RANDALL GARRETT – Too Many Magicians. Lord Darcy #1. Doubleday, hardcover, 1967. Previously serialized in Analog SF, Aug-Nov 1966. Curtis, paperback, 1969. Ace, paperback, September 1979.

   Any number of writers have been successful at blending crime and science fiction, but no one has done it better than Randall Garrett in his Lord Darcy series. On the one hand, the Lord Darcy stories are meticulous science-fictional extrapolations — tales of an alternate-universe Earth in the 1960s in which the Plantagenets have maintained their sway, a king sits on the throne of the Western World, and not physics but thaurnaturgic science (magic, that is) is the guiding field of knowledge. On the other hand, they are pure formal mysteries of the locked-room and impossiblecrime variety, ingeniously constructed and playing completely fair with the reader.

   Too Many Magicians is the only Lord Darcy novel, and so delightful and baffling that a 1981 panel of experts voted it one of the fifteen all-time best locked-room mysteries. When Master Sir James Zwinge, chief forensic sorcerer for the city of London, is found stabbed to death in a hermetically sealed room at the Triennial Convention of Healers and Sorcerers, it seems no one could have committed the crime; indeed, there is no apparent way in which the crime could have been committed.

   Enter Lord Darcy, chief investigator for His Royal Highness, the duke of Normandy, and Darcy’s own forensic sorcerer, Master Sean O’Lochlainn. Using a combination of clue gathering, observation, ratiocination, and magic, Darcy and Master Sean sift through a labyrinth of hidden motives and intrigues and solve the case in grand fashion.

   This truly unique detective team also appears in eight novelettes, which can be found in two collections — Murder and Magic (1979) and Lord Darcy Investigates (1981). The former volume contains one of Anthony Boucher’s favorite stories, the wonderfully titled “Muddle of the Woad.”

   These, too, are clever crime puzzles; these, too, are rich in extrapolative history and the lore of magic; and these, too, are vivid and plausible portraits of a modem world that could exist if Richard the Lion-Hearted had died from his arrow wound in the year 1199- — a world that resonates to the clip-clop of horse-drawn hansoms and carriages (for of course automobiles were never invented) and through which the shade of Sherlock Holmes happily prowls.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.