order to actually exist as depicted, the Angevin Empire must have been as tightly-controlled, dictatorial and ruthless as the Kingdom of Poland is claimed to be. It’s a pity the stories never gave us any real depiction of Poland other than as a Soviet Union substitute Big Bad Other; it and its people probably had pretty much the same view of the Angevins. Garrett’s parallel world is one of those that works simply because the author says it does, and because it’s all just a bit of fun the readers generally just go along for the ride. I almost feel a little guilty trying to pick away at it, because it really is a cute little concept.

Michael IMcannon

We don't really get that much information about the actual workings of government in the Darcyverse, although we do know that the monarch retains a substantial amount of real power and that reigning nobles tend to also be local judges.

Parliament does exist and chooses the king from some list of eligible royals (mentioned in "The Eyes Have It"). It isn't clear what role Parliament has during a monarch's reign,although one might expect at least some role in approving taxation.

I don't actually have a problem with the Protestant Reformation not happening. Presumably the Catholic Church in the Darcyverse was wiser about avoiding the combination of visible financial corruption and increased insistence on theological orthodoxy that led to the Reformation.

The monarchy retaining real power well into the 20th century is trickier, but I can see a more gradual reduction in power combined with avoiding any full-scale clash with other interests. There do appear to be some limits on Royal power although they don't mostly appear to be spelled out (although Lord Darcy mentions "laws concerning King's Evidence" in "Too Many Magicians").

Marcus Rowland

I remember reading the Lord Darcy novel Too Many Magicians, and a little later Michael Kurland's The Unicorn Girl which was partially set in a (cough) very similar (cough) universe, before reading any of the other stories and novelettes in old copies of Analog. The first couple I read were great fun, but after that they did get a bit repetitive. It would make a good RPG setting, but sorting out the rights might be a bit of a pain.