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Before Anita Blake and Harry Dresden, there was Garrett P.I., the hero of Glen Cook's long-running noir fantasy series...

Long before Harry Dresden tracked vampires and gangsters through Chicago's windy streets, Glen Cook's gumshoe Garrett was pounding the dirty alleyways in the city of TunFaire. A little Raymond Chandler, a little sword and sorcery, Glen Cook's Garrett P.I. novels are fantasy noir, a blending of hard-boiled mystery and fantasy. The Garrett series is not the first to mix fantasy and mystery (in fact Garrett's namesake is author Randall Garrett, whose Lord Darcy series first appeared in the 1960's), but with its wisecracking, flawed hero living in a vibrant, artfully drawn city, it's easy to see it as forerunner of today's urban fantasies.

Garrett first appeared in Sweet Silver Blues, published by Roc in 1987 (and recently reissued). He's an ex-marine with a knack for sleuthing. He's got some help—his best friend, Morley Dotes, is a half-elf with a shady reputation and contacts throughout the criminal world, and his partner, the Dead Man, has power to read minds, which can be very helpful in their line of work. Garrett's raucous, sometimes volatile hometown, TunFaire (which Cook says he loosely based on St. Louis) is a magical city full of vampires, elves, centaurs, ogres, wizards...and beautiful women—and luckily for our tough-talking private investigator, it has a respectable contingent of thieves, swindlers, blackmailers, murderers, gangsters, and, of course, molls.

So the world isn't ours, but Garrett's unmistakable voice will be very recognizable to readers of urban fantasy—an appealing world-weary humor tempered by experience...of some bad, bad things. Garrett is a protagonist who's seen it all and then some, living in a gritty world populated by characters who are never black and white, but rather, as in our world, vividly gray. Jeff VanderMeer has said of Glen Cook that, “His work is unrelentingly real, complex, and honest. The sense of place that permeates his narrative and his characters gives his "fantasies" more gravitas and grit than most novels that feature contemporary settings."

That's not surprising given Cook's own life. Born in 1944, he, like Garrett, served in the armed forces. "Unlike most writers," he says," I have not had strange jobs like chicken plucking and swamping out health bars. Only full-time employer I've ever had is General Motors." He is now retired from the assembly line at GM, writing full time, both for Roc and for Tor, which publishes his ever-popular military fantasy novels, The Black Company.

This month, Roc is thrilled to be publishing Cruel Zinc Melodies, the twelfth book in the Garrett, P.I. series. Trouble always comes looking for Garrett, and in this case it's in the form of the beautiful daughter of the largest brewer in town. The theater he's building is being attacked by all manner of paranormal creatures. Of course, Garrett takes the case, because working for a brewer means free beer. Unsurprisingly, as Garrett unpeels the layers of the mystery before him, he comes face to face with the absurd and the disturbing, the cruel and the kind, the weird and the wonderful, the many facets of TunFaire.