The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1
Page 2
One of Howard’s most successful series was about as far from the field of fantasy and horror fiction as one can go. An avid boxing enthusiast, Howard also had an antic sense of humor, and both of these went into the rollicking misadventures of Sailor Steve Costigan, who has a heart of gold, a head of wood, and fists of iron. An able-bodied seaman on a tramp steamer, he gets matched against the champs of other ships in exotic ports around the world, and manages to get hoodwinked by dames, cheated by shifty promoters, and victimized by misunderstandings, yet emerges (somewhat) victorious–at least in the ring. Twenty-one of the Costigan stories were published during Howard’s lifetime (twenty-two if we count a story in which his name was changed to “Dennis Dorgan”), compared to seventeen Conan tales, yet Howard’s boxing yarns had, until recently, gotten short shrift from fans and scholars, possibly due to the decline in popularity of the sport itself. Thanks to the work of Mark Finn and Chris Gruber, among others, these stories are again taking their rightful place in Howard’s body of work, and fans are getting a chance to see the more exuberant side of REH.
In 1931, hoping to break into a magazine featuring historical fiction, Howard wrote a story called Spears of Clontarf, a fictionalized account of the battle in 1014 in which the Irish under Brian Boru routed the Vikings who had established themselves in Dublin. When the story was rejected, he revised it, adding a weird element in hopes of selling it to either the new magazine Strange Tales or his old standby Weird Tales. In this, too, he was unsuccessful, but not because it wasn’t a fine story–it is. Farnsworth Wright, the Weird Tales editor, returned it with the comment that “the weird element is not as strong as I would like it to be.” Possibly he had just received a letter, later published in the magazine, complaining that the story The Dark Man was not really weird. Fortunately, we are not required to worry about whether the story is “weird enough,” and can include this fine tale of the twilight of an age.
As previously mentioned, the story most often named by Howard fans as their favorite or most memorable is the best of the Bran Mak Morn tales, Worms of the Earth. Here Bran swears an awful vengeance against Rome, but he pays a terrible price. No other of his fictional creations had the enduring appeal to Howard of his Picts, who appear in his fiction from 1923 to 1935, and in not only the Bran Mak Morn series, but also the Kull and Conan series, and a number of stand-alone stories. Worms of the Earth, though, stands out from the rest of the Pictish stories, and Howard himself explained the reason: “My interest in the Picts was always mixed with a bit of fantasy–that is, I never felt the realistic placement with them that I did with the Irish and Highland Scotch. Not that it was the less vivid; but when I came to write of them, it was still through alien eyes–thus in my first Bran Mak Morn story [Men of the Shadows]–which was rightfully rejected–I told the story through the person of a Gothic mercenary in the Roman army; in a long narrative rhyme which I never completed, and in which I first put Bran on paper, I told it through a Roman centurion on the Wall; in The Lost Race the central figure was a Briton; and in Kings of the Night it was a Gaelic prince. Only in my last Bran story, The Worms of the Earth which Mr. Wright accepted, did I look through Pictish eyes, and speak with a Pictish tongue!”
One genre in which Howard was not entirely comfortable, and therefore not especially successful, was the detective story. Abandoning the field after about three years of trying to write them, he said, “I can’t seem to get the hang of the art. Maybe it’s because I don’t like to write them. I’d rather write adventure stuff.” There is little of “mystery” to his detective tales, but a lot of adventure, and Steve Harrison and his brethren are more likely to solve the crime with brawn than with brains. These stories have more in common with Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu tales than with Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op. Yet, as Fred Blosser never tires of reminding me, they are action-packed stories, and the best of them, like the novel Skull-Face and the story included here, Lord of the Dead, can stand proudly alongside Howard’s other work. I do love the over-the-top climax to this tale.
Robert E. Howard loved folk songs, and sprinkled them liberally through his fiction. At one point in the mid-1920s he corresponded with the noted folklorist Robert W. Gordon, at the time compiler of the Adventure magazine department “Old Songs That Men Have Sung,” later the first head of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress (where the letters he received from Howard are held). Here we have a story built around a folk song, “For the Love of Barbara Allen.” It shows a gentler side of Howard, not often revealed. We see it, too, in the poem The Tide. Fans of the movie The Whole Wide World may recognize two stanzas which Robert Howard, played by Vincent D’Onofrio, reads to his mother in the film. It certainly resonates with the title of Novalyne Price Ellis’s memoir on which the movie was based: One Who Walked Alone.
Scholars are divided over whether or not REH actually believed in reincarnation, but there’s no question that he used it a lot as a plot device. His James Allison stories, of which most fans consider The Valley of the Worm the best, probably owe something to Jack London’s novel The Star Rover, a book which, Howard said, “I’ve read and reread for years, and that generally goes to my head like wine.” In that book, London’s protagonist, Darrell Standing, imprisoned for murder and placed in solitary confinement, escapes from the brutal reality of the present by mentally revisiting past lives. Howard apparently liked the plot device, but he made his character an invalid rather than a convict, which provides a strong contrast with the virile heroes Allison had been in his past lives. The ethnology is certainly outdated, but the story itself is timeless.
The People of the Black Circle is one of the stories people first think of when they think of Conan. It has it all, the exotic locale, the beautiful (and feisty) woman, the crafty and powerful wizards, the headlong narrative pace. It is sword and sorcery at its best. The other Conan tale here, Beyond the Black River, is, as previously noted, one of only three stories named on more than half the ballots in my poll of Howard fans. It has aroused occasional controversy: some critics have claimed that, because it uses some names from Robert W. Chambers’ Revolutionary War novels, the setting is probably derived from upstate New York, while others (of whom I am one) claim that it is a story of the Texas frontier, played out on Conan’s Hyborian Age stage. Novalyne Price Ellis, with whom Howard discussed the story, said it was a Texas story. And we have this passage from a letter to Lovecraft: “A student of early Texas history is struck by the fact that some of the most savage battles with the Indians were fought in the territory between the Brazos and Trinity rivers…. In the old times the red-skins held the banks of the Brazos. Sometimes they drove the ever-encroaching settlers back–sometimes the white men crossed the Brazos, only to be hurled back again, sometimes clear back beyond the Trinity. But they came on again–in spite of flood, drouth, starvation and Indian massacre.” Yet whatever may be its setting, this tale of conflict on the frontier is one of Howard’s finest stories, and it concludes with one of his most memorable, and most often quoted, lines.
One of the earliest characters created by Robert E. Howard was Francis X. Gordon, called in the Orient “El Borak,” the Swift. The author claimed to have created the character when he was only ten years old. In the surviving early El Borak stories, written when Howard was about sixteen, Gordon seems to be a relatively urbane man of the world. None of those early tales is complete, and the character apparently faded from Howard’s consciousness for several years. When he started “splashing the field,” though, in response to the failures of some of his markets during the Depression, he revived Gordon, but the veneer of urbanity was now gone entirely, and the former gunslinger of the Texas border had gone native in the Middle East. Hawk of the Hills, in addition to being a terrific story, is an interesting twist on one of the major inspirations for the El Borak series, Talbot Mundy, as Howard’s character must save the hide of another who appears to be based on Mundy’s Athelstan King (of King of the Khyber Rifles, and other storie
s).
By 1933, Howard’s attentions were turning toward writing westerns, and when an old stand-by, Action Stories, returned from a year-long hiatus, he submitted a story modeled on the Steve Costigan series that had been successful in the magazine (and its sibling publication, Fight Stories) before it suspended publication. This time, however, his protagonist was not a battling sailor, but an enormous mountain man by the name of Breckinridge Elkins, of Bear Creek, Nevada. Breck’s simple, trusting nature frequently gets him into trouble, as does his tendency to fall in love with any pretty girl he sees, but his size and indestructibility generally see him through. These are unabashed tall tales in the Texan tradition, and show off Howard’s madcap humor to hilarious effect. They were so popular in Action Stories, appearing in every issue of that magazine between March 1934 and October 1936, that when the editor moved over to Argosy early in 1936, he asked Howard to supply him with stories of the same type, thus providing an opening to one of the better pulps, a market the young author had for some time been hoping to crack. Unfortunately, while Howard could have some fun with the self-destructive intent of Jack Sprague in Sharp’s Gun Serenade, his own story did not have such a happy ending.
Here in this first of two volumes collecting the best stories from Robert E. Howard’s varied repertoire, you will find plenty of thrilling action, and if you read the stories a second time, or a third, you will also find that he is, as one fan magazine put it, deeper than you think. I’ll leave it to Charles Hoffman’s essay to illuminate some of the great themes in these stories. For my part, I simply hope that you will find them as enthralling as I do, and will enjoy them enough to seek out other collections of his work. Turn the page, and let Robert E. Howard sweep you into his world of excitement and adventure.
Rusty Burke
2007
The Shadow Kingdom
I
A KING COMES RIDING
The blare of the trumpets grew louder, like a deep golden tide surge, like the soft booming of the evening tides against the silver beaches of Valusia. The throng shouted, women flung roses from the roofs as the rhythmic chiming of silver hoofs came clearer and the first of the mighty array swung into view in the broad white street that curved round the golden-spired Tower of Splendor.
First came the trumpeters, slim youths, clad in scarlet, riding with a flourish of long, slender golden trumpets; next the bowmen, tall men from the mountains; and behind these the heavily armed footmen, their broad shields clashing in unison, their long spears swaying in perfect rhythm to their stride. Behind them came the mightiest soldiery in all the world, the Red Slayers, horsemen, splendidly mounted, armed in red from helmet to spur. Proudly they sat their steeds, looking neither to right nor to left, but aware of the shouting for all that. Like bronze statues they were, and there was never a waver in the forest of spears that reared above them.
Behind those proud and terrible ranks came the motley files of the mercenaries, fierce, wild-looking warriors, men of Mu and of Kaa-u and of the hills of the east and the isles of the west. They bore spears and heavy swords, and a compact group that marched somewhat apart were the bowmen of Lemuria. Then came the light foot of the nation, and more trumpeters brought up the rear.
A brave sight, and a sight which aroused a fierce thrill in the soul of Kull, king of Valusia. Not on the Topaz Throne at the front of the regal Tower of Splendor sat Kull, but in the saddle, mounted on a great stallion, a true warrior king. His mighty arm swung up in reply to the salutes as the hosts passed. His fierce eyes passed the gorgeous trumpeters with a casual glance, rested longer on the following soldiery; they blazed with a ferocious light as the Red Slayers halted in front of him with a clang of arms and a rearing of steeds, and tendered him the crown salute. They narrowed slightly as the mercenaries strode by. They saluted no one, the mercenaries. They walked with shoulders flung back, eyeing Kull boldly and straightly, albeit with a certain appreciation; fierce eyes, unblinking; savage eyes, staring from beneath shaggy manes and heavy brows.
And Kull gave back a like stare. He granted much to brave men, and there were no braver in all the world, not even among the wild tribesmen who now disowned him. But Kull was too much the savage to have any great love for these. There were too many feuds. Many were age-old enemies of Kull’s nation, and though the name of Kull was now a word accursed among the mountains and valleys of his people, and though Kull had put them from his mind, yet the old hates, the ancient passions still lingered. For Kull was no Valusian but an Atlantean.
The armies swung out of sight around the gem-blazing shoulders of the Tower of Splendor and Kull reined his stallion about and started toward the palace at an easy gait, discussing the review with the commanders that rode with him, using not many words, but saying much.
“The army is like a sword,” said Kull, “and must not be allowed to rust.” So down the street they rode, and Kull gave no heed to any of the whispers that reached his hearing from the throngs that still swarmed the streets.
“That is Kull, see! Valka! But what a king! And what a man! Look at his arms! His shoulders!”
And an undertone of more sinister whisperings: “Kull! Ha, accursed usurper from the pagan isles”–“Aye, shame to Valusia that a barbarian sits on the Throne of Kings.”…
Little did Kull heed. Heavy-handed had he seized the decaying throne of ancient Valusia and with a heavier hand did he hold it, a man against a nation.
After the council chamber, the social palace where Kull replied to the formal and laudatory phrases of the lords and ladies, with carefully hidden, grim amusement at such frivolities; then the lords and ladies took their formal departure and Kull leaned back upon the ermine throne and contemplated matters of state until an attendant requested permission from the great king to speak, and announced an emissary from the Pictish embassy.
Kull brought his mind back from the dim mazes of Valusian statecraft where it had been wandering, and gazed upon the Pict with little favor. The man gave back the gaze of the king without flinching. He was a lean-hipped, massive-chested warrior of middle height, dark, like all his race, and strongly built. From strong, immobile features gazed dauntless and inscrutable eyes.
“The chief of the Councilors, Ka-nu of the tribe, right hand of the king of Pictdom, sends greetings and says: ‘There is a throne at the feast of the rising moon for Kull, king of kings, lord of lords, emperor of Valusia.’”
“Good,” answered Kull. “Say to Ka-nu the Ancient, ambassador of the western isles, that the king of Valusia will quaff wine with him when the moon floats over the hills of Zalgara.”
Still the Pict lingered. “I have a word for the king, not”–with a contemptuous flirt of his hand–“for these slaves.”
Kull dismissed the attendants with a word, watching the Pict warily.
The man stepped nearer, and lowered his voice: “Come alone to feast tonight, lord king. Such was the word of my chief.”
The king’s eyes narrowed, gleaming like gray sword steel, coldly.
“Alone?”
“Aye.”
They eyed each other silently, their mutual tribal enmity seething beneath their cloak of formality. Their mouths spoke the cultured speech, the conventional court phrases of a highly polished race, a race not their own, but from their eyes gleamed the primal traditions of the elemental savage. Kull might be the king of Valusia and the Pict might be an emissary to her courts, but there in the throne hall of kings, two tribesmen glowered at each other, fierce and wary, while ghosts of wild wars and world-ancient feuds whispered to each.
To the king was the advantage and he enjoyed it to its fullest extent. Jaw resting on hand, he eyed the Pict, who stood like an image of bronze, head flung back, eyes unflinching.
Across Kull’s lips stole a smile that was more a sneer.
“And so I am to come–alone?” Civilization had taught him to speak by innuendo and the Pict’s dark eyes glittered, though he made no reply. “How am I to know that you come from Ka-nu?”
“And when did a Pict speak truth?” sneered Kull, fully aware that the Picts never lied, but using this means to enrage the man.
“I see your plan, king,” the Pict answered imperturbably. “You wish to anger me. By Valka, you need go no further! I am angry enough. And I challenge you to meet me in single battle, spear, sword or dagger, mounted or afoot. Are you king or man?”
Kull’s eyes glinted with the grudging admiration a warrior must needs give a bold foeman, but he did not fail to use the chance of further annoying his antagonist.
“A king does not accept the challenge of a nameless savage,” he sneered, “nor does the emperor of Valusia break the Truce of Ambassadors. You have leave to go. Say to Ka-nu I will come alone.”
The Pict’s eyes flashed murderously. He fairly shook in the grasp of the primitive blood-lust; then, turning his back squarely upon the king of Valusia, he strode across the Hall of Society and vanished through the great door.
Again Kull leaned back upon the ermine throne and meditated.
So the chief of the Council of Picts wished him to come alone? But for what reason? Treachery? Grimly Kull touched the hilt of his great sword. But scarcely. The Picts valued too greatly the alliance with Valusia to break it for any feudal reason. Kull might be a warrior of Atlantis and hereditary enemy of all Picts, but too, he was king of Valusia, the most potent ally of the Men of the West.
Kull reflected long upon the strange state of affairs that made him ally of ancient foes and foe of ancient friends. He rose and paced restlessly across the hall, with the quick, noiseless tread of a lion. Chains of friendship, tribe and tradition had he broken to satisfy his ambition. And, by Valka, god of the sea and the land, he had realized that ambition! He was king of Valusia–a fading, degenerate Valusia, a Valusia living mostly in dreams of bygone glory, but still a mighty land and the greatest of the Seven Empires. Valusia–Land of Dreams, the tribesmen named it, and sometimes it seemed to Kull that he moved in a dream. Strange to him were the intrigues of court and palace, army and people. All was like a masquerade, where men and women hid their real thoughts with a smooth mask. Yet the seizing of the throne had been easy–a bold snatching of opportunity, the swift whirl of swords, the slaying of a tyrant of whom men had wearied unto death, short, crafty plotting with ambitious statesmen out of favor at court–and Kull, wandering adventurer, Atlantean exile, had swept up to the dizzy heights of his dreams: he was lord of Valusia, king of kings. Yet now it seemed that the seizing was far easier than the keeping. The sight of the Pict had brought back youthful associations to his mind, the free, wild savagery of his boyhood. And now a strange feeling of dim unrest, of unreality, stole over him as of late it had been doing. Who was he, a straightforward man of the seas and the mountain, to rule a race strangely and terribly wise with the mysticisms of antiquity? An ancient race–