All in all, this is one of the milestone pieces of Sword & Sorcery and the wider fantasy genre.Ĭatherine Lucille Moore used her initials but not to conceal her gender from readers, but her identity from her employers, the Fletcher Trust Company in Indianapolis.

It could also be considered one of the first examples of Howard’s influence on the genre. If she’s not the actual first, she’s the next best thing. We’ll ignore the bit about the lamentations of the women, because if she heard you say that, you might be best advised to end yourself before she can hurt you. Jirel of Joiry might be the first female character in fantasy to get star billing as the peep responsible for crushing enemies and seeing them driven before her. It will never rock an arena – although how knows what might have happened with a full length – but nobody cares when they’re watching a great pub band. This book is like a perfect pub band it walks on stage, it entertains, then it walks off again and is at the bar before you’re done clapping. It’s also very tightly focused on the adventures, which will mark it down for some but up for those like me, and a lot of the resolutions come about due to Jirel’s sheer willpower rather than the might of her sword, which is nice. The writing’s decent, there’s a few good lines, the plot has a few twists, and the action and worldscapes are what makes this a cut above. Now, I will freely admit that weird violent adventures is a sweet spot of mine, so Jirel of Joiry would have to do some work for me to not enjoy it.

I’m sorry, did you miss the part where I said “Eowyn with a bad attitude invading worse acid trips”? The language is a little dated and some of the descriptive prose gets more than a bit dense, but for the most part this flows free and easy. It is perhaps closer to the mark to say that this is Eowyn with a bad attitude invading worse acid trips. The glib summation of this is “Female Conan”, but that misses some nuances to say the least. There were only six short stories written about her and the books are collections of some or all of them. What Jirel normally walked into was some horrific supernatural realm full of sinister eldritch types who, while occasionally fearful of her, mainly wanted to torment her in some way. Jirel of Joiry was a character who first appeared in Weird Tales, a formidable swordswoman and the lady of some mythical part of France, who acted like she walked right out of one of R.E. Welcome to the next installment in my Retro Reviews! If the limerick wasn’t enough of a clue, today’s book features a heroine straight from the lists of fantasy’s most bloody-handed and bloody-minded, and it is a delight to read. Who was one real tough sword-swinging belle,