Old Sorcery, New Edge: Q&A with Molly Tanzer

The award-winning author of 'The Diabolist's Library' trilogy on her route to writing, taming research and penning the official resurrection of Jirel of Joiry, the first lady of sword and sorcery

Jirel of Joiry by Sasha Durdevic

Molly Tanzer is an award-winning American novelist, short story writer and editor with a gift for combining historical fact with fantastical fiction. Reviving an iconic sword and sorcery heroine eighty-five years after her last outing, Molly is now continuing the adventures of the first lady of heroic fantasy in the pages of New Edge Sword & Sorcery.

Jirel of Joiry first appeared in the delirious 1934 short Black God’s Kiss by Catherine L. Moore. The flame-haired warrior-knight of the French province of Joiry, the character’s adventures spanned a mere six stories in as many years, all of them published in Weird Tales: Black God’s Shadow (1934), Jirel Meets Magic (1935), The Dark Land (1936), Quest for the Starstone (with Moore’s future-husband Henry Kuttner, 1937) and Hellsgarde (1939).

Cover art by Margaret Brundage

Though comparable in vigour and style, the Jirel stories were not as numerous as the barbaric tales of Robert E. Howard¹, while Moore herself never had an advocate like Glenn Lord or (thank God) an L. Sprague de Camp. Though her status as the first female sword and sorcery star has afforded her a respectable place in the canon. And I’d be very surprised if Roy Thomas hadn’t read those stories before penning Red Sonja for Marvel in 1973.²

Paperback Library edition, 1969, cover artist not credited

A young Catherine L. Moore, photographer and date unknown, image sourced from the Tellers of Weird Tales blog

Ace Books, 1982, cover artist not credited

Over thirty-five years since Catherine Moore passed away in 1987, Oliver Brackenbury, editor of respected fiction magazine New Edge Sword and Sorcery struck a deal with the Moore estate to continue Jirel’s adventures.

A canny choice of successor, Molly Tanzer excels at the very fusion of the historical and the downright Weird that makes the Jirel tales so distinctive. Like Moore, her prose is rapier-sharp and penetrating, and she’s a seasoned short story writer, with tales published in outlets including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror and The Big Book of Cyberpunk.

Molly, what do you say at parties when people ask what you do?

I usually say “I’m a writer and editor”, but if I’m wearing a black turtleneck I’ve been known to go for “I’m a novelist.”

Do you write part-time or full-time? Are you freelance? Where does writing fit in around your day job (if you have one)?

I write and edit full time. My main income stream these days is freelancing for two different companies that import manga and translate it into English. The most famous series I work on is Pokémon, but I’m currently working on a Magic: The Gathering manga called Destroy All Humans. They Can’t be Regenerated.

I also write novels and short fiction, but that’s been more part-time these days. I went through a period of pretty serious burnout for a few years, but I’m bouncing back from that!

Your first novel, Vermilion (2015) was a Weird Western, which you followed the same year with The Pleasure Merchant, a Georgian Gothic. Your paranormal trilogy of novels, The Diabolist’s Library (2017-20), spans Victoriana, prohibition-era America and 1940s England. That’s a lot of historical fantasy! What draws you to that genre?

Do you enjoy recreating historical settings? Combining fact with fantasy? Or is there a particular theme or neglected aspect of history you want to bring to light?

I’ve always liked history! My B.A. is in Art History. After I graduated, in the grand tradition of 20-somethings with no immediately marketable skills I went to graduate school, where I got my M.A. in humanities. The humanities program at my university was a very old-fashioned generalist program, so while my concentration was 18th century British literature, I ended up studying an eclectic mix of things... I took a year of Attic Greek, a history of Jazz class, Japanese art, and more. It was a great program for me — not for getting a job in academia, but when I realized I wanted to write fiction, not research papers, it’s been a constant source of inspiration.

I do like combining fact with fiction, finding those (trendy terms incoming) “liminal” and “interstitial” spaces where the fantastical could dwell unnoticed. Though, these days I have been writing less historical fiction and more purely speculative stuff, though still with research-heavy or historical cores. I have a forthcoming novella that’s a far-future SFnal art heist that tangles with Walter Benjamin’s tremendous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In 2022 I had a space opera in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction called Les Chimères that ended up having a lot to do with Surrealism, and my novel-in-progress is about the art world of a fantastical city where a new art movement similar to Impressionism is making waves.

William Morrow Paperbacks, 2017

I’m guessing those books were pretty research-intensive. How do you organise yourself and avoid getting lost in information?

Or are you just a history nerd and know all this stuff already?

I’m a history nerd, but I also do a lot of research! That said, I try to follow the advice of a friend of mine who once said his method of research was to write down everything he learned from a book or a documentary, and then only use what he could remember.

I’m not quite that severe on myself, but I also tend to be way too granular when I’m hyperfixating. So I let myself go wild in the drafting process and then in edits I pare it down to what doesn’t get in the way of the story.

Set in quasi-medieval France, Jirel of Joiry has you back in historical fantasy mode. Can you pitch us the new story?

I would never call the Jirel stories formulaic... but they do all start out in medieval France and end up with Jirel transitioning into “another realm” whether it’s her hopping through a window into a fantasy land, or traversing a mysterious swamp to a magical castle that only appears at dusk.

In my novelette, Jirel and the Mirror of Truth, Jirel actually starts out in another realm, where she is queen of a land called Coquaigne. Medievalists will probably pick out the reference to Cockaigne, the utopian land where “the houses were made of barley sugar and cakes, the streets were paved with pastry, and the shops supplied goods for nothing” found in the 13^th century French poem The Land of Cockaigne, the Kildare Poems, and elsewhere - Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted it!

Jirel’s Coquaigne is a bit different—there aren’t roast pigs walking around with knives in their backs for easy carving—but Jirel has it pretty good there. She’s queen, she has a handsome lover, she has food and wine and bloody military campaigns to keep her busy. But all is not as it seems, and when Jirel learns from a witch’s familiar that she is not of Coquaigne, but a place called Joiry, she starts to question everything about her life, and sets out to find the truth.

You’ve played with established stories before – Pygmalion in The Pleasure Merchant, The Picture of Dorian Grey in Creatures of Will and Temper, plus a bunch of Lovecraftian shorts (I really want to read your Herbert West in Love!) – but am I right in saying this is the first time you’ve worked on a non-public domain IP?

Was your approach any different? How much freedom were you afforded by C.L. Moore’s estate and your editor on New Edge?

This is indeed my first non-public domain IP, though Lovecraft is only debatably such... but I’m not going to get into that here. My approach was similar, I guess? While my Lovecraftian work is often doing a little nose-tweaking, or at least questioning some of the assumptions of the gentleman from Providence, with Jirel I tried my best to cleave pretty close to Moore’s vision. Why not? The Jirel stories are so freaking good. Well, maybe not Quest of the Starstone. But the others, ugh, they’re basically perfect!

My editor and I had a big talk about Jirel before I got started, to make sure we were on the same page—and since we were, he kind of let me run wild. I appreciated the trust!

Moore has a distinct style, balancing Dunsanian dreaminess with gritty two-fisted melodrama. And Jirel herself is a lot more strange and nuanced than the standard badass swordswoman readers might take her to be.

Would I be right in guessing one of the earliest creative decisions you had to make was: ‘How much of Moore’s style and character do I imitate and how much do I make my own?’

You’re right! I knew I could never imitate Moore’s style... Moore had this glass-clear prose style that makes me insanely envious. You can just see everything she’s describing. I struggle with that. I tend to write chewy sentences that I (or my editor) must untangle in revision. So I had to be myself in that regard.

Additionally, there have been major stylistic shifts in prose style since the ol’ Weird Tales days. It’s no longer as fashionable to write a novelette where most of it is describing, like, a bizarre landscape. So I resolved to write a more modern story (there’s more dialogue, Jirel has a friend) while honoring the spirit of the originals—and the spirit of Jirel herself!

She still likes big mean handsome men, she wears her iconic doeskin tunic and greaves, she would prefer to fight rather than think, she has an undauntable spirit, she shouts a lot. Wizards try to kiss her. You know, Jirel stuff!

Jirel is arguably the first substantial female hero in sword and sorcery fiction. Did that feel like baggage when it came to write her?

Given the character’s relative obscurity – certainly beside big brand names like Elric or Conan – there was no great fanbase to appease. But she has been canonised by a fair few critical essays. (One might argue she’s a character that’s been written about more widely than she’s actually read.)

Did you feel the need to tread with reverence or appease any section of the readership? Or did you just say, ‘to hell with all that’ and write the most rip-roaring story possible?

I treated her with reverence because she deserves it! But no, I didn’t try to appease anyone, I just tried to define for myself what really needed to be in a Jirel story and went for it.

Well, I did spend a lot of time trying to figure out which military terms were in use in medieval France and which came later? I don’t know if the Jirel readership really cares about that or not, but now that I’ve said that, I’m going to get an email lecture from somebody when the story comes out.

Bringing back Jirel in the current sword and sorcery fiction renaissance, it feels like you and New Edge have got the potential here to build this character into the icon that she never got to be.

She’s larger than life (Moore wrote that Jirel was “the woman I wish I could have been”³), but in those original stories she also feels surprisingly nuanced for a power-fantasy action hero. She’s a woman of faith who also embraces her sexuality, while remaining committed to her land and the men under her command.

How did you handle Jirel’s personality and humanity?

Jirel is a complex subject in her stories, and I tried to keep that complexity. But, Jirel is also a woman alone. Back in the 20^th century, it was pretty common for an exemplary woman like Jirel to be unique in her own context, a woman surrounded by men. There are other women, sure... there’s the campy stacked sorceress in Jirel Meets Magic, and the bitter ex-girlfriend of the demon guy in The Dark Land, and a few others. But Jirel has no women peers in her stories!

So one way I tried to explore Jirel and take her further (while remaining herself) is to give her a friend. In Jirel and the Mirror of Truth we meet a character of my own creation, the disgraced lady-chevalier Thevin Galois. Thevin was such a fun character to write, and she and Jirel ended up having a dynamic relationship that became the beating heart of the story, and let me write what I hope feels like “authentic Jirel” while showing a character capable of growth and change.

Jirel’s debut story Black God’s Kiss is her most anthologised and as such is the focus of most critical discussion surrounding the character. There’s plenty of debate over the symbolism of the stolen ‘kiss’ that sends Jirel off on her crusade for vengeance and has perhaps anchors the character in the role of victim. Yet in her later stories Jirel is entirely her own woman. Her final story Hellsgarde (1939) is, for me, where the character really finds her feet as a serial adventurer.

Which is your favourite Jirel story and how would you like to see her legacy carried forward?

Why editors anthologize Black God’s Kiss instead of Hellsgarde I will never know! Hellsgarde absolutely rips. It’s the best of the Jirel stories. I really think it’s as close to a perfect story as we mere mortals can hope to produce. All⁴ the Jirel stories are badass, but that one is clearly superior. The opening is so atmospheric, the setting is engrossing, the characters are totally wild. I love the ghost kisses and the final beat of the story is just... *chef’s kiss* so perfect. 10/10, no notes.

I get that it’s almost impossible to talk about Jirel without talking about the problem of Black God’s Kiss, but whew do I have a lot of feelings about the discourse surrounding that story! I think it’s appropriate and reasonable for people to see what they see in Guillaume’s assault — we all take what we take from art! That’s why it’s great! But to claim that the kiss scene must be read as a rape, or to say that Jirel’s character is defined in some way by that moment, is an argument — not fact.

Where can people find you online?

I’m online! I have a Twitter @wickedmilkhotel, but I don’t use it much these days for all the reasons. I’m on BlueSky under @mollytanzer. But I’m old, so I’m on Facebook more than most other sites, except maybe Instagram which I like the most, as @molly_tanzer. That’s where I post a lot of pictures of my baking and gardening and cocktail adventures.

I also have a Patreon, patreon.com/one_true_sentence, which is in a bit of transition right now... it used to be pictures of my handsome cat, but he passed away recently at the ripe old age of 16, so I’m figuring out what’s next for that space. I do post writing updates there, so if you want to hear about what I’m working on/what I have coming out/read excerpts from my writing, that’s the place.

I think I have a website too but I haven’t updated it since...lemme check. Hey, actually August ’23 isn’t too bad for me. Yikes!

Thanks so much, Molly. And stay weird!

Thank you!

You can read the double-length short story Jirel and the Mirror of Truth by Molly Tanzer in issue #3 of New Edge Sword & Sorcery, which is crowdfunding - alongside issue #4 - right HERE!

The campaign launches at 8am EST, Thursday 15th February 2024, with exclusive rewards for backers in the first 48 hours - and a unique reward for the very FIRST backer! Back issues are available as pledge Add-Ons and you can find out more about the magazine at the NEW EDGE SWORD & SORCERY WEBSITE.

Does Jirel have your sword?

Jirel of Joiry by Sasha Durdevic

1. A market-savvy pulp writer, Moore moved onto the more lucrative field of SF by the 1940s.

2. The tales of a red-haired she-devil for whom “no lover dared lay hands upon her save in answer to her smile,” the Jirel tales were collected for the first time in the Paperback Library edition of 1969. Black God’s Kiss was also anthologised in De Camp’s popular 1970 anthology Warlocks and Warriors.

3. The Faces of Science Fiction by Patti Perret (1984)

4. “Excluding Quest of the Starstone.”