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Lord Dunsany is primarily remembered for his fantasy works, so much so that the adjective "Dunsanian" crops up in many descriptions of Lovecraft and C.A. Smith's early works. These over 200 prose-poem short stories, full of irony and humour, were recently collected and spanned the period of 1905 to 1920. These were followed up by a pair of fantasy novels [Chronicles of Rodriguez (1922) and The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924)], but from 1921-1925 nary a short story. It was in July 1926 that the first -- "The Tale of the Abu Laheeb" -- of over 125 Jorkens stories began to appear. These were later collected in five books, of which the first two, The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens (1931) and Jorkens Remembers Africa (1934) are included in this first volume of The Collected Jorkens. Nightshade Books will reprint all the previously published Jorkens collections, several uncollected tales, and a recently discovered unpublished collection of Jorkens tales, all in a three-volume collection.

Who is this Jorkens? A British clubman raconteur (when properly lubricated), who is a mix of Baron Munchausen, the 19th century British explorers, and a sort of British upper middle class retiree. His fanciful tales of his life, and those of some of his equally eccentric and colourful friends, combine Lord Dunsany's hands-on knowledge of many exotic locations throughout the world, and the irony and humour of his older purely fantasy tales. It also showcases, in some tales in particular, an undercurrent of the socio-environmental concerns which are clearly played out in some of his later books, such as The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933). The stories, however far-fetched, have an air of plausibility that takes them outside the purvue of the purely farcical tales of Munchausen. Dunsany, through a great deal of little details, about the locations, characters and events, many obviously seen or experienced himself in his extensive travels, makes the tales, at least on the surface, quite believable. Add the fact that acts of Nature or the disappearance of any witnesses through death or inaccessibility render any definite proof or disproof impossible and you have the fine tales of the rather modest and effacing Mr. Jorkens. Also well done is the fact that one grows to know the character of Jorkens through the stories, he boasts but he also confesses to actions he regrets, of love and revenge, of happy times and sad times, of times of great wealth and great poverty; neither an Allan Quartemain nor an buffoon.

Georges Dodds is a research scientist in vegetable crop physiology, who for close to 25 years has read and collected close to 2000 titles of predominantly pre-1950 science-fiction and fantasy, both in English and French. He writes columns on early imaginative literature for WARP, the newsletter/fanzine of the Montreal Science Fiction and Fantasy Association and maintains a site reflecting his tastes in imaginative literature.