Lord Darcy - A Working Magic System

Randall Garret invented his detective Lord Darcy (who is clearly from the Holmes blueprint) in the late 1970s and wrote a couple of short stories and a novel (“Too Many Magicians”) about him. Later on, Garret’s friend Michael Kurland added two more novels to the collection (“Ten Little Wizards” and “A Study in Sorcery”). All are set in the same alternate reality of the late 1970s and the 1980s. And that alternate reality is what I want to talk about, because it comes with a rational magic system which presents a backdrop without getting in the way too much.

In Lord Darcy’s version of the world, two things happened in medieval times which changed the course of history:

Richard Lionheart survived the battle in which he died in our reality, found the time to re-evaluate his life, and returned to England to rule for twenty more years, surviving his younger brother John (who this way never got a chance at proving how bad a ruler he was) and leaving England in the capable hands of his nephew Arthur. As a result of this, the Plantagenets still rule and a sizable portion of Europe is part of the Angevin Empire, which encompasses France in addition to Britain and has a strong influence on other western European countries.

In addition to that, a monk discovered the rules behind magic, which allows for everyone with the Talent (the inborn ability to use magic) to be trained as a mage of some kind. This has changed the development of technology severely - many modern ‘inventions’ such as refrigerators or telephones exist, but they run on magic instead of electricity.

As a result of both changes, the world is very different from the one we know - the society is much more based on old feudal systems, magicians are their own class, healing is a topic as well, and things seem quite fantastical to the reader.

Randall Garret could have let his imagination run amuck with all of this. He could have told stories of how magic made solving crimes so much easier. But he didn’t - and with good reason. Where would the ‘mystery’ in ‘mystery story’ be, if a magician only snapped their fingers and everything was cleared up? Nowhere, that’s where.

By giving clear limits to magic, both on moral grounds and on actual technological grounds, he made it clear that magic is not solving all problems in this world. Master Sean, Lord Darcy’s assistant, claims often enough that he’s a sorcerer, but not a miracle worker. It’s Darcy’s little grey cells (to quote another detective) which solve the case, not the magic. The magic assists, very much the same way as science assists in our world. Master Sean as a forensic sorcerer can tell how long a body has been dead, identify poisons, tell whether a bullet came from a specific weapon. He can’t just conjure up a picture of the murderer or revive the body to ask it (unlike a certain Mr. Johannes Cabal, but I’ll talk about him in another post).

And magic in the world of Lord Darcy is complicated and hard. Sorcerers and witches need a lot of material, such as different wands, different parchments, different inks, a lot of tools which are expensive. Magical spells can take hours to weave and often come with complications - some demand far more than one sorcerer to work out. Magic is a full-time job with a long training phase.

Since most people do not have the Talent, however, most crimes committed in the world of Lord Darcy (who is a detective by profession, not an amateur) are committed without the use of magic, so Lord Darcy (who doesn’t have an ounce of the Talent himself) is very much suited to solving them. Master Sean provides him with information, as a forensic scientist in our world would, and sometimes provides a sounding board for his colleague and friend.

What magic provides in the stories is not the solution to the case, but the backdrop. The immediate reaction of witnesses to ‘locked room mysteries’ in a magical setting is ‘a sorcerer did it.’ Then, without fail, Lord Darcy proves that a sorcerer had nothing to do with it and it doesn’t take magic to commit a crime the way it was committed.

But magic is there, the past has shaped a different present where there’s no cars, where the train is still the best way of travelling, where people are living in a much less stressful and much less enlightened environment, where it’s perfectly normal to assume that the gentry knows what they’re doing (not Darcy, though, despite being gentry himself). The world is close enough to reality (at least if you were alive and conscious during the 80s) to be recognizable, yet unrecognizable enough so it feels like taking a break in another world entirely. As a matter of fact, this magic-based, late-20th-century world has a striking resemblance to Sherlock Holmes’ Victorian age (but with magic and without Queen Victoria, of course).

The magical backdrop in the Lord Darcy stories works, because it is only a backdrop. The rules of magic, the complicated rituals necessary to use it, the limited pool of people who can use magic at all make sure that despite the whole ‘magic is real’ part of the setting there’s never a simple solution through magic. It’s Lord Darcy’s talent (which his friend and colleague is sure has to be magic as well, in some way) to get from the problem to the solution which saves the day, no matter whether it’s in a short story or a novel, no matter whether it’s an original by Randall Garret or a pastiche by Michael Kurland.

With interesting cases, recurring characters, and a world which is both recognizable and unrecognizable, the Lord Darcy stories (the originals are available collected in one volume, both novels by Michael Kurland are also still available) are still a good read many, many years after they were written - and, sadly, many years after their creator left this globe.