Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures

HOWARD’S JOURNEY Historical Influences to Historical Triumphs by Howard Andrew Jones

Pound for pound Robert E. Howard’s historical fiction more than holds its weight against Howard’s other genre and series work. Over just a few years Howard fashioned a grander helping of these stories than many historical writers craft over a lifetime of effort, surpassing them not only in word count but in quality.

It should not be assumed, though, that he wrote any of his stories in a vacuum, nor that when he first sat down to draft historical fiction he immediately typed works of genius. Professional author though he was, Howard still had to find his comfort level with the genre. He did so in part by being familiar with both history and the writers who brought it to life before him.

All writers are influenced by other storytellers, finding in some traits or themes that they wish to emulate and in others pitfalls they wish to avoid. Usually writers imitate scenes or characters; sometimes they use plot structures or character types as models to work from; and sometimes they find inspiration at the foot of the storyteller then strike off on their own path.

While it’s typical of writers to learn by imitation, Robert E. Howard seldom imitated for long before his own voice was so intercalated into a composition that the inspiration was no longer obvious. Scholars have noted the influence of Jack London and Rudyard Kipling in his work, as well as Howard’s familiarity with myth and legend, likely via Thomas Bulfinch. The shadow cast by adventure and historical adventure writer Harold Lamb over Howard’s work has been noted but never discussed at length. Robert E. Howard seems to have found a kind of kindred spirit in Lamb, and progressed from modeling off his fiction until, student growing to master, Howard matched and even sometimes surpassed his skill.

That is no mean thing, for Harold Lamb was one of the finest of all American adventure writers. Even today, only a few years out from the hundredth anniversary of Lamb’s first great historicals, Lamb’s pacing feels modern. His best fiction is vibrant, cinematic, and exciting, which put him decades ahead of almost all his contemporaries. His plotting rises from the collision of motivations among his characters and is seldom predictable. His depth of knowledge permeates his work without ever derailing the story to trumpet mastery of the material. His characters live and breathe and ride the steppes with an honest multiculturalism. In his work heroism and villainy do not reside in particular cultures, but with individuals – we do not see much evidence of the white man’s burden so prevalent in other stories penned at this time. Some of his contemporary crafters of historical magazine fiction could spin yarns that worked as well – Arthur D. Howden Smith and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur among them – but no one else so consistently delivered high quality stories, and without resorting to formula.

It was chance that set Howard on the road to encounter Lamb’s fiction at the age of fifteen, when he bought a copy of Adventure magazine. We can’t know whether or not there was a Harold Lamb story in that particular issue, as Howard didn’t mention the issue number. He was hooked by the magazine, though, and Lamb was one of Adventure’s stars. Howard could not have read the magazine for very long without stumbling upon Lamb’s work.

Howard describes the moment of discovery himself in a July 1933 letter to H. P. Lovecraft. Although he had always loved reading, books had been hard to come by. “Magazines were even more scarce than books. It was after I moved into ‘town’ (speaking comparatively) that I began to buy magazines. I well remember the first I ever bought. I was fifteen years old; I bought it one summer night when a wild restlessness in me would not let me keep still, and I had exhausted all the reading material on the place. I’ll never forget the thrill it gave me. Somehow it never had occurred to me before that I could buy a magazine. It was an Adventure. I still have the copy. After that I bought Adventure for many years, though at times it cramped my resources to pay the price. It came out three times a month, then.”

Adventure endured in pulp form for nearly forty-three years, birthed in 1910 and falling into a feeble senility after a change of format in 1953 before an ignominious death. With its reputation for historical accuracy and its stable of well-known authors, Adventure was arguably the most prestigious of all pulp magazines when Robert E. Howard first chanced upon it. Those familiar with magazines of today should not assume Adventure was slim, quarterly, or populated with literary fiction. In a time when there were no televisions, America was a nation of readers, and turned to entertainment in these magazines, new issues of which often appeared two or three times a month. Drug store racks and newsstands overflowed with an immense variety of detective and mystery pulps, which were nestled beside magazines devoted to romance, or sports stories, or war stories. A few, like Argosy and Adventure, published a variety of fiction set in different lands and times, the sole unifying theme of their contents being that the material had to entertain. As for what Howard might have seen when he flipped open a particular issue – one that likely featured an oil painting of a historical warrior dashing into battle, given the typical Adventure cover of those years – let’s turn to pulp scholar Robert Weinberg.

Issues from the early 1920s, a favorite period of many collectors, were 192 pages of eye-straining print and usually included a complete novel, two or three complete novelettes (in reality short novels) and a goodly chunk of a serial. There would also be five or six short stories and a bunch of departments like “Old Songs That Men Have Sung,” “Ask Adventure,” and “Lost Trails.” The letter column, known as “The Camp Fire” was perhaps the best letter column published in any magazine, ever. Usually, authors of stories in the issues wrote long essays where they detailed the historical background of their work. Letters from readers argued over facts in previous stories. In an America just emerging from the Wild West and the First World War, the readers of Adventure weren’t just arm-chair adventurers spouting theories. A typical letter began, “I enjoyed Hugh Pendexter’s story about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but he got some of the details wrong. I was there and remember quite distinctly …” and continue on for three pages about the famous gun battle.* Adventure today is most famous for printing the work of an elite cadre of talented adventure writers: Arthur D. Howden Smith, Arthur O. Friel, George Surdez, and many others, although it is these three and its two most famous contributors, Talbot Mundy and Harold Lamb, whose work has been most often reprinted outside the pulps.

It seems clear that Howard enjoyed both Mundy and Lamb. We can see shades of Mundy’s influence, at least topically, in the tales of El Borak and even in the stories of Conan. But for all that Mundy is mentioned more than twice as often as Lamb in Howard’s surviving correspondence, it is Lamb’s writing that seems to have been the greater inspiration.

If Howard had never crossed paths with Adventure until 1921, then he missed the earliest phase of Lamb’s Adventure years, when he wrote the first fourteen stories of his signature character, Khlit the Cossack. Howard does not seem to have encountered the aging warrior until Khlit’s return as a secondary character; this is a shame, for the third through the ninth tales of the wandering Cossack are some of the finest adventure fiction ever written. They take the Cossack across the steppes of Asia, into ancient tombs and the citadels of kings, bringing him face-to-face with emperors living and dead, bold comrades, scheming traitors, and lovely damsels. Tempting as it is to speculate that Robert E. Howard devoured these earliest tales, we have no record that he did so, though it is easy to imagine that he would have enjoyed reading them.

It seems clear, though, that Howard was a follower of the second, shorter cycle of Cossack stories that Lamb penned, featuring characters named Ayub and Demid. Howard wrote a poem titled with the twain’s name, although the poem is unfortunately lost. Demid is lean, hawkish, quiet, thoughtful; a talented swordsman, he is also a natural leader. Ayub is not as bright – he’d rather act first and then think – but he’s a seasoned veteran and loyal friend, a mighty man who wields a massive two-handed sword and who can drink any fellow under the table.

Readers of the Conan tales can find references to Howard’s Kozaks and it is tempting to credit this influence, and the manner in which certain terms are used, to Lamb. But we should not assume too much. While Lamb’s shadow likely lies over these stories, he wasn’t the only pulp writer to pen Cossack tales.

What we do know is that Howard once sat down with a large stack of Lamb stories and transcribed all of the foreign words for equipment and clothing he found within them. Howard scholar Patrice Louinet found a list of these words in among Howard’s papers and, suspecting they might be from Lamb stories, conferred with me. By searching the texts we discovered that the terms were listed in the same order that they had appeared in several Lamb stories: “The Shield,” “The Sea of Ravens,” “Kirdy,” “The Witch of Aleppo,” “White Falcon,” and “The Wolf Chaser.” Clearly Howard must have found inspiration in these stories, or the stack would not have been so deep. For further evidence that Lamb’s tales struck some primal chord, we need look no further than Lamb’s “The Wolf Chaser.” Howard wrote a five-hundred-word recap of the story, then wrote nearly a thousand words of his own take on the events, reusing the place names and some of the characters.

Preserved in Howard’s body of letters are two that he wrote to Adventure. In February of 1924 he wrote the editors to ask more than a dozen questions about Mongolia; Howard wanted to know Mongol names for objects and creatures like swords and tigers, whether or not Mongolians worshipped Erlik, Bon, Buddha, or all three, where exactly the Khirgiz lived, and many other questions besides. He almost certainly had encountered these terms in Lamb’s Adventure tales. In July of 1924, Howard again wrote to Adventure, though this time he asked questions about Europe, wondering what exactly the rights of a Feudal Baron were, how long the Feudal system flourished in central Europe, and other related matters.

Howard had been drawn to history from a very young age, so we should not think that he found all his desire for writing historical adventure from perusing the pages of Adventure magazine. He was keenly interested in Irish history, about which Lamb seems rarely to have concerned himself, and as is well known, wrote widely of a certain Puritan who spent a great deal of time in Africa, another area that never seems to have much interested Lamb.

In Lamb, though, he found a kindred spirit. It is not that the themes Howard so often dealt with in his fiction came first from Lamb, it is that Lamb’s themes resonated so strongly with Howard because the outlook of both men was quite similar. They were drawn to write tales of outsiders and veteran warriors. Both were suspicious of civilization’s strengths and often portrayed rulers and merchants as decadent, greedy, and immoral. Many of Lamb’s heroes were barbarians, or one step removed, just as Howard’s were. And both gloried in bloody action and adventure. Lamb never comes right out and says that barbarism is the natural state of mankind, but in many of his stories it is made clear that civilization will destroy a way of life that Lamb thinks more honorable – that of the folk who protect the borders, who are continually pushed back from the civilization over which they themselves stand sentinel. Overall Lamb was a better plotter (though Howard’s finest stories stand at least shoulder to shoulder with Lamb’s) but Howard was the more gifted storyteller. Lamb’s style is spare and strong, and quite effective, but it rarely rises to the poetic and dreamy heights of Howard’s greatest work.

Howard himself tried Adventure magazine as a market, but never managed to get in. By the time he was writing his finest historical fiction, he’d given up on ever appearing in the magazine – more is the pity – but did have a regular market of his own.

ORIENTAL STORIES

Unfortunately for all lovers of swashbucklers, Oriental Stories, later briefly retitled Magic Carpet Magazine, had a short lifespan. In four years, only fourteen issues were produced. Howard seems to have been made aware of the publication by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, who was readying to launch the new historical magazine. Wright wrote to Howard that “I especially want historical tales – tales of the Crusades, of Genghis Khan, of Tamerlane, and the wars between Islam and Hindooism. Each story will be complete in one issue, and we will use no serials. The longer lengths are preferred – that is about 15,000 words.”

To all appearances, Howard seems to have leapt at the chance to write this kind of fiction. He said in a 1930 letter to Lovecraft that:

I think Wright’s “Oriental Stories” bids fair to show more originality than the average magazine dealing with the East, though the initial issue, was, to me, slightly dissappointing – not in the appearance of the magazine but in the contents. However, with such writers as Hoffman-Price, Owens and Kline, I look for better things … For my part the mystic phase of the East has always interested me less than the material side – the red and royal panorama of war, rapine and conquest. What I write for “Oriental Stories” will be purely action, and romance – mainly historical tales. And I greatly fear that my Turks and Mongols are merely Irishmen and Englishmen in turbans and sandals! Howard was worried that he wouldn’t be able to accurately portray people of other cultures and times, but after his initial forays he showed the humanity of his characters, regardless of their point of origin. Far from sounding like Irishmen and Englishmen with turbans, they walk onto the stage as fully realized people, bearing their courage and their flaws regardless of their nationality. The sainted and knightly are few and far between in these stories. Instead Howard drafted fiction of hard men and hard deeds.

The first historical Howard sent Wright’s way shared a byline with Howard’s old friend Tevis Clyde Smith. In a letter to Smith penned in July or August of 1930, Howard directly quoted what Farnsworth Wright had said about the story, relaying Wright was “very well pleased with Red Blades of Black Cathay, and may use this as the cover design story for our third issue of Oriental Stories.”

It’s easy to see why Wright would be pleased with the tale. A greater mystery is why the already accomplished Howard wrote it with his friend. Smith once said that he’d handled the research while Howard did the writing, which still seems odd, for Howard was not only capable of solid research but enjoyed the process. Howard scholars speculate that the story might simply have been a case of Howard trying to help his friend Smith get into print in the pulps.

“Red Blades” is an engaging tale, and a solid enough sounding blow, though it can only hint at what will shortly follow. It is the only Howard historical that can truly be said to read like a Harold Lamb pastiche. It may be that Howard leaned heavily upon a genre master as he was finding his bearings. Howard is too accomplished to mimic plots, but he borrows and remixes concepts he came across in Lamb’s writing, most particularly within “The Three Palladins.” There is the same search for Prester John – though Howard’s character comes from the west rather than the east – and the discovery of the Keraits (Christians) that Prester John rules only a short time before Genghis Khan invades the region. Just as Sir Hugo sides with natives against the invasion of a Mongol tribe in Lamb’s “The Wolf Chaser,” Howard’s Godric advises the Black Cathayans to hold a narrow pass, though instead of facing off a tribe and antagonists unknown to westerns, he fights against the forces and champions of Genghis Khan, and even meets the mighty conqueror himself. Anyone who has read Lamb’s “The Three Palladins” or “The Making of the Morning Star” or the second and third novels of his Durandal trilogy will be familiar with the portrayal of Subotai, Chepe Noyon, and Genghis Khan, who sound and behave in “Red Blades” very much the way they do when scripted by Lamb. So similar are they in tone and behavior that “Red Blades” can almost be seen as a companion piece in the same fictional universe: nothing within Howard’s tale precludes any of the events within Lamb’s stories, and may even follow naturally from some of them. Howard is no slavish imitator, and goes so far as to invent additional characters and moments, but the influence is unmistakable.

Howard flew solo for his next historical outing, the first of two finished tales of Cormac FitzGeoffrey. Titled “Hawks of Outremer,” it would eventually appear in Oriental Stories. Howard named FitzGeoffrey “the most somber character I have yet attempted” and sent him “into the East on a Crusade to escape his enemies.” In an October 1930 letter to Harold Preece, Howard wrote that he was considering writing a series based around the character. Howard did so, but it was short lived, consisting of only two completed tales and one unfinished draft of another, possibly because FitzGeoffrey was better in conception than in execution. Howard developed a complex background for his character, then frontloaded it into the first FitzGeoffrey story through direct narration and a long, forced conversation between FitzGeoffrey and an old friend, Sir Rupert. The depth of information is impressive, but the means of transmission is not; it is a contrived information dump.

The next chapter reveals FitzGeoffrey’s personality and mission through showing him in action, a marked improvement, but the tale lurches forward without ever really convincing the reader we should care about FitzGeoffrey or his adventure. In all it’s a weaker tale than “Red Blades.” A sequel story starts more strongly, but never really rises to great heights. Howard himself seemed to think he sold it merely on his reputation, “if I can be said to have one. The title, ‘The Blood of Bel-Shazzer,’ referring to a jewel, was the only interesting thing about it. The plot was hackneyed and sketchy, the action labored and artificial. Only once in the entire story did I evoke a slight spark of the fire that has smoldered out in me.” Howard frequently undervalued his writing and his intelligence when he discussed them in his letters, but his criticism this time is somewhat accurate. “The Blood of Belshazzar” is a murder mystery featuring a blizzard of characters who are introduced in passing as FitzGeoffrey surveys them in a feasting-hall. They are difficult to remember and harder to care about. FitzGeoffrey passively moves though the action, striving only to survive as he comes first upon the murdered victim and then the rogues responsible. The problems in the story look forward somewhat to one of the central issues of Howard’s “The God in the Bowl” in that the mystery itself just isn’t very compelling.

When FitzGeoffrey is saved at the end by a Mongolian borrowed from a Lamb story (one who calls FitzGeoffrey Bogatyr, a Russian term from Lamb’s Cossack stories unlikely to be used by a tenth-century Mongol) he rides off for further adventures, although after two stumbles it is hard to imagine too many people would be eager for another helping.

It is only with the third tale that we can finally glimpse what Howard must have been striving for with FitzGeoffrey in the first stories. It’s never seemed sporting to me to spend too much time criticizing the characters, prose, and plot elements of fragments and unpolished works – after all, they’re unfinished. They weren’t taken from the workshed for presentation because the writer didn’t think they were ready to share. What fragments can show us is the writer’s process and reveal the means that the writer employed in the act of creation. What we have of “The Slave Princess” would make any other writer shake his head a little in wonder. In first draft form it’s as polished as most finished pieces by other authors. There are occasional moments where an adjustment would have been called for – FitzGeoffrey’s retelling of his early battles goes on for far too long near the fragment’s conclusion – but it’s a rough draft, and an impressive one. It starts with a bang and flows smoothly from scene to scene. FitzGeoffrey may not be likable, but he fascinates, which is more than he did in the first two stories. He’s a shrewd schemer, a mighty warrior who has been shaped by his tumultuous past and genetics into more a force of nature than a normal human. In his physical description, with his volcanic blue eyes and square cut mane of black hair, he physically resembles Conan. His fighting prowess and cleverness look forward to the Cimmerian as well, although there the similarities end, for he lacks Conan’s humor, and it is hard to picture Conan so completely losing his cool that he launches into a berserk frenzy, as FitzGeoffrey does, nearly choking his host to death.

Judging from the surviving plot synopsis, Howard abandoned the story with only a few thousand words to go; most of the key scenes were composed, and he had to have known that the story was working. Writers have a sense about such things. It would have been a good story, had he completed it. But perhaps he abandoned a potentially good story because he had in mind one that would be great.

FROM JOURNEYMAN TO MASTER

If Howard had stopped with the FitzGeoffrey tales his historical work would only be an interesting sideline in the adventure writer’s career. Instead, he found his comfort level and sat down to write masterpieces.

In its first moments, “The Sowers of the Thunder” seems to mimic “Hawks of Outremer,” for the story begins with the arrival of a mighty Frank who before long seems poised to pour out his tale in too much detail, just as FitzGeoffrey had done in “Hawks of Outremer.” But Howard has to have recognized how artificial that opening discussion from “Hawks” was, and closes the mouth of Cahal just as his tale is growing interesting. It leaves the reader wanting more rather than drowning in details, and is a sign that Howard has mastered his narrative.

In the first chapter Howard introduces us to Cahal and Haroun, both giants of men. Howard has Haroun play cleverly with clues about his own identity without tipping his hand to readers or Cahal and presumably other listeners; the character is clearly trying to amuse himself via his own antics, be it the subtle hints as to his true identity or the broad attempts to find pleasure in a drinking contest with the grim Cahal. Haroun recognizes in Cahal a kindred spirit, a theme that runs through the story. If Cahal sees the same thing he does not show it, understanding instead that he and Haroun are evenly matched, which wakens in him a wary suspicion that the Moslem is a threat. He is right, of course, for Cahal and the readers eventually learn that Haroun is Baibars. The Moslem is more reckless than Cahal perhaps by nature or perhaps because he is more secure in his place and has unlimited resources at his disposal. Cahal is loyal to his people, Baibars is loyal to his cause – namely himself. Command and power are his, but he is lonely, a lion among sheep. In Cahal he senses a man like himself, one he would rather name friend.

Howard presents events like a master playwright, revealing key moments on stage and discussing mighty battles that take place beyond. He shows us Cahal plotting a mad dash for treasure with the knight Renault, but not the encounter with Kharesmians which destroys all but Cahal. The conversation between the Shaykh Suleiman and Cahal is head and shoulders above the informative discussion in the tales of FitzGeoffrey: it reveals both the character of the noble Shaykh, who mourns the death of an enemy and respects the prowess of the mad Frank, and emphasizes to us again the might and endurance of Cahal himself.

In the end, though, Baibars triumphs no matter Cahal’s great efforts. Glittering, victorious, he is in a fine mood as he looks down upon the Frank dying in the midst of the battlefield. Baibars names him king, then says “they who oppose the destiny of Baibars lie under my horses’ hoofs, and over them I ride up the gleaming stair of empire!”

But Cahal, whose own kingdom eluded him, whose own hopes were dashed just as they were within his grasp, has no joy to share. He knows that there is no glory in the rule of men. “Welcome to the fellowship of kings!” Howard has him say: “To the glory and the witch-fire, the gold and the moon-mist, the splendor and the death! Baibars, a king hails thee!”

The story is a long, bloody thrill ride. Kings and kingdoms have fallen and loves have been lost; it is a masterful performance, and a sign of more great works to come.

Howard next turned to the time of Tamerlane. Lamb’s excellent “The Grand Cham,” published in Adventure in 1921, is set in the same time period Howard chose to write about, and features a protagonist, Michael Beorn, who interacts with both Tamerlane and Bayazid, just as Howard’s protagonist does. Despite these similarities, Howard’s inspiration seems to have come from Wright, who, as Howard wrote in a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith in August of 1931, had been “hinting Tamerlane as a fit subject for an Oriental Story story … Now I’ve got to get hold of something on the Big Tatar and try to pound out a novelet; I’ve been thinking of writing a tale about him for a long time. And Babar the Tiger who established the Mogul rule in India – and the imperial phase in the life of Baibars the Panther, the subject of my last story – and the rise of the Ottomans – and the conquest of Constantinople by the Fifth Crusade – and the subjugation of the Turks by the Arabs in the days of Abu Bekr – and the gradual supplanting of the Arab masters by their Turkish slaves which culminated in the conquest of Asia Minor and Palestine by the Seljuks – and the rise of Saladin – and the final destruction of Christian Outremer by Al Kalawun – and the first Crusade – Godfrey of Bouillon, Baldwin of Boulogne, Bohemund – Sigurd the Jorsala-farer – Barbarossa – Coeur de Lion. Ye gods, I could write a century and still have only tapped the reservoir of dramatic possibilities. I wish to Hell I had a dozen markets for historical fiction – I’d never write anything else.”

One can only wish Howard had written all that he lists here. It is likely, though not altogether certain, that Howard was introduced to many of these topics in the fiction and non-fiction of Harold Lamb, who wrote of Babur, and who’d written of Baibars three months before “Sowers of the Thunder” saw print, for Adventure was steadily publishing excerpts from Lamb’s upcoming history of the Crusades.

By this point, though, Lamb’s influence is no longer as obvious in Howard’s own historicals. Donald’s decision to flee the west with his newfound companion to serve in the east is reminiscent of Sir Robert’s departure with a disguised Chepé Bega to serve Genghis Khan in the opening of Lamb’s “The Making of the Morning Star,” but it is far from identical, and the persons of Tamerlane and Bayazid are similar in their portrayal only in that they are powerful rulers. Gone is the sense from “Red Blades of Black Cathay” that the historical figures have been borrowed from Lamb’s own depiction of them; Howard has grown confident enough in his own abilities that he makes of them what he wishes.

As with “Sowers,” “Lord of Samarcand” is the tale of an eastern monarch and a western man who crosses his path. In the case of “Samarcand,” Donald serves Tamerlane because he desires vengeance against Bayezid, and continues his work for the aging king because he has no other real options or allies, nor indeed does he have many pleasures. And as with “Sowers,” the story concludes with a last confrontation between fighting man of the West and monarch of the east. In “Samarcand,” though, the westerner slays Tamerlane. Howard cleverly writes Donald out of recorded history – for there is no record of a westerner slaying Tamerlane – yet still delivers us the ending he desires.

Reduced to an overview, the stories sound more similar in scope than they truly are; what they share more certainly are a bleak sense of hardship and loss, of victories won for priceless costs, of lives and empires tossed aside on whims. Even the mighty can fall, and fall they do when they overlook simple details, like the love of Donald for a simple slave girl who is not even true to him, or when they place trust in the wrong person, as does Bayazid when he relies upon Donald.

“Samarcand,” like all the best of Howard’s historicals, is an epic threaded with tragedy, showing us the sweep of battle sometimes from a distant vantage point and sometimes from a close-up. It compresses the span of years or months with a few choice phrases, and describes a relationship between characters with a few well-turned conversations. The prose is gilt everywhere with words that are crystal clear and descriptive, beautiful even when it describes the fall of cities and the death of men.

Perhaps the grimmest of all these historicals is “The Lion of Tiberias.” No matter that Sir Miles and Ellen survive for a happy ending. Though it is the story of Sir Miles that pulls us onward through the narrative, it is the conqueror Zenghi who most fascinates. Brave, capable, even witty, we are shown contemptible cruelty at his hand at the story’s open. Yet Howard is too skilled to present us with a one-dimensional villain. Later we learn that the one action Zenghi regrets in his long life is the brutal death of young Achmet that so stuns the reader in the opening scene of “Tiberias.” Miles may be as clever and as accomplished as any of Howard’s protagonists, but it is Zenghi who we remember most when the tale is done. Like Baibars and Tamerlane, he is a lion among men who dares to mold the earth as his own. It is he who brings about his own downfall; he sets his own death in motion as surely as if he had slit his own throat, first by slaying the noble prince, then by sparing John Norwald. Once more Howard brings us a tale of the fall of kingdoms and the death of kings, but seldom has any writer delivered a conclusion so somber and otherworldly without resorting to the fantastic. When Zenghi’s advisor Ousama approaches the atabeg’s tent, he finds the unexpected.

He stopped short, an uncanny fear prickling the short hairs at the back of his neck, as a form came from the pavilion. He made out a tall white-bearded man, clad in rags. The Arab stretched forth a hand timidly, but dared not touch the apparition. He saw that the figure’s hand was pressed against its left side, and blood oozed darkly from between the fingers.“Where go you, old man?” stammered the Arab, involuntarily stepping back as the white-bearded stranger fixed weird blazing eyes upon him.“I go back to the void which gave me birth,” answered the figure in a deep ghostly voice, and as the Arab stared in bewilderment, the stranger passed on with slow, certain, unwavering steps, to vanish in the darkness. Once more the dreams of empire fade, and Ousama eloquently mourns his master when he discovers the body of Zenghi. “ ‘Alas for kingly ambitions and high visions!’ exclaimed the Arab. ‘Death is a black horse that may halt in the night by any tent, and life is more unstable than the foam on the sea!’ ” It is just one more memorable quote from a story that is laced with them.

In each of the last three stories, Howard has played variations upon one of his favorite themes; that we must eat and drink and be merry while we can, for death comes all too swiftly, even for the great.

While an eastern monarch again plays a leading role in the next of Howard’s historicals, Suleyman is much less the focus than Red Sonya and Gottfried von Kalmbach. It is probably well enough known now that Red Sonya has little in common with the comic-book character Red Sonja other than a similar name, red hair, and a skill with weapons. At no point during the length of the story does Howard’s Red Sonya don a chainmail bikini; she and von Kalmbach neatly steal the show without the use of gimmicks.

Life may be just as grim under “The Shadow of the Vulture” as it was amongst Tiberian Lions and Thunder Sowers, but Howard finds greater room for other tones within the work. Von Kalmbach is strong and courageous, but he’s a drunkard always out to enjoy himself a bit even if he’s doomed. He’s essentially good natured; the grim melancholy that has dogged the other male protagonists is mostly absent from von Kalmbach himself, although the environment he moves through is not so different. Howard avoids the temptation to make the character a comic sendup, though he does furnish von Kalmbach with a straight man in the person of Red Sonja, his brighter half. As much as von Kalmbach might desire it, he and Red Sonja do not become romantically linked, but they do recognize each other as two of the few who are competent enough to stand the walls, and she watches out for him. If not as explicitly intelligent as some of Howard’s other characters, Sonja can think on her feet, and it is her brains that save von Kalmbach and that set the final scheme in motion that finishes the vulture.

Suleyman, for all that he is portrayed as intelligent, does not fare as well; he comes across as cultured but a little petulant. His aims at conquest are thwarted, but he decides to celebrate the campaign’s failure as a success anyway, a point of irony from history that amused Howard. Though Suleyman does not die like the monarchs in the Howard historicals that precede him – he would live on for many years yet – his evil henchman does, and surely Mikhal Oglu is the blackest figure yet used in these history tales, one who “recalled with satisfaction the blackened, corpse-littered wastes – the screams of tortured men – the cries of girls writhing in his iron arms; recalled with much the same sensation the death-shrieks of those same girls in the blood-fouled hands of his killers.” There’s nothing redeemable in the man but his efficiency. We feel no sympathy for either him or the haughty Suleyman come story end, when the two are face to face a final time.

“Vulture” is another epic, close on the heels of the three previous – four truly excellent historical adventures, all dashed off in a single year. It was quite an achievement. For once Howard himself voiced awareness of the story’s worth. To Lovecraft he wrote that “… I do like ‘The Shadow of the Vulture.’ I tried to follow history as closely as possible, though I did shift the actual date of Mikhal Oglu’s death. He was not killed until a year or so later, on the occasion of a later invasion of Austria, in which the Akinji were trapped and destroyed by Paul Bakics.”

Howard was also proud of his characters, writing to Lovecraft in March of 1933 that “I’m curious to know how the readers will like Gottfried von Kalmbach, one of the main characters in a long historical yarn I sold Wright, concerning Suleyman the Magnificent’s attack on Vienna. A more dissolute vagabond than Gottfried never weaved his drunken way across the pages of a popular magazine: wastrel, drunkard, gambler, whore-monger, renegade, mercenary, plunderer, thief, rogue, rascal – I never created a character whose creation I enjoyed more. They may not seem real to the readers; but Gottfried and his mistress Red Sonya seem more real to me than any other character I’ve ever drawn.”

Truer or not – for by this point Howard had breathed convincing life into any number of characters – von Kalmbach and Red Sonya are some of his most compelling characters, and we can lament the fact that we never heard more from Howard about them. Von Kalmbach is not quite so dissolute as Howard paints him here; the fellow in the story is almost staid by comparison to the way he’s described to Lovecraft. Those same words might better describe the protagonist of “Gates of Empire.”

Some Howard fans name the run of work from “The Sowers of the Thunder” to “The Shadow of the Vulture” as Howard’s historical high water mark, but “Gates of Empire” succeeds just as well. The fact that it is not more widely celebrated, even among Howard fans, may be because it’s different in style and tone from almost everything else in Howard’s entire canon. It’s not that details and events within the tale are any less grim than those of the historicals that come before it, but that the character who drunkenly weaves his way through all the blood and battle and death is another kind of fellow entirely. Howard was so confident now with the material that he was experimenting with construction and character; every historical from this point forward was a chance to further flex his muscles. Unfortunately we can only speculate as to what Howard might have gone on to write in the genre had the market not closed to him.

“Gates of Empire” is not the broad slapstick comedy of the Breckinridge Elkins stories. Giles is just this side of realism, and while a comic figure, is one who is constantly in danger. Not so Elkins, who will never be harmed. Throughout “Gates of Empire” Howard reveals a fine sense of comic timing and understatement. The pacing is brilliant. Guiscard de Chastillon always manages to arrive at just the worst, and most entertaining, moment. Sometimes the humor in the piece arises from characters having what would be a perfectly reasonable conversation if it were not completely based upon lies that Giles has told them about his own condition. A rogue, Giles is mostly harmless, and likable, clever enough to stay just ahead of any situation he’s created for himself. Indeed, almost everything that befalls Giles comes of his own poor choices. His cleverness allows him to make lemonade every time he falls into a vat of lemons, but in climbing out of one barrel he nearly always manages to make another poor choice that leads him into another.

Following Giles is nothing like following Conan, who is usually one step ahead of the readers. With Giles, Howard lets us in on the joke. We’re the superior to Giles in many ways, although few of us would be likely to lie so convincingly when the chips are down. As readers we know far better than Giles that the lovely girl leading him on through the darkness cannot possibly intend anything good for him; we have a greater understanding than Giles of exactly what he is up against in scene after scene and it creates a different kind of tension than Howard is famous for. Conan will surely get out of the scene via his prowess and intelligence, but how will Giles manage to avoid destruction this time? Dumb luck? More clever improvization? “Gates of Empire” is one of those stories that only improves upon revisiting.

Sadly, although it would have been nice to know what Howard thought of the story, or his progress as a writer, no surviving letter discusses either Giles or “Gates of Empire,” and he was never to write another piece quite like it.

A FINAL FLURRY

“The Road of the Eagles” returned Howard to the driven men and the darker tone more typical of him, but he strove even further this time, presenting us with a host of characters, all at odds, each so compelling that we cannot help but root for all of them, even though we know that for any one of them to triumph the others will fail and almost surely die. In the first pages it may seem at first that Ivan’s mission of vengeance will be the story’s central focus, but before long we meet Osman Pasha, and after some time in his company his agile mind and capable arm win our admiration. On the run, he has no options left him until the girl Ayesha begs him for aid in freeing a prince who will surely grant a kingdom to him and his followers. The chief conflict falls between Ivan’s chase of Osman and Osman’s pursuit of his dream, but there is also the matter of Ayesha, who’s fallen in love with the Turkish prince and uses all the wiles and charms at her command to win his freedom. She is merciless but determined, and we cannot help but root for her success. Howard even allows us a glimpse of the prince’s potential, hashish-addled though he is: “But there were strong lines in his keen face, not yet erased by sloth and dissipation, and under the rich robe his limbs were cleancut and hard.” Even so minor a character as Kral, who desires to aid the Kazaks and avenge himself upon the Turkomans, is brought to life, and death.

Death awaits nearly everyone over the course of the story, Howard sending each of them neatly on their way to their ends with the precision of an accomplished tragedian. The only moment within the piece that really falters is the conclusion, where Ivan and Osman discover that they are old friends, far from home. After so many fine scenes, from the irony of the prince’s death moments before men arrive to liberate him to our final glimpse of Kral, this last one feels less like the concluding moment and more like one hammerstroke too many on the bell of futility. In Howard’s defense, though, it is hard to imagine the story ending happily for either character, and this conclusion, at least, is a surprise.

Almost incidentally, we see a final Lamb influence within this tale, for the speech of Ivan and his friends – sometimes the very cadence and rhythm of their words – is reminiscent of the talk and behavior of Ayub and Demid. By this point, though, Howard is not writing pastiche. He is like a fine musician who has listened well to the playing of a piece and can effortlessly weave part of that theme into his own work.

In “The Road of the Eagles” Howard experimented with the rising and falling of fates of a whole host of characters and managed to make us care about all of them, despite the fact that none of them were explicitly good, or bad – although it might be conceded that “Ivan” is the least black-hearted among them, for all that he is a slayer like the others. “Hawks Over Egypt” is a return in some ways to the focus of Howard’s earlier historicals, although the twists and turns of the plot and its focus on a single span of days rather than a course of years is different from the epic sprawl of his four master tales (beginning with “The Sowers of the Thunder” and ending with “The Shadow of the Vulture”). Each of those four deals with the fall of cities and the death of kings – usually from their own hubris – the disintegration of empires or the dreams of those empires. Once Howard reaches “Gates of Empire” the events within take place over no more than a span of months. “The Shadow of the Vulture” might be said to look back toward its three predecessors and forward – with its greater focus upon character and telescoped narrative – toward the next. But then there are seldom clear boundary lines in any discussion of fiction, be it genre definition or periods and phases of an author’s work.

It must be noted, too, that these last three complete historicals – “The Road of the Eagles,” “Hawks Over Egypt,” and “The Road of Azrael” – did not see print within Howard’s lifetime. Likely that was because, in the depths of the depression, Oriental Stories did not generate enough income to survive, even with a name change to Magic Carpet. Howard had created a backlog of stories that didn’t see print, despite the efforts of Otis A. Kline, his agent. He was to write nothing more in a similar vein, and once claimed that writing the historicals took far too much time. One wonders, though, if Howard might have plunged forward into a genre for which he clearly had a natural talent had there been more markets. Could he have been putting the best face on a bad situation when his historical markets dried up? Clearly he loved the study of history and found rich inspiration for stories whenever he read of it. A letter to H. P. Lovecraft in April of 1932 bears witness:

I read with much interest and appreciation your speculations on the possible trend of history, in the event of the destruction of Rome by the Gauls; they seem to have considered all possible angles. Continuing with these theoretical wanderings: suppose that Martel had not stopped the Arabs at Tours? Or that Tamerlane or Genghis Khan had conquered Europe? Or, speculating from the other way, suppose that Alexander the Great had conquered India, and pressing on, subjugated the Cathayan empire? Would the East have been Aryanized, or the Western races sunk that much quicker in a mire of Orientalism? And suppose the Black Prince had carried out his dream of Oriental conquest? He was probably the only Western general of medieval times capable of holding his own with the great Eastern conquerors. In fact, I am convinced that, with his English archers, he would have proven more than a match for Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Baibars, Subotai, Saladin, or any of the rest. The main reason that the Crusaders and other western armies were so repeatedly defeated and overthrown by the Moslems and Mongols was partly because of the extreme mobility of the Oriental armies, partly because of the incredible inefficiency of the western kings and generals. In this exchange we can see a brief glimpse of viewpoints that are likely to strike modern readers as politically incorrect, but we cannot castigate a man for being a part of his own time rather than ours. Howard’s views on race were hardly unique to him; what were then considered scientific discussions of race were all the vogue in Howard’s day, and before the rise of the Nazis, discussion of the Aryan race as superior did not have the same sinister connotations that we experience today at the mere mention of the concept. Howard’s own views on race seem almost to have more of a “home-town” pride feel to them than anything else; in that same letter to Lovecraft, Howard writes: “I’ll swear, I’ve written of Christian armies being defeated by Moslems until my blood fairly seethes with rage. Some day I must write of the success of the earlier Crusades to gratify my racial vanity.”

Anyone truly familiar with Howard’s work can find heroic characters of different cultures and races fairly easily, even if they are painted in stereotype at other times. “Hawks Over Egypt” contains several minor moments where modern readers are likely to feel discomfort – for example there is a scene where the Emir Othman is described in terms no one would dare write today: “He shrank back like a great black ape, his eyes burning red, his dusky hands opening and closing in helpless blood-lust.” The blacks in the story are dealt with far more superficially – and with more exaggerated language – than are the rest of the factions.

An exhaustive discussion of the racial outlook of a Texan from the 1930s is beyond the scope of this essay and my own expertise. We should probably be more surprised that, when viewing Howard’s entire body of work, someone from his time and region is relatively open to the idea that a brave and honorable man can be found from any race, than we are surprised that his prose is sometimes colored with racial language typical of his time.

“Hawks Over Egypt” begins with one of the most memorable moments in Howard’s canon, as de Guzman and Al Adfhal meet upon the street just as killers close on Al Adfhal. Howard is reaching for the same complex mix of relatable characters that he worked with in “The Road of the Eagles”; we are presented with intrigues, double-crosses, exotic color, and thrilling battle scenes – but then Howard excels with battle scenes even in his rough drafts. For all of these strengths, “Hawks” never succeeds quite as well as “Road of Eagles” because we are never made to care about the characters and their desires and fates as much as we do in “The Road of the Eagles.” But whereas “The Road of the Eagles” rises to a crescendo then loses power in its final moment, it is in its conclusion that “Hawks Over Egypt” truly excels. Some of the best scenes in the whole of the story are with the depiction of the mad Al Hakim. Indeed, Howard even anticipates a more famous moment, as he has Zaida declare Al Hakim’s godhood to save her life. Robert Graves uses the same trick when Claudius recognizes that Caligula has become a god in I, Claudius some years later.

Despite Al-Hakim’s madness, and despite knowing that his death will make things much safer for millions of people, Howard evokes tragedy at the moment of his death. Zaida’s moment of vengeance, a scene we would have expected to feel was deeply deserved, suddenly seems cruel, as the man who thought he was a god is left to die alone under the stars … and a strange legend is born. It’s powerful stuff, and far stronger than what has come in the pages before.

My favorite of these last three post–Magic Carpet stories is the “Road of Azrael.” Although there are fine moments in all three, and “The Road of the Eagles” approaches greatness, it is the “The Road of Azrael” to which I have most often returned. It does not matter to me that the prose has more of a purple tinge than the other stories; it’s a grand adventure that starts out at a gallop and never lets up. Howard’s Chatagai narrator is brave, resourceful, a little full of himself, and very charming. Despite the fact that his temper or sense of honor can make him reckless, Kosru Malik possesses a shrewd intellect and has personal insight. His dialogue and thoughts drip with witty asides. In short, he’s a flawed narrator we can’t help but like, which is a huge strength for any piece of fiction. The skeptical reader can scoff at the coincidental meeting between Kosru Malik and Eric de Cogan and their past history, but an intelligent reader accepts the moment and rides with them into their mad adventure. There are moments of grim realism within, and of tragedy – the fate of Muhammad Khan, who throws his life and future away solely over lust for a Frankish girl. Kosru Malik sees greatness in him even in their final moment, as they battle: “ ‘Muhammad Khan, why be a fool? What is a Frankish girl to you, who might be emperor of half the world? Without you Kizilshehr will fall, will crumble to dust. Go your way and leave the girl to my brother-in-arms.’

“But he only laughed as a madman laughs and tore his scimitar free.”

Hubris destroys Muhammad Khan just as it has destroyed other leaders within Howard’s historicals. Yet while it’s a fine moment, it is not the one we remember, as the death of a ruler is perhaps the most resonant scene in three of the four most famous of these historicals. When we experience “The Road of Azrael,” what stands out the most is the brotherhood between the two characters and the friction that results from the different viewpoints of their shared struggle. We remember Kosru Malik’s little throwaway comments, such as “He cursed me beneath his breath as is the custom of Franks when a sensible course is suggested to them …” and the moment when the pair stumble upon a group of Vikings shepherding none other than King Harold. Who else but Howard could have conceived of such a moment and pulled it off? By that scene in the story we are so invested in the characters that what might have seemed absurd in someone else’s hands becomes inspired storytelling, no matter its improbability. With “The Road of Azrael,” Howard meant to introduce us to characters we care about, transport us into a distant land and time, and relentlessly pull us forward into adventure. He gives us moments of humor, poignancy, romance, and tension, and heaps of vividly described action. He achieves all these goals and makes it seem effortless; at the conclusion we cannot help but feel satisfaction at a tale well told, and key moments remain at the forefront of our imaginations, like the afterimage on a television monitor, or the lingering taste of a great wine when the glass is drained.

UNPUBLISHED AND UNFINISHED WORKS

Anyone who writes regularly is likely to end up with a few fragments, especially someone who writes professionally. Like an artist sketching out characters or environments before starting on the final drawing, or a sculptor making studies in clay before starting in marble, authors make initial drafts as they’re exploring a story. Someone who’s practiced and gifted, like Robert E. Howard, is likely to produce roughs that are quite polished, but a professional experimenting with different markets and story concepts ends up with false starts and fragments that were put aside because they weren’t quite working. Howard’s early death had nothing to do with the incomplete state of the fragments in this collection; they were abandoned for other reasons.

As I’ve already stated, I think analysis of fragments for literary worth somewhat problematic – naturally they will have flaws that a finished work will not. In the case of the fragments included in this volume, “The Slave-Princess” is the most compelling, and perhaps the only one that practically begs for completion. “The Track of Bohemund” has stirring moments and fine action scenes and it may be that had it been completed we would have seen another success, but it lies unfinished, and Howard himself might have sensed that something was missing. It does not seem to rise to the heights of the completed historicals from “The Sowers of the Thunder” on.

The other fragments seem to have come from earlier in Howard’s writing career. We have his summary and recap of Lamb’s “The Wolf Chaser,” a tale that clearly captivated him, judging both by these fragments, his brief foray into a tale with the same characters, and the similar conclusion to “Red Blades of Black Cathay.” Howard was probably experimenting with the aspects of the story he most wanted to learn from.

In addition to numerous tantalizing fragments, at the time of his death Howard had a bevy of fine stories and partial series that he never saw in print. Wandering through one of them is Turlogh Dubh O’brien, one of the best realized of Howard’s lesser known heroes and one of my personal favorites; I heartily wish Howard had composed more stories of the Irish rogue. Wherever he turns up, he tends to steal scenes through sheer force of personality, as he does in “Spears of Clontarf.”

When “Spears” failed to sell, Howard upped the quotient of the fantastic, retitled it “The Grey God Passes,” and tried, and failed, again to sell the piece. “Spears” is quite similar to “Grey God,” save that it begins with the slaying of Conn’s master and has a little too much story development through dialogue. When Howard cut this opening and replaced it with a brief glimpse of the All-Father, he improved the story.

Clontarf gives us an early glimpse of Howard’s ability to portray multiple characters in battle scenes. It works very well, even though it does not succeed quite as well as it does in his later historicals. Still, Howard at good is better than most adventure writers at their best, and it is hard to find much fault with the piece except in comparison to Howard’s own later and greater work. It seems strange to us now that the story, be it titled “Spears of Clontarf” or “The Grey God Passes,” did not sell in Howard’s lifetime.

Turlogh turned up as a central character in two more stories – one of which is often mentioned among Howard’s best (“The Dark Man”) and popped up in a few fragments, but Howard lost interest in him, or failed to find more stories to tell of him, and moved on. A different fate was to befall another of his promising heroes, Agnès de la Fère.

We can’t be certain when Howard wrote the Dark Agnès stories, although we can be certain that he set them to paper before January 1935, when he sent “Sword Woman” to C. L. Moore. Catherine Moore is well-known in fantasy circles and especially among fans of Weird Tales for creating a cycle of stories around space opera hero Northwest Smith, and for her tales of Jirel of Joiry. It is likely that the latter, featuring a flame-haired warrior woman of a mythical province of France, inspired Howard’s letter, though we should not leap to the conclusion that Jirel inspired Agnès.

Superficially Agnès and Jirel sound similar. They are both red-haired warrior women and French – but they are poles apart. There are obvious differences: Jirel is a noble and Agnès a peasant; Agnès narrates her story while Jirel’s adventures are told in third person; Jirel’s adventures have fantastic elements from almost the very start, whereas it is only in the Agnès fragment that the supernatural makes an entrance.

A greater difference than these elements, however, is one of tone. Howard and Moore were both of them splendid writers and Howard at least was capable of a variety of different styles. Here, though, he was direct and forceful, even a little spare, especially when compared to the often glorious prose poetry sprinkled through his best historical pieces. The two complete Agnès stories thunder forward at breakneck pace. Moore writes with a dreamy sensuality somewhat reminiscent of William Hope Hodgson’s best work, for mixed in among the surreal imagery are moments of horror and tension. Howard was perfectly capable of this tone as well, as his Kull stories bear witness, but he did not use it when he wrote of Agnès de la Fère.

If Moore influenced Howard in any way it is not really discernable, and it may be that he sent the stories her way because he sensed a kindred spirit, or because he wanted her to see he’d done something a little similar but hadn’t been stealing from her. Perhaps he contacted her for a bit of both reasons; we can only speculate.

What we do know is that Moore replied that she’d enjoyed Agnès, and that Howard never found a market for the series. He might have been considering altering them for Weird Tales – which would surely have required the fantastic element he introduces in the unfinished “Mistress of Death.”

The completed Agnès stories read like the first two chapters of a serial novel, or, perhaps more aptly, like the first two episodes of a radio or television drama. The main characters are introduced in an origin story, and so too is a villain who survives both adventures. It’s a shame we can’t know where Howard was planning to take the series. Presumably he had some idea, but no series outlines survive.

What we can clearly see is evidence to counter one of the critiques sometimes leveled against Howard’s work. No misogynist could have penned a tale with such a valiant heroine. She outwits and outfights any man who stands against her, and is of higher moral fiber besides, sparing Villiers, who would have betrayed her, then risking her life to save him and reigniting his own sense of honor.

Howard should not be faulted if Agnès and her companions are painted in more primary colors than the figures in his more famous historicals. Howard was capable of greater variety than his detractors give him credit for. Agnès comes from a pulpier and more melodramatic tradition, and she can stand shoulder to shoulder with similar heroes. Howard crafted his tales for market requirements. His writing was his living, after all, and it may be that’s why his women often were little more than verbal eye candy. It helped his stories sell. He wrote what sold in the market, and the fact that these fine tales of a heroic female adventurer never saw print are testimony that the wider world, or at least the gatekeeping editors, were not yet ready for the more egalitarian tales Howard was perfectly capable of, and comfortable with, giving us.

TRAIL’S END

Many writers have left their readers wanting more before they rode into the sunset, frequently because they had a popular character or series that readers could not get enough of. One of many fascinating things about Robert E. Howard’s writing is that he managed to pull this trick not once, not twice, but for almost as many series and genres as he worked with. The craving for more Conan stories fired an entire industry of (mostly bad) pastiche based around the character, and now there is an entire role-playing game as well as an online multiverse so that others can walk into the mighty Cimmerian’s world and find their own adventures. But readers don’t just desire more tales of Conan – they want more Solomon Kane, more Kull, more Bran Mak Morn. And there are lesser known characters as well that we would gladly have glimpsed more of – El Borak, Turlogh, Dark Agnès – the list goes on, and if one reflects upon the length of that list and then upon both the relatively short time Howard was creating professional writing and the immense amount of prose he produced over those years, his accomplishment is all the more impressive. He gave us a great deal of fiction, and yet left us still hungry. He was only thirty when he died, a point I like to raise when critics speak to an immaturity they see in his themes or prose. Given that he was already this good when he was thirty, and given he was only getting better, what more could we have seen from him had he lived for ten, twenty, forty years more? When we mourn Howard we should not just regret the passing of a brilliant young man, but the loss of all that he might have lived to give us.

One of those things, I’m certain, would have been more quality historical stories. If his letters and accounts of conversations in the final months of his life are any judge, those historicals were likely to have been westerns, but Howard may have returned to other genres as well. Sadly, we can never know. We should take solace, though, in the excellence of the work Howard left us. It is my hope that this volume will help acquaint both Howard fans and curious newcomers with some of the finest work in his canon. It has been unfairly overshadowed by that featuring his more famous characters and perhaps at last will find the audience it has long deserved.

• Weinberg, Robert, “The Long Journey of the Morning Star,” in Swords from the West, pp. xiii–xiv.

NOTES ON THE ORIGINAL HOWARD TEXTS