(If this isn’t my best review, please bear over with me; it’s been over two months since I read this book.)

2001 (1970, 1962, 1970).
165 pages.
“Induction” (2 pages)
“The Snow Women” (74 pages)
“The Unholy Grail” (27 pages)
“Ill Met in Lankhmar” (62 pages)

Swords and Deviltry is the first collection of short stories in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series’ The First Book of Lankhmar omnibus. In it is contained the story of how Fafhrd came to run away from his barbarous village far to the north, where his clan’s women ruled supreme over the men through the power of their frost magic (”The Snow Women”); the tale of how the hedge wizard acolyte Mouse came home from a journey to find his master betrayed and dead, set out to avenge his master, and finally left for Lankhmar as the Grey Mouser (”The Unholy Grail”); and finally how these two came to meet in that city, how they befriended each other, and how they became as close as brothers (”Ill Met in Lankhmar”).

It is more or less classic sword and sorcery. Fafhrd has an uncanny resemblance with Conan, and the Grey Mouser have some traits in common with, say, Elric (master swordsman and more or less able sorcerer) although with a lot of roguish characteristics as well. They inhabit a world of dark magic and cruel men, with large, sprawling city states and gargantuan, thinly populated wild areas, and an ancient history. Much of this is only hinted at in Swords and Deviltry, though, but seeing as it contains only the first three of about a hundred Fafhrd and Grey Mouser short stories, I assume more detail will be added later.

Not that it’s in any way light on detail as it is. Leiber’s prose has a very Baroque feeling to it, with a slightly archaic syntax (not as archaic as most of the Fantasy writers of only a generation before, though); a lot of old words, especially adjectives, rarely seen today; a dark tone; and very lavish and organic descriptions of surroundings, atmosphere, characters, and what have you. At times the text is so packed with information reading becomes slow, but Leiber still manages to keep it all interesting enough to make it worth reading.

The stories do, however, wear their individual short story origins on their sleeves, at times, and it is quite obvious that the stories are written in a whole different sequence and only collected in an intradiagetical chronology (so to say) on a later point in time. This, combined with roguish characters who live by their wits and their skill with a blade, contributes greatly to the picaresque atmosphere of the collection as a whole, but the fact that they are, after all, put together in a chronological sequence, reduces the annoyance this relative lack of continuity and consistency might generate.

For me, the main weakness of the collection was that beyond the introduction of the characters of Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, it did not contain a sustained plot. Granted, this is a general dislike I have, one that makes me prefer long narratives (e.g. novels) over shorter ones (such as novellas and short stories). Granted, too, that the whole Lankhmar sequence might be said to constitute a single narrative of sorts, or even that a deeper, broader, more lasting and unified plot might surface later on, but in the case of this first collection, none of this really matters to me.

All in all, I was left with a most ambivalent impression of Fritz Leiber’s works. It showed great promise, and was almost exquisitely well made, but that it is basically a collection of semi-related short stories kinda ruins it for me, and will make it hard for me to pick the collection up again and read on.

6.0/10.