WEDNESDAY’S SHORT STORIES #149: THE BOOK OF FRITZ LEIBER

43 Replies
COVER ARTWORK BY GEORGE BARR

I’ve been a fan of Fritz Leiber’s works since 1963 when I bought a copy of Fantastic and read Leiber’s marvelous “Bazaar of the Bizarre.” I was hooked!

My next step was to search for Fritz Leiber paperbacks. I found a few: The Big Time, The Silver Eggheads, and Night’s Black Agents. Leiber leapt to the top of my Favorite Writers list. Over the years, I bought and read every Fritz Leiber book that came my way. One of my favorite Fritz Leiber books is The Book of Fritz Leiber. You won’t see an Editor credit on this book because Fritz Leiber chose all the stories and essays included in this great DAW volume from 1974.

In his “Forward” Leiber writes about influences on his work. The first is Shakespeare (his father was a Shakespearean actor) and his writing on “King Lear” in this volume is masterful. The second influence is H. P. Lovecraft who can be the spirit behind “To Arkham and the Stars.” “Beauty and the Beasts,”  a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story, captures the wonder of sword and sorcery.

The stories and essays in The Book of Fritz Leiber reveal the talent and genius of this exceptional writer who is too little known. GRADE: A

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43 thoughts on “WEDNESDAY’S SHORT STORIES #149: THE BOOK OF FRITZ LEIBER”

  1. Steve Oerkfitz

    I’m a fan of Leiber also. I had that issue of Fantastic. This volume seems to be mostly of leftovers. None of his classics are here. The Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story looks to be only a couple of pages long.

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    1. george Post author

      Steve, DAW gave Leiber a free hand to pick whatever he wanted to include in THE BOOK OF FRITZ LEIBER. In 1975, DAW published THE SECOND BOOK OF FRITZ LEIBER. I may be reviewing that book soon.

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  2. Wolf

    Same here!
    Just had to look it up:
    I own around 20 novels bei Fritz and 12 collections of stories – But Conjure Wife and of course The Wanderer are my favourites.
    Of course it helped that his stories were among the first fantasy/horror/sf that I read in English – fond memories!

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  3. Byron

    In a serendipitous touch I’m halfway through the Open Road Press edition of “Smoke Ghost,” a latgely horror-themed collection, and am enjoying it immensely although the selection feels odd and some of the tales are a little spotty like second-rate “Twilight Zone” episodes. Still, the good stuff is quite wonderful. My only other exposure to Leiber has been “Conjure Wife” and that was fine but Leiber seems much stronger in the short story format. I confess I don’t have much interest in his science fiction (although I’ll keep an open mind) and frankly have zero interest in the fantasy stuff. I’d love to check out more of his horror fiction so if you can recommend a good vintage paperback I’ll poke around ebay for a copy. The Open Road edition is POD and the quality is abysmal. Pages are falling out of the book as I’m reading it and this is a new copy.

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    1. george Post author

      Byron, I’m sure Todd Mason–a huge Leiber fan–will weigh in on Leiber’s horror fiction collections. I’d recommend: Day Dark, Night Bright (2002) a collection of 20 short stories. Also,
      Horrible Imaginings (2004), a collection of 15 short stories.

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      1. Byron

        Thank you, I’ll start looking for them. Forgot to mention that as an old movie lover I see Fritz Sr. On a regular basis. He had quite a distinctive fave and real old school screen presence. His also looked more than a bit like him.

  4. Jeff Meyerson

    I downloaded three Leiber collections to the Kindle – THE BLACK GONDOLIER, THE SMOKE GHOST (which I’ve read), and HORRIBLE IMAGININGS. The first thing I read by him was CONJURE WIFE, after watching BURN, WITCH, BURN! about 50 years ago.

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    1. Jeff Smith

      We were really hoping for a Nobel for Ursula K. Le Guin. Alas, didn’t happen. I don’t know if she’d have cared or not. (How can you not?) she didn’t much care about being published in the Library of America — she didn’t even realize that it was quite a honor because they rarely publish living writers.

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      1. george Post author

        Jeff, I see the Library of America has just published a volume of Joanna Russ: Novels & Stories:
        THE FEMALE MAN

        WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO . . .

        ON STRIKE AGAINST GOD

        THE COMPLETE ALYX STORIES
        Bluestocking
        I Thought She Was Afeard Till She Stroked My Beard
        The Barbarian
        Picnic on Paradise
        The Second Inquisition
        A Game of Vlet

        OTHER STORIES
        When It Changed
        Souls

    2. Todd Mason

      Well, I’ll take that as an honor…and Byron is wrong to dismiss CONJURE WIFE…all three of his horror novels (including also OUR LADY OF DARKNESS and YOU’RE ALL ALONE, which has also been published in a slightly longer form as THE SINFUL ONES) are among his best work.

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  7. Todd Mason

    Leiber didn’t produce too many “pure” collections, ass nearly every collection mixed as much of his range as possible–to dismiss his fantasy is frankly foolish, and to only grudgingly take on his sf likewise. BOOK OF and its sequel were meant to reflect his publishing career beyond his fiction, and his other 1970s retrospectives BEST OF and WORLDS OF are notable for a lack of overlap.

    If you wanted a single volume to give a good sense of his range leaning in on horror, the Berkley or Gregg Press editions of NIGHT’S BLACK AGENTS (which vary from 1st Arkham) would do, or of course the MASTERS OF tHE WEIRD TALE volume from Centipede if one can beg or borrow it. THE GHOST LIGHT has his fine memoir along w/good survey as well.

    But to not want to read, say, “The Man Who Never Grew Young” because it’s (ick!) fantasy rather than horror is to deprive yourself for no good reason.

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    1. george Post author

      Todd, the GOP Debate seemed to be an exercise in futility. The GOP base wants Trump and not these weak contenders. I think this GOP Debate will be memorable for “You are scum.”

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      1. Todd Mason

        …though perhaps it should be because Christie played the adult in the room this time, and delivered the hard and unpopular truth that “pro-life” doesn’t end with birth…Ramaswamy was aiming to be asinine scum, and if this performance doesn’t help sink DeSantis, I don’t know what will, except Meatball Ron himself in toto.

      2. george Post author

        Todd, one of the commentators on MSNBC said about the Wednesday GOP Debate: “I didn’t see anyone with Presidential qualities on that stage.”

      4. george Post author

        Todd, Trump will win the GOP nomination. But I’m concerned about all these Third Party knuckleheads. Remember when in 2016 when Jill Stein tipped three key states to Trump?

      5. Todd Mason

        No, she didn’t. Clinton ran such a bad campaign that she managed to lose, remarkably, to Rump in several states…thanks to the ridiculous notion that we should throw away the votes of voters in each state (with weak workarounds in Maine and Nebraska) and let Electors decide who is president. It’s similar to blaming Nader for Florida’s ridiculous 2000 ballot, the irresponsibility of Gore and Day O’Connor in how they handled the challenges to that ballot, and so on.

        I suspect that Kennedy, if he gets any notable votes at all, will draw mostly from potential Rump voters, as he has all the crazy without the jail cells in his near future (“choose your ‘martyr’, folks–step right up!”).

        No one is Owed a vote, however much Democrats like to insist they are.

      6. george Post author

        Todd, there’s plenty of agreement that Gore lost Florida because of Ralph Nader. Third parties are always wild cards that that are hard to predict. I suspect you’re right about Robert Kennedy, Jr. attracting anti-vaxers and conspiracy theory lovers.

      9. Todd Mason

        All the agreement that Nader “cost” Gore Florida is from Democrats who think they Deserve votes they haven’t earned. Even Pat Buchanan, who ran as a Reform candidate to help keep the David Dukes and Ross Perots from choosing to try again, noted how ridiculously-set-up the 2000 Florida punch ballot was. so that Buchanan received an improbable number of votes from heavily Jewish-American districts…who were presumably trying to vote for Gore.

      10. george Post author

        Todd, and Bush got help from the Supreme Court to win, too. Later, Sandra Day O’Connor admitted she regretted her vote.

      11. Todd Mason

        Of course the cultists do see tRump thus, but the question remains, are Christie or Haley somehow Less Presidential than tRump? Not really. Even /their willingness to play along with him for too long.

        Meanwhile, without the travesty of the EC, we wouldn’t have “spoiler” whining.

      12. Todd Mason

        Indeed, as I mentioned, O’Connor’s irresponsibility was if anything worse than Gore’s, though both deserve little praise for their feeble efforts to deal with the crimes before them. Other right-wingers on the SC were beyond any non-partisan judgment.

  9. Todd Mason

    His best sf novel by me is A SPECTER IS HAUNTING TEXAS, though the novella THE BIG TIME is even better.

    And since we’re noting Joanna Russ, one of my backed-up SSWs involves the stories that Russ and Leiber wrote involving each other’s characters Jirel and Fafhrd…like Leiber, Russ began as primarily a horror writer, and branched out. –Russ’s is “I Thought She Was Afeard Till She Stroked My Beard” (which Damon Knight first published as “I Gave Her Sack and Sherry”) and Leiber’s “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar”…

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  10. Todd Mason

    Leiber’s mother was also in the family Shakespearean troupe, as was young Fritz (who had a minor film career, unlike his father’s busy one)…Leiber Jr.’s most notable film was the Greta Garbo version of CAMILLE.

    Leiber’s parents play roles in his autobiographical story/play for voices “247 Talking Statues, Etc.”…in middle age, father and son were almost identical.

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    2. Todd Mason

      Career retrospectives didn’t end with the ’70s, such as his estate’s agent’s somewhat annoying posthumous LEIBER CHRONICLES…but the work is good.

      Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories range in quality…but the best of them are among his best work. If you’ve decided against them on the basis of one or even several…well, try “Ill Met in Lankhmar”…basically a story he used to help him out of one of his alcoholic hazes, this one following the death of his wife, Jonquil….the book gathering the Fafhrd and Mouser origin stories, and “Ill Met”, SWORDS AGAINST DARKNESS, is my default choice for the best of Ace’s paperback series, the first attempt to publish the stories in interior-chronological order.

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