Something of an addendum to my little review series where I went through Charles R. Saunders novels – this year, I was surprised to see the release of a biography of the author by Jon Tattrie called To Leave a Warrior Behind. The title derives from the first Imaro novel, referring to the troubled hero Saunders first dreamed up in the 1970s.

Saunders’s African history-inspired sword and sorcery Imaro series never truly took off in his lifetime, dropped by not one but two publishers before the story could conclude. Yet Saunders had a strong core of fans, and those inspired by his work eventually helped him self-publish the conclusion and his other works many years later.

I came across his name from sword and sorcery-centred forums in the late 2000s, where members spoke very highly of both Imaro and Dossouye. My only encounter with him outside reading his novels were kind comments he left on this blog as he was getting back into writing and publishing fantasy again. Outside of the fantasy space, he had a celebrated career as a journalist and non-fiction author in Nova Scotia.

That’s where Tattrie knew him from, with both of them working at the same newspaper before it was bought out and unceremoniously shut down. As Tattrie observes, most people who knew Saunders as an editor and journalist knew nothing about his alter-ego as a fantasy author; and most of the people who knew him from his sword and sorcery work knew nothing about his day job.

This biography brings the two sides of Saunders together. As a deeply private person, Charles R. Saunders didn’t make the task an easy one. While he had a web of correspondence that stretched around the globe, exchanging letters on the regular with colleagues and fans, he seemed reluctant to reveal much about his past. To Leave a Warrior Behind is not structured as a straight biography, skipping back and forth between what pieces of Saunders’s life Tattrie could glean from a stash of letters, published and unpublished interviews, and conversations with those who knew him, to his own personal story of finding where Saunders’s was buried after his body went unclaimed in 2020, and extended reflections on Saunders’s stories and novels.

I admire Saunders a great deal, so finding out surprising details of his life measured against the image I had in my head was all part of the appeal. Yet other pieces made me deeply sad, as the framing narrative remains focused around his death and how he didn’t get much of the attention and recognition he deserved when he lived. I hope this book, at least in Canada, helps rectify that.

Tattrie does sometimes go on long tangents that stretches the sparse material he could find to fill the large gaps in Saunders’s bio, only bringing it back to how those could be important to understanding Saunders’s fiction many pages later. This is especially evident in the chapter on Saunders’s time at Lincoln University. But this biography comes into its own when it follows Saunders packing up and moving to Canada, I think because that’s where Charles R. Saunders came into his own as well.

Knowing how important and active Saunders was in the Ottawa fantasy writing community while he lived there, following Saunders’s decision to move to Nova Scotia and making a life for himself there, were all very absorbing to me, and I felt I got a better understanding of his work as a whole. Especially because so much of Saunders’s own words are in here, either unknown to me or never published until now.

Last year, Gollancz put out a reprint of Imaro, with the intent of releasing the entire series. Shortly after Saunders’s death, his self-published books disappeared from the internet and a big chunk of his bibliography became difficult to find. It looks like we may be perched on the edge of a revival, with this biography teasing that at least one unpublished novel manuscript may come out after all, and I look forward to a wider audience getting the chance to discover and enjoy Saunders’s unique brand of fantasy.