• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 572 0

until 1918 that his greatest enemy appeared in the pages of the Union Jack, a weekly paper devoted to Blake’s adventures. The enemy was Monsieur Zenith (always “Monsieur,” perhaps to show that he was a Romanian aristocrat in disguise), a pink-eyed albino who smoked opium cigarettes, played the violin like an angel, was waited on by fanatically loyal Japanese servants, and was immensely strong and agile, living only for danger and careless of his own life. He would battle Blake in a series written always by Anthony Skene (real name G.N. Phillips) until 1941 when, in The Affair of the Bronze Basilisk, he would die in an air-raid. The Sexton Blake Library finished in the early 1960s, but not before it had published my first novel Caribbean Crisis under a house pseudonym. Blake stories, however, continue to be written to this day.

Of course, as a boy, I had read copious amounts of Romantic fiction and poetry, from Norse epics to The Song of Roland, various Peninsula Romances and Gothic novels either by Germans or in the German tradition, including Carlisle’s German Romance, Lewis’s The Monk and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer. I had read Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Fritz Leiber and Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword, but I had not read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, though I had met both Tolkien and Lewis, who were also enthusiasts of some of the Americans I enjoyed. By the time I was sixteen, in 1956, the year I became editor of Tarzan Adventures, I had found my way to Paris, which was where every London boy wanted to go for his first solo trip abroad. There, I played my guitar outside George Whitman’s Mistral bookshop (now Shakespeare and Co.) and made enough money to buy books from him. By then my great enthusiasm was for Sartre, Camus and other French existentialists. All of these would influence the Elric stories.

When I was first asked to write an epic fantasy series for Science Fantasy magazine in the early 1960s I already had some pages written concerning a hero who would continue M. Zenith’s adventures in a fantasy setting. They were written in open homage to Skene’s creation, though, of course, by the time I came to set Elric’s adventures down on paper my hero was already undergoing something of a sea-change. Reflecting the zeitgeist of my generation, which made heroes of James Dean, Elvis Presley and the early Marlon Brando, he became the man you will find in the following pages. Instead of perfect evening dress, he generally wears black leather and iron. Like M. Zenith, he swiftly becomes an outcast, but where Skene’s albino was mysterious concerning his origins, mine was very specific about the psychic burdens he bore, the events creating his nightmares, and, of course, he had acquired supernatural powers. The first story, “The Dreaming City,” appeared in 1961. The first Elric stories were published in France in about 1965. Philippe Druillet, around the same time, began to draw an original Elric story for a short-lived magazine called Moi Aussi. The Elric stories have, therefore, been appearing in France almost as long as they have appeared in England and before they came out in the United States. Nowadays he appears in a considerable number of different languages, including Mandarin, Estonian and Hebrew, and is without doubt my best-known character around the world. I have a particular affinity for his French version, however, especially since Druillet, like the English illustrator Cawthorn, who first drew him, in turn inspired me. Elric soon appeared in lavish Opta editions, which remain probably the most beautiful books ever to feature him.

It was not long before Elric left his inspiration behind and became my own character completely. These days I can, if I wish, write about him without reference to anything I have previously done. He lives, three-dimensional, inescapable, in my imagination. I recall his adventures much as I might recall my own. I have reread very few of the stories here, yet have never been accused of any serious inconsistency. I wrote the majority of them rapidly. Short