Several things raise the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories well above the level of most sword and sorcery fiction. One is character development.

Another is Leiber's satire. The most important, however, is style. Leiber is one of the finest prose stylists ever to write fantasy or science fiction, equaled in his generation only by Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon. Although he is capable of writing terse, actionoriented prose when the occasion calls for it, he is most at home with a kind of elaborate, slightly archaic language which has as much in common with Shakespeare and the King James translation of the Bible as it does with the prose of genre fiction. Leiber has suggested that his love of language comes directly from his having been raised in a theater family and, almost from birth, having heard and seen his father, Fritz Leiber Sr., act in English Renaissance...