Sweet Silver Blues

"Cook starts off with a fantasy world, a high fantasy world. I mean, it is a super duper fantasy-fantasy world, along the lines of Piers Anthony’s Xanth , where there are just thousands of magical species. This entire menagerie of supernatural entities all get thrown together into the same mix with people, and we see what happens. One of the defining features of Glen Cook’s work is that there’s a magical war in progress. He was a Vietnam veteran himself, and so he understood the reality of the situation on the ground in combat, versus what the American public knew and what the news was saying and the politicians were saying… everybody had a slightly different viewpoint on it. The entire truth is far uglier and messier than anybody really wants to deal with. So his characters all have that same feeling as noir set in the late ’40s and early ’50s, where they’ve all been in the war, they all know how horrible it is. As a result, when you’re dealing with bad men, you’re dealing with bad men who know how to handle machine guns (or their world’s equivalent). And there’s a lot of currency in that shared experience – ‘Ok, we have this common experience. I can walk into this den of cutthroats and ruffians, and maybe walk out again, because I know who they are and where they come from; we’ve got this common experience and respect to base things on.’ This vast supernatural world is very much leveraged on the haves and the have-nots. There’s huge power interests at play behind the scenes, and there’s always somebody who’s getting walked on. Garrett, who is Glen Cook’s PI, is the guy who winds up on the side of the people getting walked on and the folks in the lower classes who need help. He’s got his partner, who is essentially a dead but sentient creature called a Loghyr; after they die, they’re still alive for a number of centuries, although they exist only telepathically. Their physical form is limited and has to be protected, so that’s the trade off: he works with a partner who’s this incredibly powerful psychic who can make sure that his home is always safe, but he also has to protect that incredibly powerful psychic’s decaying corpse from being eaten by mice and things like that. Garrett is a PI who does not have any magic, he’s not a wizard. He’s familiar with magical equipment, which he learned how to use during the war, so he can do some stuff that a conventional human PI couldn’t do. It harks back to Robert Howard a little bit, where his hero Conan is always going up against opponents with fantastic powers, and all he has to fight them is courage and instinct. Garrett has almost the same thing, only I would say that instead of instinct, he has streetwise. He knows the streets, he has allies there, he knows how things function – and as a result, he can pull levers to have some powers countering each other. That’s one of my favourite things about the Garrett books. He’s somebody who has his own network of support, people that he works with, and usually he uses them to gain knowledge; but his real power is understanding how the balance of power works in his city, and being able to lean one against the other, and hopefully create some shelter for the little people underneath. That’s his purpose. I’ve always loved Glen Cook’s work. He was on one of my very first panels as a professional author, where Neil Gaiman totally set me up – it’s a good story, I’ll tell you sometime. But I’ve always had tremendous respect for Glen’s writing, and his ability to write a really good mystery. He writes exactly the story he wants to write, and I love reading his work. Okay, so: I’m at my very first convention as a professional. I’ve sold my scripts, but the book isn’t out yet. I’m mostly there because I was a grad student in the School of Professional Writing at ODU, and this was an event that was happening in Austin with a bunch of crossover of personnel, people who studied at the School. So they invited me down, and here I am on this panel. I’m going up to my room and I get on the elevator, and there’s one other guy, a slight man in a black leather jacket. We say hello, are you at the convention, yes, oh that’s great… I think we talked about Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a moment. Just, what a nice guy. I say, “Maybe I’ll see you around”, he says, “Yeah, sure.” And then I show up later and it’s Neil Gaiman. He treated me with such respect and such courtesy, like a regular human being, when I wasn’t anybody, when he didn’t know me from the regular con-goer. He is a person of tremendous sincerity and integrity. I respect Neil greatly. One of my first panels was called ‘Books that needed a better editor’. I’m on the panel with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the most awarded editor in science fiction, Neil Gaiman, and Glen Cook. They’re all veterans, and here I am, the new kid: I don’t even have a book out yet. The panel has gone on for a while, and I’ve made a couple of lippy comments along the way, no big deal, just a few jokes; and I’ve almost gotten myself out of this panel without shoving my foot in my mouth. We’re getting close to the end. And at that point Neil Gaiman, who’s at the far end of the table, leans forward and looks down the table at me and says: “You know, Jim, you’re new to this business. We’re all veterans. We all know one another’s opinions. But you’re new here, and I noticed that you’ve been fairly quiet; and I’d really like to know what books you thought needed a better editor.” And I say, “Oh, I’m new at this game. Y’all don’t really need…” But he says, “No, no, honestly, I’m very interested. Let’s hear something new.” And I just look at the other guys, and I say… “ The Lord of the Rings could have started on page 204 without losing anything. It was terribly edited. And here’s why.” I deliver my speech about how The Lord of the Rings starts slow and needed to go somewhere faster; how we spend 50 pages reading about Frodo moving from Bag End, and you know what, I’m not that interested when it’s me moving… And I remember Glen Cook putting his head in his hands, and Neil just leans back and looks aside at Patrick Nielsen Hayden; and Nielsen Hayden proceeds to tear me a new one for the next five minutes. Because I didn’t know how to be on panels, and I didn’t know how genial the arguments tend to be on panels about things like this… There was just this little gleam in Neil’s eyes. He’s a mischievous git; I think that would be the appropriate phrase."