Swords and Deviltry by Fritz Leiber

My copy

It's time for me to relive the 1980s, when I was an AD&D obsessed teenager and sought out Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories because Gary Gygax mentioned them specifically, and emphasized the importance of Leiber, in the famous Appendix N of the Dungeon Master's Guide.  In those late Cold War days I acquired the six Ace Books chronicling the adventures of Fafhrd and the Mouser, Swords and Deviltry, Swords Against Death, Swords in the Mist, Swords Against Wizardry, The Swords of Lankhmar, and Swords and Ice Magic, the first four with vague but evocative Jeff Jones covers, the fifth with a pretty specific cover by Jones, and the sixth with a very literal Michael Whelan cover.

Today we read my copy of Swords and Deviltry.  Swords and Deviltry was first published in 1970, and my copy of the 16th printing from 1985 is labeled "The First Book of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser," but isfdb informs us that Swords in the Mist, Swords Against Wizardry, and The Swords of Lankhmar all have copyright dates in 1968, and that the first F&GM stories appeared in John W. Campbell Jr.'s Unknown Worlds in the World War II era.  As an undated Author's Foreword and a revised version of a 1973 Author's Introduction written by Leiber that appear in my copy of Swords and Deviltry indicate, these Ace Books are numbered such that they reflect the course of F&GM's lives, not of Fritz Leiber's writing career, and the meat of Swords and Deviltry consists of stories first published in magazines in 1962 and 1970 about the youths of the famous pair of swordsmen.  I strongly considered reading the F&GM stories in publication order, to follow possible changes in Leiber's style and consider the evolution of the presentation of sex in SF and in American culture in general and all that, but opted instead for the simpler nostalgia route--I will engage these stories in the order in which I first did back in the later 1980s.

Swords and Deviltry contains four stories, plus the aforementioned Foreword and Intro that tell you what order to read the books in, assure us that F&GM are the greatest swordsmen in all history and all universes, and pay homage to Leiber's friend, Harry Otto Fischer, whom Leiber credits with creating Fafhrd and the Mouser as well as Ningauble of the Seven Eyes and Sheelba of the Eyeless Face.  There is no map of Nehwon or Lankhmar in this book, though a map of Nehwon does show up in my 1986 printing of The Swords of Lankhmar.

On the left, a first edition of Swords and Deviltry

"Induction" (1957)

This one-and-a-half-page item introduces us briefly to the world of Nehwon and the Land of Lankhmar and the City of Lankhmar, and to Fafhrd, the barbarian from the cold north, and the Gray Mouser, a little guy in a hood apparently from the cities of the warm south.  Leiber puts forward the idea that they are "two long-sundered, matching fragments of a greater hero" and will be comrades for "a lifetime--or a hundred lifetimes--of adventuring."  This reminds us of Horace's third ode from his first book of odes, in which he calls Virgil "half of my soul."  Should we perhaps think of these F&GM stories as a monument to, or a wish-fulfillment fantasy of, male friendship?  I do recall hearing that Fischer based them loosely on himself and Leiber.

"Induction" was first presented in the 1957 hardcover book Two Sought Adventure, which collected seven F&GM stories from magazines like Unknown Worlds, Suspense and Other Worlds.

"The Snow Women" (1970)

Whoa, this is a long one, over a hundred pages here in Swords and Deviltry.  "The Snow Women" first appeared in Ted White's Fantastic, illustrated by Jeff Jones.  This issue also includes Leiber's reviews of books by Judith Merril, C. L. Moore, and Joanna Russ that are worth checking out.

Fafhrd is eighteen, a member of the Snow Clan of nomadic barbarians who every year come down to Cold Corner on the edge of the frozen north to trade with southerners.  The tall blue-eyed women of the Snow Clan keep their men under control with their cold magic, and during the trading visits to Cold Corner they exercise their witchcraft to the utmost, because at Cold Corner a troupe puts on a show that women and children are forbidden to attend, a show featuring naked Southern dancing girls that inspire the Snow Women's jealousy.  This battle of the sexes is so intense that the women keep to their own big communal tent, chanting spells that threaten to inflict on their men runny noses and impotence.  The Snow Men travel in groups, because if they venture out alone the Snow Women are liable to gang up on them, bombarding them with frozen snow balls and even  beating them up!

"The Snow Women" is the story of Fafhrd, who is alienated from his cruel controlling mother Mor, the most powerful of the snow witches, and has pumping through his veins the blood of his adventurous father Nalgron, who loved to climb mountains and died doing so (perhaps killed by one of Mor's curses!) when Fafhrd was a child, making a decisive break from his people and leaving behind the life of a barbarian to embrace civilization, to explore the world of the south and its bustling cities.  When the Snow Women catch Vlana, one of the Southern dancing girls, alone and pummel her with snowballs, Fafhrd rescues her and tends to her wounds--Fafhrd is trained as a skald, one of the Snow Clan's singers and healers.  Fafhrd has a girlfriend, Mara--in fact she is pregnant and this story features a sex scene between her and Fafhrd--but Vlana, who is not only beautiful but for Fafhrd represents the wider world and the civilization that fascinates him, wins his heart.  The conniving designs of Mor and Mara, who think men need to be controlled by any means necessary, and the brutishness of pirate captain Hringorl, toughest man in the Snow Clan, who seeks to purchase Vlana as a slave from the manager of the show, serve to further sour Fafhrd on barbarian life, while Vlana's stories of life in Lankhmar city make civilization ever more enticing.  Vlana and Fafhrd have sex and plot to escape Cold Corner together.

In the action climax, Vlana betrays Fafhrd and sneaks out of Cold Corner with another man, but Hringorl and his pirates are in hot pursuit.  Fafhrd ignores the pleas of Mara and survives the murderous magic of Mor to hurry after Vlana in hopes of saving her.  He takes a shortcut, using rockets stolen from the show to boost him as he ski jumps over a canyon like some kind of Dungeons and Dragons Evel Knievel.  He rescues Vlana after her other lover is killed by the pirates.  Vlana explains her treachery in a speech about life in a man's world: because men are stronger than women, women have to cleave not to the man they love the most, but to the man whom they think can best protect them.  Now that is Fafhrd, and the two flee the power of the Snow Women south to the cities. 

There are a lot of sexual elements to this story, lots of talk of rape, lots of women's breasts being bared, and Mara and Vlana both accuse Mor of incestuously fashioning Fafhrd into a replacement for the dead Nalgron.  When Fafhrd sneaks a peek of Vlana's naked dancing, Mara sneaks up behind him and grabs his crotch to see if he is aroused by the southern dancing girl.  Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser have sex with lots of not-quite-human women throughout their careers (we just saw this in "The Mer She") and it is perhaps significant that one of Vlana's sexy dances, which Leiber spends two pages describing, has her dressed as a big cat, so cunningly disguised with fake fangs and forelimbs that some of the barbarians in the audience think she is an actual leopard.

As a kid I was disappointed that the first Fafhrd and Gray Mouser story was a relationship drama about leaving home and not some kind of tomb-looting monster-slaying horror/adventure, but as an adult I of course am thrilled by the tale of a young man escaping the clutches of smothering jealous women and ditching nowheresville for the big city.  The magic of the Snow Women is well presented, and the whole story is well constructed, with early hints and foreshadowings paying off later in a satisfying fashion.  Thumbs up!

"The Unholy Grail" (1962)

"The Unholy Grail" made its debut in Fantastic during the editorship of Cele Goldsmith, where it enjoys some pretty creepy and effective illustrations by Emsh.  In his intro to a 1995 omnibus edition of Swords and Deviltry and Swords Against Death titled Ill Met in Lankhmar, Michael Moorcock tells us that Goldsmith loved sword and sorcery stories and the early Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories in particular, and commissioned Leiber to write new F&GM tales for Fantastic.  Moorcock says that the audience for sword-swinging fantasy stories, which now dominate SF publishing, was tiny back then and claims that Goldsmith, by spurring the creation of new Gray Mouser stories, and Donald Wollheim, by printing a more or less illegal edition of The Lord of the Rings, started the fantasy boom that still continues today.  Moorcock also says that Goldsmith's editorship of Fantastic makes her an equal partner with Judith Merril as a "godmother of the American sf New Wave."

(You can borrow a scan of this 1995 Ill Met In Lankhmar from the internet archive and read Moorcock's two-page intro yourself; he manages to mention John W. Campbell, Jr. without insulting the man, but does work in an attack on fans of J. R. R. Tolkein, whom Moorcock famously has it in for.)

Glavas Rho was a white wizard who lived in a little cottage behind a big boulder in the woods in the land of Lankhmar where he tended his herb garden and was friends with the forest creatures and trained his apprentice, Mouse, a young man with a dark side, an interest in swords and black magic that Glavas Rho tried to discourage.  In sight of the woods sits Duke Janarrl's stronghold.  Janarrl hates wizards, perhaps because of those rumors his now dead wife was Glavas Rho's lover and that the daughter he has raised, Ivrian, is in fact the wizard's flesh and blood.  When Janarrl discovers that Ivrian has been sneaking off to study with Glavas Rho at Mouse's side, he beats Ivrian until she helps him unravel the confusion spells which obscure the path to Glavas Rho's cottage.  So, when Mouse returns from a quest for a magical artifact, artifact in hand, he finds his master's burned cottage and burned corpse, and vows revenge on Janarrl.

Mouse uses a voodoo doll to torture Janarrl, bringing him to the brink of death, but when Ivrian seeks him out and finds him in his cave with his magical implements she is followed by the Duke's men and Mouse is captured.  Janarrl puts Mouse on the rack, but with Ivrian's help the apprentice wizard exploits the Duke's fears of his dead wife and weaponizes his own hate and destroys the Duke with a powerful work of black magic.  Mouse has embraced what Glavas Rho called "the spider's way" or "the cat's path" and earned the name The Gray Mouser. 

In "The Unholy Grail" we see some of the same themes we saw in "The Snow Women," like women credibly accused of treachery who argue they were pushed to extremes by men, and people whose parents are evil violent jerks with disastrous marriages.  Janarrl's efforts to make Ivrian cruel and violent like was her mother echo Mor's attempts to fashion Fafhrd as a replacement for her lost husband.  I can certainly get behind this strike-out-on-your-own message!  An additional theme we see in this story is the oblique debate over whether the universe is run on love, as Glavas Rho tries to teach, or hate, as teaches Janarrl.

A good black magic story.  "The Unholy Grail" has been included in several anthologies of fantasy stories, among them Dark Imaginings and The Sword and Sorcery Anthology.

"Ill Met in Lankhmar" (1970)

"Ill Met in Lankhmar" was first printed in F&SF and was embraced by the SF community, winning both a Nebula and a Hugo for Best Novella and being reprinted in numerous anthologies over the years.  In "The Snow Women" and "The Unholy Grail" it is hinted that Fafhrd and the Mouser briefly met while Mouse was on that quest and Fafhrd was sailing with a pirate raid commanded by Hringorl, but this story tells of the decisive meeting that starts their famous partnership.

Our story takes place in the smoggy city of Lankhmar, to which The Mouser and Ivrian arrived a few months ago, and Fafhrd and Vlana a little more recently.  The barbarian and the wizardling meet when they both ambush, each to the surprise of the other, a pair of thieves who are returning from the robbery of a jewelry store during which they killed a guard leopard and knocked unconscious a merchant.  They then join forces to fight off the thieves' bodyguards.  Immediately striking up a friendship, the Mouser invites Fafhrd to meet Ivrian at the home he has lavishly decorated with stolen rugs and tapestries for his aristocratic girlfriend; Fafhrd brings with him Vlana and lots of booze.

In this story we learn about the Thieves' Guild of Lankhmar, an institution of great power that manages all the stealing in the town and ruthlessly punishes anybody who tries to do any freelance thieving.  Back in "The Snow Women" we learned that Vlana has a bitter grudge against the Thieves' Guild because she tried to live by stealing in Lankhmar and her partner, another woman, was murdered by the Thieves' Guild.  (Membership in the Thieves' Guild is forbidden to women--if a Thieves' Guild operation requires the services of a woman to seduce a man or something like that, they hire a whore from the Whores' Guild.  Similarly, the bodyguards F&GM slew were hired from the Slayers' Brotherhood.)  Vlana's vow of revenge on the Guild is a main topic of conversation among the four freelance criminals, and the dancer bitterly complains that Fafhrd and the Mouser didn't murder the two thieves they robbed.  At first the men resist calls to wage a war on the powerful Guild, but after everybody has gotten quite drunk and Ivrian has added her voice to Vlana's, F&GM relent and head out to reconnoiter Guild HQ.   

Disguised as beggars (the Beggars' Guild is a subsidiary branch of the Thieves' Guild), our heroes enter Thieves' House and observe the layout of the place and the various goings on in there, witnessing the work of a diabolical magic by a hideous sorcerer who is a master of rats and smog and being confronted by, and escaping from, the Master Thief.

Back at the Mouser's loot-furnished attic F&GM come upon the horrible product of the spellcasting they witnessed: Vlana and Ivrian were killed by magical smog and are now being devoured by rats!  They rush back to Thieves' House and battle the wizard, and then, vengeance achieved, depart from Lankhmar.

Leiber does a good job of building suspense in "Ill Met in Lankhmar," littering the story with foreshadowings of future disaster and evidences of dangerous magic working against them that our heroes miss or misinterpret.  Everything F&GM do--getting drunk, leaving the women alone, daring to infiltrate the Thieves' Guild--feels like a mistake and we readers are on edge waiting for the payment for these errors to come due.  Like "The Snow Women" the story is well constructed, and like both "The Snow Women" and "The Unholy Grail" it features very cool, quite sinister sorcery.

Unlike that other 1970 story, "The Snow Women," which was replete with references to rape, incidents of girls baring their breasts, and sex scenes, "Ill Met in Lankhmar" has no sex elements that I can recall.  Maybe this is because of the tragic tone Leiber was going for, but maybe the more prestigious venue in which it appeared played some role?

In 1971 Theodore Sturgeon's "Slow Sculpture" won the Hugo for Best Short Story, and when I read it I declared this celebration of elite manipulation of the masses a "Hugo mistake."  But I can side with the Hugo voters who gave the nod to "Ill Met in Lankhmar."  Hugo well deserved.

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I enjoyed these stories more than I had expected to, more than I did when I read them as a teen.  So, a big thumbs up for Swords and Deviltry, and high hopes for Swords Against Death, which I plan to read soon.

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A hardcover edition of Swords and Deviltry published in 1977 by Gregg Press included not just a map (maybe the same map in my copy of Swords of Lankhmar?) but also a poem about the Gray Mouser written by Leiber that first appeared in the 1944 fanzine The Acolyte.  You can read this fanzine at the internet archive, which besides Leiber's poem includes an article by Leiber about H. P. Lovecraft's work, an article about Lovecraft the man by E. Hoffmann Price, a drawing of a monster by Clark Ashton Smith, and other things of interest.  I copy the poem by Leiber below.