Pulp Fantasy Library: Sweet Silver Blues

Glen Cook's name has appeared in this feature once before, in discussing his 1984 novel, The Black Company, which Gary Gygax cited as an example of a book that, in his opinion, mapped well onto his vision of Dungeons & Dragons. Though The Black Company proved a success and spawned many sequels, it's not Cook's only fantasy series. In 1987, he kicked off a different set of novels with Sweet Silver Blues. "Different" may be an understatement, since, except for the fact that Sweet Silver Blues and its sequels also use first person narration, they don't have a lot in common with the tales of the Black Company. In terms of both style and content, Sweet Silver Blues almost feels as if it were written by another author, though some of that might be because Cook is self-consciously imitating the tone and diction of a genre other than mainstream fantasy. Sweet Silver Blues begins thusly:

Bam! Bam! Bam!

It sounded like someone was knocking with a sledgehammer. I rolled over and cracked a bloodshot eye. I couldn’t see a figure through the window, but that wasn’t surprising. I could barely make out the lettering on the grimy glass:

Garrett
Investigator
Confidential Agent

I had blown my wad buying the glass and wound up being my own painter.

The window was as dirty as last week’s dishwater, but not filthy enough to block out the piercing morning light. The damned sun wasn’t up yet! And I’d been out till the second watch barhopping while I followed a guy who might lead me to a guy who might know where I could find a guy. All this led to was a pounding headache.

“Go away!” I growled. “Not available.”

Bam! Bam! Bam!

“Go to hell away!” I yelled. It left my head feeling like an egg that had just bounced off the edge of a frying pan. I wondered if I ought to feel the back to see if the yolk was leaking, but it seemed like too much work. I’d just go ahead and die.

Bam! Bam! Bam!

I have a little trouble with my temper, especially when I have a hangover. I was halfway to the door with two feet of lead-weighted truncheon before sense penetrated the scrambled yolk.

When they are that insistent, it’s somebody from up the hill with a summons to do work too sticky to lay on their own boys. Or it’s somebody from down the hill with the word that you’re stepping on the wrong toes.

In the latter case the truncheon might be useful.

I yanked the door open.

For a moment I didn’t see the woman. She barely came up to my chest. I eyeballed the three guys behind her. They were lugging enough steel to outfit their own army, but I wouldn’t have been shy about wading in. Two of them were about fifteen years old and the other was about a hundred and five.

“We’re invaded by dwarfs,” I moaned. None of them was taller than the woman.

As you can see, Sweet Silver Blues has as much in common with hard-boiled detective fiction as it does with fantasy, so much so that its protagonist, Garrett (he has no other name) is in fact a private investigator after the fashion of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade. The world that Garrett inhabits is still (largely) recognizable to fans of fantasy -- there are dwarfs and centaurs and and vampires -- but their presentation is nothing like Tolkien or Howard or any of their imitators. Instead, Garrett's world is basically 1930s but with magic taking the place of technology and fantasy beings and nations in place of more familiar ones. Like the real 1930s, it's also a world that's still recovering from a disastrous war in its recent past, one whose outcome still has repercussions for the present day.

One of those repercussions hits Garrett personally. The dwarfs who show up on his doorstep want to hire him to investigate the death of one of their kinsmen, Denny Tate. Denny, it turns out, served in the war alongside Garrett, so discovering the real cause of his death isn't just another job for the private eye. I say "real cause," because, though Denny supposedly died an accidental death, his family thinks otherwise -- especially once they discover the terms of his will. Denny, who was a shoemaker by trade, seemed to have a secret fortune in gold and silver and, rather than leave it to his family, as one might expect, he left it all to a woman none of the dwarfs had ever heard of and whom they presumed to have been an old flame. Of course, Garrett's heard of this woman, because she'd once been his girlfriend as well, which only makes the investigator even more suspicious about this case.

Like The Black Company, I knew of the existence of Sweet Silver Blues for years before I actually read it. For some reason, I just never came across a copy and so I missed out on the chance to enjoy what is a fun little tale cleverly told. As I said above, it's a lot more lighthearted than The Black Company, though it's still very cynical and world-weary at times, as befits its inspirations. I'm not completely convinced that its transposition of hard-boiled literary tropes to a fantasy setting works, though I'm also not sure that I care. Cook is a good writer, with a knack for creating interesting and compelling characters. The central story of Sweet Silver Blues is perhaps a little clichéd, particularly if you're familiar with the sources he'd drawing upon, but I don't think that necessarily weakens the novel or one's pleasure in reading it. This is one of those lean-back-and-enjoy-the-ride books and makes a nice change of pace from the pretension and self-seriousness that characterizes too much of modern fantasy.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Black Company

One of the frequent criticisms of looking to Appendix N for inspiration is that all of its books were written before 1979, most of them by a decade or more. I've never seen this as a damning critique, given my contention that Dungeons & Dragons was written to broadly emulate the characters, themes, and situations of pre-mass market pulp fantasy literature. Nevertheless, in the 30 years since the first appearance of the famed appendix, a lot of fantasy stories have been written. Surely some of them must have been written whose characters, themes, and situations were consonant with those that inspired Gygax and Arneson, right?

This was a question frequently put to Gary Gygax in numerous online forums and his response was generally the same: there are only a handful of post-1979 authors whose works he admired and considered in the same vein as he saw D&D -- and Glen Cook was among that august company. Cook's first novel, 1984's The Black Company, was one that Gygax recommended in a contemporaneous "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column. Alas, I can no longer find the specific reference, but I nevertheless recall Gary's effusive praise for the novel. That intrigued me at the time and I tried to find the book to see what all the fuss was about.

I never managed to do so and it wasn't until comparatively recently that I actually read The Black Company. The book takes its name from a mercenary company that's been in existence for several hundred years prior to its start. With such a long history, the company has an official annalist, the current one being named Croaker, and the novel is told from his perspective, as he records the events that befall him and his brothers in arms. The story begins in a faction-riddled city, where the Black Company is employed by its current ruler, whose position is rapidly deteriorating, costing the Company many men and much materiel. When a better offer comes along -- heading north to serve a mysterious patron known only as the Lady -- the mercenaries assassinate their current employer in order to void the contract and thus be in a position to accept the new one, as the sanctity of contracts is very important to the Black Company's ability to stay together and continue to attract work.

The Lady, it turns out, is a powerful wizard and the wife of an even more powerful one named the Dominator, who together once ruled a great empire with the assistance of former enemies turned allies known as the Ten Who Were Taken. Until recently, the Lady had been magically imprisoned, along with her husband and the Taken. She is awakened by a power-hungry wizard, who sought to use her to win an empire for himself, but his plan went awry and now the Lady is awake and keen to resume her rule alone. Unfortunately for her, things have not gone as planned, with various rebel factions arising to oppose her, not to mention rivalries within the Taken, some of whom seek to supplant her as well.

This is where the Black Company comes in and becomes involved. Caught between a variety of dangerous factions and standing by the terms of their contract, they must find a way to survive and fulfill their duties to the Lady. The result is a gritty, occasionally remorseless swords-and-sorcery tale told in the form of a first person military chronicle. I can certainly see what attracted Gygax to the book, although its applicability to D&D is less obvious to me. I myself found the book fairly slow going and, while I appreciated it for its ideas, I wasn't won over by Cook's writing, which felt very flat to me. That disappointed me greatly, as I wanted to like this book and its sequels more than I did. Still, there's no question that they're well worth reading and that they are good examples of contemporary pulp fantasy. My own disappointments to the contrary, The Black Company at least should be read by anyone with an interest in the genre.