"David Gemmell - The Complete Chronicles of the Jerusalem Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gemmel David)

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




4
 THE COMPLETE CHRONICLES OF THE JERUSALEM MAN


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.




5
 THE COMPLETE CHRONICLES OF THE JERUSALEM MAN

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 conscious 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 fightback.
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.