Elric_ The Stealer of Souls - Michael Moorcock [5]
Over a period of time following almost exactly the period in which I was writing the first Elric stories, I was inclined to distance myself from the work of Robert E. Howard, even though he had been an important influence (unlike Lovecraft, for whom I had no taste). Over the years I have seen many other writers put space between themselves and their main sources of inspiration and have come to understand it as an important, if not particularly admirable, part of the process of trying to make one’s individual mark. I soon began giving Anthony Skene the credit he deserved for Zenith the Albino. Eventually I was instrumental in helping get Skene’s only Zenith hardback novel, Monsieur Zenith the Albino, republished in a particularly fine edition by Savoy Books (www.savoy.abel.co.uk/HTML/zenith.htm). Until then, there were only three copies of the book known, one of which was in the British Library. In recent times, of course, I have also given Howard due credit and even by the early 1960s was perfectly happy to announce him as an important influence. Tolkien, although my dislike for The Lord of the Rings became exaggerated in argument, was never an influence. As with Lovecraft, I think I came to him too late. Neither author needed any help from me to get the readership he deserved. I am proud, however, of my part in getting Skene republished and helping, in a small way, to make so many of his old magazine stories available online. From being a hero of my youth Monsieur Zenith appears to have become the friend of my seniority. As well as helping Savoy to reprint their extraordinarily lavish version of Monsieur Zenith, I have written a number of stories designed to return Elric to his roots. By linking Zenith (or Zodiac as he’s sometimes called) and Elric, I hope I show how they were almost certainly the same person! Sexton Blake is “disguised” by my use of the detective’s real name (Seaton Begg) from his days as a Home Office investigator. These stories were recently published as The Metatemporal Detective (Pyr, 2007). Zenith, rumoured to be a Yugoslavian aristocrat, disappeared during the intensity of World War II, making his last Sexton Blake appearance in a story called “The Affair of the Bronze Basilisk.” Another version of his return can be found at the Sexton Blake web site written by Mark Hodder (Blakiana.com).
Looking back through the non-fiction pieces of the 1950s and early 1960s, I seem to have been consistent in my admiration for Fritz Leiber. My dislike of The Lord of the Rings has, as I say, been exaggerated. I do, I must admit, dislike the religiosity exhibited by the work’s nuttier fans but had, in fact, every reason to like Professor Tolkien. When I was young and The Lord of the Rings was seen as one idiosyncratic book among others—like William Morris’s pseudo-sagas, E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of Pegana or David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus—Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were both very kind to me, as were writers I admired rather more, like T. H. White, author of The Sword in the Stone, and Mervyn Peake, author of Titus Groan. Peake in particular was a more direct influence on the Elric stories. I came to know Leiber and take as much pleasure from his company as I did from his fine, precise prose which in my view is superior to that of every English fantast of his generation. I don’t think I was alone as a boy in preferring, for well-written escapism at least, the work of American writers. And not