"David Gemmell - Wolf in Shadow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gemmel David)

And to Ethel Osborne, her sister, for a lifetime of love and care.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Nothing is created in a vacuum, and I am grateful to many people for
their help in the creation of WOLF IN SHADOW. My thanks to Elizabeth Reeves,
my editor, for bringing me out of the mist; to Peter Austin, for the
wagon-master; and to Jean Maund, Stella Graham, Tom Taylor, Ross Lempriere,
Ivan Kellham and Tony Fenelon for invaluable assistance.
 Thanks also to Jeremy Wells, for loyalty and friendship, in a world that
rarely understands either.

Foreword Of the many characters I have created over the years, few have
captured the imagination of readers as powerfully as Jon Shannow, the
Jerusalem Man.

Alan Fisher, the award winning author of Terioki Crossing, and a fan of
the film Casablanca, has a phrase that sums up characters like Shannow. 'They
walk out of Rick's Bar, fully formed and real. The author doesn't have to work
on them at all. There is no con-scious act of creation. One moment they don't
exist - the next they stand before you, complete and ready.’ I remember the
moment Shannow walked out of Rick's Bar.

It was at the end of a miserable, wet day in Bournemouth at the start of
autumn in 1986. I was the group managing editor of a series of newspapers
stretching from Brighton to Portsmouth on the south coast. The previous week I
had a call from my father to tell me that my mother was in hospital and that
surgeons feared she had terminal cancer. They were right. A year before she
had suffered the amputation of her right leg, and fought back to make a
dramatic entrance at a Christmas Dance. This time there would be no fight
back.

I had visited her in London, and then driven to Bournemouth for a
business meeting, concluding it at around ten that night. I was Staying in a
small hotel of remarkable unfriendliness. The kind of place - as Jack Dee once
said - where the Gideons leave a rope! I hadn't eaten since the previous
evening and I called the night porter. He said the kitchen staff had gone
home, but there was a plate of olives someone had left at the bar. Nursing the
olives and a very large glass of Armagnac I returned to my room and opened the
Olympia portable typewriter.

I was at the time preparing a Drenai novel, featuring the Nadir Warlord
Ulric, which my publishers had commissioned. According to the contract the
book was to be called Wolf in Shadow and was, loosely, a prequel to Legend. I
had completed around sixty pages. They weren't good, but I was powering on as
best as I could.

Sitting by the window, looking out over Bournemouth's glis-tening
streets, I tried to push the events of the week from my mind. My mother was