I’m reading Randall Garrett’s collection of LORD DARCY stories at the moment, and it’s proving to be hard going. The kind of book I dip into a story at a time, then set aside for a long stretch while I go find something that’s more my speed as a reader. I have issues with Garrett’s pacing, but that’s a conceit of the genre–he’s essentially doing Sherlock Holmes stories in an alternate universe where magic exists and thaumaturgical forensics is a studied art–and I have never been a voracious reader of the pure mystery story.
I’m making a concreted effort to finish the collection because it plays into my thesis, being a significant source of inspiration behind Elizabeth Bear’s New Amsterdam stories featuring the forensic sorcerer Abigail Irene Garrett and the immortal vampire detective Sebastien de Ulloa. Those stories I devoured at a rapid clip when I first encountered them, immediately pre-ordering collections every time they were announced.
The difference isn’t just that the two writers are different, but that they way Bear approach’s her characters have been informed by thirty or forty years of detective stories since then. They’re flawed investigators, with their own conflicts and desires, compared to Garrett’s Lord Darcy. They’re still iconic characters, in the pattern described by Robin Laws, but their iconic nature stems from conflicts that are at the core of who they are. Emotional and moral wounds that will not heal over the course of the story, but may be played out in the microcosm of the investigation at hand.
It’s a shift that played out in TV over a similar period, bourn of changes to the consumption model that injected more serialisation into the traditional episodic model where character change meant risking the loss of audience members who missed pivotal episodes. It’s interesting to watch a similar shift in approach here in fiction.
