YMMV / Garrett, P.I.

• Bizarro Episode: Petty Pewter Gods, which erased several of the assumptions of the series up to that point, defined it as being in a Crossover Cosmology with Earth, and the myths thereof as well as the Cthulhu mythos, and had no affect whatsoever on the ongoing story arcs or Character Development.
  • Garrett mentions Cthulhu by name at the end of chapter six. "Et tu, Cthulhu?"
  • Possibly Translation Convention at work? He also mentions the Rapture in Gilded Latten Bones while pondering the end of the world, and Karenta's chief religion is only an Expy of Christianity, not the real thing.
  • In Faded Steel Heat, he quotes the First Commandment^note Thou shalt have no other gods before me, although in a figurative rather than genuinely religious context, referring to Relway's rage on learning that one of his men was also an agent for a human-supremacist group.
    • Given that Petty Pewter Gods confirmed it's a Gods Need Prayer Badly Verse, it makes sense that every faith would have a similar commandment.
  • Considering how Garrett's also made cracks implying his world has equivalents to Paul Bunyan stories, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' motto, New Year's resolutions, and Der Ring des Nibelungen, the Cthulhu reference may be more a case of broad parallelism between his reality and Earth's, not Crossover Cosmology.
  • Or possibly Garrett had previously overheard some passing reference to K'thool Hoo C'Thug, a nasty demonic entity that would later appear in Wicked Bronze Ambition, but didn't have a clue how its name was spelled.
• Cargo Ship: Garrett routinely (half) jokes that he's in love with Eleanor, who exists only as a haunted painting. Though, more of a case of Boy Meets Ghoul in that Eleanor and Garret did have a relationship, Cruel Zinc Melodies solidified their feelings, and possibly confirmed she *was* still haunting the painting. The Old One makes a complete copy of both Garret and Eleanor, so some part of them will be together forever.
• Iron Woobie: As details of his life surface through the books Garrett definitely becomes one of these. Cold Copper Tears is the start, where we learn that both Garrett's brother and father were killed in the war, and his mother died of a broken heart after she was mistakenly informed that Garrett had been killed too.
  • It gets worse in Wicked Bronze Ambition, when we learn that Garrett left out some woeful details when he told Maya about his mother. She actually had a debilitating stroke when she was told the last of her family had died, and lost her ability to say Garrett's name among other things. She'd called him "that man" for a while after he'd gotten back from the Cantard, before a second stroke deprived her of speech entirely and set the stage for her third and fatal one.
    • A few times Garret mentions that he wasn't his mother's favorite either, and wonders if she had wished Mikey had made it home instead of him.
    • Ma Garrett probably qualified herself, considering she'd also lost her father and two brothers to the Cantard yet kept carrying on. It took the deaths of her boys being reported in the same week to bring her down.
  • Max Weider is a beermeister who doesn't dare sample his own top-grade wares, because he loves it too much. He lost one son's leg, another son's mind, and a third son's life to the Cantard War. His daughter Kittyjo has clinical depression and his wife is dying a slow, bedridden death. And that's before Kittyjo, his wife, and the insane son all die on the same night, killed directly or indirectly by the Black Dragon Valsung shapeshifters. Amazingly, Max bounces back in later novels, rising above grief to find new interests and a new girlfriend to court.
  • The ratpeople seem like something of an Iron Woobie race, what with their lower-than-dirt status, lack of any legal rights or protection, and the claim that they used to be hunted for their fur. But they're still here, and between Singe and John Stretch, their prospects are slowly improving.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Both Morley and Dead Man. Morley managed to get all of his creditors off his back by promising to bring back a vampire who had offended them, then he delivered the vampire to them as a ravenous beast that eliminated them all. All the while getting Garrett to pay for the expense. Dead Man by contrast is so skilled that he can predict all of the movements of the Cantard war simply by hearing about what's going on second hand and solves most of Garrett's crimes much the same way.
  • Donni Pell is a subversion: she's good at setting up schemes and manipulating people when things go according to plan, but screws up - badly - as soon as the unexpected throws her off her game.
• Squick: Some of Garrett's lines and metaphors can be like this ala "I don't play with little girls, but I know the feeling a man can get looking at a ripening fifteen-year-old."
• Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome:
  • Strafa Algarda, aka Furious Tide of Light, in Wicked Bronze Ambition.
  • Pokey Pigotta didn't survive the second book he appeared in.
• Strangled by the Red String: Garrett and Strafa Algarda seems to be one, probably intentionally by the author, as her eyes seem to be a different color every time Garrett mentions them (a oft-parodied trait of many Mary Sues). With barely any interaction, everyone is happy for Garrett to drop long-term flame Tinnie Tate in favor of Strafa, even members of Tinnie's own family. Granted, his relationship with Tinnie was a long on-and-off again one, with known issues on both sides.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Used and Lampshaded with the final appearance by Crask and Sadler, who are captured without a fight and expire off-page in Faded Steel Heat. Even Garrett himself is almost disappointed that it didn't end in the cataclysmic battle he'd been anticipating for years.
• Ugly Cute: Pular Singe. Garrett himself comments that she is uncommonly cute for a ratwoman, though not so much that her crush on him has any hope of being reciprocated.
• The Woobie: Garrett's late brother Mikey is a posthumous example. Like Garrett, he lost his father and at least two uncles and one grandfather to the Cantard War, and in his case, was too young to even remember them. The girl he had a crush on died in a house fire shortly before Mikey himself began serving his five years ... or what would have been five, had he not been yet another casualty. His other maybe-crush was a foreign girl who'd been his buddy in childhood, until her family moved away. His family was so poor that Ma Garrett wouldn't let him keep any of the stray pets he'd bring home. The last, she forced him to abandon himself rather than claiming the Dog Got Sent to a Farm, and Garrett sadly recalls that his little bro was never the same, afterward.