Brian Murphy’s Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery by Bill Ward In Flame and Crimson (2019) Brian Murphy has crafted no less than the first book length history of the sword-and-sorcery genre, from its origins and antecedents right down to its reflection in the popular culture of the present day. It is a work both indispensable and long overdue, one that fills a gap in our collective bookshelves while establishing an academic and historical baseline for discussion of sword-and-sorcery going forward. But Murphy also accomplishes the most difficult task of all, balancing the need for critical rigor with readability, and the result is a book that not only provides a compelling and comprehensive view of its subject, but is also as fun to read and impossible to put down as the classic stories referenced in its pages. I’ve been familiar with Murphy’s work as an essayist and blogger for something like a decade now, both from his personal blog The Silver Key and from his appearances on websites and in magazines such as Black Gate, Skelos, and The Cimmerian, and I’m pleased to say that my already high expectations for Flame and Crimson were met and more than exceeded. Remarkably in something so well structured and paced, this is Murphy’s first book – hopefully, the first of many. While Flame and Crimson is a serious academic look at the subject of sword-and-sorcery over the years, again it seems worth stressing that it is eminently entertaining in the best un-put-downable style, as much so as any of the successful popular academic works of history or biography that exist for the curious laymen. It isn’t bound by in-group jargon, or require some esoteric knowledge to appreciate – indeed, Murphy fills in all the gaps for you, not only providing a coherent narrative for the whole history of the field, but numerous sidebar asides that illuminate everything from finer points of literary analysis to sword-and-sorcery’s influence on Heavy Metal.  Organized chronologically, with chapters focused on discreet periods such as the heyday of the Weird Tales era or the boom years of the 60s and 70s that saw sword-and-sorcery elevated to near-ubiquity in not only the publishing world but in all of pop culture, Flame and Crimson also manages to provide mini literary biographies for the major figures of each period, along...