It’s been sometimes sad, sometimes joyous, but always a pleasure to hang out with people at Windy City Pulp and Paper and celebrate the life and work of Howard Andrew Jones.
Left to right: Arin Komins (moderator and bookaholic), John O’Neill (force of nature), the oversigned (some weirdo graybeard), S.C. Lindberg (organizer of the GenCom writer’s track and sole surviving intern of the Magician’s Skull), John C. Hocking (master of adventure fantasy) photo courtesy of Van Allen Plexico
Too many stories were shared for me to scribble down. But the common theme was: Howard’s deep interest in people and his intense empathy were central to what made him a great editor, a great writer, and a great human being. “If you knew Howard, he was your friend.” I forget who in the sizeable audience said that (Bob Byrne, maybe?) but it echoed with agreement around the room.
Hocking has sometimes said about storytelling, “Action is character,” and it’s become one of my mantras for writing. But, as he pointed out last night, Howard’s character, his belief in decency and heroism, was key to his work and his life.
It was S.C. Lindberg who found the closing words for the panel. They were Howard’s words, the way he closed countless letters and conversations.
For various reasons I’ve had a couple different essays under my eyes this afternoon: “Epic Pooh” (Moorcock’s Titanic body-slam against Tolkien and other “high” fantasists) and Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories”.
All critical writing about fantasy needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. When the critics are themselves fantasists, you’d better have pounds of the stuff on hand. I’ve noted this before about Le Guin. She is, to my mind, the greatest stylist among modern fantasists. Her essay on style and fantasy, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”, is a must read. But, as I’ve argued elsewhere, she’s not infallible.
Clarke’s First Law is the relevant standard to apply here.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Replace “scientist” with “critic”/“scholar”/‘artist”/“writer” and you’ve got it. (Also be aware that in the now-distant day when Clarke was writing, “he” could be used of people in general, regardless of their natural gender, because personhood was gendered masculine. I don’t endorse this position; I just report it.)
Moorcock’s discussion of Tolkien (and the style of much high fantasy) is worth reading, whether you agree with it or not.
The sort of prose most often identified with “high” fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby; it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth-music. It is frequently enjoyed not for its tensions but for its lack of tensions. It coddles; it makes friends with you; it tells you comforting lies. It is soft.
He doesn’t like it.
And I guess I get that, especially given the date of Moorcock’s original essay, a time when bookstands were groaning under the weight of Tolkienian knockoffs. If Moorcock is less than fair to Tolkien, he’s certainly got the number of the Tolkienizers.
I would argue, though, that Tolkien himself has more than one string to his epic harp, and in particular when he’s writing about war (something that he, unlike most writers of heroic fantasy, experienced at its worst) we see him in a different mode.
Here’s Pippin in battle at the Black Gate of Mordor:
Like a storm <the orcs> broke upon the line of the men of Gondor, and beat upon helm and head, and arm and shield, as smiths hewing the hot bending iron. At Pippin’s side Beregond was stunned and overborne, and he fell; and the great troll-chief that smote him down bent over him, reaching out a clutching claw; for these fell creatures would bite the throats of those that they threw down.
Then Pippin stabbed upwards, and the written blade of Westernesse pierced through the hide and went deep into the vitals of the troll, and his black blood came gushing out. He toppled forward and came crashing down like a falling rock, burying those beneath him. Blackness and stench and crushing pain came upon Pippin, and his mind fell away into a great darkness.
’So it ends as I guessed it would,’ his thought said, even as it fluttered away; and it laughed a little within him ere it fled, almost gay it seemed to be casting off at last all doubt and care and fear.
Pippin isn’t actually dying; he just thinks he is. But it’s not a coincidence that Tolkien sends his most childlike characters (Pippin, Merry, Sam) into the most terrible places. Tolkien had been one of those children. As Tolkien remarks grimly and memorably, “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”
Moorcock is philosophically opposed to consolation, which for Tolkien is a major feature of fantastic storytelling. These are both legitimate points of view. But I would deny that Tolkien turns his eye away from grief and suffering and loss—the things people need consolation for.
Should people suffering from such things (and that’s everyone who lives, sooner or later) be offered any kind of consolation?
Absolutely not. Let them toughen up! Whatever it is, there’s worse coming.
Or maybe: No. It’s insolence and cowardice to babble chipper advice to someone suffering from terrible grief and pain.
Or maybe yes. If you think you can fairly offer it, if someone needs it, if it will do any damn good in a world without enough good in it, then maybe yes.
It’s not a question with just one correct answer. But as I get older, and fatter, and more corrupt, and as the world grows worse and worse, I have more and more sympathy for people who just want escape: for an hour, for longer, forever.
It’s not crazy for people who seek that kind of consolation to look for it in fantasy. And it’s not dishonest or corrupt for fantasists to try and offer it.
But with style, definitely. There’s a great line in Stan Freberg’s The United States States of America. A square general is asking a hipster fife player, “Do you want the war to end on a note of triumph or disaster?” And the fife player says, “Either way, man, just so it swings.”
That’s the only real rule for style. Either it works as verbal music or it doesn’t.
I watched a couple of pretty good new-to-me movies that could loosely be described as noir: Panique (1946) and The Window (1949). Both of them are based on fiction I haven’t read, but now kind of want to. Reviews follow, along with some spoilers. But neither of these movies is a mystery in the whodunit sense.
In Panique, a guy who goes by three names, but is usually called Monsieur Hire (Michel Simon) falls under suspicion of having murdered a woman. The infallible signs that point to his guilt are: he’s always taking pictures of things, he’s Jewish, and people don’t like him. He’s quite aware of his universal unpopularity; at one point, he remarks that even his mom didn’t like him much.
In fact, he didn’t commit the murder, but he knows who the killer is, an auto-mechanic calling himself Alfred (Paul Bernard). When Hire sees a young woman named Alice (Viviane Romance) getting friendly toward Alfred, he tries to warn her off. When Alice asks Hire how he can be sure Alfred is the murderer, he tells her that he saw it happen while he was taking a slash in the vacant lot. When she asks him why he doesn’t tell the police, he laughs and says it’s against his philosophy.
Unfortunately for Hire, Alice is Alfred’s longtime girlfriend. They’re just pretending to meet for the first time, as he’s a career criminal on the run and she’s an ex-con who just got out of prison for a robbery he committed. Alfred and Alice manipulate feeling in the neighborhood against Monsieur Hire. Hire takes an interest in Alice, and she convinces him she likes him, primarily so that she can plant some evidence on him (the murdered woman’s purse).
In the climactic scene, the neighborhood forms a mob that attacks Monsieur Hire. He flees from them and the police, losing his camera in the process. He falls to his death, and Alice and Alfred figure that’s the end of it.
But it’s not. Hire was always taking photos of weird, ugly things, and one of the weird, ugly things he took a photo of was the murder. The police find the photo and they’re closing in on Alice and Alfred at the movie’s end.
Michel Simon gave a very likable performance of an unliked man. He has his principles and abides by them, and he carries the irrational hate of his neighbors on his shoulders without bending under the weight.
Viviane Romance apparently had a long career of playing femmes fatales in French movies. She renders Alice with weary charm; you can see why Monsieur Hire is taken with her, and you can fully understand why she prefers the loathsome Alfred.
Paul Bernard’s performance of Alfred was a little odd. He may have been a little old for the role of a youngish criminal. His face seemed very heavily made up, and he wore a lot of scarves and tweedy clothing you wouldn’t expect a mechanic to be wearing at work.
This movie marked the director’s return to French cinema after a wartime exile to the United States. It can be read as a commentary on the French who collaborated with the Nazis in WWII. The citizens who turn so readily on an innocent man are repugnant, as are the criminals who edge them on.
But Monsieur Hire shares some responsibility for the fatal predicament he finds himself in. If he’d been civic-minded enough to go to the police with what he knew, he might have lived peacefully and unpopularly ever after. On the other hand, what does a man owe to a community that hates him for no good reason?
The movie is based on a novella by George Simenon, Les Fiançailles de M. Hire (Monsieur Hire’s Engagement). I’m not a huge fan of Simenon, having bounced off a couple of different Inspector Maigret novels. But this book sounds like it might be worth checking out.
Okay, since it’s just you and me here in the absolute privacy of my blog, where no one ever comes, I’ll admit something. I watched The Window because Barbara Hale has the top billing. I always liked her in Perry Mason, where she played the unflappable Della Street, and I thought it would be fun to see her play the lead in something.
Maybe she did sometime, but this isn’t it. The main character in this movie is the kid, Tommy (Bobby Driscoll) who witnesses a murder. Nearly as important are the murderous upstairs neighbors, the Kellersons (a dead-eyed and terrifying Paul Stewart and a semi-ruthless Ruth Roman). Then there’s the kid’s kindly and frustrated father (Arthur Kennedy). Barbara Hale is Tommy’s mom, a relatively trivial role that anyone wearing a dress could have played as well. I guess she had a great agent; it’s too bad he didn’t get her a better part, though.
Tommy’s original problem is this: he’s a damn liar. He’s always making up some ridiculous story to get people to notice him, and it’s driving his parents crazy. One fiercely hot summer night, he sleeps out on the fire escape outside the family’s apartment. From that vantage point, he watches in horror as the couple upstairs rob and murder a man they’ve lured somehow into their apartment.
He tells everybody he can get to listen to him, but of course almost no one believes him. He’s the boy who’s cried “Wolf!” once too often.
There are two people who believe his stories of apartment-house murder, though: the murderers. Once they realize that their crime has been witnessed, they set out to silence the neighborhood storyteller once and for all.
The movie has a slow but not uninteresting start, carefully establishing Tommy’s fraught relationship with the neighborhood and with his frazzled parents. The pace picks up with the murder, as you might expect. The climactic sequence, which finds Tommy fleeing from the murderers in the empty hours of the night, through dark streets and abandoned buildings, is pretty harrowing.
The story that the film was based on is “Fire Escape” (a.k.a. “The Boy Who Cried Murder”) by William Irish (a.k.a. Cornell Woolrich). Woolrich has his fans, but I’ve never really been one of them. I did like The Bride Wore Black, though, and I’ve liked other movies based on his short fiction (e.g. the classic Rear Window). Now I’m thinking I should give his short stories a try.
I’m reading the minor declamations of pseudo-Quintilian in Shackleton-Bailey’s great Loeb edition. The idea is to briefly escape the current political nightmare by immersing myself in the weird little stories of these controversiae.
It’s not going that well.
For example: take Decl. 272. The law in question is Qui publica consilia enuntiaverit, capite puniatur (“Someone who revealed the state’s plans should be punished by loss of citizenship or life”).
The messaging app Signal isn’t actually mentioned in the text, but it might as well be.
Then there’s Decl. 274. It’s a scenario where a tyrant is killed by a lightning bolt. Certainly a beautiful thought. One law says that a tyrant’s body should be tossed out of the city unburied. Another law says that people killed by lightning should be buried where they died. Which law prevails?
I figure I’m safe from the modern world here.
Then the anonymous lawyer starts saying stuff like this:
Exuit se tyrannus et erigit supra leges; ponendo extra illas se posuit. Hominem occidere non licet, tyrannum licet.
—Decl. 274.5
“The tyrant has stripped himself of and put himself above the laws; by putting them off, he has put himself beyond their protection. It’s unlawful to kill a person, but lawful to kill a tyrant.”
Hard to disagree with this.
But the argument raises a concern I’ve long had that the failure of a political system leads to unchecked civil violence. These guys who think they’re being so cunning in abrogating laws, ignoring courts, erasing the Constitution: they’re just setting themselves up for a lightning bolt.
If they were the only ones likely to get hurt, one might try to laugh it off. But failed states are usually a precondition for mass murder. In any case, civil violence tends to spread like a wildfire.
Maybe I should start reading horror fiction for escape. It’s bound to be more cheerful.
Here and there, though, the pseudonymous lawyer(s) come up with some really great lines.
From a case where a crime (attempted parricide) hinges on the intent of the accused:
Numquam mens exitu aestimanda est.
Decl. 281.2
“The intent of an action must never be reckoned from the outcome of the action.”
Later in the same case, the speaker is talking about something conceded under the threat of force:
non sunt enim preces ubi negandi libertas non est.
—Decl. 281.4
“Those aren’t ‘requests’ when there is no freedom to refuse.”
The best line I’ve come across yet is this beautiful but obscure phrase:
obicio tibi munus lucis.
—Decl. 282.2
“I offer you the gift of sunlight.”
Spoken by a father disowning his son, it seems to mean “Get out of my house.”
The subject matter is often depressing, e.g. a long series of cases about sexual assault, where the injured woman routinely gets to choose between the death of her rapist and marriage to her rapist. I guess, because Roman law didn’t always distinguish carefully between sexual seduction and sexual assault, this makes a certain amount of sense. A couple who were screwing around consensually could get married, and (since divorce by notification was the norm in the Roman world), it wouldn’t have to be forever. But this provision also summons nightmare scenarios where a woman is being chivvied by her relatives to marry that nice Mr. Moneybags Rapist for the good of the family. The legal cases in the declamations are always fictitious and frequently ridiculous; it’s impossible to say how many cases like this actually occurred. But one would be too many.
Whether the speeches are good or bad, depressing or uplifting, they’re soon over. The effect resembles what it used to be like to channel-surf through daytime television: glimpses of family dramas (cf soap operas), chunks of made-up history (cf the History Channel), stories of crime (cf the true crime broadcasts on Headline News), stories of unlikely awards (cf game shows), stories of wild adventure (cf movie channels).
The only thing missing are commercials, a loss which is definitely a net gain.
In summary: The Swords of Lankhmar has a slow start. In fact, it has two slow starts. But once the beat drops, as it were, the story swings into action and lots of weird things happen at an increasingly rapid pace. This is a story on a bigger canvas than Leiber usually allows himself, but remains a sword-and-sorcery adventure by virtue of its action and its wry, scurrilous details. A solid entry in the long-running series about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, ergo an essential read for the sword-and-sorcery fan. Don’t read it if rats freak you out, though.
Details (and spoilers) follow.
No lies detected in the cover copy. Cover art by the thrice-greatest Jeffrey Catherine Jones.
This book is generally accepted as the only novel in Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series —and it is. And it isn’t.
What’s a novel? Can we call a book a novel when it’s a set of stories about the same characters, collected into a single volume, ostensibly in chronological order? We can, because we can do anything we want, but some people will reject that label.
Some people, especially genre readers, describe this kind of a book as a fix-up, because that’s what Van Vogt did when he smashed his brilliant, crazy magazine stories from the 1940s into incoherent paperback novels in the 1950s.
I reject this label for Leiber’s F&G books or for the Lancer Conan books (or, for that matter, Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, collections of which were sometimes marketed as novels) because these are fundamentally different enterprises. Van Vogt rewrote his stories for book publication, screwing them up in the process. In contrast, Leiber rewote his stories with a light and skillful hand, creating connective material (including whole new stories) to fit his existing stories (mostly published in magazines) into a re-imagined chronology for his Ace collections.
I consider these to be a kind of novel, the episodic or picaresque novel, a kind of book with a long but mostly forgotten tradition in English. But I’m not going to be mad if people feel differently. We’re all friends here, and if you’re not then get the hell out.
But The Swords of Lankhmar is a slightly different beast than the rest of Leiber’s F&G books. In 1961 he’d published a novelette called “Scylla’s Daughter”. Rather than stuffing it into a collection, he wrote a long continuation of the novella, and published the whole thing as a standalone novel in 1968. The volume has no descriptive table of contents and no interior chapter or section titles, just numbered chapters. This is pretty typical for books of the period, but makes The Swords of Lankhmar an outlier in the F&G series, and maybe less user-friendly than the other volumes.
I. Chapter One: a kind of prologue
For this volume, Leiber wrote a brief introductory scene in which Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser return to Lankhmar after a long absence, and are met with a bunch of people who are mad at them, mostly because of unpaid bills.
They face swords, staves, and sorcery, and because this is the first few pages of the novel they defeat their attackers with ease in a scene full of stylized, even cartoonish action. After they’ve done this, the herald of Glipkerio Kistomerces, Lankhmar’s weird Overlord, steps forward to recruit them for a mission.
He doesn’t explain what the mission is, and the next scene will find them embarked on the mission, where necessary background detail will be worked in. So why is this scene even here? Why not just begin where the story actually begins?
The answer lies in real-world chronology (as opposed to Leiber’s invented chronology). This is the first of the Ace F&G volumes to actually appear on bookstands. Leiber had been writing about the Mighty Twain for 30 years, but The Swords of Lankhmar would have been the first time many readers encountered them. This opening scene was clearly written to introduce the Twain and their adopted city.
Does it work?
Hard to say. I like the comradely back-and-forth between the two, which contains one of my favorite lines by the Mouser. They’re talking about why the people they’re approaching are mad at them. Fafhrd says that the Mouser should have paid his dues to the Thieves Guild.
“It’s not so much the dues,” the small man said. “It slipped my mind to split with them after the last job, when I lifted those eight diamonds from the Spider God’s temple.
The big man sucked his tongue in disapproval. “I sometimes wonder why I associate with a faithless rogue like you.”
The small man shrugged. “I was in a hurry. The Spider God was after me.”
I love that bit. Frequently when I’m late arriving somewhere, I apologize by saying, “The Spider God was after me.” This has the virtue of silencing all questions (at the possible risk of someone trying to have me committed). Some of the other stuff works as well, I’d say.
But the action is too cartoony to be taken seriously. Fafhrd and the Mouser deflect death spells and armed mobs with remarkable, almost tedious ease; they slay or drive off the sorcerers and thugs, and are left alone and conveniently unwounded by the end of the non-adventure.
Since this was not my introduction to the Mighty Twain, I can’t really tell if it does its job in creating reader interest in the main characters. I can tell you that I skim over this or skip it on rereading.
As chapter 2 opens, we find the Twain far from Lankhmar, engaged in an extremely cushy gig. They are on a grain ship, one of several being sent under the protection of Lankhmar’s navy from Lankhmar’s Overlord to his wavering ally, Movarl the Lord of the Eight Cities. Also on the ship is the Demoiselle Hisvet, a Lankhmart of high status, daughter of the grain merchant Hisvin. She and her twelve highly trained white rats are part of the gift package that Glipkerio is sending to Movarl to shore up his doubtful loyalty to their alliance.
What could go wrong? “Practically everything,” you say, and right you are.
For one thing, this isn’t the first grain fleet sent by Glipkerio to Movarl. It’s the third. The first two were destroyed in transit by some unknown attacker, and the present fleet is being pursued by an unknown ship that sneaks along just under the horizon. In addition another weird craft has been seen drifting across the sea, like a black cloud flecked with lights.
There’s a lot of exposition in the first eleven pages of this section, and not a lot of event. We learn that Fafhrd can imitate the love-cry of a sea-monster. We meet a German-speaking, sea-monster-riding traveller in time and space named Karl Treuherz (“Charlie Trueheart”). We hear the legend of the Thirteen: a shadowy rumor that all kinds of animal are ruled by an inner council of thirteen super-intelligent beasts. Slinoor, the captain of the Squid (the ship F&G and co. are travelling in), thinks that the Thirteen of Rats are none other than the twelve rats in Hisvet’s care, with the freakish Hisvet herself as the 13th rat.
Fafhrd and the Mouser talk this last idea down. For one thing, it’s obviously superstitious nonsense. For another, they’re horny.
How horny? Horny enough that the idea of Hisvet being part-rat doesn’t turn them off. The Twain side with Hisvet and her rats in a quarrel that develops between the passengers of Squid and the captain, backed by the naval captain Lukeen, who’s often stopping by Squid to shout at people, insult them, and spit in their face.
Through fair means and foul, the Mouser and Fafhrd succeed in allaying the crew’s suspicions about Hisvet and her ratty comrades. The Twain are rewarded with a special dinner in Hisvet’s cabin, where she sends them kisses and other favors by way of her attendant Frix.
But Slinoor is not convinced. He dopes the food sent to Hisvet’s cabin, hoping to take Hisvet and her partisans unaware. Fafhrd and the Mouser fall into a drugged stupor, but Hisvet and Frix, warned by the white rats, don’t eat the food. When the sailors start to break down the door to the cabin, the rats and the women arm themselves and sneak away into the ship’s hold through a trap door. The sailors drag the unconscious Fafhrd and the semi-conscious Mouser up to the deck and tie them up. From this vantage point, the Mouser witnesses the increasingly chaotic battle that the sailors fight against the ship’s rats, black and white, resulting in a total victory by the rats.
At some point during the banquet scene the story transitions from a slow, unsettling tale to a fast-paced nightmare. The leaders of the rats (Hisvet, her father Hisvin, and one of the white rats named Skwee) reveal themselves. Hisvet is fond of torture and murder as part of her romantic games, and it looks as if Fafhrd and the Mouser are going to play a role in her fantasies, when Fafhrd (waking belatedly from his opium-daze) summons the solution to their problems as only he knows how. (“Hoongk!“)
The opening part of the story requires some patience from the reader. It’s not a good introduction to the heroic pair, but if you already know them it’s agreeable to see them lounging around and enjoying themselves for once. The first thing the Mouser says in Chapter 2 is “Fat times in Lankhmar!” They’re not exactly in Lankhmar when he says it, but those-who-know will recognize the callback to “Lean Times in Lankhmar”, published in Fantastic only 18 months before “Scylla’s Daughter”. (The Ace collection including it, Swords in the Mist, would appear on the stands later in the same year as The Swords of Lankhmar.)
The balance of the story is a lot more lively. And everything in the slow opening section gets used again, and significantly, in the action-packed part of the story, right down to the ship’s kitten who has a love-hate relationship with Fafhrd.
This novelette began life back in the 1930s as a long, meandering story set on Earth in the reign of the Roman emperor Claudius I. Leiber was deeply enamored of Robert Graves’ historical novels, especially I, Claudius and Claudius the God. And why not? They’re some of the greatest historical fiction ever written. For a while he pursued the idea of making the Mighty Twain heroes in a series of historical fantasies, where they would be reborn or somehow emerge on Earth once every hundred years or so.
“Adept’s Gambit” is the only complete story that survives from that period, but there also is a lengthy fragment from “The Tale of the Grain Ships” (which appeared in the New York Review of Books, May 1997, and in the collection Strange Wonders, Subterranean 2010). It’s fairly interesting, with zero apparent overlap with “Scylla’s Daughter”. In it, the Mouser emerges from the sewer into the kitchen of Claudius’ palace and interacts with the kitchen staff and some others, including Claudius himself. On balance, I’m glad Leiber shook off the shackles of history and put the Twain back into imaginary world fantasy where they belong.
“Scylla’s Daughter” was a worthy addition to the series, but it pales in comparison to the balance of the novel, which finds Leiber at or near the top of his game.
III. Chapters Seven through Sixteen: The war between the Lankhmars
The rest of the book is a braided plot, where we follow four distinct series of events until they all tie together at the novel’s conclusion.
In one strand we follow the adventures of Fafhrd, travelling solo. The Mouser left him in Kleg Nar, Movarl’s city on the north coast of the Inner Sea. He’s been having fun drinking and gambling and sleeping with a woman named Hrenlet. But Hrenlet sneaks a cow into his bed and sneaks away with Fafhrd’s money, and Fafhrd has to get out of town rapidly. He’ll travel to Lankhmar via the land route, despite an invasion of Mingols and more eldritch horrors, visiting the Twain’s patron sorcerers, Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face, along the way.
The Mouser sailed with Squid back to Lankhmar, hoping to get the reward of bringing the good news of how they saved the grain fleet from rats. When he gets to the Overlord’s palace, he finds that Hisvet and Hisvin have already sold Glipkerio on their own version, where they were the ones who saved the fleet from the rats. They pretend now to be helping Glipkerio fight off an ongoing invasion of rats from Lankhmar Below. The Mouser consults Sheelba for help, and Sheelba gives him a magic potion that, he is told, will put him “on a footing to deal with the situation”. He ends up unexpectedly rat-sized, trying to spy out the counsels of the Thirteen who rule ratkind.
A third strand follows events in the palace, focused on the depraved Glipkerio and his long-suffering servants. Glipkerio is a cowardly sadist whose only real happiness lies in two things: watching his servants be tortured and dreaming of escape from the world of Lankhmar, which he thinks doesn’t appreciate him.
The fourth strand is a running third-person omniscient narration of the degenerating situation in Lankhmar, as the rats of Lankhmar Below become increasingly aggressive toward the inhabitants, human and other animals, of Lankhmar Above.
All the braids tie into a single knot at the story’s climax, when Fafhrd summons supernatural aid of the direst kind to battle the monstrous tide of rats, the Mouser foils the wily leaders of the rats, and the ship’s kitten from Squid emerges to save the day (or at least help save it).
IV. Chapter Seventeen: epilogue
It won’t have surprised you to hear that the rats are defeated, but it also probably won’t surprise you that Fafhrd and the Mouser don’t get credit for it. If they did, then their status would change from outsiders to insiders, and the series would end, or at least dramatically change. Leiber isn’t ready for that. So the last chapter finds Fafhrd and the Mouser, reunited with each other and their sweethearts of the moment, riding out of Lankhmar in search of new adventures.
Final comments:
A. Theatricality
This is the most theatrical of Leiber’s novels, even including The Big Time (which Poul Anderson claimed would work as a stage play) and A Specter Is Haunting Texas (which is about an actor). It even has a character, Frix, who murmurs stage directions to herself and lingers on the stage long enough to see the drama play out before making her own spectacular exit, concluding the climactic scene.
In the aftermath, the Mouser jokingly accuses Fafhrd of being a scene stealer. When Fafhrd objects to being called an actor, after all he’s been through, the Mouser says
“Halfway around the Inner Sea you say . . . and nevertheless time your entrance perfectly! Why you’re the greatest actor of them all!”
Leiber was, in some sense Fafhrd as he admits in “Fafhrd and Me” and elsewhere. But Fritz Leiber jr. was also the son of Fritz Leiber sr., a once-famous (and infamously vain) Shakespearian actor. If the vanity that Leiber jr. repeatedly attributes to the Mouser reminds him, consciously or unconsciously, of Leiber sr., these lines could read as wish-fulfillment on the author’s part. An avatar of his stagey father is awarding him the highest accolade in the family business (which Leiber jr. early pursued, but didn’t excel or persist in).
B. Weird sex.
It can get very weird indeed with Leiber. When Fafhrd accuses the Mouser of having a penchant for childlike women, it’s only the truth. We saw it when he briefly retired to become a respectable extortionist in “Lean Times in Lankhmar”; we saw it when he had an affair with the Eyes of Ogo in “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar”; and we see it here, in his obsession with the treacherous, sadistic, and at best semi-human Hisvet. She would seem to be of an age to legally consent, but much is made of her girlish figure. The Mouser never does find out in this novel how much of Hisvet’s anatomy comes from her rodent ancestry, but he never tires of trying to find out.
Fafhrd, on the other hand, is having sex with Kreeshkra, a female Ghoul, a race of people with invisible flesh so that they appear to be animated skeletons. They also enjoy killing and eating people who aren’t Ghouls, but she hasn’t killed Fafhrd. Yet.
Then there’s Glipkerio’s and Hisvet’s separate obsessions with torture. They are obviously not Our Heroes, but Leiber’s frequent returning to this theme (Hasjarl in “The Lords of Quarmall” had the same kink) might be a little disturbing.
How do we deal with this? Should we deal with it, or just toss Leiber into the memory hole?
Not the latter, I’d say. We don’t have to assume that Leiber is advocating human/rat sex, for instance, just because he depicts it as happening in this imaginary world. I’d say the same for the rest of the sexual variations Leiber depicts.
C. What kind of series is this?
Back in 1952, James Blish distinguished between two types of story-series: template and evolving. A template series is when all the stories in the series are written around a character or set of characters that are essentially changeless. Each installment is a new adventure, but at the end of it the hero(es) will still be around to have another adventure.
A lot of great genre fiction has been written on this template model. Consider Sherlock Holmes, for instance, or Jeeves & Wooster, or any of the pulp heroes from the 30s-40s, like The Spider!, The Shadow, Doc Savage etc. Almost all TV shows used to be on the template model. Series like this can go on as long as the audience is willing to pay attention.
Evolving series are where the writer(s) permit their characters and situations to change and grow, even at the risk of disrupting the premises of the series and bringing it to an end. One of Blish’s examples for this is the Foundation series where, once the premises of the series are solidly established, Asimov throws a Mule-sized wrench into Seldon’s Plan. But what Blish really wants to talk about are his own Okie stories, nowadays available as the tetralogy Cities in Flight. A more recent example would be Le Guin’s Earthsea series or her Hainish series, where the main characters tend to be transformed by the end of the book.
Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories began as a template series. Whenever it looked as if the characters or their relationships were going to permanently change (e.g. in “Lean Times in Lankhmar” or “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar”), it was just a fake out and pretty soon the Mighty Twain are on the road again seeking new adventures together.
The first collection of F&G stories (Two Sought Adventure, Gnome 1958) and the first three Ace Books installments of the series to actually appear (The Swords of Lankhmar, January 1968; Swords Against Wizardry, July 1968; Swords in the Mist, September 1968) are all stories of the template type.
But already with “The Unholy Grail” (Fantastic, October 1962) Leiber was starting to do something different. In creating a backstory for his heroes (continued, of course, with “The Snow Women” and “Ill-Met in Lankhmar”), Leiber became committed not only to the idea that his heroes could change, but that they hadalready changed. Whether we like what he was doing, he knew what he was doing when he wrote the origin stories of the Twain (collected as Swords and Deviltry, May 1970) and then embedded the earliest F&G stories in that retroactive continuity (Swords Against Death, July 1970).
The template stories were now just an island of stability in a pair of long adventurous careers, presenting only stage two or even stage three of the heroes’ lives.
Lots of people who like Leiber and like this series really dislike Swords and Deviltry. This is interesting to me, and also weird to me. Some people talk about “The Cold Women” as if it were The Eye of Argon. Others more guardedly say that it’s not a good introduction to the series.
For my money, both views are mistaken. But I think (looking at the shift from a template series to an evolving one) some people just really prefer the template model. For those with this preference, it’s best to look at the books as collections of stories and skip the ones that give them the ick.
The end of the 1960s was a rough time for Leiber. His beloved wife Jonquil died of cancer; he fell off the wagon for another harrowing round of alcohol and drug abuse. But he never stopped writing. His greatest novel (Our Lady of Darkness, a.k.a. “The Pale Brown Thing”) and some of his best short fiction (e.g. “Catch That Zeppelin”) lay ahead of him.
And as the 1970s wore on, he turned away from Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’s past and started thinking about how they would change in the future. The long-running series would change and change again in the next collection, Swords and Ice Magic (Ace, July 1977). I’ll talk about that one another time.
Some writers I take to with irrational intensity. Others, who may be equally good or even great, I don’t. Sometimes I understand the process involved; sometimes I don’t.
Left: a couple paperback editions of Unnatural Death from the 1980s
Sayers is one of the writers I took to as soon as I came into contact with her work. The Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries are good mysteries, and great genre fiction: urbane, erudite, witty, at turns moving and funny. But her ambitions as a writer and thinker were deeper and higher than mystery fiction: she was a scholar and translator of medieval Romance languages; she was a playwright and a Christian apologist. She was an Oxford graduate who worked at an advertising agency. She was a clergyman’s daughter who had a child out of wedlock. She was super-weird and didn’t really fit in anywhere, but insisted on doing good work everywhere she landed.
Her mystery novels were early entries onto my always-reread list. In my most recent desultory read-through of the series I’m up to Unnatural Death (1927), also known as The Dawson Pedigree, because American publishers love to slap alternate titles on British books, and vice versa. Spoilers abound in the ensuing discussion of the book, so be forewarned.
Several of the Wimsey books were adapted to television by the BBC in the 1970s, and a few more during the 1980s. Unnatural Death is not one of them, because the one of the plot-points hinges on a visual identification that isn’t made until the penultimate chapter. That works in a novel, and might even in a radio play, but not on TV, where the viewer is likely to shout at the screen, “Why can’t you see her? She’s right there!”
As a matter of fact, the BBC did adapt Unnatural Death as a radio drama, featuring Ian Carmichael (who so brilliantly played Lord Peter on TV in the 1970s) and a solid cast of voice actors. It’s very talky, as radio plays are apt to be, but Carmichael is always great.
There’s a lot to like about Unnatural Death, but when talking about a book of popular fiction that’s nearly a hundred years old, some warnings may be in order. Issues of race and gender come up. Sayers is deeply scornful of people harboring racial prejudice, but there are some characters in this novel who are bigots and speak accordingly. There is also some tacit discussion of same-sex activity in the book. It’s not as narrow-minded as you might think, but the murderer is pretty clearly coded as a lesbian. If you’re annoyed by that, you might want to skip this one.
At some point after the Lord Peter mysteries became reliable best sellers (circa 1935), Sayers was inveigled to write a biographical note about Lord Peter. She writes it in the person of Lord Peter’s maternal uncle, Paul Delagardie. It’s usually attached to Unnatural Death in later printings. Those interested can read it here.
The book proper opens with Lord Peter and his friend Inspector Parker sitting in a restaurant discussing their favorite topic: murder. Specifically, they’re arguing about a then-notorious series of poisonings in which Edward Pritchard apparently murdered a servant in his household, and later definitely murdered his mother-in-law and wife.
The death of the servant was investigated, but resulted in no action. When Pritchard’s mother-in-law died, her physician refused to supply a death certificate and wrote a letter explaining why to the Registrar (I guess: the equivalent of a county clerk). Again, nothing happened. This lack of action may have emboldened Pritchard to go ahead and murder his wife.
Sayers’ story begins in mid-argument, but Parker seems to have been saying that the mother-in-law’s doctor (who was also Mrs. Pritchard’s doctor) should have done more than he did. Wimsey argues the contrary, and says that Parker doesn’t understand what kind of hot water a physician could get in for making trouble about a death certificate.
At that point a guy at the next table horns in. He says that he’s a case in point. He declines to give his name or any identifying characteristics (he thinks) about the patient in question, but he tells the sad tale of how he lost his practice for demanding an autopsy for one of his patients, an old woman who had been fighting a long, slow battle against cancer, but in the end died with unexpected suddenness.
The physician may be professionally discreet, but Wimsey is professionally indiscreet, and he soon tracks down the death in question and where it occurred, and sends an ace investigator down to poke around and ask questions. This is Miss Katherine Climpson in her first but not last appearance in the series. She’s a kindly, middle-aged spinster with a mind like a steel trap who can ask questions without causing offense because no one takes old maids seriously.
Wimsey’s investigation eventually alarms the murderer enough that she starts killing again to cover her tracks. It’s these later murders that she’s eventually arrested for; it’s pretty clear that she did kill the old woman, but there is never enough evidence to charge her. There is some question of whether Wimsey himself bears a moral, if not legal, responsibility for these later deaths.
From pretty early on in the novel, there isn’t much doubt about who killed old Agatha Dawson: it was her great-niece, Mary Whittaker. The mystery lies more in how (since an autopsy showed no evidence of anything other than heart failure) and why (since old Agatha was expected to die eventually and the great-niece was sure to inherit as the closest relative).
The how is pretty good. It involves deliberately injecting an air-bubble into a vein, where it will go straight to the heart and stop it. Whether this would actually work or not I don’t know and don’t want to know, but it’s fiendishly plausible.
The why has to do with British inheritance law. There was a Property Act passed by Parliament in 1926 that changed inheritance rules for people who died intestate (i.e. without a will). Apparently it made the inheritance status of great-nieces at least ambiguous. Mary Whittaker tries, by hook and by crook, to get Agatha to make a will, but the old lady is pathologically terrified of wills and extremely stubborn. When persuasion and trickery fail, Mary resorts to murder, killing her great-aunt before the new Property Act comes into force in 1927.
Now that I’ve ruined the central mystery of the book for you, is there any point to going on to read the novel?
I think so. There are other mysteries involved, for one thing. But I don’t expect anyone would pick up this novel without having first read Clouds of Witness and maybe Whose Body? If you liked those, you’ll like this. It’s got a varied and vivid cast of characters: the aforesaid Miss Climpson, Mr. Bunter, who is the Jeeves to Wimsey’s Wooster, the distinctively different old biddies that Climpson worms info out of, the brash young biddy and dupe of the murderer, Vera Findlater; there is a distant cousin of Agatha Dawson who appears in the story and has the bad taste to be a person of color. He’s an agreeable guy who seems to pity (and be amused by) the shock his presence causes people who want everyone in the world, or at least everyone in England, to be white.
The year itself is kind of a character in the book. Sayers seems to have been glancing at the newspaper as she wrote: there are constant background references to news events of the day, such as the unrest in China around the Shanghai Massacre; the Property Act itself was still recent and in the news; and there was a brief total solar eclipse in June 1927 which makes its appearance on the novel’s last page. A copy of the American detective magazine Black Mask plays a role in a carefully staged murder scene. Bestselling authors of the mid-20s like Sheila Kaye-Smith and Michael Arlen both come up in conversation. The period detail is as dense as if this were a historical novel. The book isn’t set in some Neverneverland of quaint vicarages, each with a decorous corpse sprawled in the library. It brashly insists that it’s set Now, in this very modern year of 1927 AD.
We also get a lot of deep background on the Victorian Era, old Miss Agatha’s heyday. When she was just a young woman she took up with her school-friend Clara Whittaker and they settled down together. Clara was a fierce young woman who made a fortune in horse-trading; Agatha was the “domestic partner” (sic) who kept house. Everyone who knew them talks about them with admiration and respect. But the implication is as strong as it can be in a popular novel from this period that these two women are in a same-sex relationship.
Clara’s brother married Agatha’s sister. Charles Whittaker, Mary’s father, was the offspring from that union. Charles was super-mad when Clara left all her considerable fortune to her domestic partner Agatha Dawson. But Agatha proposed to make it up to Mary by leaving all the wealth to her… except that Agatha couldn’t be persuaded to make a will.
Mary Whittaker is the target of love and hate and fear in the book, but somehow she never quite comes into focus. It occurs to me that, in one of her identities, she’s the sort of woman that Sayers herself might very much liked to have been:
With her handsome, strongly-marked features and quiet air of authority, she was of the type that “does well” in City offices. She had a pleasant and self-possessed manner, and was beautifully tailored—not mannishly, and yet with a severe fineness of outline that negatived the appeal of a beautiful figure.
Sayers was herself someone who worked in an advertising office, but would probably not have been described this way. She’d had at least one same-sex “pash” for the French teacher at her prep school, from which she’d been discouraged perhaps in much the same terms that Miss Climpson tries to discourage Vera Findlater from her “pash” for Mary Whittaker. Sayers writes with feeling and (my guess is) from experience about sexually charged friendships between women.
In another one of Mary Whittaker’s identities, she may be more like someone Sayers feared she would become: a woman with a scandalous reputation living alone in London, insecure socially and financially.
It may be Sayers’ own turbulent feelings about her villain that keep Mary Whittaker from snapping into focus. Or it may be the inevitable effect of a story which is made up of different accounts from different people of the same events—Rashomon in Jazz-Age England.
This is not the best of the Wimsey mysteries, but it’s far from the worst. Sayers is flexing her muscles as a storyteller and seeing what she can do. The book is well worth reading. Unlike Mary Whittaker’s syringe, there’s definitely something in it.
A couple years ago I set out to review all of Fritz Leiber’s books about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser—foundational texts for sword-and-sorcery and for my personal imagination. I knocked off the first three (or four, depending on how you count) pretty quickly. (See my review of Swords and Deviltryhere, my writeup of Swords Against Death and Two Sought Adventurehere, and my misty water-colored memories of Swords in the Misthere.) Then I ground to a halt.
Why? In a single word: Quarmall. “The Lords of Quarmall” is not the least interesting of the stories about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, but it is by a fairly long chalk my least favorite, one that I almost always skip in rereading the saga, and it occupies roughly half the space in Swords Against Wizardry, the fourth volume in the Ace series collecting all the stories of the Mighty Twain. (I’m sure there are those that love the story. De gustibus non disputandum.)
But “The merit of an action is in finishing it to the end,” as Genghis Khan remarks, so here goes.
Is this book a novel? I’ve flogged that dead horse enough, possibly, so I’ll just say that the answer is absolutely yes. Or maybe no.
Anyway, the lion’s share of SaW‘s words belong to two unequal-sized novellas, “Stardock” and the aforesaid “Lords of Quarmall”, supplemented by an introductory episode, “In the Witch’s Tent”, and an interlude in Lankhmar, “The Two Best Thieves” in Lankhmar”. We’ll tackle them in the order that God and Leiber intended, but for once there’s no complicated backstory to the—no, of course there is, this being a Leiber book. But don’t worry about it. You’ve seen worse already.
I. “In the Witch’s Tent”
We find the Mighty Twain in the deep north, far out of the Mouser’s comfort zone. They’re in quest of a stash of legendary jewels said to be atop Stardock, the tallest mountain in their world of Nehwon. They stop in Illik-Ving, last and least of the Eight Cities, to consult a witch about their journey. While that’s happening they’re attacked by rivals on their quest, and take an unconventional route to escape.
This is just an episode, acting as an introduction to “Stardock” and written years later than the longer story. (It first appeared in SaW in 1968, whereas “Stardock” was first published in Fantastic three years earlier.)
But I like it a lot. It’s got some great back-and-forth between the heroes; the story, such as it is, moves swiftly, and there’s rich, disturbing detail about the witch and her tent.
Plus, there’s a kind of audiobook. In the 1970s, there was a company named Alternate World Recordings that released LPs of great sf/f readers reading their stories. The best one, in my view, was Ellison’s “Repent Harlequin,” Said the Ticktockman. It’s not only a great story, but Ellison was a professional performer at the height of his powers. I also had, at one time, Theodore Sturgeon’s recording of Bianca’s Hands, and a couple others, among them Leiber’s reading of his mythic fantasy Gonna Roll the Bones. There was some space on the B-side of the LP (ask your grandparents, kids, or your hipster friends), so they added a recording of Leiber reading “In the Witch’s Tent.“
Leiber had briefly been a professional actor in his even-then-distant youth, but he didn’t stick with it and had lived a pretty hard life of alcohol and drug abuse. His voice is wavery in the recording. But he reads skillfully and with zest. I wish we had more of his voice.
A technical issue about the writing. Le Guin, who was the greatest stylist in American fantasy, wrote a great essay about style in fantasy, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie”. In it, she took aim at two giants of sword-and-sorcery.
Fritz Leiber and Roger Zelazny have both written in the comic-heroic vein…: they alternate the two styles. When humor is intended the characters talk colloquial American English, or even slang, and at earnest moments they revert to old formal usages. Readers indifferent to language do not mind this, but for others the strain is too great. I am one of these latter. I am jerked back and forth between Elfland and Poughkeepsie; the characters lose coherence in my mind, and I lose confidence in them. It is strange, because both Leiber and Zelazny are skillful and highly imaginative writers, and it is perfectly clear that Leiber, profoundly acquainted with Shakespeare and practiced in a very broad range of techniques, could maintain any tone with eloquence and grace. Sometimes I wonder if these two writers underestimate their own talents, if they lack confidence in themselves.
I think Le Guin’s mistaken here, partly because she may underestimate the power and poetic impact of colloquial American English. Leiber knew exactly what he was doing in exchanges like the one below, and the literature of fantasy would be poorer without them.
“Shh, Mouser, you’ll break her trance.” “Trance?” … The little man sneered his upper lip and shook his head. His hands shook a little too, but he hid that. “No, she’s only stoned out of her skull, I’d say,” he commented judiciously. “You shouldn’t have given her so much poppy gum.” “But that’s the entire intent of trance,” the big man protested. “To lash, stone, and otherwise drive the spirit out of the skull and whip it up mystic mountains, so that from their peaks it can spy out the lands of past and future, and mayhaps other-world.”
The clash of symbols between the Mouser and Fafhrd here is audible and intentional. The Mouser uses “stoned out of her skull” in one way, and Fafhrd understands it in another, investing the trite slang with mystic import. That’s not lack of confidence on the writer’s part; that’s complete understanding of the instrument he’s making music with.
II. “Stardock”
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser arrive at a range of mountains in the Cold Waste, along with a snow-cat (a kind of lioness of the north) named Hrissa. Their task is to climb Stardock, but if climbing an unclimbable mountain weren’t enough of a challenge, they face human rivals with both weather-magic and werebear servants at their command, not to mention invisible enemies riding invisible flying bird-fish through the snows, and the occasional hotblooded furry snake-monster.
The clues to Stardock’s treasure were scattered around the world by the mountain’s savage yet sorcerous ruler, who’s looking for new seed to infuse into his people’s thinning bloodline. Fafhrd and the Mouser conquer the mountain despite all, sleep with a couple of invisible princesses, escape the more brutal attempts to collect their seed, and make it safely back to the base of the mountain, which is more than their rivals can say.
The ascent of Stardock is one of the great mountain-climbs in fantasy fiction, matched only by Juss and Brandoch Daha’s ascent of Koshtra Pivrarcha in the mighty Worm. It’s harrowing and dense with authentic detail. Leiber mentions in “Fafhrd and Me” how he climbed the occasional rock himself, and he dedicates “Stardock” to Poul Anderson and Paul Turner “those two hardy cragsmen”. No doubt they swapped a few stories.
A must-read for the sword-and-sorcery fan.
decoration by Keith Henderson from Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (1922)
III. “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar”
The Mouser and Fafhrd have fallen out on the long road back to Lankhmar. They split the loot and take different paths to fence their valuable but hard-to-dispose-of jewels from Stardock. Their different paths bring them to the same place at the same time: the intersection of Silver Street with the Street of the Gods in early evening. There the aristocracy of Lankhmar’s thieves are gathered, and the Twain grudgingly admit to each other that they’re the best of the lot.
Or are they? Before the end of the night they’re shorn like sheep and heading out of town by different routes.
This is just a transitional piece, to link “Stardock” with “The Lords of Quarmall”, but it’s nicely done. There’s some nice writing, and some nifty worldbuilding touches for the city of Lankhmar; we get a first mention of Hisvin the merchant, who’ll figure largely in The Swords of Lankhmar, and we see a lot of the thieves of the City of the Black Toga, including one intruder from another world: Alyx the Picklock, heroine of a wonderfully weird set of stories by Joanna Russ. Russ borrowed Fafhrd for her first story about Alyx (“The Adventuress”, a.k.a. “Bluestocking”), and this is Leiber nodding back at her.
IV. “The Lords of Quarmall”
The covers of Fantastic (January 1964 and February 1964) in which “The Lords of Quarmall” was serialized.
Okay. Here we are. What’s not to like about this novella?
There’s a lot to like about it, that’s for sure. For one thing, it includes the only substantial writing in the saga from Harry Otto Fischer, who invented Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser in correspondence with Fritz Leiber in the 1930s. He’d written about 10,000 words of a story and ground to a halt. With his approval, Leiber took his draft and wrote 20,000 more words, fitting in sections from Fischer as he did so.
In the novella, Fafhrd and the Mouser both find themselves in the subterranean realm of Quarmall as it comes on a crisis of succession in power. The current Lord of Quarmall is about to die, setting up a battle between his two sinister sons: sadistic, twisted Hasjarl and kindly, murderous Gwaay. Unbeknownst to each other, Fafhrd has gone into the employ of Hasjarl and the Mouser has been hired by Gwaay.
One of the two sons has to win the coming battle, and that means that their two bodyguards must come into mortal conflict. Unless there’s some third way for things to go. (Spoilers: there is.)
An interesting setup, certainly, and there are some good things along the way.
However, I find the pacing in this story to be off. For instance, the first 10 pages of the novella are just the Gray Mouser and Fafhrd each being bored in their respective places in Quarmall. Boredom is a difficult subject for fiction: it’s hard to depict it without boring the reader, and there’s seldom any point in doing it. Doubling these scenes by having Fafhrd and the Mouser go through almost exactly the same discontents doesn’t make it more interesting. Boredom in stereo is still boring.
Things start to pick up when the sorcerous stalemate between the two awful brothers breaks down. That’s forty-five pages into the story, but better late than never. In the end, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser will face each other in battle, like Balin and Balan in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, but less tragically, while Hasjarl and Gwaay settle their sibling rivalry in the only way that can satisfy them both, and the next Lord of Quarmall reveals himself.
It’d be interesting to figure out which parts of the stories are Fischer’s and which are Leiber’s. I spotted a couple passages I think may have been written by HOF rather than FL. One is the long infodump in the form of a letter sent to Fafhrd from Ningauble. It’s well-written but doesn’t sound like Leiber’s Ningauble; it’s interesting and shows great elements of worldbuilding, but it doesn’t advance the story at all–and in fact is slightly in conflict with it. Another is a scene where a local farmer narrowly escapes being captured by the Quarmallians. Again, it’s well-written and interesting, but doesn’t advance the plot. There are a few other bits that stand out to me. But unless there’s some evidence in the Leiber papers, wherever they are kept, I doubt we’ll ever know about this.
Not a worthless story, anyway; Leiber was incapable of writing something that is not worth reading. But the end of it has Fafhrd and the Mouser racing back to Lankhmar, where a far better tale awaits them in The Swords of Lankhmar.
D and I watched Lured(1947). It was watchable, maybe even rewatchable. With a script by Leo Rosten (of Joys of Yiddish fame), I expected it to be wittier than it was. But, given that it’s about the hunt for a serial killer, maybe it’s too light-hearted as it is. The mystery was pretty transparent, even though the red herrings in the story kept getting larger and neon-luminous. But the story moved pretty quickly, took some interesting turns, and made sense more often than not.
Screenshot
A very strong cast: Lucille Ball as the lead (as much as a woman is usually allowed to be the lead in a mid-century crime movie) was likable and convincing. George Sanders did his George-Sanders thing which works equally well if he’s a suave hero, a shifty spy, or a man-eating tiger. Borith Karloff chewed holes in the scenery in a wonderfully weird if small role. The secondary cast was full of character actors who appeared as murderers, crooks and third bananas in Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series (e.g. George Zucco, Alan Mowbray, Gerald Hamer).
Ball plays Sandra Carpenter, a taxi-dancer who becomes involved in the hunt for the serial killer after her friend becomes his latest victim. She clues the police into the fact that the killer is contacting his victims via the personals. She’s hired by the police to answer suspicious personal ads and keep the police informed. (I know this would never happen. Please direct all inquiries and comments to Messrs. Sirk & Rosten, who are dead and won’t mind so much.)
The joke, if it’s a joke, is that she’s constantly running into schemes to exploit young women in various ways. Only one of them is a serial killer, but they’re all creeps, and the movie implies that their name is legion. It’s the most realistic note in this not-very-realistic movie.
The murderer turns out to be the guy you knew the producers didn’t hire just to say two lines in three scenes. In the end, he’s caught red-handed. And true love triumphs over all, which is a weird feature of these softer-edged midcentury crime stories.
A painless 100 minutes for me, and a decent nap for D. Not quite up to the level of Sirk’s Thunder on the Hill(1951), which I saw for the first time recently and was deeply impressed by. But good enough to keep working my way through his filmography.
I’m always a little bemused that Lucille Ball didn’t have a bigger career in film. She was beautiful, had an expressive face and voice, projected intelligence, and (I’ll go out on a limb here) she was a gifted comic actress. But maybe that was the problem: comedy was the kids’ table in the studio system, and most of the seats were reserved for men.
Also: #EverythingIsStarTrek. In case you thought I’d forgotten that.
Artist unknown, but I’m pretty sure this image predates generative-AI boom. Anyway, she has the right number of fingers.
I reread more than I read. This has certain bad effects; e.g., the towering stacks of TBR books that constantly threaten to topple over and crush me, which are always growing taller, more numerous, and (if I’m not misreading their expressions) more angry.
I’d like to say rereading has compensating benefits, e.g. a deeper understanding of the texts I obsessively reread. But often my rereads just make me more confused.
Take Beowulf, a text that would be on my always-reread list even if I didn’t teach it twice a year.
Woody Allen was one of my heroes as a kid, but this line from Annie Hall should’ve been my first warning that there was something wrong with him.
Beowulf is already a hero when he lies down in Heorot, King Hrothgar’s famous mead-hall, to await the arrival of Grendel, the manslaying monster. Beowulf has come with his Geatish pals to Denmark specifically so that he can defeat Grendel. He discusses in advance his plans to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the monster, putting aside weapons and armor.
So: why doesn’t he wait by the door?
Beowulf may want to draw Grendel into the hall, not warn him off from the door. But that doesn’t explain what happens next. I’m not trying to roast Beowulf here, by the way, just trying to wrap my head around the scene.
Grendel bursts in, slamming the door of the hall open. He’s come to kill and eat, as he has so many times before.
Beowulf does nothing.
Grendel goes to one of Beowulf’s band of Geatish warriors, a guy (we will later learn) named Hondsciō (“glove”; compare modern German Handschuh “hand-shoe; glove”).
Beowulf does nothing.
Grendel kills Hondsciō and rips him to pieces.
Beowulf does nothing.
Grendel goes to where Beowulf is lying.
Beowulf does nothing.
Grendel grabs Beowulf, and then the fight is on. It’s WWE Raw Is War.
The (surviving) Geats leap up from where they’re lying and try to attack the monster but their swords have no effect. The Grendelkin seem to be immune to ordinary weapons.
Grendel soon realizes he’s out of his depth and tries to flee, but Beowulf won’t let go. Finally Beowulf rips Grendel’s arm off (hand, arm, shoulder), dealing him a mortal wound. Grendel flees back to his underwater lair to die.
The question that constantly bedevils me when rereading this passage is: why does Beowulf wait so long to start doing what he came there to do?
So far, my answer to this question (spoilers: I cannot really answer this question) comes in multiple parts.
The first part is geographical, and hinges on the design of these medieval Germanic halls like Heorot. They’re long buildings with a peaked roof, and a firepit running down the middle.
image above: a reconstructed Viking-era meadhall at Trelleborg in Sweden. image below: artist’s conception of such a hall’s interior from Gudmundson, Den islandske Bolig i Fristats-Tiden (1894)
After the feast, the tables etc would be stacked away (or used as beds?) and the henchmen would sleep in the hall by the firepit.
So the Geats come to Heorot, make a big deal about it being occupied again. (Grendel has been attacking it at night for twelve years, and people had given up sleeping there, lest they wake up dead.) The Geats lie down as if to sleep on either side of the firepit. Maybe Hondscio is on one side of the firepit and Beowulf is on the other. Grendel, like Buridan’s donkey, could go in one direction or the other. Unlike Buridan’s donkey, he’s not going to starve to death while making a decision. He launches himself against Hondscio, and then turns to the guy on the other side, who is Beowulf.
Professionally drawn graphic by a professional graphic-drawing guy.
Okay. But this still doesn’t explain why Beowulf takes so long to act. He’s not asleep and he’s not scared (according to the poet). It’s almost as if this is a turn-based game, like chess, and Beowulf has sacrificed a pawn to put the opposing player in an untenable position. That seems to conflict with the magnanimous nature of the hero as the poet represents him, though.
A bookish sort of explanation: Hondsciō’s death is necessary because it prefigures Grendel’s own death. In reparation for the loss of Hondsciō, Grendel loses his hand (along with his arm and shoulder), suffering a fatal wound.
A slide from my Norse myth class.
If this seems too academic and tweedy a reading for so savage a poem, I should add that Beowulf himself makes the connection when he’s retelling the tale to his uncle and king, Higelac, back in Geatland (line 2069b-2100). He talks about the hond-rǣs hæleða (“the hand-battle of heroes”) and goes on to describe the death of Hondciō, naming him for the first time in the poem. He mentions for the first time a weird glove (glōf) made of dragon-hide that Grendel had. Beowulf seems to describe Grendel’s habit of putting dead men into the glove. Which is really weird, does not clarify the situation, but does remind me of another mythological situation, where Thor and friends find themselves in a giant’s glove.
Beowulf concludes this part of his humblebrag by mentioning how Grendel’s right hand (swīðre… hand) remained behind in Heorot.
That line from hand to hand connects a lot of dots in the narrative. And maybe that’s enough. Beowulf describes Hondsciō as fey (“doomed”; fǣgum), and maybe that’s enough.
But maybe it’s not. It still doesn’t give a motivation for Beowulf’s odd stillness until he himself is attacked.
I wonder if the answer isn’t hidden inside Grendel’s identity. The Beowulf-poet famously or infamously grafts the Grendelkin onto the family tree of Adam and Eve, tracing their line of descent from Cain the murderer. But the Beowulf-poet is Christian, and this story probably pre-existed the arrival of Christianity in northwest Europe. So what was the pre-Christian identity of Grendel and his mother?
I think they were the restless dead, a perennial affliction in these Nordic stories. (Think of the Barrow Wights from The Lord of the Rings.) Glám, Grendel’s analogue in Grettir’s Saga (chs. 33-35), is one of the walking dead. And Grendel is repeatedly described as a ghost (ellengǣst “bold ghost”, 86a; se grimma gǣst “the cruel ghost”, 102a; wergan gāstes “accursed ghost” 133a).
But Beowulf kills Grendel. Killing someone who’s already dead seems like a definitional impossibility. But it is something that comes up a lot in these stories, and the answer is frequently some kind of mutilation, a practice known as “arm-pitting” (Greek μασχαλισμός). It’s precisely this kind of thing that Beowulf inflicts on Grendel.
But (not to beat a dead horse or monster here) why does it take Beowulf so long to act?
This is where I came in and this is where I go out, I guess, asking the same question. The only answer I can come up with is personal and has to do with nightmares. I don’t know if you’ve ever been attacked by a ghost or a sinister shadow in a dream. It used to happen to me pretty frequently, back when I was able to get a decent night’s sleep. (Deep sleep is a luxury old people have to learn how to do without. If you wonder why the old people in your life are increasingly crazy, that might be one of the reasons.)
When the ghost is coming for you in the dark, it seems to get the first move. You may see it; you may know it’s coming for you. But you can’t do anything about it. There’s a whole branch of magic in Morlock’s world devoted to stuff you can do in these situations. (See “A Stranger Comes to Town” for some practical applications.)
It may be that in the Ur-myth of Beowulf, he was in that nightmare state, watching the ghost approach and unable to stop it.
That’s not the the answer; as is common in myth and storytelling, there isn’t just one answer. But that’s the best I’ve got from this most recent reread.
I’m not a big fan of literary criticism in any field (although I have committed some), but one of my big books from my late teens onward was Le Guin’s The Language of the Night (1979), especially for the essays “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie” and “A Citizen of Mondath”.
Le Guin has some great passages in “Citizen” about what she liked to read as a kid, and how she liked it.
We kids read science fiction in the early forties: Thrilling Wonder, and Astounding in that giant format it had for a while, and so on. I liked “Lewis Padgett” best, and looked for his stories, but we looked for the trashiest magazines, mostly, because we liked trash. I recall one story that began “In the beginning was the Bird.” We really dug that bird. And the closing line from another (or the same?)—“Back to the saurian ooze from whence it sprung!” Karl made that into a useful chant: The saurian ooze from which it sprung / Unwept, unhonor’d, and unsung. I wonder how many hack writers who think they are writing down to “naive kids” and “teenagers” realize the kind of pleasure they sometimes give their readers. If they did, they would sink back into the saurian ooze from whence they sprung.
I’m pretty sure the first story she refers to is “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag” by Heinlein inUnknown (Oct 1942). It appeared under the false whiskers of “John Riverside” because at the time the Heinlein byline was reserved by John W. Campbell for RAH’s “future history” stories.
I never figured I’d find the source of the mysterious “saurian ooze”–except that maybe I just did. In looking for Henry Kuttner stories online I found this opus in Strange Tales (Aug, 1939). The appearance is pseudonymous, because he had a “Prince Raynor” novelette in the issue under his own name. And the crucial phrase was from the editorial blurb rather than the story itself.
Screenshot
Kuttner, of course, was roughly half of “Lewis Padgett”, along with C.L. Moore. And most of their work, whatever name it appeared under, seems to have been collaborative from the time they met and married, so Moore may have exuded some of that saurian ooze herself.
Le Guin’s accounts don’t exactly match up with these texts: “In the Beginning was the Bird” is a ritual phrase used by the Sons of the Bird in Heinlein’s story (one of his best fantasies, by the way), but it’s not the opener of the story. And the saurian ooze springs out at the reader at the Kuttner story’s beginning, not its end (and with a shift of ablaut at that). But given that Le Guin was writing about these stories 20-30 years after she’d read them, I’d say the shoes fit the footnotes pretty well.
