Long before Moorcock, however, another author had found a way to combine Howard's gusto with a more literate sensibility: Fritz Leiber. Even before Howard's death, Leiber and his friend Harry Fischer had in 1934 created the characters of Fafhrd, a clever barbarian, and the Gray Mouser, a consummate thief -- both expert swordsmen, both adventurers extraordinaire, and both relying in more or less equal parts on their skill at swordplay, their brains, and their luck, but above all, on their partner. The two young authors even in 1936 submitted a story apiece (Leiber's "Adept's Gambit" and Fischer's "Quarmall") to H. P. Lovecraft, famous as an encourager of young artists, who thought Fischer had more imagination but judged Leiber the better writer. Fischer soon abandoned writing to become a salesman of corrugated cardboard boxes (any job being precious in the Depression),[1] but despite rejection notices from Weird Tales Leiber pressed on, honing his style and developing a whole world (Newhon, an anagram from "No when") as a backdrop for the pair's adventures. With the advent of John W. Campbell's Unknown,[2] Leiber finally found the perfect venue for his tales: an audience that craved adventure but demanded witty dialogue and plot twists, above all insisting that the stories obey their own internal logic. The five stories that appeared there are still among the best in the entire series (and, by extension, the entire sword and sorcery genre): "Two Sought Adventure" (later renamed "The Jewels in the Forest"), "The Bleak Shores", "The Howling Tower", "The Sunken Land" (which contains the inspiration for D&D's cloakers), and "Thieves' House" (from whence all subsequent Thieves Guilds derive).
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