Where I Was Riveted

Lord Darcy by Randall Garrett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I seldom read or like short stories (a little, sometimes), but I really liked this collection. Almost 700 pages long, I never got tired of picking it up, and I just wanted it to go on. (In fact, I already ordered one of the books that follow, though it's written by another author. Maybe it can keep the fun going for a bit. Fingers crossed.)

Set in an alternate Europe, where the Plantagenet descendants of Richard the Lionheart keep the throne, France and England remain united under one line, the entire New World is administered (though not much colonized, apparently) by the Anglo-French Empire, and magic works but isn't terribly common, it has a sort of steampunk feel. The original stories were set in the years they were written, in the 1960s and 1970s, but they seem 60 or 80 years behind technologically. The main enemy of the empire is the Polish empire, mirroring the east-west split of those years, but with a twist. All in all, it is clever and well carried out, leaving lots of room for more stories that we probably will never see. Alas.

Lord Darcy is rather like Sherlock, intuitive and well informed, gathering slight clues others miss, though he is much more socially adept and friendly. His assistant, Sean O Lochlainn, is a master wizard, using magic to do the kind of tests we expect forensics to do in modern stories. Together, they're highly effective, and they're both as round as they need to be for the stories to work.

I get it; deep stories need characters with tragic backstories, filling the pages with pathos. There's not a ton of that here, though. Instead, we get to see interesting people with amazing abilities be awesome while working as a team. That's my favorite thing.

(Every time I differ from the masses of novel readers--when I dislike books that everybody else loves--it's because the main characters are all kinda shitty to each other. They're not a team. They're not nice. It's every man and woman for themselves. Ack. I don't like that. In fact, I hate that. I love good friends or a found family, especially with awesome people being awesome. That's my favorite. That's this collection.)

(Others are free to continue liking the stuff I don't. I won't understand it, but that's cool.)

Anyway, these are entertaining short stories (and one novel) that I highly recommend to readers of all types--Sherlock-style mystery, fantasy, alternate history, espionage, and more--and I suspect lots of people who would love it missed it back in the 70s like I did. And if it weren't for the Austen-sounding title, I might not have taken a chance myself. Glad I did.

Good stuff.

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