Forgotten Stories
of
Fantastic Sword-fighters:
”Jeffrey Lord’s”
Blade of Dimension X

by Andy Beau

Jeffrey Lord is the pen name for a group of authors who wrote the thirty-seven various tales of Richard Blade from 1969 to 1984. One source lists them as Lyle Kenyon Engel (b. 1915), Roland Green (b. 1944), Ray Nelson (b. 1931), and Manning Lee Stokes (1911–1976). Another source states that Manning Lee Stokes wrote books #1 through #8, Ray F. Nelson #30, and Roland Green the rest. Some in this group are authors under their own names. Roland Green wrote the Wandor series in the 1970s and seven of Tor’s Conan books in the 1990s, among other stories. Manning Lee Stokes was also one of the authors who wrote the Nick Carter secret agent series in the 1960s and 1970s. Ray Nelson has written science fiction and other novels and short stories from the 1960s on. He was a co-author with Philip K. Dick on the 1967 novel The Ganymede Takeover. He is also the inventor of the propeller beanie, which he figures will still be remembered and used hundreds of years in the future somewhere on a distant planet, long after his writings have disappeared.

It appears that the series is continuing in French, with the French series at least up to #163, which was written in 2005. Some of the French authors using the Jeffrey Lord pen name are Richard D. Nolane (b. 1955) and Christian Mantey (b. 1941).

The Blade series is about a modern-day British secret agent who is sent to what is called Dimension X. Dimension X is actually many different dimensions, some with advanced technology and others that are pre-industrial and sword-based. He is sent there via electrical connections to a special computer by a small secret group in British intelligence to either find a way to colonize a new world or discover some new resource that would benefit Britain. As with the Casca series that I reviewed in an earlier column, I have only read the twenty-six stories that contained the sword-based or more primitive societies. The stories with the advanced technology societies were more futuristic or science fiction-like and don’t appeal to me.

The story lines in each book are very similar. Blade is transported, totally naked, to a strange new dimension where he encounters a set of opposing societies, with one oppressing the other. His sense of what’s morally right leads him to join the oppressed people in their battle over their oppressors. He becomes involved with the leading ladies in the stories and has sexually explicit encounters with them, regardless if they are the oppressed or the oppressors. Some of his ladies are killed in some of the books. The dimensions are very similar to Earth, but with some different types of vegetation and animals, and different skin colorings on some of the peoples he encounters, such as dark blue, red, etc. Also, neither magic or the supernatural exist in any of these dimensions. The closest to supernatural elements occurs in #28 Wizard of Rentoro. In that book, the “wizard” possesses highly developed paranormal abilities such as telepathy, teleportation, and high-level hypnosis. He also uses paranormal crystal balls for spying on people. Soon after the conclusion of winning the freedom of an oppressed people, the computer sends Blade back to Britain in his normal dimension. The societies in the various dimensions are of every type, from cave dwellers to Roman to medieval to Renaissance to a mixture, all of which give Blade different challenges to overcome and add more interest to the stories. This setting described above suggests that the series could be classified as between a sword-and-planet story and an imaginary swashbuckling historical; I would describe it as sword-and-dimension, for lack of a better word.

As an example of the books in the series, I’ll review a book I’ve recently read, Gladiators of Hapanu, #31 in the series. This adventure finds Blade transported to the middle of an Amazonian-like jungle, with huge trees, and plants with brightly colored flowers and fruit beneath the trees. The huge Great River runs through the jungle, containing the main predators of the region: large crocodilian creatures with two horns on the end of their six-foot jaws and two more horns rising behind their eyes, which are at the end of two scaly knobs; these creatures are rightfully called the Horned Ones. Blade eventually chances upon hunters, five-and-a-half-foot tall and with white tattoos on naturally dark blue skin. They are from the Fak’si tribe, one of the four tribes of the Forest People who inhabit the jungle. He lets himself be captured and rowed down the river to their village. On the way, a very large Horned One attacks the canoes. Blade is able to kill it with the help of a jaw-extender he had made earlier after seeing his first Horned One. This impresses the tribe and he becomes highly honored after he explains he is a warrior from a distant land and is willing to help the tribe. The Forest People’s greatest threat comes from the Treemen, seven-foot ape-like creatures that attack the villages to steal the women and kill the men. The primitive arrows and spears of the Forest People are virtually useless against these creatures. In one Treeman attack:

A Treeman was running out from among the huts, a naked woman under his arm and several men with spears and clubs at his heels. …Blade…started to step aside to give them fighting room, then saw the Treeman’s victim was Lokhra. Blade’s cry was as animal as a Treeman’s. Instead of stepping aside he leaped at the Treeman, his two hundred pounds of bone and muscle smashing into him at full speed. Lokhra flew out of the Treeman’s grip, landed with a thud, and had enough sense to keep rolling after she landed. Now Blade had all the fighting room he needed. …He was in a berserker’s fury, and that made him more that a match for any Treeman. The Treeman was a foot taller than Blade, at least as heavy, and probably both stronger and faster. He still didn’t have Blade’s unarmed-combat skills, or Blade’s rage driving him. Blade punched the Treeman in the mouth, knocking loose half a dozen teeth. The Treeman spread his arms wide, then clutched at Blade, trying to embrace and crush him. Blade ducked under the arms and punched the Treeman hard in the stomach, one-two-three-four. The Treeman doubled up, gasping for breath. Blade stepped aside, grabbed the Treeman by one arm and pulled him within reach. His other hand came down like an ax on the back of the Treeman’s neck. The Treeman pitched forward, writhed briefly, then lay still.

On the edge of the sea, at the mouth of the Great River, lies Gerhaa, the walled city of the Hapanus, a dark brown people with culture and weapons similar to the ancient Romans. Gerhaa is a colony of the Empire of Kylan from across this sea. The Hapanus hunt and capture Forest People, and use the men as mine slaves and gladiators and the women as prostitutes. Blade realizes that the Fak’si will need a better weapon than their weak bows and arrows, spears, and clubs to overthrow their Hapanu oppressors. As he is about to develop it, a Hapanu raiding party captures him and brings him to the city. Blade becomes a gladiator of some skill, and soon soldiers escort him to the palace the Protector, Gerhaa’s ruler.

…the bronze doors of the palace swung open…the spectacle of the palace was too staggering. Beyond the door was a room five stories high, with a balcony across the rear, stairs curving up to each end of the balcony, and a quadruple archway under the balcony. Everything was on a colossal scale, dwarfing human beings to the size of ants. It wasn’t just a matter of sheer size, either. As Blade studied the room, he couldn’t find a single square inch of wall or floor that wasn’t decorated. The floor was inlaid with marble and other polished stones, separated by silvered metal bands. The columns of the arches were carved from something like blue jade into the forms of Horned Ones, birds, and snakes. Each step of the stairs was made of a different kind of stone, except for a few made of carved and polished wood. The railings of the stairs and the balcony were complicated metal lattice-work, all enameled or gilded. Everywhere Blade saw (rubies), some faceted stones the size of a man’s fist, others as fine as dust.

In the city, one of the army officers from the raiding party helps Blade at various times for what at the time are unknown reasons to Blade. Because of his weapons skills, Blade quickly rises in fame among the city dwellers and the other gladiators. Blade devises a scheme to overthrow the Protector, using the gladiators, the oppressed poor of the city, and the tribes of the Forest People as his soldiers. When Blade and his gladiators attack the Protector’s soldiers in the city, the city’s subjugated common people join Blade. At the same time, all of the four tribes of the Forest People sail down the river, and using their new weapons, attack the Protector’ ships in the harbor. Some of the Protector’s ships have tall siege towers built on them for attacking the city's harborside walls where Blade’s rebels are holed up. As the battle for the city is under way, Blade sees one of these ships in the harbor drift close to the tall harborside wall he is atop of.

The leap from the wall to the top of the ship’s siege tower was a long one, even for Blade. He nearly went through the railing on the far side of the platform on top, and felt planks groan and creak under him. For a moment he was at a disadvantage if anyone attacked, but the one man on the platform was too surprised. Before the man could recover, Blade whipped out his sword, split the man’s unhelmeted head, and pitched his body on to the deck below. The first two men to climb the stairs inside the tower died nearly as quickly. Blade knocked the first one on the head with a loose plank, then stabbed the second in the throat as he climbed over his stunned comrade. This gave a third man the chance to get up on to the platform beside Blade. He wore a scale-mail shirt and helmet. Blade stepped back, to give himself room to swing his sword hard against the man’s armor. The moment he’d opened the gap, there was a wsssht-thuk and the man staggered to the railing , a crossbow bolt in his chest. He slumped to the platform, face showing a mixture of outraged indignation and pain, then died. Blade turned to see (a fellow gladiator) and half a dozen archers standing on top of the (wall’s tower).

The battle in the city and in the harbor is fierce and bloody, but Blade finally prevails. Afterwards, in the middle of the meeting with the leaders of his allies, the computer quickly pulls him back from Dimension X and to his own dimension in Britain, disappearing before the eyes of everyone present.

This story is a combination of Amazonian natives against a Roman-style city, and involves action and adventures in a jungle, a gladiatorial arena, a walled city, and aboard ships—a lot for a book less than two hundred pages long. For me, that’s one of the appealing aspects of this series. Another attraction for me is what I’d call the “Odyssey” element. Like Odysseus’s travels to different lands containing unknown peoples and creatures, Blade travels to different dimensions that might appear similar to ours, but nonetheless also contain unknown peoples in an environment of strange plants and animals—very similar to part of the settings for a sword-and-planet tale. The few pages of the stories that occur in London at the beginning and end of the books are usually not very important to the story except as a literary device to get Blade back and forth from the various dimensions he is transported to. For the most part, these books could be read in any order, since most of the books are standalone adventures. The books that are somewhat related to each other only contain minor references to occurrences in past books, but this really doesn’t affect the story.

Below is a list of Blade’s 26 English language sword-and-dimension adventures in Dimension X:

  #1 - The Bronze Axe
  #2 - The Jade Warrior
  #3 - Jewel of Tharn
  #4 - Slave of Sarma
  #5 - Liberator of Jed
  #6 - Monster of the Maze
  #7 - Pearl of Patmos
  #8 - Undying World
  #9 - Kingdom of Royth
#12 - King of Zunga
#13 - The Golden Steed
#14 - The Temples of Ayocan
#16 - The Crystal Seas
#18 - Warlords of Gaikon
#20 - Guardians of the Coral Throne
#21 - Champion of the Gods
#22 - The Forests of Gleor
#23 - Empire of Blood
#25 - The Torian Pearls
#27 - Master of The Hashomi
#28 - Wizard of Rentoro
#31 - Gladiators of Hapanu
#32 - Pirates of Gohar
#33 - Killer Plants of Binaark
#35 - The Lords of the Crimson River
#37 - Warriors of Latan

Here are a couple of links for those who’d like to view some of the book covers for the above books and the others in the series, both the English set and the French set .

These books are available at Abebooks.com, Amazon.com, and other similar online used book stores.