Shunning the clichés of fantasy like a thief shuns the light, Leiber guides Fafhrd and the Mouser through the gritty, decadent streets of Lankhmar – the prototype for every mediaeval fantasy city from Thieves’ World to Ankh-Morpork – feasting, drinking, wenching, fighting, winning and losing fortunes. Making their debut in the August 1939 issue of Unknown (as it was then), in Leiber’s first published story, ‘Two Sought Adventure’, the nimble thief and the giant barbarian are the forerunners of recent fantasy’s morally grey protagonists. That’s to name just two.īut his crowning glory and the series before which all fans of Joe Abercrombie or Scott Lynch should abase themselves (just kidding reading the books will be sufficient – no need to abase!) is, of course, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. And Our Lady of Darkness (1977) brings the paranormal to the streets of modern-day San Francisco a decade ahead of the curve. That’s forty years before Terri Windling‘s Borderland series of shared world anthologies was launched, and a good half a century before the first Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter novel.

How so? Well, he published Conjure Wife in Unknown Worlds in 1943 (expanded and released as a stand-alone novel ten years later), a dark tale of witchcraft in contemporary small-town America. But what if your tastes run more to heroic fantasy or sword-and-sorcery? Or contemporary fantasy or urban fantasy? To which antecedents do you tip your hat in those cases? Obviously, there are a number of options for such a wide spread of subgenres but, as it happens, you could probably save yourself a lot of legwork by just saying ‘Thank you, Fritz Leiber’. It is a well-established article of faith that if you love modern epic or high fantasy, then you acknowledge a debt to J.R.R. Winner of the 1944 Retrospective Hugo Award, Conjure Wife is widely celebrated as a modern classic of horror-fantasy and has been adapted for film three times: Burn, Witch Burn (1962), Weird Woman (1944), and Witch’s Brew (1980).

Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber