I notice, for instance, that I claimed to be the product of a particular form of Christian mysticism. While it is true that for a short time (at around the age of seven) I attended Michael Hall School in Sussex, which was run on the rather attractive mystical Christian principles of Rudolf Steiner (in turn a break-away from Madame Blavatsky's brand of spiritualism), it is not really true to suggest, as I did in one of the pieces reprinted here, that I was "brought up" according to Steiner's ideas. In fact, my background was almost wholly secular, much of my immediate circle was Jewish and I was only briefly interested, as a young adult, in Steiner's ideas, which had influenced my mentor, Ernst Jelinek. These, however, did influence the cosmology of the Elric stories. Poul Anderson's marvelous fantasies The Broken Sword and ThreeHearts and Three Lions were probably of equal influence, as was my fascination with Norse, Celtic, Hindu, and Zoroastrian mythology.
I had begun my professional career as a contributor to a British weekly juvenile magazine called Tarzan Adventures, which was a mixture of reprinted newspaper strips and original text. My first regular commission was a series of articles on Edgar Rice Burroughs and his characters, but I was soon writing fiction, some, like Sojan, adapted from the stories that first appeared in my fanzine Burroughsania, which I had founded in my last year at school (I left at the age of fifteen).
These first stories were fantasy adventures bearing, not surprisingly, a strong ERB influence, and I have reprinted one here to give a flavour of what I was doing a few years before I created Elric. More of my early ups and downs in publishing can be found in the various departments of www.multiverse.org. Warts and all, they don't show as much promise as I sometimes like to think. They do offer, I hope, some encouragement to writers who are yet to publish professionally! Re-reading these stories, however, I think they do show a fairly marked improvement as it began to dawn on me that there was a readership for that kind of fiction and that I was no longer-as I had been when I worked as a journalist and for the comics-anonymous.
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 Zeniththe Albino, republished in a particularly fine edition by Savoy Books (www.savoy.abel.co.uk/HTML/zenith.html). 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 theRings 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 TheMetatemporal Detective (Pyr, 2007). Zenith, rumoured to be a Yugosla-vian 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 just for escapism, of course. Faulkner-though not most of Hemingway or Fitzgerald - was a huge enthusiasm, and I had others, including Twain, of course, together with Sinclair Lewis and his generation of realists. There were many I found in the pulps. I had loved the full-blooded science fantasies of Leigh Brackett and the work of the young writer she had befriended, Ray Bradbury, who often appeared in the same issues of Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories. It only occurred to me later how so much that was good about Anglophone fiction came out of California. It wasn't just the great movies being made there from the beginning of the twentieth century. Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars wasn't too far away in the deserts beyond Tarzana, and both Brackett and Bradbury grew up there, making of Burroughs's Mars what others made of Dickens's London. Like his Vermilion Sands, Ballard's Mars is as Californian as the language that influenced the likes of Chandler, Hammett, Cain and all those other Americans whose tone can still be heard, faintly perhaps in English literary fiction, to this day.
Before I came to write the first Elric stories I was already absorbing the kind of literature which influenced my generation, including that of the great French Existentialist writers and film-makers. I made my first trip to Paris at the age of fifteen. I went to see Sartre's Huis Clos and Camus's Caligula. I read their novels. I became an enthusiast for the likes of Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Boris Vian, Blaise Cendrars and William Burroughs. Although no great fan of most of the Beats, I had met some of them in Paris and had friends who were huge admirers.