Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Howard Chaykin

It is a Door, while Ningauble glibly speaks the languages of many worlds and universes, loving the gossip of all times and places.Īnd then, during a danger-filled sea voyage: It is rumored by the wise-brained rats which burrow the citied earth and by the knowledgeable cats that stalk its shadows and by the sagacious bats that wing its night and by the sapient zats which soar through airless space, slanting their metal wings to winds of light, that those two swordsmen and blood-brothers, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, have adventured not only in the World of Nehwon with its great empire of Lankhmar, but also in many other worlds and times and dimensions, arriving at these through certain secret doors far inside the mazy caverns of Ningauble of the Seven Eyes - whose great cave, in this sense, exists simultaneously in many worlds and times. Here are a few sections that struck me as particularly memorable from the brilliant, if relatively down-tempo, 1968 short story 'The Wrong Branch' (which on the prior point, has almost no spoken dialogue at all). The answer to this riddle is the immensely strong narrator's voice used by Leiber, with all its flourishes of language, cosmic description, and internal monologues and conflicting desires much like a movie based on similar books, any adaptation can't avoid losing the essence of the thing, namely the amazing richness of the written word. Fortunately, there is a short 10-page preview of the original text at the back, which itself I found to be electrifying. The action seemed random, unpredictable, and unmotivated.

But I really started with Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser about a year ago with the comic collection by Howard Chaykin and Mike Mignola - comic artists I admire greatly - which frankly left me a little cold. I've written about one of these stories previously, in the context of D&D thieves-reading-magic-scrolls. It probably doesn't hurt that Leiber based the characters on real-life models, namely himself and his friend Harry Otto Fischer. Now let me spend some time lavishing praise on a truly excellent piece of art: Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser stories, as collected in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks The First Book of Lankhmar (which puts together the books Swords Against Deviltry, Swords Against Death, Swords in the Mist, and Swords Against Wizardry - themselves collections of various short stories and novelettes).īoth the characters and the language are truly an immense joy to discover they're completely fantastic, even if they have quite a bit of variance from one story to another (not a bad thing kind of like what people say about the Beatles, you can see Leiber evolving and experimenting with his art form, not just churning out longer hack-work over time).

Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Howard Chaykin