A Review of Sweet Silver Blues
The one sentence pitch for the Garrett P.I. series is this: take a Chandler-esque detective and stick him in a High Fantasy world. Superficially, it might seem like an odd fusion – it’s hard to imagine Philip Marlowe as one of the members of the Fellowship of the Ring, after all(except when he’s played by Humphrey Bogart, because I’m pretty sure Bogie had chemistry with just about everyone). But, if you realign your thinking from the black-and-white Tolkien to the dust-and-dirt Moorcock or Howard, things start to make more sense. In fact, I think that Noir and High Fantasy merge rather naturally. They both trade on the inscrutable and arcane(whether that be magic or motives), and neither are much concerned with explaining themselves, rather relying on vibes to win the day. Beyond that, a conspiracy-minded Noir story is the perfect setting for cabals of witches and gangs of not-quite-human goons to strut their stuff.
Sweet Silver Blues opens with a hangover and a death and proceeds to bounce around from plot to plot for three-hundred-odd pages until they’re so tied up that you can hardly tell they’re turning into a neat little bow by the end. For the Noir side of things, you’ve got it all in spades: layered conspiracies, questionable allegiances, head-scratching twists, and banter that’s almost too witty. On Fantasy’s end, you’ve got your witches and spells, undead advisors, and a half-dark elf sidekick that splits his page time smashing heads and complaining about Garrett’s non-vegetarian diet. It’s a big amalgam of ideas, but Glen Cook’s smart prose and expert dialogue ties it all together seamlessly. He tells you just enough that the misty nature of the plot never becomes frustrating. This is only the second book by Cook that I’ve read(I listened my way through the first Black Company novel while training for a marathon some years back), but I can see why he has an enduring reputation among big fantasy readers.
I had a lot of fun with the first entry in the Garrett P.I. series, and I’m eager to continue on to the next one. It reminded me a lot of the Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust, a favorite of mine with a similar genre mashup(Vlad is an assassin to Garrett’s detecive). At points the plot is maybe a little too vague, and its treatment of women can be best described as ‘matching its genres’, but I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys hard-boiled fiction or classic high fantasy.
My rating: 8/10 – recommended
