Gemmell said in interviews that this was the book that lost him his journalism job: the war raging in the novel was based on the real-life newspaper battle Gemmell, and his team at the struggling Folkestone Herald, were fighting against their bigger rivals, the Kent Messenger group. Their partnership will change both their lives. Waylander begins when the title character inadvertently rescues a priest who is being tortured in a forest. Gemmell said in an interview that he didn’t tend to plan his novels: he came up with a promising character, put him on a horse and had him ride out of a forest, and then saw what the character did next. The crossbow-carrying hero is also one of his darkest and deadliest. You can buy the novel here: Wolf In Shadow (Jon Shannow Novel)Īfter Druss the Legend (see below), Waylander the Slayer – once a soldier named Dakeyras, then an assassin, now a man on the path to redemption – is David Gemmell’s most famous character. Fuelled by Armagnac and filled with despair, Gemmell created the character of Jon Shannow, who leapt onto the page – and Gemmell never looked back. Gemmell’s love-letter to the work of Louis L’Amour (though also bearing the influence of the Clint Eastwood film, Pale Rider, which had been released a couple of years earlier), Wolf in Shadow was written when Gemmell was in danger of losing his job as a journalist (sure enough, he was made redundant a short while after), and when – as he recalls in his preface to a reissue of the novel – he was coming to terms with the fact that his mother had terminal cancer.
This is the first in a loose trilogy of novels featuring Jon Shannow, half-crazed Christian pilgrim and gun-toting hero who stalks the post-apocalyptic world of the future, in search of the lost city of Jerusalem. You can buy the novel here: Ravenheart: A Novel Of The Rigante: (The Rigante Book 3) The third novel in the Rigante sequence, Ravenheart earns its place on this list chiefly because of its most magnetic character, Jaim Grymauch, who of all Gemmell’s characters – perhaps apart from Druss – is the one most closely modelled on Gemmell’s stepfather, whose strength and courage appear to have been crucial to the development of Gemmell’s worldview (reflected in his work). You can buy the novel here: Sword In The Storm: A breath-taking, adrenalin-fuelled read from the master of heroic fantasy (Rigante)
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