History Literature / LordDarcy

* ObfuscatingDisability: John Peabody walks with a fake limp, which Master Sean figures out after watching him rush to catch a train since a real limp does not become less pronounced when a person is in a hurry. Sean and Darcy both agree that the limp was an excuse to carry a SwordCane.

* {{Glamour}}: A non-magical version occurs is "The Eyes Have It" when it's revealed that the image extracted from a dead man's eyes isn't what he ''saw'', it's what he ''perceived''. Once he knows this, Darcy realizes that [[spoiler: the killer, an impossibly beautiful woman seen in that image, doesn't exist. It's how the dead man pictured his sister in his mind, and she killed him in self-defense when he attempted to sexually assault her]].

* HandOfGlory: Lord Darcy finds one in "The Eyes Have It".

* ObviouslyEvil: It is explained that BlackMagic is a matter of symbology and intent instead of different techniques. To cast the same spell in black magic as you would in white magic requires grotesque sacrifices, malevolent equipment, etc. Just possessing some of these supplies is a crime, and an instant indicator of evilness. [[In "The Eyes Have It", Darcy discovers various BlackMagic gear while searching the luggage of a visiting Scottish laird; even though the laird is found to have had nothing to do with the murder of the Count D'Evreux, Darcy states that he will still have to be arrested for practicing illegal black magic, by the local priest acting as the arresting officer under Imperial law.]]

* SuccessionCrisis: Played for laughs when discussing a treaty between the Angevin Empire and Roumeleia, since both of them claim to be the successors of the Roman Empire (The Basileus of Roumeleia as a direct continuation of the Roman Emperors, and the King as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire). Richard, Duke of Normandy, takes advantage of his prerogative as the King's brother to point out that the claims of a Greek in Constantinople are just as valid as a bastardized Viking in London. This statement briefly outrages one of his listeners until he realizes, to his chagrin, that it's SelfDeprecation on the part of the Duke.)

* {{Geas}}: One of the characters is a psychopath with murderous tendencies, and thus had a geas put on him that makes him incapable of harming anyone unless [[spoiler:he's given a specific code word by his superior.]]. Self-defense is not an included option, since a psychopath may interpret a simple slap as something justifying a murder. It's mentioned that geas are often used to "treat" people with dangerous mental conditions.
* GenghisGambit: The Russian people historically have never unified into a single state, and for years have been at the mercy of the expanding Kingdom of Poland. After Poland conquered most of what is Ukraine and Belarus, the Russian people further east have finally banded together into a loose confederation to oppose further Polish expansion. This is what has spurred Poland to begin to expand westward and come into conflict with the Angevin Empire.

* ObviouslyEvil: It is explained that BlackMagic is a matter of symbology and intent instead of different techniques. To cast the same spell in black magic as you would in white magic requires grotesque sacrifices, malevolent equipment, etc. Just possessing some of these supplies is a crime, and an instant indicator of evilness.

* PointOfDivergence: Richard the Lionheart's survival in 1199 is where things split apart. His benevolent and competent rule is followed by his nephew Arthur, whose reign is regarded as such a Golden Age that it is sometimes conflated with the mythical Myth/KingArthur.

* SecretKeeper: In ''A Study In Sorcery'', Darcy and Sean are entrusted with the Gemini Secret of [[spoiler: long-distance communication between the Old and New World]], a ''very'' important state asset which they swear never to reveal.

* SuccessionCrisis: Played for laughs when discussing a treaty between the Angevin Empire and Roumeleia, since both of them claim to be the successors of the Roman Empire (The Basileus of Roumeleia as a direct continuation of the Roman Emperors, and the King as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire). Richard, Duke of Normandy, takes advantage of his prerogative as the King's brother to point out that the claims of a Greek in Constantinople are just as valid as a bastardized Viking in London.

* ThatOldTimePrescription: The series occasionally shows that medical science dead-ended once magic turned out to be easier by having somebody refer to "superstitious folk remedies" such as treating wounds with mould or using foxglove extract to treat heart trouble.
* ThisIsYourBrainOnEvil: The use of BlackMagic always corrupts the user. Always. That is why it is illegal in all circumstances, and not even used by the military.

* UtilityMagic: Most spells have fairly MundaneUtility. The one Master Sean uses most commonly is a preservation spell, whose primary purpose is to keep the body from decomposing, but is also applied in this world's equivalent of fridges.
* WhoMurderedTheAsshole: Count D'Evreux, the victim in "The Eyes Have It", has many personality flaws. The underling who finds his body says outright that he'd always expected the Count to wind up being done in by somebody.

* CreepyRedHerring: In "A Case of Identity", [[spoiler:Lord Seiger]] is a very disturbing man who works for the missing Marquis of Cherbourg and who creeps out the Marquis's wife. He is in fact a homicidal psychopath, but a geas has been placed on him by the Church to render him safe and keep him safe from others. He is incapable of using force on others unless instructed to by his superior.

** Subverted in "The Sixteen Keys". Some people ''think'' it's murder, but he actually died of natural causes (...sort of). Of much bigger concern is where he hid (or dropped or threw away) some critically important documents while he was in the process of dying.

* BlueCollarWarlock: Journeyman Sorcerers handle the practical, day-to-day magical work of society. One Journeyman in ''The Sixteen Keys'' is a locksmith, and despite his higher title Master Sean says that he wouldn't want to try and break his spells without several hours to work at it.

** Master Sean is accused of the murder in ''Too Many Magicians'', but it's only a ploy by the Marquis of London to get Lord Darcy to come and investigate the murder for him. Darcy deals with it swiftly instead of having it hanging over him throughout the investigation by accusing ''the Marquis assistant'' with evidence just as flimsy as the evidence against Sean, so the Marquis lets the whole thing drop.

** Anglo-French is the court language of the Empire, but low-class characters grow up speaking French and are described as having accents when speaking Anglo-French. For those with the strongest accents, their dialogue is nearly unintelligible.

* TheNeidermeyer: The commander of Darcy's unit in "The Spell of War".

* CouldHaveAvoidedThisPlot: At the end of ''Too Many Magicians'', it is revealed that the crimes were committed by [[spoiler:an officer who was TrappedByGamblingDebts in an attempt to recruit him as a double agent under threat of speaking to his superior about it and ruining his career. Lord Darcy remarks that had the offer to recruit come a bit earlier, the officer, instead of all the crimes, would have simply told his boss the debts were a deliberate gambit to draw out the spy ring, and would have had a successful career as a triple agent.]]

* TrappedByGamblingDebts: A standard ploy by the Polish spies in London is to force English officers deep into debt and force them to pass along information under threat of being exposed to their superior officers. [[spoiler:Commander Lord Ashley was so desperate to avoid appearing at risk that he tried to ''pretend'' to sell info to Poland to get the money to cover his debt. Unfortunately for him, the 'Polish spy' he tried to sell fake info to happened to be a ''triple agent'' who was actually working for his own superiors, so he was about to be exposed as an ''actual'' spy and had to resort to murder. ]]

# King UsefulNotes/RichardTheLionHeart survived the crossbow wound and subsequent infection that killed him in our history, but the narrow escape caused him to reconsider his life and become a famously great monarch. Nobody ever got around to agitating for Magna Carta, and in the twentieth century the Plantagenet dynasty still rules absolutely in England -- not to mention France, most of the rest of western Europe, and North and South America.

In the later stories, Lord Darcy and Master Sean increasingly often become entangled in the espionage and counter-espionage of their world's version of the UsefulNotes/ColdWar, between the Angevin Empire and the ambitious-but-not-strong-enough-to-wage-conventional-war Polish Empire.

* AllohistoricalAllusion: In one of Kurland's novels, a character views paintings of Plantagenet monarchs past, and speculates about how horribly history could've gone, had King Richard died sooner and the throne had passed to his JerkAss [[UsefulNotes/KingJohnOfEngland brother]], instead of his nephew.
* AlwaysMurder: Well, mostly. Subverted in [[spoiler:"The Sixteen Keys"]], where it turns out they already know what the victim died of (it was natural causes--kinda), and just need Darcy to figure out where he'd hidden an important document before he snuffed it.
* AmericaIsStillAColony: History diverged around 1199: the Anglo-French Empire is still ruled by a descendant of UsefulNotes/RichardTheLionHeart's nephew Arthur, and controls most of western Europe as well as America.

* AssholeVictim: The dead nobleman in "The Eyes Have It" was widely disliked and hated and there's no shortage of potential suspects. [[spoiler: When Darcy determines the killer was the man's sister and she'd killed him in self defense when he tried to rape her, he's content to let the matter drop while the authorities search for a woman who doesn't exist. Although the implication is they're not going to try too hard]].

* BlackMagic: Combined with SaintlyChurch, in that performing any kind of harmful deed through magic (even injuring a criminal in defensive combat) causes [[ThisIsYourBrainOnEvil irreparable mental damage of some sort]]. The clergy function as magical psychologists of a sort; though they can't "cure" people of the resulting ([[NotBrainwashed or causative!]]) evilness, they can magically detect psychosis and render such people [[BroughtDownToNormal incapable of working magic]] to prevent further harm to a black magician's mind. As a result, practicing magic requires an official license gained through examination by the clergy.
* BlueBlood: Extremely prevalent, and even explained in-universe--the involvement of the office of the Duke's Investigator is ''required'' for crimes involving members of the aristocracy, while city Armsmen (local police departments) handle the investigation of crimes among the common people. Although the Duke's Investigator are also legally required to be called upon for assistance by the Armsmen in any case that goes beyond their ability to solve, so Darcy does handle several matters on that social level as well.
* BlueCollarWarlock: Many magician characters are skilled tradesmen (for example, a locksmith in ''The Sixteen Keys'').

** In "The Bitter End", Master Sean is accused of the murder by the bumbling [[Franchise/ThePinkPanther Sergeant Cougair Chasseur]], for no real reason beyond his assumption that since the method of poisoning wasn't obvious, AWizardDidIt, and [[InsaneTrollLogic Sean was a wizard who happened to have been in the same pub as the deceased at the time he was discovered to be dead]].
** Master Sean is also accused of the murder in ''Too Many Magicians'', but it's only a ploy by the Marquis of London to get Lord Darcy to come and investigate the murder for him, and Darcy deals with it swiftly instead of having it hanging over him throughout the investigation.

* DeadPersonImpersonation: In [[spoiler:"The Muddle of the Woad"]], and in ''Ten Little Wizards'' - in the latter, the first scene is of the impersonation, but the identity of the person being impersonated is hidden.
* DetectiveMole: [[spoiler:In ''Too Many Magicians'', the murderer is one of the people conducting the investigation; the people he murdered had each discovered, or were about to discover, that he had been subverted by the Polish secret service.]]

** In "The Eyes Have It", Darcy asks the family priest to divert the Countess from her guests' presence for a few minutes. The priest tells her that the steward requires her attention, and Darcy muses that, since a priest wouldn't knowingly tell a lie, he must've pre-arranged for the steward to request Her Ladyship's aid at that specific moment.
* EyeRemember: Used in an attempt to discover the murderer's identity in "The Eyes Have It". [[spoiler: Subverted in that the image retrieved is the victim's subjective view of the murderer, which doesn't really look anything like her.]]

* ForWantOfANail: Richard the Lionheart's survival resulted in the discovery that led to the harnessing of magic. (It might be easier to imagine a timeline in which the harnessing of magic resulted in Richard's survival, but it's explicitly stated that in this timeline Richard's survival came first.) The explanation is that Richard's brush with death caused him to change his rulership style. For the remainder of his reign, he encouraged learning and the arts. And this trend continued under his successor; his nephew Arthur. It was the academic environment fostered by Richard and Arthur that led to the discovery of the rules of magic.

* FunetikAksent: Polish characters who aren't trying to disguise themselves as Angevin subjects tend to have this.
* {{Geas}}: One of the characters is a psychopath with murderous tendencies, and thus had a geas put on him that makes him incapable of harming anyone unless [[spoiler:he's given a specific code word by his superior.]] (self-defense is not an included option, since a psychopath may interpret a simple slap as something justifying a murder) It's mentioned that geas are often used to "treat" people with dangerous mental conditions.

* {{Infodump}}: Because the stories were originally published separately, the exposition about Richard the Lionheart surviving and magic being developed gets repeated over and over again in every story.
** The 2002 omnibus edition removes most of the repeated sections.

* IstanbulNotConstantinople: Especially when it comes to the Americas, which are called New England (North A.) and New France (South A.).

* MajoredInWesternHypocrisy: Several instances, though all without the hypocrisy part because the Angevin Empire is better than its counterparts in our world.
** The most prominent example is Lord John Quetzal, a native American nobleman who is studying in London in ''Too Many Magicians''.
** The "character wrong-footed by foreigner's education" version appears in Michael Kurland's ''A Study in Sorcery'', where Lord Darcy meets a woman who has invented a dramatic past for herself that includes a stint in the harem of the son of the Osmanli Sultan; in the course of dissecting her story, he mentions that he and the son of the Osmanli Sultan were at Oxford together.

* ModernMayincatecEmpire: Garrett left the state of things in the Americas largely undefined, but ''Too Many Magicians'' mentions that the Aztec emperor Montezuma's descendants now rule "Mechicoe" as noblemen of the Angevin Empire. Michael Kurland's ''A Study in Sorcery'', being set largely in North America, is much more specific, and adds that part of the Aztec Empire continues unabated farther south.

* SaintlyChurch: Apparently magic makes it possible to ensure that only suitable people become priests (and has presumably cleared up the whole is-there-a-God question, although that point is never really addressed).

%%Shout Outs now have their own page.

* SuperpowerfulGenetics: In order to practice magic, one must be born with "the Talent". This exists to varying degrees, such that only a small portion of the population can work magic, some others exhibit strange powers, nearly all can at least perceive strong magic to some extent, and a few on the other end are magically inert and utterly unable to directly sense the supernatural. Interestingly, the world's foremost magical theorist and expert in the symbolic manipulations underlying modern magic happens to be unable to work magic at all.

* TrappedByGamblingDebts: Happens to one character in ''Too Many Magicians''.

* UnreliableNarrator: The opening of [[spoiler: ''Too Many Magicians'' has the close third-person thoughts of an intelligence agent noting that he couldn't see any evidence to indicate who might have committed the murder. At the end of the novel, it revealed he had been checking to make sure ''he'' hadn't left any behind.]]

* TheKlutz: Because magic is impossible to use for direct aggression without veering into BlackMagic, it has played very little part in warfare; however, it is ethically permissible to use magic to ''interfere'' with the actions of another to prevent harm. The plot of ''Too Many Magicians'' turns on the invention of a device that weaponizes this effect by inducing catastrophic physical clumsiness in anyone attempting to load or fire a ranged weapon ([[TheWorfEffect Lord Darcy himself]] takes nearly ten minutes to load a pistol when serving as a test subject, constantly fumbling and dropping both bullets and pistol, and misses his target completely when he finally does shoot). The effects are magnified tenfold when disrupting a team such as a naval gunnery squad, allowing the weapon to render Polish naval vessels completely ineffective -- as long as the Angevins have it and the Polish don't.

In the 1980s, following Garrett's death, his friend and fellow-author Creator/MichaelKurland wrote two more Lord Darcy novels, ''Ten Little Wizards'' (1988) and ''A Study in Sorcery'' (1989).

* MindOverManners: The priests, especially Sensitives, often refuse to dig thorugh someone's mind without a really good reason because of their work ethic.

* MajoredInWesternHypocrisy: Several instances, though all without the hypocrisy part because the Angevin Empire is better than its counterparts in our world. The most prominent example is Lord John Quetzal, a native American nobleman who is studying in London in ''Too Many Magicians''. The "character wrong-footed by foreigner's education" version appears in Michael Kurland's ''A Study in Sorcery'', where Lord Darcy meets a woman who has invented a dramatic past for herself that includes a stint in the harem of the son of the Osmanli Sultan; in the course of dissecting her story, he mentions that he and the son of the Osmanli Sultan were at Oxford together.

** In Kurland's ''A Study In Sorcery'', the Angevin governor of New England guarantees his agents' loyalty with a magically-reinforced oath, by which they swear to be loyal servants to their sovereign and his appointed proxies. [[spoiler:Unfortunately, the oath's wording neglects to ''name'' the sovereign to be served, to save having to reconstruct the spell every time a new king takes the throne, which means a Polish spy can take the oath without consequence by staying loyal to Poland's monarch.]] Also an issue with Pyramid Island's avoidance spell, which was designed to repel anyone without a legitimate purpose in coming there. [[spoiler: Turns out that the gun-runners honestly believed that smuggling weapons on and off the island ''was'' a "legitimate" purpose.]]

* CreepyRedHerring: [[spoiler:In "A Case of Identity", Lord Seiger is a very disturbing man who works for the missing Marquis of Cherbourg and who creeps out the Marquis's wife. He is in fact a homicidal psychopath, but a geas has been placed on him by the Church to render him safe and keep him safe from others. He is incapable of using force on others unless instructed to by his superior, who is in this case the Marquis himself.]]

* BrilliantButLazy: The Marquis of London, who Darcy believes could solve any case if he every actually bothered to get up and leave his house.

* AmericaIsStillAColony: History diverged around 1199: the Anglo-French Empire is still ruled by a descendant of UsefulNotes/RichardTheLionHeart, and controls most of western Europe as well as America.

* ImpersonationExclusiveCharacter: In ''Ten Little Wizards'', the first scene is of a character's murder so that they can be impersonated. It's not until the climax that we find that who the assassin was impersonating.

** In "The Bitter End", Master Sean is accused of the murder by the bumbling [[Franchise/ThePinkPanther Sergeant Cougair Chasseur]].

* SufficientlyAnalyzedMagic: A key element to the whole series. Magic has been analyzed to the point it can be taught as an university topic and has clear laws that are so obvious and rigid, "regular" science (which doesn't adhere to stuff like [[TheLawsOfMagic Law of Similariy or Law of Relevance]]) is considered obviously false.

* WitchSpecies: In order to practice magic, one must be born with "the Talent". This exists to varying degrees, such that only a small portion of the population can work magic, some others exhibit strange powers, nearly all can at least perceive strong magic to some extent, and a few on the other end are magically inert and utterly unable to directly sense the supernatural. Interestingly, the world's foremost magical theorist and expert in the symbolic manipulations underlying modern magic happens to be unable to work magic at all.

* PoliceAreUseless: Not normally the case (the police are the main characters), but in "The Bitter End", Sean finds himself held as a possible suspect in a murder by the incompetent Sergeant Cougair Chasseur for no reason beyond the fact that since the method of murder wasn't obvious, AWizardDidIt, and Sean happened to be a wizard who was in the same pub as the deceased when he was discovered to be dead.

* DeadPersonImpersonation: In [[spoiler:"The Muddle of the Woad"]].