Great idea! Reading this thread has given me lots of new material to consider. And of course I have a couple things to suggest...
1) Fritz Leiber, specifically his Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tales. This was my second exposure to fantasy, after Tolkien, and it's pretty much the opposite of Lord of the Rings. Mostly these are collections of short stories about two "heroes" who are more thieves than adventurers, and end up spending most of their ill-gotten gains on drink and whimsical ventures. They also adventure in Lankhmar which is one of the greatest old fantasy cities in my opinion. If you're looking for a place to start I would actually recommend the second collection, Swords Against Death, which includes "The Jewels in the Forest" from way back in 1939.
2) P.C. Hodgell's God Stalk imagines another amazing city along with some very interesting characters. I'm not totally sure about the larger story this book is part of (because I haven't read all the books), but it can stand on it's own. Now that I think about it, the main character here is also a thief... I wonder if I have a predisposition?
3) Glen Cook and the first novel of his series, The Black Company. It's a thoroughly enjoyable military fantasy about a long-standing mercenary company with mysterious origins and a historian-soldier as the main character. I liked the later books only very slightly less, but they're all still pretty great.
4) And then I really like all the old Conan stories for pure nostalgia, and the fact that a large number of the villains are felled by a well-aimed random object forcefully hurled by the barbarian hero...
I would say that numbers 2 and 3 are actually quite good, but Leiber influenced the whole genre in a seriously significant way (I think he may have invented the idea of the Thieves' Guild) and Conan is... well... Cimmerian!
cheers,
Meshon
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