Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [6]
In recent years, Jim confined himself chiefly to private commissions, including a jacket for my own copy of Stormbringer, illustrations for other friends’ books and so on. His last professional commission was a portrait drawing of some of his favourite characters for Savoy Books, which they have put on their website.
After he returned from London to his native Gateshead, he helped look after his mother, a woman of considerable character whom I liked a great deal and who periodically wondered if I could help him meet a “nice girl” to marry. Jim’s standards, as I would tell her, were far too high, perhaps because he knew so many outstanding women of considerable strength of mind. He loved his mother as well as his sister, Maureen, who was very much her mother’s daughter. Sadly, he never married. For some years he was in love with a woman who, while being fond of him, did not wish to marry him. This was the tragedy of his life. He had several other relationships but never found another woman with whom he wished to settle down. His love for family and friends was considerable and enduring, and those closest to him often felt they knew his family as well as he did, since he spoke of them constantly. He came from a family of hard, fighting Tyneside men, though he and his father were rather more sensitive than the others and were inclined to use their humour and eloquence to negotiate any trouble. In fact, Jim was one of the gentlest and kindest men I knew. He gave away enormous numbers of drawings and paintings. His close friends and family would get wonderful birthday and Christmas cards, frequently containing humorous drawings and limericks. It’s painful to realize we shan’t be seeing them anymore.
In the months before he died Jim had become unwell and had not felt like talking on the phone. He explained some of this in terms of the depression he sometimes suffered, but we continued to correspond. One of his last letters was about The Yiddish Policeman’s Union and Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon. He was enthusiastic about these new Elric editions and particularly pleased that his work was being represented in them. He went into hospital for routine tests on November 2, 2008, and died there unexpectedly on December 2. A postmortem diagnosed pancreatic cancer. He leaves his recently widowed sister, Maureen, and a number of nephews, nieces and cousins. Our sympathies go to them. They have lost a particularly fine and talented relative as we have lost a friend. Savoy Books have a tribute on their website and there are plans to produce a memorial volume of his work. It is a matter of particular sadness that he did not live long enough to help put this last Del Rey volume together. We have tried here, in an expansion of our usual archive section, to show some of his best work, which also serves as a tribute to him.
A year or two after the film The Land That Time Forgot was released, John Goldstone, one of the producers of The Final Programme (the Jerry Cornelius movie done a couple of years before that), suggested that I write a script based on my Eternal Champion series. I agreed, on condition that Jim do the storyboard if and when the project went into production. In those days hardly