Customer Reviews

Swords And Deviltry

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've heard of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series for as long as I've been reading fantasy but never bothered to pick them up. I'm always leery of starting long series. I took the opportunity with the new reprints of this series to jump in and start from the beginning. I'm not disappointed in the least.

While all the familiar fantasy trappings are here (the evil wizards, thieves guilds and helpless princess) they are done in a fresh way that makes this older series look more modern than most of the new books out. The cities are well developed and rich with a detailed history that is drawn with a quick sentence or two. Just the description of a mason's office adds a depth that automatically gives the city deep dimensions.

The characters are described as "anti-heros" but they act with honor and a code of conduct. they aren't perfect by any means but are drawn realistically.

The real beauty of the book isn't the swords and sorcery action although there is plenty of that. The great thing about this book is the relationships explored here. Fritz Leiber explores mother/son relations, the yearning of a young boy for a missing father and the longing for escape every teenager growing up in a small town feels. He describes the pain of fear Ivarian feels so exquisitely it almost breaks your heart.

The most amazing thing to me is that Mr. Leiber packs such a dense, rich narrative in only 217 pages. This book feels a lot more entertaining than several of the epic fantasies I've read in the past few years. Like another of my favorite authors, Ray Bradury, Fritz Leiber is succinct and to the point and truly a great storyteller.

This is the first of the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser books. It includes the origin story for each hero, as well as _Ill Met in Lanhkmar_, a classic novella that no true fantasy fan can afford to miss. It is truly exceptional.

Leiber can write circles around most fantasy writers, just as the Mouser's trusty blades Scalpel and Cat's Claw forever carve deadly arcs of steel lightning around so many hapless foes . . . Welcome to friendship, adventure and dialogue of the first water--welcome to Newhon!

(Note: This one is followed by Swords Against Death & Swords in the Mist. All 3 are available in a book-club edition called The Three of Swords, which is a great intro to Leiber's fantasy world and to "low" fantasy in general.)

Poor Fritz Leiber. He has never truly received the credit he deserves for fostering the fantasy genre. Along with the old Conan stories and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, this is amongst the most influential works of fantasy fiction.
Fascinating worldbuilding, intrigue and exciting characters abound in these tales, all told with Leiber's exceptional artistic skills. Not only are the plots and personalities compelling, but Leiber has a magical rhythm to his storytelling and descriptions. This is one of the few stories that is on my "reread" list.

Pick this up and you'll love the stories--and when you look at the copyright date of these tales, you'll come to appreciate just how much Leiber has affected the fantasy authors that have come since.

THREE-AND-A-HALF STARS

Fantasy usually concerns itself with sweeping subjects. The rise and decline of ancient empires. Fell magics as old as the cosmos. The terrible tolls mighty armies extract on the field of battle. You get the idea: It's a Texas-sized genre. Small doings and personal struggles generally need not apply unless they somehow factor into the grander picture. That's why Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories (which have largely fallen out of the popular consciousness) read so differently than contemporary fantasy. Though they contain all the tropes, such as swords and spells and spectacularly strange beasties, their protagonists are petty criminals preoccupied with petty deeds. In fact, Leiber's first installment in the series, Swords and Deviltry, feels more like crime fiction than anything else.

Grown to near manhood in the Cold Waste north of the Trollstep Mountains, barbarian Fafhrd once stood to inherit a chieftain's life and the hand of a beautiful maiden. But an insatiable longing to see the civilized south bore him away from the land of his birth. In another corner of the land of Nehwon, Mouse had planned to spend his days studying gentle conjurations with a humble hedge wizard. Yet when a local lord's prejudice lead to his mentor's death, he took up the sword and a new name -- the Grey Mouser. When the two meet by chance in smoggy Lankhmar (called City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes), a meeting conducted over the unconscious bodies of professional thieves (their loot hastily divvied up by share), an impromptu agreement is sealed between the northman and the former magician's apprentice. Come peril or danger, fire or blood, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser will face it together.

Time magazine's Lev Grossman named the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories in a list of his favorite fantasy novels, calling their protangists "pure hard-boiled noir." This may be a bit of an overstatement, particularly in Swords and Deviltry's opening novella, "The Snow Women." Intended to explain Fafhrd's origins, it's a slow slog through cold wastes, one alternately serious and silly. Jealous womenfolk weave deadly ice magic and pelt interlopers with frozen snowballs. A village leader plummets to his death attempting to leap a gorge on skis. Flush with jealousy over a comely southern dancer, Fafhrd knocks over the tent of one of her admirers with a sleigh. Only during a climactic battle near the story's end do the kid gloves come off and the hardboiled tone asserts itself with a vengeance. ("His sword came away almost before the gushing blood, black in the moonlight, had wet it, and certainly before Hrey had lifted his great hands in a futile effort to stop the great choking flow. It all happened very easily.")

The other two tales fare better. "The Unholy Grail," which details the Gray Mouser's background, is a classic revenge story, showing how the unjust killing of mild-mannered Mouse's mentor turned him into a remorseless rogue trapped between light and darkness. A subtle, slightly ambiguous ending only adds to the intrigue. But "Ill Met In Lankhmar" is the best out of all of them, a slow-burning noir that gradually grows more and more dire, culminating in the kind of all-out martial rush that high fantasy does so well. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser's robbing from the Thieves' Guild teaches them that there are higher prices to pay than one's own life. Deviltry provides an intriguing twist on a oft-stale genre.

Fritz Leiber's tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were something I'd hear about off-and-on as a young gamer. Unfortunately, they seemed impossible for me to find. Library after library didn't have the collections in stock, and older acquaintances who fondly remembered them reading in various magazines had long lost the actual copies. As I got older, I heard more and more about how Leiber's tales shaped how gamers approach fantasy, especially through works like Dungeons & Dragons and its computer-based successors and imitators. But beyond that, there is a general respect for Leiber as a story-teller. My impression after reading this collection is that it is well-earned.

I was having a sleepless night when I decided I wanted to read some fantasy, and I downloaded this on my iPhone, set the text really dim... and read and read.

The first "story" is actually a vignette, introducing our heroes on their first meeting. The next two are "origin" tales for the pair. These stories are not the first tales of Lankhmar, but were selected according to their chronology. The stories themselves are straight-up swords & sorcery. I won't get into the debate about Leiber's qualities as a world-builder without reading more, but the actual world here is both thin and very familiar to anyone who has ever sat down to play D&D. While the tropes of the genre are all there--including, yes, the sex & violence--Leiber stands above the genre in a way no other writer in it has for me, other than Robert Howard.

Leiber's cadences and vocabulary are studied and old-fashioned, but he drives the stories along. These are "page-turners" in the best sense of the word. I will definitely seek out the other collections after reading this; I'm convinced, at least, of the pleasures of reading Leiber.

I must confess that I had some preconceived notions about Fritz Leiber's work. Because he's credited with coining the phrase "Sword & Sorcery," and because I never hear women talking about his stories, I imagined that they appealed mainly to men.

But, a few factors made me decide to give Fritz Leiber a try:

1. I feel the need to be "educated" in the field of fantasy, which means that I should read
novels that are out of my normal repertoire.
2. The fantasy shelves are glutted with urban and teen fantasy and I'm feeling a bit nostalgic.
3. And (this one's the clincher) [...] has recently produced audio versions of the
Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories.

So, I downloaded Swords and Deviltry to my MP3 player and pressed play. Within two minutes, I was completely enthralled. The first part of the novel (which is really a compilation of short stories) tells the tale of Fafhrd's liberation from the taboos, close-mindedness, and "icy morality" of his mother and clan (and the girl he got pregnant) in the northern wastes. He yearns for civilization, and finally gets a chance to "escape this stupid snow world and its man-chaining women" with a beautiful showgirl.

The second section introduces us to Mouse, who is apprenticed to the white magician Glavas Rho, but who feels the pull of the black arts -- "the magic which stemmed from death and hate and pain and decay, which dealt in poisons and night-shrieks, which trickled down from the black spaces between the stars..." A murder and a betrayal force Mouse over the brink and he restyles himself as The Gray Mouser.

I was engrossed in the tales of both of these young men, so when the audiobook reader finally said "Chapter 4: Ill Met in Lankhmar," I felt a thrill of delight! Of course I'm familiar with the name of this Nebula (1970) and Hugo (1971) award-winning novella, and I knew I'd be reading it in Swords and Deviltry, but for the first time the name had real significance for me and I couldn't wait to witness the meeting of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. And it was, as promised, a lot of fun.

But most of all, even more than the adventure, I just loved Fritz Leiber's prose. It supported the story in the few places where it dragged or at times when I was annoyed that all of the female characters were odious. For me, its cleverness and beauty was the dominant feature of Leiber's writing:

"The Mouser dug into his pouch to pay, but Fafhrd protested vehemently. In the end they tossed coin for it, and Fafhrd won and with great satisfaction clinked out his silver smerduks on the stained and dented counter, also marked with an infinitude of mug circles, as if it had been once the desk of a mad geometer."

Certainly these stories will appeal most to men who particularly enjoy fast-paced adventure, male camaraderie, sword-fighting, and easy women. But I found this first set delightfully refreshing. I've already downloaded the next Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser compilation (Swords Against Death) and I'm hoping to meet some worthy women in it. But if not, I'll still enjoy Fritz Leiber's way with words.

Fritz Leiber is the grand master of sword & sorcery (although he also mastered science fiction and did some fine contemporary fantasy as well). Other writers got in a little earlier in the pioneering phase of the genre (Robert Howard with his Kull, Conan, and Solomon Kane series, all fine books) but no one ever mastered the sheer inventiveness of dark fantasy, the wit and humanity of two lovable characters, the deliciously strange-yet-familiar aura of his imaginary world, and the deceptively literate writing style (deceptive because his beautiful writing forms no barrier to whatever pace of reading you set for yourself) as has Leiber.

His heroes, unlike others, such as Conan, do not whore themselves out as paid murderers, and they do not steal anything from anybody who really needs what they are stealing -- they exist in an acceptible moral gray-area, if you care about such things. You surely do care about Fafhred and The Gray Mouser, though, because they utterly human while being utterly heroic.

If there is any flaw in these tales, it is that the role (or "agency/personhood" if you want the anthropological term) for the females is not strong until the middle and end of this saga (which spans 53 years of off-and-on writing), although even some of the early female characters are powerful in their own way. Leiber wrote these tale across his whole career, spanning ~1939 to 1992 at his death, and this saga series in a sense reflects the changing ideologies of American culture during this time.

Leiber did remain a liberal humanist, though, and the artistic core of all his writing reflects a a way of thinking that still seems fresh today (and for me, after several readings). He was my writing mentor though he did not know it, as he must have been for three generations of fantasy writers. If you have not read Leiber, I envy you! Because I can only re-read him, now.

He is in and out of print,lately. I am glad to see some publishers trying to keep him alive, though the quality of the actual books is sometimes disappointing. I do miss the old Jeff Jones covers! -- wt

Swords & Deviltry is the first of a series books chronicling the adventures of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. It is not a novel, but rather three connected stories. The first 'The Snow Women' tells of what prompts Fafhrd to leave the cold northern wastes and seek a different life in civilization. 'The Unholy Grail' tells of the first adventures of the Grey Mouser and the origins of his name. A Nebula was awarded to the third story 'Ill met in Lankhmar' and recounts the first meeting between the two heroes. While the first two stories are good, it is only when our heroes meet that the magic really begins. Leiber is an excellent writer and the Swords series is amongst the best of the genre.

I first read of the companions / champions Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser as an early teenager. Some of the writing was simple and some a slow slog ( as has been said before) in the introduction of the main characters. The magic begins as they first meet and from that point on there is no power on earth and possibly more importantly neither in Nehwon and Lankhmar that can ever seperate the bond they have. From one great fantasy story to another they forge an unlikely duo against death, they roam far and wide for love, honor or just escape. Every story reveals the undividable nature of their relationship, one that stands for all time in this world and many many others. I found this first book and the ones to follow as I have reread them through the years, to be unique in the fantasy realm and a treasure that laughs at any god that would attempt to rout this twains ability to stand the test of time.

I've heard about Fritz Leiber for years, but having grown disillusioned with the fantasy and swords and sworcery genres a long time ago, I only now got around to trying out this first volume in the "Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser" series.

It is surprisingly subtle, with as much humanity and as vivid characterizations as any fantasy book I've read. At the same time, it is told from a very male perspective. The women are not cardboard cutouts, and Leiber (for someone born in 1910) has a surprisingly modern perspective on gender relations, but it must be admitted that the men dominate the action, with the women forced to wait at home. Of course it could be argued that this male dominance is not unrealistic, but it may well be unsatisfying for those hoping for brawny, sword-swinging women.

The book gets stronger as it progresses. I would have given five stars, but the first story, "The Snow Women", begins at a glacial pace. However, the hard slog pays off. By the the time you reach the climax of "Ill Met in Lankhmar", you can't put it down.