Several years down the line, a tardy 'student of the classics' pokes his head in.
I greatly enjoy the few stories I've read from the many that Moore co-wrote with Kuttner, and whether or not the stories collected in
Robots Have No Tails are examples of these, they're great SF comedy stories.
As to Jirel, the flame-haired warrior lady of Joiry...I first read these stories at a time when I was fresh from a happy season spent under the spell of Leiber's tales of Fafhrd & Grey Mouser. Whatever Moore's strengths are, they seemed to pall after the wit, whimsy and many other wonders of Leiber's sly thieves and the fantastic world of Nehwon.
Following a thread on Kuttner in the Lovecraft sub-forum, I decided to give Moore another try.
I do in fact have the Gollanz Masterworks title that includes her Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry tales, but I decided to have a second crack at the Jirel tales, even though comments here make the Smith ones seem more appealing.
Moore's style here is breathless, visionary, intense...undisciplined. Sometimes it's like wading through a haze of kinetic excess waiting for Jirel to pull out her sword, stab someone and advance the plot. Jirel seems cast from the same gung-ho, 'a good sword in my hand and a wall to my back and I shall take on the world' mould as Conan, a character I often endure rather than admire, because Howard's breathless way with plot and fantasy makes the ride worthwhile.
Similarly, the visions of magic and the fantastic in Moore's tales of Joiry are often breathtaking in that way in which only weird tales written in the first half of the last century seem to be; before all our imaginations somehow became a lot more homogenized, perhaps precisely because of the success of writers like Moore in carving out new subgenres from the literary substrata of fantastic fiction. The aspects of plot and characterisation are...about as much as you'd want to advance the wild action and dark magic that the ride is essentially about. The fact that these are short stories, and of a certain vintage, makes it likely that I shall continue re-visiting the Jirel stories although this thread shows me that I should investigate other aspects of Moore's work as well.