by John Boston

Watchers of the Dark, by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

Lloyd Biggle’s Watchers of the Dark is a sequel to All the Colors of Darkness (1963), which I am sure I read when it came out but can’t remember a thing about.  That’s easier to understand after reading the new book.

Jan Darzek is a private detective in New York City in a future where people get around by means of matter transmitters.  He occupies himself with such challenges as a poison pen letter writer, a bookkeeping saboteur, and vending machine pirates.  He has a sixtyish secretary, Miss Schlupe, a/k/a Schluppy, who is known for such exploits as breaking bones, reads confession magazines for relaxation, and brews her own rhubarb beer, which makes repeated appearances in the story.

by Emanuel Schongut

A Mr. Smith, who is repeatedly described as reminiscent of a dead fish, tries to hire Darzek for a dangerous and time-consuming assignment that he won’t describe in advance.  Darzek doesn’t want the job and demands a million dollars in small bills as an initial payment, and shortly his office is full of cardboard boxes of money.  So it’s a contract!

It seems there is a galactic federation that keeps loose order in a galaxy heavily populated with sentient species, with unruly worlds like Earth excluded, i.e., “uncertified.” Someone or something called Supreme is in charge, and asked for Darzek by name.  For what?  To investigate the Dark—an unknown something that is taking over worlds in some unknown fashion and cutting them off from the usual galactic commerce.  All that is known is that the “natives”—Biggle’s word, throughout—become hostile to interstellar traders and riot and pillage, driving them off their planets.

Why hire a private eye from a world with no knowledge of the galactic civilization to investigate this threat to its existence?  It’s not explained, but before he can do anything, he and Schluppy have to go to school to learn multiple languages—“And manners and customs and finance and business and practical technology.” It’s hard to believe the galaxy doesn’t have a few good detectives, pre-acculturated and ready to go.

Once their lengthy schooling is complete, Darzek and Schluppy head off towards the Council of Supreme, unaccompanied.  Their contact, a textile merchant, doesn’t show up and turns up dead in space, showing that the Dark is on to them even if it hasn’t found them yet.  Darzek immediately finds the room from which the merchant was defenestrated, and his sample case.  They figure out how to transmit themselves to a hotel. 

Three creatures transmit into their room and try to kill them, using weapons we later learn are called Eyes of Death, but Darzek kills them by moving quickly and shooting them with his automatic, assisted by Miss Schlupe with her knitting needle.  Next, a member of the Council of Supreme, called EIGHT, shows up, and when he sees the carnage, says, “Now I understand why you were chosen.  Praise Supreme!”

This all takes us through a little more than a quarter of this moderately long (228 pages) book, but the landscape is plain enough, and it doesn’t get better.  It’s a sort of collage of cliches from 1950s-and-later SF, like a ransom note made with words clipped out of magazines: the galactic civilization governed by what amounts to a rudimentary quasi-monarchy, the mysterious menace, and the hyper-competent savior from Earth to set it all right.  There is the menagerie of funny-looking aliens, distinguished from one another only by their looks, increasingly cartoonish as the book progresses, and no match for the superior intellect and talents of the Earthman.  Indeed, it comes to resemble the familiar repertoire of Eric Frank Russell and Christopher Anvil: smart humans and dumb aliens, played for laughs, except that Biggle is even less funny than Anvil.  He’s clearly trying, at least occasionally, but he just doesn’t know how.  The book is impossible to take seriously and fails as farce.

This is not a terrible book.  Being terrible requires at least some distinctive character, and this has none.  It’s a species of determined mediocrity, reshuffling stock elements with a certain facility but with no value added in style, concept, or anything else.  Apparently the publishing strategy is a sort of arbitrage of boredom—as long as it is marginally more interesting than what is going on around the potential reader, it will sell.  I feel for anyone who is that bored.  One star.

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