‘Shadow Thieves’ – Glen Cook

I figured it was way past time that I got stuck into the pile of books that I got for my birthday… 😉 Not just that though, I was really after a little ‘short story action’ as well (can’t seem to settle on a regular sized book at the moment) so ‘The Best of Glen Cook’ covered both angles.

I’m always a little wary of books that say they’re the ‘best of’, it feels like a bit of a bold statement to make and with me being an awkward character, my response runs along the lines of ‘who are you to tell me that?’ I know, it’s silly but that’s the way I’m wired 😉 A Glen Cook collection though, that’s a little bit different; mostly because I tend to enjoy the books of his that I pick up (although I haven’t read all of his work) so I am a little more accepting that I’ll find well told tales here, maybe even his best.

I’d thought I’d start off in some familiar territory, the city of Tunfaire and a certain former soldier turned private eye. Lets talk about ‘Shadow Thieves’, a story that originally appeared in the collection ‘Down These Strange Streets’ and is now to be found in ‘The Best of Glen Cook’.

It’s a day much like any other for Garrett P.I with a mid-morning skirmish on his doorstep leading to rival parties doing whatever they can to enlist Garrett’s help to track down The Shadow, a box that everyone believes Garrett has inside information on. Garrett doesn’t have the first clue about it but he will never pass up on the promise of a paying client…

One of the things that I love most about detective noir are the stories where the detective doesn’t have the slightest clue what is really going on; those ‘sleight of hand affairs’ where our hero is roped into something, normally by way of a beating from someone who thinks they’re involved, but they’re really a distraction while the real business goes on elsewhere. That’s not quite what we’re looking at with ‘Shadow Thieves’ but we do have Garrett trying to make sense of something, that has quite literally landed on his doorstep, and very much after any money that comes out of it. And it’s all handled very smoothly by Cook; Garrett has been around for a while now (since the eighties I think) and Cook very knows by now how Garrett would handle something like this. It’s just a question of getting it down on paper and it just works. Everything is balanced very neatly, in terms of setting vs plot, and the end result is an intriguing tale with enough background to not overload newcomers but just enough to let you know exactly where you are.

The danger with stories like these is that once you find out all the main stuff actually happened ‘off-screen’ (as it were), the ending can come as a bit of an anti-climax. Fortunately for ‘Shadow Thieves’, this isn’t the case here as Cook lets us share in Garrett’s relief (he may not have made any coin from it but he’s still standing, sometimes that’s the best you can hope for in Tunfaire) and also consoles us with the knowledge that while we may not see it play out, this is actually far from a finished tale. If it’s done right, an open ended story can give some closure and that’s what we get here.

I always seem to struggle to get through ‘Garrett P.I’ novels (and that’s a post for another day, maybe when I actually get round to posting about one of those books…) so a short and fairly snappy short story like ‘Shadow Thieves’ made for a refreshing read. I wouldn’t mind seeing a collection of ‘Garrett P.I’ short stories actually, it could be a lot of fun. In the meantime, I’m more than happy with this one.