David Gemmell, the father of modern heroic fantasy and one of my favourite authors, hands down.

If you like heroic fantasy full of grey characters (think Joe Abercrombie and George Martin where all evil has a hint of good and all good has a hint, or a great big smudge, of evil), you’ll love his work. Check out Legend, or the Rigante series, or the Troy series, any of his books can be considered magnificent in their own manner. This year I’m working through his Drenai series but I’ve yet to read a bad novel from this author.

My obsession with his works started out with a few books an American mate of mine left me when he left for home and I came back down to the central coast from uni. The Rigante series. Characters such as Connavar, Bane, and Grymauch (Possibly my favourite character of all time) kept me turning the pages well into the early hours of the morning. I’ve re-read the series probably four or five times I consider them to be that good.

Gemmell was the first author I read where I can genuinely remember characters being so grey. Where the heroes are not all golden boys whose excesses stop at having two bars of chocolate instead of one. Where one moment you think a character is awesome, and the next moment he’s completely lost it, runs into a town of women and kids, and slays them all. Where people are recognized as having colossal flaws, as well as immense virtues.

One of the things I love to read about him was that he was not immediately successful. He’s quoted as saying that his first book was so bad it could curdle milk at fifty paces. And then he wrote Legend after being told, incorrectly, that he had terminal cancer. In fact, the entire book is a metaphor for his body’s fight with the disease. The fortress of Dros Delnoch is his body, and the Nadir horde facing Druss and the Drenai is the cancer. And with that book he began his rise to his glorious position as the father of heroic fantasy.

That the man died so young is incredibly sad. It feels like the book of his life was cut short with five chapters still remaining. The epilogue of the final book of the troy series, that was written by his wife posthumously, is heartbreaking and incredibly personal for her. To read it without the knowledge of his death is to miss its point entirely.

If you haven’t checked his work out yet, go to www.bookdepository.com, fork over ten bucks and grab Sword in the Storm, Legend, or Troy. You won’t regret it.