Gemmell's crime novels

Two novels that sit outside the fantasy. White Knight, Black Swan is a crime thriller set in working-class London, following Jardine, a bouncer and gang enforcer. It was published by Arrow in 1993 under the name Ross Harding, was the only one of Gemmell's novels that did not become a bestseller, and was reissued under his own name in 2017.

Rhyming Rings is a London thriller with a supernatural edge. A struggling local reporter, Jeremy Miller, stuck writing gentle human-interest pieces, finds his stories converging with the hunt for a killer of women. Stella Gemmell found the manuscript among his papers, and it was published by Gollancz in 2017, eleven years after his death, with an introduction by Conn Iggulden and an afterword by Stan Nicholls. Its hero's trade was Gemmell's own for twenty years. It is not the book he was working on when he died; that was Troy: Fall of Kings.

Neither belongs to a series, and they can be read in either order. In the late 1980s Gemmell told an interviewer that he was writing thrillers to get back into the real world, and found that the results were really fantasies: the heroes were much the same and the good guys still won against the odds. That is a fair description of both books. The settings are modern and the moral shape is familiar.

They are for readers who already like him rather than a way in. Anyone curious about how his fantasy instincts work without swords will find both interesting, and White Knight, Black Swan, whose hero works the door as Gemmell once did, is the closer of the two to his own early life.

The books

Either order. Neither is connected to the fantasy series.

1. 1White Knight, Black Swan (1993)A giant London debt collector with a soft heart protects a friend from a protection racket, and finds he has picked a fight with his own boss.
2. 2Rhyming Rings (2017)A young local reporter in 1980s London is stuck on human-interest stories while a killer stalks women, until his stories and the murders meet.