Part of Series
Jerry Cornell was a Class A Secret Agent. Dedicated, intrepid, ice-cool in a crisis, Resourceful, master of disguise, impervious to pain—by these qualities are such men known. Jerry Cornell was different. He was honest—at least, to himself. He knew the truth: his trade wasn't glamorous, was hardly ever important, getting one side to defect to the other was a PR matter and most options aren't worth keeping anyway. But, and these were important buts, it was fashionable. Camp even. Above all it offered wonderful opportunities for skiving and fiddling and marital infidelity. Realist and coward, Jerry Cornell was doing very nicely. Until the terrible night when he found The Devil Rider: Masked Fighter for Justice, a comic-strip hero clutched in the dying hand of a fellow agent Jerry had never much liked anyway...
Author
Michael John Moorcock is an English writer primarily of science fiction and fantasy who has also published a number of literary novels. Moorcock has mentioned The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw and The Constable of St. Nicholas by Edward Lester Arnold as the first three books which captured his imagination. He became editor of Tarzan Adventures in 1956, at the age of sixteen, and later moved on to edit Sexton Blake Library. As editor of the controversial British science fiction magazine New Worlds, from May 1964 until March 1971 and then again from 1976 to 1996, Moorcock fostered the development of the science fiction "New Wave" in the UK and indirectly in the United States. His serialization of Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron was notorious for causing British MPs to condemn in Parliament the Arts Council's funding of the magazine. During this time, he occasionally wrote under the pseudonym of "James Colvin," a "house pseudonym" used by other critics on New Worlds. A spoof obituary of Colvin appeared in New Worlds #197 (January 1970), written by "William Barclay" (another Moorcock pseudonym). Moorcock, indeed, makes much use of the initials "JC", and not entirely coincidentally these are also the initials of Jesus Christ, the subject of his 1967 Nebula award-winning novella Behold the Man, which tells the story of Karl Glogauer, a time-traveller who takes on the role of Christ. They are also the initials of various "Eternal Champion" Moorcock characters such as Jerry Cornelius, Jerry Cornell and Jherek Carnelian. In more recent years, Moorcock has taken to using "Warwick Colvin, Jr." as yet another pseudonym, particularly in his Second Ether fiction.
