Fritz Leiber - The Black Gondolier and Other Stories

“Yes,” she explained, standing up, “the bees are merely going to carry your pollen to all these beautiful girls.” She spread her arms wide, then leaned forward and finished. “But before they can carry your pollen, Mr. Adams, they have to collect it."

Detectives Morris and O'Brien stayed for a last ruminative look around the stuffy, dried-out garden, after the rest of Homicide had come, sniffed and sniffed, finally shrugged and departed.

“There's something real mysterious here,” O'Brien declared, staring at the rows of shriveled brown plants. “For instance, why do I keep thinking of mummies?"

Morris shrugged. “The coroner says Adams died of simple inanition. That means nothing but lack of water and food. Now why should a guy with all that dough and all those beautiful babes lock himself in a secret hot house and starve? There's your mystery."

“He couldn't have been such a bad joe,” O'Brien observed absently. “Look at all that money he left to the girl fresh out of the mental hospital—Alice something-or-other.” He moved to the potting table. The intent note came back into his voice. “But there's still a mystery here. Take those dead bees all in and around that one pot—that pot with the dried-up plant that's got dead vines around it from the next pot and that still looks to me—"(he shivered) “a little like him."

Morris chucked uneasily. “The real mystery,” he said to O'Brien, “is where you get your morbid imagination."

How on earth do you sum up the lifetime achievement of someone like Fritz Leiber? In truth, I don't believe you can, at least not to any great satisfaction. Leiber's influence on the horror, fantasy and science fiction genres is incomparable. You only have to look at the slew of modern fantasists and fabulists out there with their urban take on horror and the lurking evils of stone and slate to see the paranoid nightmares of Smoke Ghost creeping across the rooftops all over again.

Fritz Leiber was special. Not only was he a genuine literary titan, there's no question of that, he was a gentleman known for getting into long correspondences with fans, an actor and a scholar. Still the question remains, where do you begin? Obviously one angle would be to focus on the critical acclaim and the shelves laden with Hugo's, Nebula's, and World Fantasy Awards but the truth is awards only tell so much of the story. Equally, one could attempt to dissect the body of work left behind, picking out the highlights from a career of highlights, offering thoughts on just why Conjure Wife and Our Lady of Darkness are two of the most chilling occult novels of all time, or on what makes Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser such a captivating—and lasting—pair of rogues but that has been done so wonderfully by writers much more accomplished than I. A brief biography perhaps? Illuminating the dry spells which interestingly enough seemed to almost always end with a change in writing direction might be interesting.

Or one could simply say thank you for the chance to share such a precious gift.

I can still remember the scene quite vividly. I was nine and my father was working away from home a lot. On one of his rare returns he came into my bedroom clutching a very battered copy of Fritz Leiber's Night's Black Agents he had found on the train. He thought it might be my cup of tea because the blurb promised “Worlds of fantasy and adventure!” coupled with “Nightmare stories of the oily-clawed beings that lurk in the coal-sack shadows of the city!” He was going through a stage of absent parent guilt, I think. It was just after the divorce and both he and my mother were very worried as to how I would take it, after all, divorce was a relatively new phenomenon back then. About the only thing he knew for sure about me was that I loved ‘strange’ stuff like Star Wars, so over the last few homecomings he had brought copies of Tolkien's The Two Towers (another novel rescued from a train) and one of Brian Daley's Han Solo spin-offs. All of these were terrific introductions to the literature of the fantastic and in their own way shaped my childhood into one of awe and wonder where nothing was ever quite as it seemed and shadows existed for no other purpose than to cloak a deeper and more sinister darkness. I was hooked.

That copy of Night's Black Agents travelled with me to school for about three months with me reading each of the stories over and over. My favourites differed from week to week, depending on my mood. One week I might be haunted by The Dreams of Albert Moorland, the next I would be unable to escape the lure of The Girl With The Hungry Eyes. Thanks to Fritz Leiber, I know one truism for sure: you

never forget a good story.

When I was fourteen—and had devoured the entire stock of Lankhmar novels shelved in the local library, as well as Silver Eggheads and Green Millennium—I went back to Night's Black Agents, to read again The Sunken Land and Adept's Gambit. It was a hot summer day and England were doing fairly well in the Test Match so my English teacher, Mr. Knock, was in a benevolent mood. Free reading was the order of the day. Whilst my classmates lifted out battered copies of Henry IV Part One and Cold Comfort Farm I took refuge at the back of the class and lost myself in Simorgya once again. While Fafhrd and Mouser were in danger of being sucked down by the sinking island Mr. Knock plucked the book out of my hands and began thumbing through the yellow-edged pages, perhaps looking for some adolescent sex scenes, after all, I was utterly engrossed and that never happened with school work. Holding front and back cover delicately, he opened the book like a bird taking flight, the breaks in the spine showing which pages I kept returning to most frequently or lingering on longest. Smiling to himself, Mr. Knock began to read aloud:

“I think of the autumn of 1939, not as the beginning of the Second World War, but as the period in which Albert Moreland dreamed the dream. The two events—the war and the dream—are not, however, divorced in my mind. Indeed, I sometimes fear that there is a connection between them, but it is a connection which no sane person will consider seriously, if he is wise."

He ended up spending the next thirty minutes reading The Dreams of Albert Moorland to the class. About a week later, I noticed a copy of The Book of Fritz Leiber on his desk. Coincidence?

Apart from in itself being a dream come true, putting together The Black Gondolier And Other Stories has been a gift more precious than I can begin to express. I had actually forgotten just how wonderful some of these stories are. The language is crisp, the dialogue rich, the imagery vibrant. It is an incredible thing when you think about it, but The Casket Demon's media savvy heroine would be equally at home in today's Hollywood, her jet-setting lifestyle a match for an army of modern starlets, her command of the paparazzi sharp enough to rival the glamour of even the boldest and the most beautiful. And it's not just that story. The Black Gondolier with its prescient oil is more even more vital now than it was in 1964. Think United Nations edict 666, think Kuwait and Sadam, think of the x-million cars a day that roll over the bridges into our major cities, think of the failure of so called green power and the fallout of Chernobyl. Who can say for sure that the black stuff isn't working to its own agenda?

I think this longevity of not just story but the actual writing as well is the ultimate tribute I can offer to Fritz Leiber as a writer. That, coupled with the honest admission that there are eighteen stories gathered here and I dearly wish that I had written all of them, they are quite simply that good. As a writer, Leiber transcended the natural scope of genre, creating equally brilliant stories in the fields of fantasy, science fiction and horror, something a good many of the self-professed literati still claim is impossible despite the evidence laid before them.