Deadly Things: A Collection of Mysterious Tales / The Judgment of the Gods and Other Verdicts of History / Darrell Schweitzer, Robert Reginald. Borgo Press / Wildside Press, 2011 (trade paperback 978-1-4344-1205-8). 149, 123 pages.

Darrell Schweitzer is an eminent author and editor in the field of speculative fiction, specializing in dark fantasy, with whom I have the honor to be acquainted with through our mutual interest in fantasist L. Sprague de Camp and participation in the Yahoo group d for de Camp. Darrell’s fiction is moody, mannered and edgy, and occasionally exhibits an impish sense of humor. All these characteristics are on display in a somewhat uncharacteristic collection of what he refers to as his “alleged mystery stories,” issued back to back with a complimentary assortment of tales by the late Robert Reginald. I highly recommend both—though given the publication format, you can hardly get one without the other.

The book, better described as a collection of historical/literary mysteries, is, on its Schweitzer side, titled Deadly Things: A Collection of Mysterious Tales (Borgo/Wildside, 2011). A cautionary word; his self-deprecating descriptor of “alleged” is an apt one; these are not so much classical mystery stories as typical Darrellian mood-and-concept pieces, using the tropes of the genre without the ratiocinatorial rigor. So if you go into the book expecting to match wits with the detective in determining the solution you will be disappointed. On the other hand, he plainly had fun with these stories. The concepts he works are offbeat and/or intriguing, and there are indeed problems to be solved, even if not fiendishly perplexing, and even with the solutions presented rather than participatory.

In the initial two stories, “Some Unpublished Correspondence of the Younger Pliny” and “The Stolen Venus,” the ancient Roman literary and political figure Pliny the Younger is the featured investigator—as one might guess from the title of the first. Set in the period of his governorship of Bithynia, they take the form of epistolary reports to the emperor Trajan akin to those known from his actual letters. The problems arise naturally from Pliny’s gubernatorial duties, and he is ably assisted in his investigations by his Greek secretary and Roman aide. First he is presented with the puzzle of a charismatic local Christian leader seemingly able to effect bodily resurrection of deceased believers, in accordance with early Christian apocalyptic expectations. Later he must deal with the apparently miraculous disappearance of the cult statue of an important local goddess. Both instances prove of mundane explanation. The Christians, incidentally, are depicted as dangerous, deluded and persistent fanatics, in accordance with the historical Pliny’s views.

With the third story, “Last Things,” we move from Rome’s height to its nadir. Set during the reign of Romulus Augustulus, last emperor of the Western Empire, it projects futility and despair in contrast to the air of confidence permeating the first two tales. Here we follow a minor police official on his last visit to his earliest patron, an aristocratic old lady who has spent her life denying the inglorious present by maintaining in her own household the ways of the glorious past. A cynic who has always scoffed at possibility of the supernatural, she now finds herself haunted to death by an apparent ghost. The “ghost” is exposed, though not in time to save her, and the criminal, while caught, is spared official judgment amid the disintegration of imperial authority. The protagonist compensates by giving the culprit over to the untender mercies of the roving barbarians.

In the fourth story, “In a Byzantine Garden,” mood comes to the fore, extinguishing mystery; there isn’t one, in fact, and the piece is hence, in a way, filler. It justifies its place by being good filler that extends the Roman theme. An aged Byzantine empress is paid a call by her equally antique arch-enemy, a scheming bureaucrat. Together they wistfully recall their friendlier youth, expressing regret for what their relationship has come to. While their words seem genuinely felt, their enmity and jockeying for advantage persist. Parting, each perceives weakness in the other’s nostalgia, and prepares to strike accordingly.

With the fifth and sixth stories we desert Roman history for the realm of Shakespearean literature. “The Death of Falstaff” revisits that beloved character’s decease as reported in the play Henry the Fifth,disclosing that he died not of heartbreak from his rejection by King Henry, as was supposed, but was actually murdered. Narrator Mistress Quickly tells how an incognito Henry investigates the circumstances of Falstaff’s demise and brings the killer to justice. In one sense all that is accomplished is the death of one more rogue; in another, both victim and king achieve a certain redemption.

“Murdered by Love” is set in the aftermath of a less familiar play, The Two Noble Kinsmen, a late collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher. Aged philosopher Phraates relates to a callow youth a case he and his former master untangled during his own youth. Theban nobleman Palamon had dueled his cousin Arcite for the favor of Athenian princess Emilia, and as the survivor though not the victor had gained it, only to waste away and die. Phraates’ master, initial charged with healing him, was instead left to unravel the mystery of his death, in which the hand of another character from the play stood revealed. Phraates and his master drew different lessons from the solution, and the later-day Phraates’ auditor takes away yet another.

The seventh, eighth and ninth stories take a leap into the Victorian world of Sherlock Holmes, and paradoxically into outright fantasy. These tales relate three of Watson’s unwritten cases of the Great Detective. Good Holmes they ain’t, but good fun they certainly are. “The Adventure of the Death-Fetch” has Holmes and Watson investigate the haunting of their lovely client’s father by a deadly doppelganger, a vengeful acquaintance from the man’s unsavory past. Our heroes fail to forestall the murder, the perpetrator escapes, and the crime appears perpetrated by supernatural means, all factors most unsatisfactory to the rational Holmes. The perceptive will discover in the piece nods to H. P. Lovecraft and Indiana Jones.

“Sherlock Holmes, Dragon-Slayer” is presented as a club tale told by Lord Dunsany’s infamous raconteur Jorkens (unnamed in the story), who claims to have participated in the case. Here Holmes and Watson attempt to debunk a legend. An amateur archaeologist excavates the burial mound of semi-historical Saxon raider King Uffa, said to have been done in by a dragon. The legend reads like a condensed version of the Beowulf plot, conflating Grendel with the dragon. Supposedly both the dragon and Uffa’s ghost haunt the mound, where unexplainable occurrences have frightened off the workers. Holmes works the mundane aspect of the case while Jorkens is drawn into the supernatural end. Unless, just possibly, Jorkens is telling a whopper, Holmes does indeed off the dragon, albeit unknowingly and by accident.

The improbable narrator of “The Adventure of the Hanoverian Vampires” is a cat, in itself implying we’re off the beaten track here. Doubtless inspired by the “Hanoverian” element of this lost case, Darrell has made it an alternate universe Holmes story. It seems Bonny Prince Charlie long ago regained the British throne for the Stuarts, from which nefarious Hanoverian claimants like current pretender-queen Victoria still plot to unseat them. In this instance they have employed Count Dracula to bring a quintet of vampires to the Sceptered Isle. Is there any hope of thwarting them? Well, let’s just say it’s a good thing the cat’s there...

As noted above, Deadly Things is actually half of a double book; flip it over and you get a second mystery collection piggybacked onto Darrell’s; The Judgment of the Gods and Other Verdicts of History, by Robert Reginald. Reginald was actually California State University professor and librarian Michael Burgess, who died in November of 2014—this last a fact of which I was unaware until I looked him up in preparation for this review. His was a true loss to speculative fiction, as he performed numerous services for and in the genre, bibliographical, editorial and authorial. He was the founder once upon a time of Borgo Press, and even earlier one of the two masterminds behind the Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library, way back in the 1970s.

Reginald’s contributions are at once more strongly historical and further into the fantastic than Darrell’s. There are four stories. The first, “The Judgment of the Gods,” is a straight historical mystery set in ancient Assyria, in which two visiting Greeks seeking a trade deal are commissioned by prince and future king Ashurbanipal to investigate the murder of his grandfather, lately deceased King Sennacherib. To add spice, the Greeks investigators are a father-son team, Telemachos and Achilleus, son and grandson respectively to the epic poet Homer, and plainly named in honor of characters from his own poems. They successfully solve the mystery while adroitly navigating the deadly perils and politics of the Assyrian court. At the end Achilleus remains in Assyria to head the Greek trade delegation and perhaps solve more mysteries. Or so I infer, since the tale reads like the beginning of a series—though I apparently Reginald never got around to writing the sequels.

The remaining three stories form an actual series, “Occam’s Razor,” “Occam’s Treasure” and “Occam’s Measure,” all headlined by medieval cleric and philosopher William of Ockham, he of the eponymous Razor. He does his sleuthing in the service of baleful Pope John XXII, with whom his relationship is at best antagonistic. The principal target of Ockham’s investigations is the supposedly defunct Order of the Knights Templar, with whose secret members he actually gets along much better than he does with his employer. His cases adhere to strict history and unfold according to strict logic—except that when he is perplexed he is prone to utilizing a magical speculum that unlocks clairvoyant powers in his acolyte. No, really!

More fantastic elements seep in as the triad proceeds, until by the third tale Ockham’s principal antagonists are a pair of demon-serving malefactors playing an infernal game of chess that somehow enables them to commit serial killings through faceless, magically-animated simulacra. But whatever the weirdness level, Ockham remains an attractive protagonist. His adventures feel oddly reminiscent of Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy, though Garrett played things a lot straighter—his puzzles, however supernatural they appeared, never involved magical shortcuts.

If you prefer to unravel the problem alongside the detective, neither collection in this Siamese pair may be for you. But if you’re in for entertainment, a fun ride, and an unusual assortment of sleuths, you can hardly do better.

—Brian.