Watchers of the Dark Revisited

Spotted in a charity shop: a copy of the UK hardback of Lloyd Biggle Jr's Watchers of the Dark (1966). Bought it on a whim. I remembered enjoying it, along with the first in the series, All the Colours of Darkness, back when I was a weird teenager haunting the SF shelves in my local library, and wondered if it still held up.

The series (five in all: Biggle published three more in the 1970s) elborates the increasingly exotic adventures of private eye Jan Darzek, combining SF tropes with mystery plots -- Biggle also wrote traditional mysteries, including a couple of Sherlock Holmes novels. In All the Colours of Darkness, Darzek investigates the disappearance of a number of travellers using the new, disruptive technology of matter transmission. And in Watchers of the Dark, which also makes inventive use of matter transmission, he and and his secretary, Effie Schlupe, are recruited by aliens to probe the nature and cause of the Dark, which is driving planetary populations to sever all contact with the peaceful, multi-species, pan-Galactic civilisation.

Has it dated? Well, sure. Darzek is a competent hero in the Campbellian mode, possessing a singular human quality that's central to the mystery's solution. For much of the novel, Effie is more of a sounding board than an active sidekick, even though she's initially characterised as a tough, limb-breaking broad disguised by an innocent, little-old-lady act. Wives serve the interests of their husbands, even in inter-species marriages, and Biggle's vividly economical depictions of eldritch alien morphologies are somewhat flattened by stock characterisation and the centring of the kind of commodity capitalism which was a hackneyed and outdated raison d'etre for interstellar trading even back in the 1960s.

In short, it's an old-fashioned space opera in which the immensity of the Galaxy is reduced to a backdrop of conventional Earth-like, mono-cultural planets, populated by aliens whose weirdness doesn't much extend beyond gross-out body forms. And yet it's also a swift, entertaining thriller that combines high stakes with off-beat humour, sharp dialogue, and a cosy, low-key style. Apart from the early massacre of his employers, there's little in the way of mean street violence: Darzek is more like Inspector Morse than Philip Marlowe, a dogged, humane guy who uses intution, off-beat logic and some sly legardemain to unknot the how and why of the Dark's rabble-rousing nativism, and discover the identity of the agent it has secreted within a small group of interstellar traders. Effie Schlupe has a central role in the final, hectically wacky attempt to overthrow the Dark's machinations, there are smart observations on the vulnerability of liberal utopias, and the key to the Dark's manipulation of planetary populations has a relevance to current politics, and the spread of fake news and xenophobia through social media. While I'm not minded to search out the other volumes in the series, I'll definitely pick them up if I stumble across them in the dust heaps of futures past.