Murder by Magic (46 page)
“Faugh,” Sahib coughed as he straightened. “Let’s not do that again anytime soon, shall we? I’m getting too old for last-minute rescues.”
Last-minute rescues—’cause we went off alone! “Oh, Sahib, Memsah’b—” Nan felt her eyes fill with tears as it suddenly came home to her that her protectors and benefactors had just put themselves into deadly danger to save her. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’ mean—”
“Nan, Nan, you aren’t to blame!” Sahib said immediately, putting one strong arm around her shoulders. “You did nothing that you shouldn’t have done, and if you hadn’t been so careful, we wouldn’t have known where you were until it was too late! No, it was our fault.”
“It certainly was,” Memsah’b said grimly. “But it was someone else’s as well . . . and there is going to be a reckoning. But let’s get away from here first. I don’t altogether want to find out if the bindings keeping that thing confined to this house will hold under provocation.”
Sahib took Sarah’s arm, giving her Grey to tuck inside her coat, and Selim lifted Neville onto Sarah’s shoulder. As they walked quickly away from the house, Memsah’b continued. “Someone came to me a few days ago with a story about this place, how some haunt was making it impossible to rent out and he was in dire difficulty because of it. He wanted Sarah or me, or both of us together, to lay the spirit, but I have heard all of the stories about this address, and I knew better than to try. Something came to dwell there, over a hundred years ago, and it is not a thing to be trifled with. Men have died here, and more than one, and many people have gone mad with fear. Whatever that thing was—”
“Is old,” Nan put in with a shudder. “Real, real old. I dunno how it got ’ere, but it ain’t no spook.”
“Well, evidently this person decided to force our hand,” Sahib said thoughtfully, and as Nan looked up when they passed under a streetlamp, she saw that both his face and Selim’s were grim. “I believe that I will have a private word with him.”
“As will I—although I am sorely tempted to tell him that his devil has been laid, and suggest he spend a night there himself,” Memsah’b said with deep anger in her voice. “And from now on, we will contrive a better way of bringing you girls if I should need you.”
“Please,” Sarah said in a small voice. “What happened to Nan and Neville? And you and Sahib and Selim?”
Sahib cleared his throat awkwardly; Selim just laughed, deep in his throat. “You saw us as we seem to be—”
“Are,” Sahib corrected dryly.
“Are, then—when we are warriors for the Light,” Selim concluded.
“Though how Nan happened to slip over into a persona and power she should not have until she is older—much older—I cannot imagine,” Memsah’b added with a note in her voice that suggested that she and Nan would be having a long, a very long, talk at some point in the near future.
But for now, Nan was beginning to feel the effect of being frightened nearly to death, fighting for the life of herself and her friends, and somehow being rescued in the nick of time. She stumbled and nearly fell, and Sahib sent Selim in search of a cab. In a good neighborhood like this one, they were not too difficult to find; shortly, both the girls were lifted in to nestle on either side of Memsah’b, birds tucked under their coats with the heads sticking out, for Nan had left Neville’s hatbox and was not at all inclined to go back after it. And in the shelter of the cab, Neville providing a solid oblong of warmth, and the drone of the adult voices above her head, safe at last, she found herself dropping off to sleep.
But not before she heard Memsah’b saying, “I would still like to know how it was that the child came into her Aspect without any training—and where she found the Words of Power for the Holy Light.”
And heard Grey answer.
“Smart Neville,” she said in her sweetest voice. “Very smart Nan.”
N
ow that you’ve taken your trip into the shadows, I suppose you have a few questions. Why these murders? Why murders at all, for that matter? Why mix murder and magic?
It’s a long story.
In one sense, every story is a mystery, even if it isn’t intended to be a mystery for the reader. How do you get the characters from here to there, and the story from “Chapter One” to “The End”? So I suppose an interest in unraveling that sort of puzzle leads naturally to an interest in mysteries, but in point of cold hard fact, I was a mystery reader long before I began the daunting process of becoming a writer. Writers like puzzles and mysteries because they spend so much of their professional life solving them.
As for why
occult
mysteries, well . . . there’s a basic rule of fiction that I’ve always followed.
If you want to keep a reader’s attention, keep raising the stakes.
It’s like this.
Murder is the most unnatural act, a crime that often requires the keenest and most insightful investigator, whether official or amateur, to solve it. The investigations, and the theories, are bounded by the laws of possibility, if not probability, and so the murderer is eventually identified and brought to justice.
But what if, once you eliminated the impossible, what you had left were still impossible? What if a killer could be in two places at once, kill from a distance, or enter a locked room without a trace? What if, in a world where magic was a fact of everyday life, a killer were to commit a crime by purely mechanical means?
I’m not the first person to have thought of this, of course. Crime and the supernatural have long been a popular mix. Nearly every detective worth the name has at least dabbled in a case touching on the occult at some point in his career—even Lord Peter Wimsey, in “The Incredible Elopement of Lord Peter Wimsey,” undertook to solve a case of supposed witchcraft and demonic possession.
To do even the sketchiest history of the occult detectives would require a full book, not just a few pages. I’ll try to hit one or two of the high points here, but in order to even begin to winnow things out, I need to stick to series where most of the detective’s adventures focus on the occult, and to leave out single-title works entirely. So
Dracula
isn’t here, or
The Exorcist,
although you could make a strong case for both Doctor Abraham Van Helsing and Father Lancaster Merrin being occult detectives.
Nor do I have the space to get into movies, comics, or television, though that means I have to leave out
Ghostbusters; The Exorcist
(the movie);
Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts; The Sixth Sense; Kolchak: The Night Stalker; The X-Files; Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Charmed;
and many more that would certainly otherwise be worth mentioning for their influence on the field.
The Occult Detective—often called a ghosthunter or Ghost Breaker—found his (almost always “his” in those early days) first true flowering in the world of the pulps and the proto-pulps, in an era when there were hundreds of magazines on the newsstands every month and thousands of stories published every year. And now, a few pages from our “angels gallery” . . .
Doctor John Silence was the creation of Algernon Blackwood, perhaps best remembered today as a horror writer. Silence first appears in 1908, with a final adventure dated 1914, though the early adventures may only have appeared in book form. Silence is an archetypal O.D.: like many of his successors, he is independently wealthy, a member of the professions, and possesses psychic powers himself, gained through rigorous years of study.
Jules de Grandin was the brainchild of pulp master Seabury Quinn, and appeared almost exclusively in the original incarnation of the magazine
Weird Tales
. Unlike Silence, de Grandin is all flamboyance and quirks, rather like a ramped-up Poirot. He’s referred to as “the Sherlock Holmes of the Supernatural,” and he makes his way with great verve and an immoderate body count through a host of zombies, vampires, and other ghoulies in the ninety-three adventures that appeared from 1925 through 1951. De Grandin is notable for having both connections to French Intelligence and a military background, both of which he exploits in his fight for good.
Carnacki the Ghost-Finder is the O.D. of William Hope Hodgson, who is best remembered today for his classic dark fantasy
The House on the Borderland.
Carnacki’s first adventure appeared in 1912, and he flourished in various British and American magazines through 1947, his career overlapping those of both Doctor Silence and de Grandin. Like Doctor Silence, Carnacki is a psychic investigator, called in to investigate occult disturbances, but unlike other occult detectives, he always attempts to eliminate any mundane cause through the scientific method before turning to the “Black Arts” to solve the crime.
Doctor Taverner, who appears in twelve stories originally published in
Royal Magazine
at unknown dates, and first collected in 1926 in
The Secrets of Dr. Taverner,
is the creation of Violet Mary Firth, who wrote under the pen name Dion Fortune, a pen name taken from her family motto,
Dio et Fortuna.
Possibly unique among the ranks of the creators of the O.D.’s, Fortune was herself a practicing occultist, a member of the Golden Dawn. She claimed to have based Taverner on her mentor, Doctor William Moriarty, and said that her Taverner stories were “studies in little-known aspects of psychology put in the form of fiction because, if published as a serious contribution to science, they would have no chance of a hearing.”
Beginning in the 1930s, Manly Wade Wellman gave us three classic O.D.’s: Judge Keith Hilary Pursuivant (1938–82), a retired judge who has devoted himself to a study of the occult; John Thunstone (1943–85), a renowned scholar of independent means whose passion is the occult (and who, oddly enough, possesses a blessed silver-bladed sword cane identical to Judge Pursuivant’s); and Silver John (1946–87), sometimes known as John the Balladeer. Of the three, Silver John, a soft-spoken countryman who plays a silver-strung guitar and whose adventures are drawn from the folklore and mysticism of the American South, is perhaps best known. All three characters shared the same universe and met each other at various times.
Marion Zimmer Bradley was best known for her fantasy and science fiction novels, but she also wrote quite a large body of occult and gothic novels and stories. Colin MacLaren is her occult detective, who appears with his psychic partner, Claire Moffat, in four books:
Witch Hill, Dark Satanic, The Inheritor,
and the collaboration
Heartlight,
which was written with yours truly.
With the diminishing of the pulp market and the rise of the paperback novel at the end of World War II, the classic O.D. became less prevalent. But you certainly can’t keep a good man (or woman) down, and the O.D. quickly found a new home in the SF and Fantasy field, shedding much of his pulp-horror background in the process.
A distinct subgenre of the O.D. is the tale set in an alternate universe where the ground rules are decidedly different, but the problems of detection and justice remain the same. Three examples:
Lord Darcy, whose original adventures appeared from 1964 to 1980, is the creation of SF master Randall Garrett. Darcy is an investigator for Richard, Duke of Normandy, in an alternate universe where magic works and the Plantagenet dynasty rules to this day over a low-tech Anglo-Norman Empire. Garrett gave us classic puzzle-based mysteries, sticking firmly to the rules of his “scientific” magic and filled with allusions to the classics of the mystery field.
Glen Cook provides an archetypal hard-luck hard-boiled gumshoe, also (coincidentally) named Garrett. Garrett has appeared in ten novels since 1987 and doesn’t seem to have a first name as of this writing. The difference between Garrett and the classic mean-streets private eye is that Garrett hangs his hat in another world: the city of TunFaire, a decaying outpost of the Karentine Empire, a corrupt (in all senses of the word) city populated by elves, giants, centaurs, pixies, wizards, and just about anything else that ever escaped from a fairy tale. In a tip of the hat to Rex Stout, Garrett shares his lodgings with The Dead Man, a massive creature who isn’t a man but is certainly dead. And quite grumpy about it. Philip Marlowe would certainly recognize Garrett’s problems, if not their packages.
Anita Blake, vampire executioner, is the creation of Laurel K. Hamilton, and has appeared in nine novels since 1993. Anita lives in a world where vampires and other supernatural creatures have come “out of the closet” and into the mundane world, much in the tradition of Dean R. Koontz’s 1973 classic,
The Haunted Earth.
Anita, who has the innate ability to animate the dead, executes rogue vampires for the state of Missouri. And to her surprise, she finds that the supernatural community has begun coming to her to investigate crimes.
And that brings us to the modern day, and the wonderful assortment of choices, both traditional and nontraditional, awaiting the connoisseur of the O.D., many types of which you find represented in these pages.
But all of this really doesn’t quite explain how the anthology
Murder by Magic
came to exist. For that I owe a personal debt of gratitude to Debra Doyle, because without her, you would not be holding this anthology in your hands at all. A few years back, she and I were both guests at a DarkoverCon together, discussing, as writers will, the Great Unwritten Stories we wanted to write and never would, simply because there just didn’t seem to be a home for stories that blurred the lines between fantasy and mystery. She mentioned a story she’d always wanted to write, about a “country-house” murder set in the Mageworlds universe, where magic was a fact of life. A mystery that—literally—could not have occurred—or been solved—anywhere else.
“But who would publish an occult mystery set in an SF universe?” she said, shrugging.
“You write it,” I said. “I’ll edit the anthology.”
And so
Murder by Magic
was born. Thanks, Debra. I owe it all to you, and to the other fine writers who came along to play.
—Rosemary Edghill
Chez Edghill, January 2003
