Playacting or not, this Mednaiya Knight—an incredible beauty, beyond belief!—was unbelievable. Almost as unbelievable as his own wild notion that beauty, agility, and piratical, swashbuckling swordsmanship might have some chance of saving his country from the machine-gun-toting army of Stonefletcher Global Logistics.
Mednaiya appears in the story “The Midnight Knight” by Ed Greenwood, published in The New Hero Volume 1.
Ultra-wealthy, dismaying curvaceous, and attended by a loyal retinue of Renaissance fair performers whose modern spy skills are no mere reenactment, Mednaiya Knight could only have sprung from the uninhibited mind of Ed Greenwood. In the eponymously titled “The Midnight Knight”, her do-gooding instincts take her to the tyrant-troubled nation of Mariacordoba—and a deadly encounter with a former flame.
Ed’s excursion into freewheeling Modesty Blaise-style contemporary adventure plays as a departure from form. Yet at the same time it celebrates a pure love of storytelling that can only be described as quintessentially Greedwoodian. This romp embraces the pulp with glinty-eyed relish. Although the laws of chronology and intellectual property prevent them from ever meeting, I have a feeling that the Midnight Knight would certainly give Elminster a run for his money.
“In the freewheeling days of my youth, before the grimmer Cold War days of James Bond, there were the more whimsical, pulpier ‘gentlemen desperadoes’ who battled crime with fists, repartee, little tricks like throwing knives and swindles, and a fine disregard for the plodding minions of the law,” says Greenwood. “I wanted to revisit those days, and do a female version of the Saint, Norman Conquest, and all their ilk. Like, yes, Modesty Blaise. It was great fun, and I hope that shows.”
Ed Greenwood is the creator of the Forgotten Realms® fantasy world-setting, an award-winning game designer, and a bestselling author whose books have sold millions of copies worldwide in more than thirty languages. Once hailed as “the Canadian author of the great American novel,” Ed is a large, bearded, jolly Santa-Claus-like librarian who lives in an old farmhouse crammed with over 80,000 books in the countryside of Ontario, Canada. His most popular series include the Elminster books published by Wizards of the Coast, the Band of Four series from Tor, and the Falconfar trilogy from Solaris.
All New Hero artwork by Gene Ha.
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