Mort was published by Victor Gollancz in 1987. It is the fourth Discworld novel and the one where Pratchett first became fully himself — where the series stopped being merely clever parody and became something genuinely profound. It introduces Death (ALWAYS SPEAKS IN CAPITALS) as a character rather than a device: a seven-foot skeleton in a black robe who rides a pale horse named Binky, lives in a house with a garden where black roses grow, and who has developed an interest in humanity that his job does not require.
Death takes an apprentice: Mort (short for Mortimer), a gawky, unpromising teenager whose father cannot find anyone willing to hire him. Mort’s job is to collect souls — to be present at the moment of death and ensure the transition occurs. He is terrible at it. When he is sent to collect a young princess, Keli, who is scheduled to die by assassination, he kills the assassin instead and saves her.
This creates a catastrophic divergence in reality. History insists Keli is dead. Reality begins to close around the space where she should not exist. Mort has introduced free will into a deterministic universe, and the universe is not pleased.
The novel operates on two levels simultaneously: as a coming-of-age comedy (Mort falls in love with Death’s adopted daughter, Ysabell; struggles with his new powers; gets drunk on the authority of being Death) and as a serious philosophical meditation on whether death is necessary for life to have meaning. Death’s own growing fascination with human experience — he tries fishing, he tries cooking, he gets a job at a tavern — is both comic and poignant: an immortal being trying to understand why the mortals he collects seem to find existence so precious.
Collecting Mort
First edition (Victor Gollancz, London, 1987): Hardcover, dust jacket by Josh Kirby.
Market values:
- First edition in fine dust jacket: $150–$400
- Signed first edition: $400–$1,000
- Without jacket: $30–$60
- First Corgi paperback (1988): $5–$15
Mort is the most commonly recommended starting point for the Discworld series (alongside Guards! Guards! and Small Gods). The Death subseries it inaugurates (Reaper Man, Soul Music, Hogfather, Thief of Time) is among the most popular strands.