Fritz Leiber died on this day in 1992, at eighty-one. He had been writing for something close to sixty years, since a correspondence with his college friend Harry Fischer in the mid-1930s in which Fischer invented a small grey thief and Leiber gave him a large northern companion. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser outlived nearly everything published alongside them, which is the only durability test a bookseller trusts.

The part I like best is the naming. In the early sixties the readers of the fan magazines wanted a term for this kind of story, and someone put the question in print: what do we call it? Leiber answered in a letter to a fanzine and proposed sword-and-sorcery. No manifesto, no publisher's marketing meeting, no committee. A hyphenated phrase in an amateur magazine, and half a century later it is a shelf label, a section of my shop, and a thing people know they want before they know the author's name. Names for genres almost always arrive that way: sideways, from a reader, in answer to a practical question.

He wrote horror and science fiction too, and poetry, and he was the son of a Shakespearean actor, which shows in the sentences if you listen for it. If you have never read him, the stories are the door, not the novels. They were written to be read in one sitting, and they still are.