24 May, 2002
Too Many Magicians
Randall Garrett
1966
342 pp (MMPB)
This review was posted to the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written. You can read the discussion here.
This is the only novel-length story in Randall Garrett's series of fantasy-alternate-universe detective stories, featuring the detective Lord Darcy. A recent thread on rec.arts.sf.written inspired me to read it again. (I last read it so long ago, that I didn't even remember the solution of the mystery.)
The alternate universe of the Lord Darcy stories is one where King Richard I of England did not die in 1199, but returned from the Crusades with a massive personality change, and produced a long line of wise, benevolent Plantegent kings. Additionally, this is a world where magic works, where, in fact, the Laws of Magic were formulated centuries before the Laws of Physics, and society has evolved accordingly. Although the stories are set in 1966 (or so) of that world, the technology level is more like that of 1866. Because there was no King John, there was, apparently, no Magna Carta, and the system of governance is a strict monarchy. As far as I can tell from this book, there seems to be no Parliament or Prime Minister, just the King, and Dukes, and Lords. Even so, the citizens of the Anglo-French Empire seem to enjoy some human rights, such as the right to a fair trial.
The Anglo-French Empire is one of two great Western powers which appear to dominate the world, much as the United States and the Soviet Union did at the time the novel was written. The Cold War of Garrett's universe is a conflict between the good, noble, and just Anglo-French Empire (comprising much of Western Europe, as well as the Americas) and the nasty, bad, evil Polish Empire (Eastern Europe and significant parts of western Russia).
Too Many Magicians begins with the murder of a spy who had been part of a plan to uncover a traitor in the English Navy's intelligence division, who was trying to sell the plans for England's latest magical secret weapon to the Poles. Lord Darcy, investigator for the Crown, is called in to find the murderer. Meanwhile, Darcy's forensic sorcerer, Sean O Lochlainn is in London, attending a professional convention. Murder strikes at the convention, as well-- London's leading forensic sorcerer, Sir James Zwinge, is stabbed in his hotel room, and Master Sean is arrested on suspicion of having done the deed. Darcy soon discovers that the two crimes are connected, and so he must find Zwinge's killer, as well.
Zwinge's murder is a "locked room mystery." At the time of his death, he was alone in his room, with all the doors and windows locked. While that's not necessarily a problem in a world with magic, the problem is that there are way too many magicians to suspect!
As a character Lord Darcy is not a very exciting guy. He's modelled somewhat on Sherlock Holmes, what with spontaneous deductions just to show how smart he is, and even utters an occasional Holmes-ism:
"I should like to call your attention to the peculiar condition of that knife."However, Darcy lacks the flair and eccenticity which make Holmes fun, rather than simply insufferable. While he's got better manners than Holmes, that doesn't help him; it only makes him come off as more of a stiff. The quasi-Victorian setting plays up the Holmes angle, what with foggy London, and hansom cabs (although here, the horse-drawn carriages have pneumatic tires). No, the meat of this book is not in its main character.Master Sean frowned. "But... there was nothing peculiar about the condition of that knife."
"Precisely. That was the peculiar condition."
It's not in the secondary characters, either. It's not that they're badly-drawn, but there's nothing really interesting about any of them. Mostly, they just serve as agents to move the plot along. One notable thing is that several of Garrett's characters are conspicuously "borrowed" from other works. For example, Sir Lyon Gandolphus Grey is the leader of the Magicians' Society. He's a bit player, and has no similarity to Tolkien's Gandalf, beyond the name. More disconcerting is Garrett's use of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin as the Marquis of London and his assistant, Lord Bontriomphe. It's a very good pastiche, but it resulted in a bit of cognitive dissonance for me. Bontriomphe and the Marquis aren't perfect duplicates of Goodwin and Wolfe, so I was disconcerted when they acted "out of character." For example, Wolfe and Goodwin are always hiding information from the police. The Marquis and Bontriomphe are the police, and become unhappy when Darcy keeps information from them.
The strong points of Too Many Magicians are the setting and the plot. Beyond whatever inherent value it has as an alternate history setting, the world of Lord Darcy is interesting because of the twist it puts on the mystery genre. The forensic evidence used in a magical society is, in many ways, different from that used in our world (for example, using consecrated smoke to determine the time of death), but similar in others-- body tissue is very important for them, as it is for us, but they use the magical "Law of Similarity" to match blood, hair, and so forth to a person, intstead of a DNA test. Furthermore, the assumptions made and conclusions drawn are different. Since Zwinge dies alone, in a locked room, the investigators conclude that he was killed with Black Magic. In our world, we'd conclude that the killer had some clever, unknown way of locking the door behind him and returning the key to the room afterwards.
Given a magical world, it's not easy to write a "fair" mystery. For all the reader knows, the murderer could have used some magic trick, such as invisibility or levitation, to accomplish his dirty deed. However, Garrett does an excellent job of writing as fair a mystery as possible. In order to get around the problem of the characters knowing fundamental things about the way the world works, of which the reader is ignorant, he has the brilliant Lord Darcy, or equally brilliant-in-his-field Master Sean, explain things to other, less brilliant, characters when such issues arise. Generally, I do not advocate such "infodumping" as a literary tactic; it tends to bring the narrative to a screeching halt. In this case, it is not only warranted, but necessary to keep the mystery fair.
The mystery plot itself could have been tighter; there's a lot of running about and tracking down suspects who turn out to be innocent, and moving along to the next guy. For example, I think the whole Tia Einzig subplot could have been reduced substantially, and the novel would have not suffered for the loss. But, in the end, it's still a good mystery. The killer's identity came as a complete surprise to me, but looking back over the text, it is all laid out for the reader to see, if one knows what to look for.
Big, mystery-ruining spoilers for Too Many Magicians below:
Garrett really pulled a dirty trick on the reader: the first chapter is told from the killer's point of view, right after he's committed the first murder. The presentation is entirely consistent with him being the murderer, it's just not something a reader expects, so I immediately dismissed Ashley as a suspect! On the one hand, I kind of feel like I was tricked, but on the other, I've got to admire how skillfully the author set things up so that I would not suspect him until the time came for his identity to be revealed.