One Sought Adventure

Writing about Fritz Leiber is not easy for me, because while the man was an acknowledged master of several genres and a highly popular and influential writer, he’s not someone who’s work resonates with me in particular.

Leiber was born in Chicago in 1910 – a late part of the same generation as Howard – only 4 years younger. He was roughly contemporary with the Weird Tales set, and yet he outlived almost all of them, passing away in 1992, long past the glory days of the pulps. Leiber was one of the few pulp writers who managed to transcend the label and move out into a wider fame and even a certain literary respect in an era when few genre authors got much of any.

He was born to an acting dynasty, and he hovered around the fringes of the profession most of his life. He wrote for movies, taught drama, and even appeared in a few small parts himself. In his fiction he shifted from form to form, producing stories and novels from fantasy to SF to horror. Later in life he produced lauded works and won several Hugo awards, spending the heyday of the 60s SF field as a kind of elder statesman.

But his first published work was a Sword & Sorcery piece entitled “Two Sought Adventure” in 1939, and it introduced his indelible heroes Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser – the prototype for all the Tank-and-Rogue pairs ever since. He produced a slew of stories about the two throughout his life. Their career spanned most of his own, with new works appearing well into the 80s.

Leiber is also credited for coining the very term “Sword & Sorcery”, in a fanzine exchange of letters with British author Micheal Moorcock. Moorcock demanded a name for the genre and Leiber came back with “Sword & Sorcery” no doubt in line with such familiar genre titles as “Sword & Sandal” or “Cloak & Dagger”. The name stuck, as it was both apt and edged with Leiber’s trademark wit.

And wit was a big part of what made Leiber a giant, as well as why his S&S stories just do not work as well for me as such. Leiber was inventively, almost savagely satirical, and he quickly tired of straight-up adventure stories and moved into more slyly humorous territory. Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser stories like “Lean Times in Lankhamar” and “Bazaar of the Bizarre” are some of the most viciously pointed satires you will ever find. His more direct tales, like the original “Two Sought Adventure”, and the hair-raising “The Howling Tower” are some of the leanest, most engaging S&S stories you will find. But Leiber’s need to work commentary into his narratives adds a layer of irony I just find does not work as well for me.

He remained a familiar and welcome presence in the field his whole life. TSR Inc. licensed his setting and characters for publication in game terms, and the royalties from this allowed him a measure of comfort without needing to work through his twilight years – his writing had never provided as much money as it had admiration. He lived simply in a single room in San Francisco, passing away at the age of 81. He moved S&S away from simple imitation of Howard and proved the genre had the breadth to be more than people perhaps imagined. Leiber was never one to be bound by conventions, and neither was his fiction.