Introduction
The “call to adventure” … signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight.
–Joseph Campbell
No writer has ever answered the call to adventure with greater alacrity than Robert E. Howard, and few have proven superior to him in issuing that call to readers. For all that his stories appeared in the pages of pulp magazines during the era between the World Wars, they are always fresh, always modern, “always ready,” as David Weber observes, “to teach another generation of writers how to tell the high, old tales of doom and glory,” because they spring from that eternal well of hero tales from which the most enduring writers have drawn. His is the art of the bard, the skald, the cyfarwydd, the seanchai, the griot, the hakawaty, the biwa hoshi. Howard, in fact, may be said to have a direct connection to the oral tradition, as he is well attested to have talked his stories out, sometimes at the top of his voice, while he was writing, and to have been a spellbinding oral yarnspinner among his friends. The tales in this book, and in its companion volume, could well have been told around a fire, the audience listening raptly to the teller, surrounded, just outside the circle of light, by Mystery, and Adventure.
The telling of stories is as old as mankind, and many theorists believe that stories do much more than simply entertain us (though of course there’s nothing wrong with that). They help us find a way to make sense of the world and our lives, to give a narrative structure of meaning to what might otherwise seem a chaotic jumble of events. (In a startlingly postmodernist metanarrative within his loosely autobiographical novel, Post Oaks & Sand Roughs, written in 1928, Howard critiqued the very book he, and through him his fictional self, was in the act of writing: “It was too vague, too disconnected, too full of unexplained and trivial incidents – too much like life in a word.”) Story helps us connect and explain the incidents of life, helps us understand who we are and where we are and how we are to behave in the world and our society.
Among the oldest and most popular types of stories are hero tales, centered around an individual who performs some notable deed, and in so doing demonstrates some type of exemplary behavior (or, alternatively, behaves in a way that brings about his comeuppance, thereby showing us how not to act). It is this type of story that most appealed to Robert E. Howard, and in this volume and its companion you will find many fine examples. They can be, and all too frequently have been, read superficially, as amusements to while away the idle hour. They work splendidly on that level, and as Joseph Campbell noted, “The storyteller fails or succeeds in proportion to the amusement he affords.” For those who enjoy a fast-paced narrative expressed in direct yet poetic language, Howard succeeds marvelously. But in the best stories, there is more than amusement. “The function of the craft of the tale,” says Campbell, “was not simply to fill the vacant hour but to fill it with symbolic fare.” And here, too, Howard succeeds wonderfully. One of the real secrets of his enduring appeal, I think, is that he worked with archetypal materials almost directly, delving deeply into the reservoir of myth and dream to bring forth undisguised images and themes, to free them from the flowery conventions of “romance” that had accreted to them over the centuries, and to present them couched in language and in a worldview that was distinctly modern.
As Don Herron observed, at the same time Dashiell Hammett and the “hard-boiled” writers of Black Mask were dragging the mystery story out of the drawing rooms of the upper classes and onto the “mean streets” of the lower, Howard was hauling fantasy from the castles and magical forests to which it had long been relegated into a grimmer, darker world that was not so far removed from the experience of postwar readers. His heroes are not always “good guys”: they may be thieves, pirates, gunmen, feudists, outcasts guilty of terrible crimes. But they are good men, who adhere to strict inner codes of morality even when doing so conflicts with their self-interest. They match Raymond Chandler’s famous description of the hard-boiled private eye: “a man … who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid … a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man … a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it … the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world … The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.” Says Herron, “Many critics have taken up the cause of Hammett and the Black Mask writers, arguing for the ‘moral vision’ in their work, but most … have missed similar themes in [Howard’s] writing.”
It is not within the scope of this introduction to examine the themes and imagery of Howard’s tales: Steven Tompkins, in this volume, and Charles Hoffman, in its companion, have done an outstanding job of indicating something of the richness to be found in Howard’s work, and there is a growing body of critical literature for those who are so inclined. Read simply for pleasure, or plumbed for the richness of its symbolic content and ideas, the work of Robert E. Howard will reward the reader on multiple levels.
As I noted in the introduction to the first volume, this is largely my personal selection of the stories and poems of Robert E. Howard that I think are his best. However, I was greatly aided by a poll I conducted among longtime Howard enthusiasts and scholars, and I have sought the advice of colleagues when I faced tough choices. To keep the books manageable, we’ve had to leave out some outstanding tales and verse, of course, and many Howard fans will undoubtedly find some of their favorites missing, as are some of my own. I do hope that, should the stories or poems in this book pique your interest, you will seek out other collections: the excellent website Howard Works (www.howardworks.com) is the best online bibliographical resource.
Many of Howard’s contemporaries in the weird fiction field agreed with H. P. Lovecraft that “the King Kull series probably forms a weird peak” to his work, remarkable considering that only three tales featuring Kull saw publication during Howard’s lifetime. Two of these (The Shadow Kingdom and Kings of the Night, the latter generally considered a Bran Mak Morn story in which Kull is a guest character) were included in our first volume; the other, The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune, is presented here. It is a metaphysical reverie that almost amounts to a prose poem, and certainly leads one to wonder how some critics ever got the idea that Howard’s barbarian characters were all brawn and no brains.
Unpublished during Howard’s life, but among the finest of his Kull tales, was By This Axe I Rule! The story is not, strictly speaking, one of “swords and sorcery” – there is no fantasy element other than the setting itself. In this tale, the ostensible villains are the conspirators who hope to overthrow Kull, but I think the real villain is one more terrible than any other-worldly demon, nefarious sorcerer, or would-be assassins: it is the stultifying traditions and laws of an ancient society, inflexible rules that stifle and inhibit everyone, from king to servant. The lack of a fantasy element made the story unsuitable for Howard’s primary market at the time, Weird Tales, while the imaginary antediluvian setting probably hurt it with the non-fantasy magazines to which he submitted it. A few years later Howard would rework the story considerably, turning it into the first of the Conan of Cimmeria tales, The Phoenix on the Sword. While the rewritten story was quite good, I’m not the only one who finds the Kull version superior: in my informal survey it outpolled the Conan version by almost three to one.
Conan, of course, proved to be a far more popular character with the readers, from the original Weird Tales appearances to the present day. This has been something of a mixed blessing: on the one hand, millions of people have become familiar with the character through comics, movies, role-playing games and other popular media, to the point that, like Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, and Tarzan, the character is more widely known than his creator; on the other hand, though, many of those millions know the character only through the adaptations into other media, and the popular image of the fur-clad, muscle-bound, inarticulate barbarian is far from Howard’s original conception. In The Tower of the Elephant, one of the earliest written of the series, a youthful Conan, not long out of the Cimmerian hills, finds himself derided as an outlandish heathen, but soon encounters one far more outlandish than himself. Anyone who thinks Conan is little more than a brute will find those preconceptions shattered in this tale of compassion, and of unearthly revenge.
The first of Howard’s numerous series heroes to see publication was Solomon Kane, a somber Puritan adventurer and self-appointed redresser of wrongs. Believing himself to be acting as an instrument of God’s will, Kane nevertheless, in occasional moments of self-awareness, recognizes that he is prompted as much by lust for adventure as by love of God. A rigid Puritan in his creed, he nonetheless consorts with a tribal shaman and carries a ju-ju staff given him by that worthy. Wings in the Night is one of the Kane stories set in Darkest Africa, that continent that so fired the imaginations of writers like Rider Haggard and Howard, and that largely existed only in the imagination. The “white-skinned conqueror” business at the end makes us rather uncomfortable today, but as Patrick Burger notes, “Solomon Kane is all about contradictions,” and the text itself subverts one reading with another: the Aryan fighting man, we note, is standing with his ju-ju stave in one hand; the ardent Puritan who thanks the Lord for bringing him through was earlier the gibbering madman who “cursed the gods and devils who make mankind their sport, and he cursed Man who lives blindly on and blindly offers his back to the iron-hoofed feet of his gods.” Kane is one of the most complex and fascinating characters in fantasy literature.
“There is no literary work, to me, half as zestful as rewriting history in the guise of fiction,” Howard wrote to Lovecraft, so when Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, wrote him that he planned to start a new magazine of Oriental tales, and “especially want[ed] historical tales – tales of the Crusades, of Genghis Khan, of Tamerlane, and the wars between Islam and Hindooism,” Howard was excited enough to cut short a vacation trip with some friends and return to Cross Plains and start working to fill the order. He produced some of his very best work for that unfortunately shortlived magazine, first called Oriental Stories and then The Magic Carpet Magazine. We present two of them here, Lord of Samarcand and The Shadow of the Vulture, and we wish we could include more: in my opinion, these stories represent Howard at the very top of his game. In addition to these two, I would encourage readers to seek out The Lion of Tiberias, The Sowers of the Thunder, and Hawks of Outremer, in particular. The protagonists of these stories are flawed human beings, at times bordering on the psychopathic, and they fight for causes no more noble than they are. Howard has sometimes been taken to task for what some perceive as glorification of violence, but in these stories – and in the vast majority of his stories generally – there is no glory to be found in conflict, only dust and ashes. Of Lord of Samarcand he wrote, “There isn’t a gleam of hope in it. It’s the fiercest and most sombre thing I ever tried to write. A lot of milksops – maybe – will say it’s too savage to be realistic, but to my mind, it’s about the most realistic thing I ever attempted. But it’s the sort of thing I like to write – no plot construction, no hero or heroine, no climax in the accepted sense of the word, all the characters complete scoundrels, and every-body double-crossing everybody else.”
While much of Howard’s fiction may seem unrelentingly grim, arguably his most commercial series, during his lifetime, consisted of humorous stories. A lifelong fan of boxing, in 1929 Howard sold his first story of the battling merchant sailor, Steve Costigan, and subsequently twenty-one of these rollicking misadventures appeared in the pages of Fight Stories, Action Stories, and Jack Dempsey’s Fight Magazine (as well as one in The Magic Carpet Magazine, with Costigan’s name changed to Dennis Dorgan, under the byline “Patrick Ervin”). “But don’t be fooled by the slapstick nature of the stories,” says Chris Gruber; “the themes of love, responsibility, sacrifice, and honor churn just beneath the surface of the rugged, burlesque humor.” And certainly Costigan and his other boxing characters stand alongside his great heroic fantasy characters in their refusal to give up, no matter how badly they may seem to be getting beaten.
In 1930, Howard began corresponding with that other great weird fictionist of the day, H. P. Lovecraft, and in short order the two were sending one another lengthy letters full of commentary, travelogue, anecdote, and argument: they debated art vs. commerce, law and order vs. individual freedom, and most famously, “civilization” vs. “barbarism.” Very early in this correspondence, Lovecraft encouraged Howard to use his own Southwestern milieu as a background for his stories, as Lovecraft had done with New England and August Derleth, another Weird Tales writer with whom Howard would strike up a correspondence, had done with his native Wisconsin. This nudge sent Howard down the path of western writing, which would increasingly occupy him for the remainder of his short life.
The Man on the Ground is a very effective little vignette that reflects Howard’s fascination with the fuedists of Texas, and with hatreds so strong that they become almost concrete, living things. Leo Grin has noted that, in Howard’s work, “Heroes, villains, animals, plants, landscapes – all seethe and writhe with a breathtaking, unrelenting, very human emotionalism,” and that “In Howard’s worldview every obstacle – whether Man or Beast or Nature – becomes not just an impediment but an enemy, something not only to be battled but to be hated.” Within the stories included in the two volumes of The Best of Robert E. Howard will be found ample evidence that Howard’s characters are often driven by hate, to the point that their foes become no longer human but mere objects of that hatred. In this tale, and in the later Red Nails, we see that the hatreds born of feuds can become something like forces of nature, against which the individuals caught up in them are as helpless as they would be against a tempest. Again, I think it is important to recognize that, in writing about hatred as a motivating force, Howard is not advocating for it; as with his seemingly unrelenting focus on violent action, he is portraying an aspect of human nature, one with which we find ourselves all too often confronted in the daily news.
In Old Garfield’s Heart, Howard takes the admonition to write about his native environs literally: “Lost Knob” is his fictional version of Cross Plains, the small Central West Texas town in which he lived. Howard’s love of Texas history and legend came not only from his reading but from talking with old pioneers, men and women who had lived through the frontier days of a region through which the last Indian raids had swept only about fifty years before this tale was written.
“The phenomenon of an outlaw looting a section under the guise of an officer of the law was not unknown in the early West – as witness Henry Plummer, and some others,” Howard wrote Lovecraft. He went on to relate at some length episodes from the beginning and end of Hendry Brown’s brief career as marshal of Caldwell, Kansas: the marshal had come to a bad end when he and some accomplices tried to rob the bank. Not long afterward, Howard told August Derleth that he had just written a thirty-thousand-word western story in which “my main character was drawn from Hendry Brown.” That story was Vultures of Wahpeton, and along with passages from his letters, it strongly hints of the promise that Howard would someday write the epic of the Southwest he hoped for. Howard was a bit ahead of his time with the western: it would not be until several years after his death that the bleak worldview and the protagonist whose hat isn’t white would come into their own in the western magazines.
Another of Howard’s commercially successful series was his tall tales of Breckinridge Elkins, a mountain man with a heart of gold and a head of lead. An Elkins story ran in every issue of Action Stories from March 1934 until they ran out in October 1936, four months after Howard’s death (a final story appeared in January 1937). When the editor of Action Stories moved over to Argosy, he asked Howard to provide a series similar to the Elkins. The young author had wanted to write for Argosy since he was a teenager, but one boxing story in 1929 had been all he had been able to manage, so he now took advantage of the opportunity and created Pike Bearfield, of Wolf Mountain, Texas. Pike may be a little slow in the thinking department, but if there’s mayhem in the offing he’s likely to be right in the thick of it. Gents on the Lynch is a riotously funny tale, and is also interesting in that we here see Howard putting a humorous spin on a plot very similar to Vultures of Wahpeton, almost as if he’d asked himself what would happen if Breck Elkins, rather than Steve Corcoran, had been recruited as a deputy in Wahpeton.
Pigeons from Hell may not be the most chilling title in the world of horror fiction, but the story it heads is among the first rank. Based on tales the young Bob Howard had heard from an old former slave, while living briefly in the piney woods of East Texas, it is a tale of terror in an old deserted house, and of a ghastly revenge. There is some period racism, but we hope it won’t mar your enjoyment of this chilling masterpiece. Lovecraft said of Howard, “Seldom if ever did he set down a lifeless stock character or situation and leave it as such. Before he concluded with it, it always took on some tinge of vitality and reality …” When Howard dealt with tropes of horror fiction, stock monsters like werewolves, vampires, and the like, he always gave them some unusual twist, something that made them uniquely his. In this tale, his creation of the zuvembie gives a Howardian spin to the zombie.
Wild Water finds Howard about as close to home as it is possible to get. Like Old Garfield’s Heart, the story is set in the “Lost Knob” country, but it is based on an actual event that had taken place the year before the story was written. Some thirty miles south of Cross Plains lies the larger town of Brownwood, where Howard had attended his final year of high school and two years of commercial courses, and where he visited frequently with his good friends Clyde Smith and Truett Vinson. In 1931, work began on a dam eight miles north of Brownwood to impound water from the Pecan Bayou and Jim Ned Creek to create a reservoir. Engineers had estimated that it would take two years, at the normal rate of rainfall, to fill the reservoir. But on July 3, 1932, a torrential rain fell over the area, and the entire reservoir was filled, 7,000 acres filled to an average depth of more than twenty feet, in just six hours. It was the equivalent of suddenly diverting the flow of Niagara Falls into the watershed of the two small creeks. The story also speaks eloquently of where Howard’s sympathies resided during the Depression.
In Howard’s library were two books on Thomas Edward Lawrence, “Lawrence of Arabia”: Lawrence’s own Revolt in the Desert and Lowell Thomas’ With Lawrence in Arabia. Howard had a fascination with adventurers who “went native”: Lawrence, Sir Richard F. Burton, “Chinese” Gordon, and many others. From these, and from the novels of Talbot Mundy, came the character Howard would claim was the first he ever conceived: Francis X. Gordon, known throughout the Orient as “El Borak,” “the Swift.”
“Some day I’m going to write stories about pirates and maybe cannibals,” ten-year-old Robert Howard told a neighbor, a promise he would make good on. Conan follows the red trade at various times in his career, and one of the tales of Solomon Kane features pirates and makes clear that Kane had formerly sailed with them. With his creation of Black Terence Vulmea, Howard created a buccaneer worthy of joining that illustrious company, and with the interplay between Vulmea and Captain Wentworth in Black Vulmea’s Vengeance, he shows how deftly he can handle a slow, subtle change in the interactions between two antagonists.
In my polling of Howard fans and scholars, the top-ranking Conan story was the last one Howard wrote, Red Nails. Writing to another great Weird Tales author, Clark Ashton Smith, Howard said, “Sent a three-part serial to Wright yesterday: ‘Red Nails,’ which I devoutly hope he’ll like. A Conan yarn, and the grimmest, bloodiest and most merciless story of the series so far. Too much raw meat, maybe, but I merely portrayed what I honestly believe would be the reactions of certain types of people in the situations on which the plot of the story hung.” Howard was fresh from a trip to Lincoln, New Mexico, site of the “Lincoln County War” and the exploits of one of his favorite outlaws, Billy the Kid. To Lovecraft he had written: “I think geography is the reason for the unusually savage and bloodthirsty manner in which the feud was fought out, a savagery that has impressed everyone who has ever made an intelligent study of the feud and the psychology behind it. The valley in which Lincoln lies is isolated from the rest of the world. Vast expanses of desert and mountains separate it from the rest of humanity – deserts too barren to support human life. The people in Lincoln lost touch with the world. Isolated as they were, their own affairs, their relationship with one another, took on an importance and significance out of proportion to their actual meaning. Thrown together too much, jealousies and resentments rankled and grew, feeding upon themselves, until they reached monstrous proportions and culminated in those bloody atrocities which startled even the tough West of that day. Visualize that narrow valley, hidden away among the barren hills, isolated from the world, where its inhabitants inescapably dwelt side by side, hating and being hated, and at last killing and being killed. In such restricted, isolated spots, human passions smolder and burn, feeding on the impulses which give them birth, until they reached a point that can hardly be conceived by dwellers in more fortunate spots … I have heard of people going mad in isolated places; I believe the Lincoln County War was tinged with madness.” In Red Nails, Howard limns the very apotheosis of the feud. It is also one of his most richly symbolic, mythological tales.
“Mr. Howard’s poetry,” wrote Lovecraft, in eulogizing his friend, “– weird, warlike, and adventurous – was no less notable than his prose. It had the true spirit of the ballad and the epic, and was marked by a pulsing rhythm and potent imagery of extremely distinctive cast.” Howard was a natural poet, able to type out page after page of spontaneous, first-draft poetry of surprising quality in letters to his friend Clyde Smith, who responded in kind. While some of his verse was published in small poetry magazines, and a number of his best appeared in Weird Tales, Howard’s preferences were for traditional forms such as the ballad and the sonnet that were falling out of favor. In his poetry we find many of the themes that inform his fiction, and in his fiction we frequently find his poetic voice. Indeed, Steve Tompkins says “His poetry … haunted his prose, imbuing it with an intensity and imagery that wedded drive and dream.” And Steve Eng, whose magisterial “Barbarian Bard: The Poetry of Robert E. Howard” remains the best study of the subject, and among the finest essays on Howard’s work in general, observed, “Robert E Howard may have sensed that poetry suited his imagination better than did prose. His fictional Sword-and-Sorcery heroes and foes would seem to be more naturally chanted or sung about than portrayed in paragraphs.”
We hope that these two volumes of The Best of Robert E. Howard will introduce new readers to the breadth and depth of his work, and that they will even have some of his fans taking a deeper look. “What is essential in a work of art,” wrote Carl Jung, “is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as a man to the spirit and heart of mankind.” In using the ancient symbols and imagery and themes of the hero tale, Howard was able to speak from his own heart to ours, in language that is rich with meaning without being expository. “The artist is the one who communicates myth for today,” said Joseph Campbell. “But he has to be an artist who understands mythology and humanity and isn’t simply a sociologist with a program for you.” Or, as Hannah Arendt put it, “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
So read the stories of Robert E. Howard for enjoyment – the meaning will reveal itself when you are ready for it.
Adventure is calling.
Rusty Burke
July 2007