Fritz Leiber Studies: Introduction

Fritz Leiber was an American fiction writer, primarily known for his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sword and sorcery series. His first professional sale, in 1939, was a tale of the two anti-heroes, and his last major work prior to his death, The Knight and Knave of Swords, was a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novel. He won a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1964 for The Wanderer. In 1967 he won both the Hugo and Nebula award for Best Novella/Novellette, “Gonna Roll the Bones”. In 1969 he won the Best Novella again for “Ship of Shadows” and both the Hugo and Nebula once more in 1970 for “Ill Met in Lankhmar”.  Leiber (pronounced LIE-ber, as in “tell a lie”, not LEE-ber) was also an actor, a chess champion, a competitive fencer, and a lay preacher.

My first encounter with Leiber was around 1978, a few months before I started playing AD&D. I was in Falk’s Food Basket, a grocery/department store in Palmer Township, Pennsylvania. There was a bin of discount paperback novels. One was titled Swords and Deviltry, and a blurb on the cover declared that it contained the Nebula-award winning story “Ill Met in Lankhmar”. I loved science fiction at the time, although not much fantasy, but if it won a Nebula I felt obliged to read it. The book went with me on my first plane trip, a family vacation to Disney World, and I read it in the airport and on the plane. The thing I remember most about that trip was wanting to find a bookstore and buy the next book. I had discovered something far better than any theme park could offer. My love for Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, and sword and sorcery in general, blossomed there.

When I bought my first Dungeon Masters Guide, I was please to see Leiber listed as a primary influence upon the game. It made me feel smart; I was ahead if the curve. As I sought out early issues of Dragon Magazine, I was pleased to see his name on the very first issue, contributing a new short story (although not, to my mild disappointment, a Fafhrd & Mouser tale). Leiber wrote a lot for the early issues of Dragon, although there’s no evidence that he ever played the game. TSR did an official Lankhmar game line, and Leiber reportedly lived comfortably in his last days on the royalties from those roleplaying products.

Recently I began re-reading the tales of H.P. Lovecraft — with whom Leiber not only corresponded, but wrote literary criticism of and even contributed a few tales of his own to the Mythos — and started exploring some Lovecraft scholarship along with it. There are several volumes in print about Lovecraft’s work and life, as well as an excellent literary podcast. This stirred up my interest in doing the same with Leiber, re-reading the Fafhrd & Mouser tales along with some sort of annotations by way of essays and biographies others have written. Alas, there are none in print. The definitive biography of Leiber was written in 1978 and is not only hard to find, its information is out of date. There simply is no active Leiber scholarship out there.

Thus, I aim to change that. My efforts here may be meager, but something filling the void is better that nothing. I’m hoping that other, more qualified people will decide they can do better than I, and take up the task. At the very least, I’m hoping readers will fill in the gaps and contact me with information I’m lacking. If this works, I’ll see about putting together a modest ebook, akin to Ken Hite’s Tour de Lovecraft. Leiber absolutely deserves more recognition, for the contributions he’s made to both fantasy fiction and fantasy roleplaying.