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The Works of Robert E. Howard

   

Contents

Lord of Samarcand and Other Adventure Tales of the Old Orient

Introduction

“There is no literary work, to me, half as zestful as rewriting history in the guise of fiction. I wish I was able to devote the rest of my life to that kind of work. I could write a hundred years and still there would be stories clamoring to be written, by the scores. Every page of history teems with dramas that should be put on paper. A single paragraph may be packed with action and drama enough to fill a whole volume of fiction work,” explained Robert E. Howard in 1933. He immediately added that he “could never make a living writing such things, though; the markets are too scanty, with requirements too narrow, and it takes me so long to complete one.” Indeed, by 1933 Howard’s historical fiction was behind him; between 1930 and 1933 he had completed only eleven Oriental tales. Several of these, however, are regularly mentioned on lists of his best fiction. It is no coincidence that those four years also correspond to the dates of publication of the Farnsworth Wright-edited pulp magazine Oriental Stories.

Farnsworth Wright, as editor of Weird Tales, the era’s most influential weird fiction magazine, had in large measure contributed to the ascension of Howard’s career. Under Wright’s tutelage, Howard blossomed from an amateur Texas writer to one of the magazine’s most important contributors. It was partly thanks to Wright’s willingness to let his authors explore new forms of fiction that Howard was allowed to develop the stories of Kull of Atlantis and later of Conan the Cimmerian which were so markedly different and original. In June 1930, when Wright informed Howard that the company was launching Oriental Stories, he naturally asked the Texan to contribute. Howard was sufficiently interested at this prospect to come back home from vacation to start working on a tale, or so he wrote a friend. Howard had been interested in historical fiction since at least 1921, when he discovered Adventure, the best adventure fiction magazine of its time. It was in the pages of this magazine that Howard first encountered the writings of several authors who were to influence his historical fiction, most notably Harold Lamb. However, Howard had never succeeded in selling fiction to Adventure, and Wright’s proposition must have been a welcome one.

After a few false starts, and after writing an adventure story set in an eastern locale, Howard hired his friend Tevis Clyde Smith to do the research on his first historical tale, “Red Blades of Black Cathay.” Soon after these two stories had been accepted, Howard completed his first solo Oriental story. He evidently appreciated—and took advantage of—the creative freedom he knew he could find in a Wright-edited magazine. Commenting on that story, he wrote: “I lately sold a tale to Oriental Stories in which I created the most somber character I have yet attempted. The story is called ‘Hawks of Outremer,’ and I got $120 for it. The character is Cormac Fitzgeoffrey. . . . One of the main things I like about Farnsworth Wright’s magazines is that you don’t have to make your heroes such utter saints. I took Cormac Fitzgeoffrey into the East on a Crusade to escape his enemies and am considering writing a series of tales about him.”

Howard’s series about the exploits of Cormac Fitzgeoffrey was an abortive one, as only one other tale was completed (a third was begun but left unfinished). This is an interesting feature of Howard’s Oriental tales. Although he is best known for his series centered on characters such as Kull, Conan, Bran Mak Morn, or Solomon Kane, in this case he soon realized that the times, places, and historical events that held his interest were far too numerous and scattered for a single character; the possibilities were too interesting to ignore. In 1931, just after completing “The Sowers of the Thunder,” he wrote a friend about possible subjects for Oriental tales:

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.

From mid-1931 to late 1932, Howard wrote the best of his Oriental tales, all aimed at Farnsworth Wright’s magazine. “The Sowers of the Thunder” was written in June 1931, “Lord of Samarcand” around October of that year, “The Lion of Tiberias” in June 1932, and “The Shadow of the Vulture” in the fall of 1932. The other stories in this volume were also written about the same time but were either left unfinished or rejected by Wright and sold only years later.

Reading these stories and examining Howard’s list of the subjects and characters that interested him, one can see the strong affinity between Howard’s and Harold Lamb’s fiction. In the tales of both men the favorite subject is the confrontation between the East and the West. Whether the protagonists be Crusaders, Cossacks, or renegades; the times the eleventh or the seventeenth century; the places Aleppo, Damas, or Vienna, these stories are linked by a common denominator: all take place near that symbolic and ever-fluctuating line that marks the frontier between an East and aWest forever grappling at each other’s throats.

It was thus not a coincidence that Howard’s first attempt at writing an Oriental story was contemporary to his reading Lamb’s “The Wolf Chaser” (Adventure Magazine, April 30, 1922). Lamb’s tale deals with an exile who leaves Christendom, trying to find relief in the land of the Tatars, fighting, dying and finding redemption in the wars which tear those lands—themes dear to Howard’s Oriental stories. The Texan first wrote a short recap of Lamb’s story, then proceeded to write a short story, or rather outline of a story, which apparently didn’t go beyond the second page. These fascinating documents were identified as such only very recently (they are not listed in The Last Celt, Glenn Lord’s authoritative biography of Howard) and are published in this volume for the first time.

One should not mistake Howard’s conception of this frontier for that of Kipling, however: the line drawn by the Texan is significantly muddier and darker. Howard’s vision is a pessimistic one, to say the least. His Crusades are never the early ones, never portray a conquering Christianity; in his tales, the early victories of the Crusaders and of the empire of Outremer are but distant memories. Division, strife, and corruption are the common lot of the survivors, barely holding on to their last fortresses, waiting for the inevitable final onslaught of their Oriental enemies. Howard’s subjects for his stories reveal his fascination with the idea of the end of civilization—of Western civilization in the Oriental stories—illustrating his oft-quoted assertion that civilization is “a whim of circumstance” and that “barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” “The Sowers of the Thunder” thus depicts the fall of the last fortress of the Crusaders, vanquished by the armies of Baibars. At Howard’s hands, the event takes on giant proportions: “The sun sets and the world ends,” declares a character; it is not a mere defeat, it is a cataclysm. A similar situation is found in “The Shadow of the Vulture.” This story takes place several centuries later, in 1529, but the situation is the same: outnumbered, besieged, famished, and exhausted, the armies and people of Vienna can only hope to survive long enough for a miracle to happen. Civilization in these tales is always on the brink of annihilation, a fluttering candle at the mercy of the next gust of barbaric wind. Howard’s pessimism permeates the tales. Commenting on “Lord of Samarcand” to Tevis Clyde Smith, he wrote: “I don’t believe the readers will like it. 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 everybody double-crossing everybody else.”

Faced with hopeless odds and cataclysmic events, Howard’s protagonists are broken men, leading hopeless lives of violence. Most of them are exiles; all have led tragic lives. Cormac Fitzgeoffrey is a bastard son. John Norwald (“The Lion of Tiberias”) has experienced only “one kindly act” in his life, when Achmet saved his life—only to see that same Achmet butchered before his eyes. Red Cahal, in “The Sowers of the Thunder,” was robbed of his kingly heritage and fled to Jerusalem “to forget the past, losing himself in the present.” Readers expecting “escapist fun” from these stories are in for a shock. There are no real successes in these tales, only the futility of bitter victories: “Alas for kingly ambitions and high visions! . . . Death is a black horse that may halt in the night by any tent, and life is more unstable than the foam of the sea!” (“The Lion of Tiberias”). The only character who would seem to escape this fate is Gottfried von Kalmbach in “The Shadow of the Vulture.” Commenting on the tale, Howard wrote: “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.” It is the second time Howard uses the word “realism” to describe the characters of his historical tales. However, Gottfried is a kind of Conan the Cimmerian without the gigantic mirth, and his alcoholism seems to be just another means to escape reality, in this instance the armageddon that is taking place around Vienna. If Howard’s characters in these tales all know that tomorrow they will die, Gottfried at least tries to drink and be merry before.

Howard ceased writing historical fiction in 1933, probably when he learned that Oriental Stories—retitled The Magic Carpet Magazine—was on indefinite hiatus. The magazine ceased publication with the January 1934 issue, which contained “The Shadow of the Vulture.” One wonders why—and regrets that—Howard never tried to sell his stories to Adventure; perhaps his long history of rejections from the magazine intimated him. Another important factor also probably explains Howard’s decision to stop writing historical fiction. At the time he was writing “The Shadow of the Vulture,” Howard was also completing a Conan tale, “Black Colossus,” a story, replete with large-scale battles, that details the ascension of a southern ruler bent on conquering Hyborian kingdoms. Here was lurking, without the need for lengthy research, another of Howard’s historical epics, transferred from one of Wright’s magazines to the other. That Howard’s fascination for the confrontation between barbarism and civilization was as intense in later years as when he was writing for Oriental Stories will be evident to all Conan readers.

Collected in this book is the entirety of Howard’s historical Oriental fiction (including what few surviving fragments have come to us). These tales are probably among the most somber ever written by Howard; among his best, too. Prepare to embark on a journey unlike any other in the field of historical fiction. The place is Outremer, the time the early thirteenth century. . . .

The Black Stranger and Other American Tales

Introduction

America . . . has a powerful disintegrative effect on the white psyche. It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the white men, like some Eumenides, until the white men give up their absolute whiteness. America is tense with latent violence and resistance.

—D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

Welcome to the New World: the prehistory and history of North America as dreamed by Robert E. Howard (1906-36), whose characters brawled and brooded their way through the pages of Weird Tales and a variety of other 1920s and 1930s pulp magazines. Howard’s gifts enabled him to lengthen perspective even as he heightened intensity, and this collection features stories that are linked not by a protagonist or a genre but by New World settings. The identification or idealization of America as Eden persists from Emerson’s “Here is man in the Garden of Eden” through Fitzgerald’s “fresh, green breast of the new world” in The Great Gatsby, but for Howard such dreams deepen and darken into nightmares commensurate with a continent as “lonely and gigantic and desolate as Eden, after man was cast forth.” The Eden of these stories is trampled by invasion after invasion; its Adam is also Cain, and its serpents tempt with crimson fruit from which only the knowledge of evil and worse evil can be had. All that interrupts man’s inhumanity to man is inhumanity’s inhumanity to man.

Leslie Fiedler has noted that “the Celts, the Irish in particular, . . . from their home on the very verge of the West, have dreamed most variously and convincingly of that other place,” a tradition that Howard, famously described as the “Last Celt,” did his part to continue. As a Texan, he was predisposed to think in terms of empires; as a Celt, he could also discern, as does Turlogh Dubh O’Brien in “The Gods of Bal-Sagoth,” that all empires were ultimately “dreams and ghosts and smoke.” The dreams and ghosts and smoke waft from the pages Howard devoted to Conan’s Hyborian Age, Kull’s Valusia, Solomon Kane’s Africa, and Bran Mak Morn’s Rome-resisting Caledonia. He resembles in this respect other American writers who made a place for themselves in fantasy by making up places: Poe’s Ulalume, Baum’s Oz, Burroughs’s Barsoom, Cabell’s Poictesme, Leiber’s Nehwon, Anderson’s Alfheim, LeGuin’s Earthsea, and the Elder Earth through whose ruins Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane stalks. But Howard also gradually wrote his way back to his own doorstep; by April of 1932 we find him informing H. P. Lovecraft that he was “trying to invest my native regions with spectral atmosphere,” and being much too hard on one of the stories in this collection, “The Horror from the Mound,” as “a feeble effort of the sort.”

America had loomed as the Uttermost West of Howard’s fantasy from the start. God’s angry swordsman, Solomon Kane, learns “somewhat of stealth and woodcraft and strategy” from “the red Indians of the new lands.” A farsighted wizard in the Bran Mak Morn story “Men of the Shadows” espies “red-skinned savages” who “roam the western lands, wandering o’er the valley of the Western River, befouling the entempled ramparts which the men of Lemuria reared in worship of the God of the Sea.” And if we remind ourselves that America has been conflated with Atlantis almost as often as with Eden in the Western imagination, the Atlantean Kull begins to seem like a New World naïf constricted by the coils of the oldest of Old Worlds.

But what about Conan? Howard’s best-known and often least-understood character is described by the heroic fantasy writer David C. Smith as “the archetypal American, full of gumption, restless, wandering, as cynical and knowledgeable, as predatory and deadly as an Indian fighter or gunslinger.” Such a character logically deserved an American backdrop, and in the spring of 1936, when Howard was bringing it all back home with the unfinished but unforgettable American heroic fantasies “The Thunder-Rider” and “Nekht Semerkeht,” Conan was no exception to the westering impulse. Replying to a fannish overture from P. Schuyler Miller on March 10, 1936, Howard confided that the Cimmerian had “even visited a nameless continent in the western hemisphere, and roamed among the islands adjacent to it.”

Unfortunately, that adventure was never committed to paper, but we do have “The Black Stranger,” the last and longest of the Pictish Wilderness stories in the Conan series. As the title of this collection implies, we hold the American-ness of “The Black Stranger” to be self-evident; the western edge of Pictland scarcely camouflages the eastern shore of North America. As we venture inland from Count Valenso’s beachhead, we meet D. H. Lawrence’s demons at their most grinning, unappeased, and aboriginal in a grandfather of all the old-growth forests that weighed and preyed on the minds of the European colonists in those first footholds of Plymouth, Jamestown, and St. Augustine.

The critic Alfred Kazin once described the Puritan enterprise as America’s Middle Ages, and, indeed, the Puritans were the only Americans ever to dwell in a sword-and-sorcery universe. Later frontiersmen called Indians savages, primitives, or even vermin, but only the Puritans could employ an apocalyptic terminology—devils, demons, fiends—and believe every word. “The Black Stranger” (and its more acclaimed and anthologized predecessor “Beyond the Black River”) are key texts in modern American fantasy because they recreate the literally be-wildered colonists’ mindset described by Richard Slotkin in Regeneration Through Violence: “The eternal presence of the native people of the woods, dark of skin and seemingly dark of mind, mysterious, bloody, cruel, ‘devil-worshipping:’ to these must be added the sense of exile—the psychological anxieties attendant upon the tearing up of home roots for wide wandering outward in space and, apparently, backward in time.”

For Belesa, the heroine of “The Black Stranger,” “the world of cities and courts and gaiety [seem] not only thousands of miles but long ages away,” and she is certain that the forests are “the logical hiding place for any evil thing, man or devil.” The story’s “black man” is on loan from classic American literature: “Art thou like the black man that haunts the forest round about us?” Hester Prynne asks Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter. Howard’s story is full of hints that he had recently encountered Hawthorne’s novel, whose crowd scenes are populated by “painted barbarians” and “rough-looking desperados from the Spanish Main.” In many ways “The Black Stranger” is The Scarlet Letter after a sex change, a blood transfusion, and some cutlass lessons. Howard’s fey girl child is all but cloned from Hawthorne’s: Tina appears “with the light patter of small bare feet across the sand,” while Pearl plays after “making bare her small white feet, pattering along the moist margin of the sea.” Howard’s “wild men of the sea” recall Hawthorne’s “swarthy-cheeked wild men of the ocean,” any of whom “might relinquish his calling, and become at once, if he chose, a man of probity and piety”—exactly the agenda of Howard’s Zarono, with his elegant bows and a “tread as stately as if he trod the polished crystal floor of the Kordava royal court.”

Conan, as Lawrence said of James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer, “seems to have been born under a hemlock tree out of a pine-cone.” The early colonists triangulated themselves against both Europeans and Indians and became Americans by taking to the woods and taking them away from their previous owners. Mastery of woodcraft has served as shorthand for Americanization from the Leatherstocking Tales through movies like Deliverance, Southern Comfort, First Blood, Red Dawn, and, as an example of how not to survive, The Blair Witch Project. Conan, who is at home even on the hunting grounds of his age-old enemies, the Picts, is self-authenticating, and his cultural credentials as a Cimmerian, a white barbarian, are a way around what for so long was perceived as the problem of renegades and runaways who wanted to join Indians rather than beat them.

Rejected by Weird Tales in May of 1932, “Marchers of Valhalla” did not see print until 1972. Craig Edward Clifford has written that “Europeans trace themselves back into layer after layer after layer of previous civilizations; Texans go back into a vast unforgiving land, a timeless sun, a silence.” Howard’s “Marchers” goes back into that land, sun, and silence and recovers unsuspected layers by way of James Allison’s yester-self, Hialmar, as when he and the other Æsir behold a heat-shimmery, chimerical anticipation of Cibola or Quivira: “Lurking in our minds had been the thought that it was a ghost city—one of the phantoms which had haunted us on our long march across the bitter dusty deserts to the west, where, in the burning skies we had seen mirrored, still lakes, bordered by palms, and winding rivers, and spacious cities, all of which vanished as we approached.”

Discussing what he terms “Southwestern Gothic,” Scott P. Sanders reminds us that “nowhere else in America do the crumbling walls of immense ruins look out from the deep shadows of caves. Nowhere else in America do stone towers mark the past tenure of an ancient civilization that has left those of us who remain uneasy successors to the land.” One way to assuage that unease is to postulate even more ancient civilizations, and “Marchers” would have us believe that it is not a pre-Columbian but a pre-pre-Columbian episode. With its premature proto-Norsemen pitted against citified Skraelings, “Marchers” transplants the Vinland Saga from the Northeast to the Southwest. For want of longships, the Æsir endure a long walk, their trek brazenly appropriating the trans-Beringian epic of the peopling of the Americas from Siberian originals. The only “actual” Indians in the story appear from an unexpected direction: “the wayward, painted people of the islands,” possibly the ancestors of the Caribs, who blacken the southern sea in their fleet of “skull-bedecked” war canoes.

Some readers have found it difficult to turn a blind eye to the emphatically blue eyes in “Marchers,” and on the surface the story is as much of a Thirties keepsake as would be a menu from the Hindenburg. But the golden hair and azure gazes disguise an inner darkness: Howard’s Æsir are peculiar wish-fulfillment figures at best, stunted and stinted as Conan never is, and at their frequent worst they become a meditation on the oldest and most terrible blue-eyed soul: “As we strode we clashed sword and shield in a crude thundering rhythm, and sang the slaying-song of Niord who ate the red smoking heart of Heimdul.” “Aryans were not made to coop themselves in walls,” Howard maintained to H. P. Lovecraft, and “Marchers” is a study of what befalls his fanciful Aryans within the walls of Khemu, with its necromancers, devil-worshippers, and “evil-eyed naked women” gliding “like dusky shadows among the purple gloom.” The Khemuri, “a subject race, speaking a mongrel tongue,” are pretenders to the throne of storied Lemuria, as were the Aztecs to that of the Toltecs, and the extent to which they are an echo-in-advance of the Aztecs (so often assigned the role of feathered serpent in the New World paradise) is clear if we consult Richard Slotkin: “At the end of the unslaked and savage desert, so like the wasteland of the Grail legends, they behold Mexico—great, white, castellated cities, heaped with greenery, floating in the midst of vast blue lakes. Within the enclosed luxuriant gardens of these enchanted cities live an exotic people, dressed in a fantastic garb of woven and many-colored feathers, intricately wrought gold, turquoise ornaments, and printed cotton. Yet these fair islands are rotten at the heart: within each towering white temple are chambers reeking of human blood from human sacrifice and human filth.”

The Æsir chieftain Asgrimm is a Cortez with no gunpowder, warhounds, horses, pandemics, or cultic masquerades up his sleeve, and “Marchers” hurtles toward a premonition of the noche triste of July 1, 1520, when the people of Tenochtitlan became a nation-in-arms and nearly ended New Spain before it began. Resonances of another conquest are also at work in the story. The Texas writer closest in outlook to Howard is historian T. R. Fehrenbach, who has explored the “vast residue of violence left over from the making of Texas,” and likened the Texans to “the Alemanni or the peoples who called themselves Englisc,” who “in the process of entering, taking, and holding a territory . . . made themselves into a distinct tribe.” If we read the Æsir as a sword-and-sorcery simplification of Texans at their deadliest and most driven, and the treacherous Khemuri as a combination of Aztec trappings and Mexican failings as seen unfairly through Texan eyes, we begin to realize that “Marchers of Valhalla” is a creation myth fit for a state that has spawned more mythology than some entire continents, a creation myth that, as is only to be expected with Howard, culminates in cataclysmic destruction.

“The Gods of Bal-Sagoth” provides a sanguinary twist on the Old World legends of the Isles of the Blest, the Hesperides, and Tir-nan-Og as Turlogh Dubh O’Brien, an outcast Gael who never loses sight of the skull beneath the skin, makes an unplanned landfall on Bal-Sagoth, an island-empire that has lingered too long. The premonitions of the conquistadorial epic to come are unmistakable, whether Quetzalcoatlan lore—”There is an old legend among this people—that men of iron will come out of the sea and the city of Bal-Sagoth will fall!”—or the vision vouchsafed to Turlogh and Athelstane, a reverie that can be glimpsed but never grasped: “Through the trees the warriors caught a glimmer, white and shimmery and apparently far away. There was an illusory impression of towering battlements, high in the air, with fleecy clouds hovering about them.” The Irish axeman will not be the last European, stranded in “a strange land in a strange sea,” to speculate that “mayhap Satan himself reigns here and it is the gate to Hell.”

Howard wrote to August Derleth, May 9, 1936, that “I haven’t written a weird story for nearly a year, though I’ve been contemplating one dealing with Coronado’s expedition to the Staked Plains in 1541. A good theme if I can develop it.” On the evidence of the two drafts of “Nekht Semerkeht” that survive, it was a very good theme, albeit one Howard denied himself the chance to develop fully. The errant conquistador Hernando de Guzman, quixotic in appearance if otherwise grimly pragmatic, is much traveled in the realms of gold as a veteran of Pizarro’s Peruvian depredations and Cortez’s Mexican exploits but rich in experience rather than in retained loot. For de Guzman, Spain is “far away, a dream-like memory, a land of Cockaigne that had once been real, in the golden glow of youth and desire, but now had no more reality than a ghost-continent lost in a sea of mist,” and he himself, for all his armored solidity, might as well be “a phantom, drifting futilely across a sleeping, indifferent land,” his disorientation anticipating the comment of the historian Elliott West in his The Contested Plains: “When they looked at the land, the Spanish saw some trouble, but mostly they saw nothing at all.”

It is to be regretted that “Nekht Semerkeht” as we have it dims and dwindles to a synopsis, but Howard’s ability to telescope and streamline history is nowhere more dramatic than in the genuine war of the worlds with which the story opens. Nekht Semerkeht himself is an out-of-towner who does not quite manage to live up to his fantastic accessories, a silhouette that Howard would presumably have filled in and fleshed out in further drafts of the story. The richness here lies rather in the wealth of regional and historical detail (tizwin, Cajamarca, a teocalla, the Karankawas, a governing tlacatecatl), de Guzman’s “blind black urge to live,” and the enormities, equal parts Alexander of Macedon and Amadis of Gaul, that he has seen and committed: “the royal blood of Montezuma dripping from the parapets of Tenochtitlan—blood running ankle-deep in the plaza of Cajamarca, about the frantic feet of doomed Atahualpa.”

Africans join Norsemen, Gaels, and conquistadors as intruders in the New World in “Black Vulmea’s Vengeance,” and it must be said not only of this story but also of “Black Canaan” and “Pigeons from Hell” that, although Howard’s best work is timeless, he himself was not. He was a white Texan in a period when being one meant membership in a caste whose prerogatives and prejudices were unconstrained by the evolution of attitudes or the revolution in legal remedies achieved by the civil rights movement, which is to say that his vocabulary included what many of us might nominate as the ugliest word in American English. Fortunately for the sake of his fiction, Howard’s worst outbursts were mostly confined to his letters, especially when he sought to out-nightrider the equally unenlightened H. P. Lovecraft. But there was another side to him, one that compulsively identified with underdogs (especially lupine underdogs) and for which all other color considerations were eclipsed by a detestation of the yellow streak that so often signifies cruelty. That part of Howard created his African-American heavyweight champion Ace Jessel and related Conan’s axe-powered emancipation of black galley slaves in The Hour of the Dragon. In “Black Vulmea’s Vengeance,” Bigomba, the Cimarroon war-chief, is in the way but not necessarily in the wrong—he has reason for asserting that “the only devil is a white man”—nor should we overlook Howard’s word choice when the Caucasians Vulmea and Wentyard lurk “like phantoms of murder.”

In admiration or exasperation, the world continues to ponder the question that Hector St. John de Crevecouer first formulated in 1782: “What then is the American, this new man?” The answer, in “Black Vulmea’s Vengeance,” is Terence Vulmea, an Irish pirate who took over from Conan (to the extent that another character could) when Howard rewrote “The Black Stranger” as the semi-historical adventure “Swords of the Red Brotherhood,” which also failed to sell. Vulmea comes into his own in “Vengeance,” and his own is, like all revenger’s tales, a kind of ghost story, in which he is haunted by having been hanged back in Galway by the Royal Navy’s Wentyard. But as also occurred with Turlogh and Athelstane, the Old World quarrel of Gael and Saxon is overridden by the perils of the New World, not the least of which is the lordly snake, larger and hungrier than life, that lairs in the jungle-engulfed city. Has any other writer ever come close to Robert E. Howard’s scrupulous compliance with the pronouncement, after the Fall in Eden, of ceaseless enmity between the seed of Eve and the seed of the serpent?

Other ghosts also threaten to appear in “Vengeance” but never quite do. Here the lost civilization is not dying, as are Khemu and Bal-Sagoth, but is already long dead; yet something new is being born too. The sea-thieves of piracy’s Golden Age were amphibious frontiersmen on a waterworld that dissolved hierarchies, New World revolutionaries of sorts before there were New World revolutions. More rough-hewn declarations of independence in the Americas preceded that which Thomas Jefferson authored by decades. “Your English king is no more to me than rotten driftwood,” sneers Vulmea; could he but catch it afloat, he would sink the monarchy itself. On land Vulmea is a naturalized citizen of the wild, and having been schooled by North American Indians, he is better equipped to survive his South American predicament than Wentyard, who has much to learn and even more to unlearn.

The poet Kenneth Rexroth has argued that as literary devices Native Americans often play the parts of “nymphs and satyrs and dryads—the spirits of the places. They are our ecological link with our biota.” In modern American fantasy, Indians serve the same function as do elves in northern European fantasies such as The King of Elfland’s Daughter and The Lord of the Rings. They were here first and they were here better; Robert Frost’s line from “The Gift Outright”—”The land was ours before we were the land’s”—does not apply to them. “The Valley of the Lost” fascinates in this context because it opens another of Howard’s temporal trapdoors, through which we plummet into an age of such unfathomable antiquity that even the Indians are not indigenes but invaders. Skeptical about how manifest Manifest Destiny actually was, Howard constantly poked and prodded the newness of the New World; in these stories there are always ruins beneath the ruins and ghosts before the ghosts.

“The Valley of the Lost” is an American cousin of “Worms of the Earth,” and like the Roman occupiers of Britain in that masterpiece, the European conquerors of America are “a heavy-footed race,” mercifully unaware for the most part that the ground beneath them shudders and seethes with secrets. The feud between the Reynolds clan and the McCrills is “a red obstacle in the way of progress and development, a savage retrogression”—in short, a Fall or a consequence of the primal Fall. Another downward journey, that of John Reynolds to the Inferno beneath Lost Valley, is foreshadowed by the “inferno of hate” raging in his heart. The collapse of what passes for civilization is paralleled by the descent into the deep places of the earth and even deeper potentialities for diabolism of the Old People. Howard’s Southwest, like that of Cormac McCarthy in his harrowing Blood Meridian, is baked and blasted by hate as if by a second sun, and we learn with Reynolds that the elder race’s “arsenal of death in strange and grisly forms” failed long ago to overcome “the blind ferocity” of their pre-Toltec dispossessors. The story is noteworthy for what we might borrow from Herman Melville’s look at Hawthorne and call the “blackness ten times black” of its conclusion. The Old People need not be at the heels of “the last of the fighting Reynoldses,” for they are now in his head: “The earth seemed hideously alive under his feet, the sun foul and blasphemous over his head. The light was sickly, yellowish and evil, and all things were polluted by the unholy knowledge locked in his skull, like hidden drums beating ceaselessly in the blackness beneath the hills.”

In the same May 1936 letter in which he alluded to “Nekht Semerkeht,” Howard sought to distance himself from a story that would appear in the next month’s Weird Tales: “Ignore my forthcoming ‘Black Canaan.’ It started out as a good yarn, laid in the real Canaan, which lies between Tulip Creek and the Ouachita River in southwestern Arkansas, the homeland of the Howards, but I cut so much of the guts out of it, in response to editorial requirements, that in its published form it won’t resemble the original theme, woven about the mysterious form of Kelly the Conjureman.” Leading Howard experts now believe any evisceration that occurred was preemptive, that Howard cut in anticipation of, rather than in response to, editorial strictures. But the story remains what it intransigently is: a tour of what Richard Slotkin calls the South’s “own unique internal frontiers, [beyond whose] borders lay a primitive world, peopled (for the white southerner) with nightmares of vengeful savagery and bloodlust or with fever dreams of forbidden eroticism.” “Black Canaan” dispenses with the “or,” combining the nightmare savagery and the fevered eroticism.

“Black Canaan” is almost as entitled to the title “Beyond the Black River” as is the Conan classic of that name, and riverine metaphors course through the story and the kernel from which it grew, “Kelly, the Conjure-Man”: “In every community of whites and blacks, at least in the South, a deep, dark current flows forever, out of sight of the whites who but dimly suspect its existence. A dark current of colored folks’ thoughts, deeds, ambitions and aspirations, like a river flowing unseen through the jungle.” Howard was conflict-minded but also conflicted, and if the grandsires of Kirby Buckner and his compatriots were frontiersmen, they were also slaveholders whose rugged self-reliance relied upon coerced servitude. Buckner says of his “isolated, shut-mouthed breed” that they are “jealous of [their] seclusion and independence,” but as we read on we see that the seclusion is also an incarceration. The whites are locked up in a private hell, whose demons are their families’ former victims: “The fear of a black uprising lurked for ever in the depths of that forgotten back country; the very children absorbed it in their cradles.” Is it possible that in some mysterious way the back country has been remembered as well as forgotten? Howard permits himself one reference to “antebellum days” and another to a blood-drenched revolt “back in ’45,” but the wider world, the outside authorities and the backdrop of Reconstruction are missing. Instead, the actors might almost be performing some time-lost dramatization of Lincoln’s worst case scenario of retribution in his Second Inaugural: “until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ ”

In this sense Saul Stark and the Bride of Damballah are debt collectors, avenging angels, and they dominate the story as they seek to dominate Canaan; in contrast, the white settlers merely react, at times with dismal predictability, as when the vigilantes are eager to loosen the tongue of the hapless Tope Sorely with the lash. Neither “Grimesville” as a town name nor Tope’s surname requires much exegesis, but Saul Stark’s monickers deserve our attention. Saul the warrior-king was Howard’s favorite Old Testament figure, and the word “stark” and its variants mean “strong” in the Germanic languages. Stark is the “son of a Kongo witch-finder,” but he hails from South Carolina, notorious as the state that was too small to be a country and too large to be an insane asylum, the epicenter of nullification and secession.

Sinuous and insinuating, the Bride of Damballah is both the result of, and an incitement to, miscegenation, the true forbidden fruit of the American Eden. Her “barbaric fascination” quickens Howard’s already racing pulse, and her “heavy ornaments of crudely hammered gold,” as “African as her loftily piled coiffure,” provide clues to what kind of race war is being waged here, as does Stark’s plan to make of the rivers and creeks moats to defend his domain: “No one can cross the waters to come against them. He will rule his tribe as his fathers ruled their tribes in the Ancient Land.” This is a counter-secession, a separatism that will separate Canaan from America itself. Have the sins of the forefathers brought not just Africans but Africa itself to what should have been a New World? Buckner reflects that the essence of the Bride demands “a grimmer, more bestial background, a background of steaming jungle, reeking black swamps, flaring fires and cannibal feasts, and the bloody altars of abysmal tribal gods.” Of course this has little to do with any Africa that ever was, except in the projections of Europeans and European-Americans whose access to Dark Continents came from closing their eyes, or their minds. But the worry that not Europe but “Africa” will reshape America in its own image—the jungle-grown marshes of Tularoosa Creek stretch “inlets southward like groping fingers”—is balanced by the tacit admission that the fallout from slavery disfigures and degrades the doers as well as the done-to. Long before Saul Stark arrives, everyone in Canaan has already been “put in the swamp.”

Another view of the same process is on display in “Pigeons from Hell,” one of the finest American horror stories, and one of the most American. Here the swamp has moved indoors and upstairs, but the “reek and rot of decay” are still pervasive. Miss Celia, “the proudest and the cruelest” of the haughty de Blassenvilles, is reduced to a zuvembie clad in “the rags of an old ballroom gown,” like a hideous parody of Scarlett O’Hara. “Black Canaan” and “Pigeons from Hell” belong in any American library of burdened conscience and shadowed self-awareness, right next to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” and Absalom, Absalom! These stories know more than they tell, and they fear even more than that: “—God, what frightful, ancient terrors there are on this continent fools call ‘young’!”

The Garfield of “Old Garfield’s Heart” was the first white settler in Howard’s part of Texas (Lost Knob is a Cross Plains Doppelganger) when “hills no white man ever set foot in before” still “swarmed with Comanches.” His elegy—that this was “good country before it filled up with cowmen and squatters”—echoes Howard’s own lament to Lovecraft in 1933: “What I want is impossible, as I’ve told you before; I want, in a word, the frontier—which is compassed in the phrase new land, open land, free land, swarming with game and laden with fresh forests and sweet cold streams.” Garfield owes his life to Ghost Man, “a witch doctor of the Lipans, who dwelt in this country before the Comanches came down from the Staked Plains and drove ’em south across the Rio Grande.” Were his name not portentous enough, we learn that Ghost Man is a worshipper of “somethin’ from away back and a long way off,” and the significance of this story’s fantastic heart transplant, from the perspective of a D. H. Lawrence or Leslie Fiedler, is fairly obvious.

Like “The Valley of the Lost,” “The Horror from the Mound” rebukes the overconfidence of the Anglo-come-lately, and the story within the story is something of a companion tale to “Nekht Semerkeht.” Here not all of the grinning, unappeased demons are aboriginal, for the caballero Hernando de Estrada and his armored pikemen have imported the epitome of Old World malevolence, an undead hidalgo in whom the doctrine of limpieza de sangre, pure-bloodedness, has become more sinister yet. As “black suspicion” eats at the heart of the expedition so also does suspicion of the only black among them, “a cannibal slave from Calabar.” Far from being black, the pursuing evil turns out to be whiter-than-white, and at the moment of crisis the suspect from Calabar is no longer regarded as a black man but simply as a man who accompanies his fellow men to beard the leech in his makeshift den.

“The Thunder-Rider” is Howard at his most modern in his aversion to modernity; the assimilated Comanche John Garfield can only resist “the most highly artificialized civilization the world has ever known” by recovering the oxymoronic “all-seeing blindness” that made possible the “dreams and visions and prophesy” of his tribal forbears. Garfield evades psychosis by resorting to metempsychosis; his memories of warriors past and warrior pasts are a still-unconquered hinterland: “My mind began turning red. . . . The shadow of a dripping tomahawk began to take shape, to hover over me.” The first, and more enthralling, half of “The Thunder-Rider” rewrites conventional American ethnography as Garfield in effect remembers too much: “I could tell you things that would shock you out of the amused tolerance with which you are reading this narrative of a race your ancestors crushed. I could tell you of long wanderings over a continent still teeming with prehuman terrors—but enough.”

Howard was still in the early stages of mapping that continent and imagining those prehuman terrors in this story, and admittedly the swords could be sharper and the sorcery more spellbinding as the second half tapers off. Still, he is on native ground and in native guise; at last the founding father of American sword-and-sorcery is writing about authentic American warriors. “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time,” as T. S. Eliot puts it in “Little Gidding.” And just as the blond berserkers of “Marchers” have been replaced by the Comanches, the barbarians at Howards’s very own gate, the incongruous extra-continental nomenclature of the earlier story, with its Poseidon, Ishtar, and Ymir, has disappeared. Instead the master of the Darkening Land is addressed by his servants as Tezcatlipoca: “the name of one of the sun god’s incarnations—taken, no doubt, in a spirit of blasphemy by the ruler of this evil castle.” Howard’s letter praising “Teotihuacan,” a poem by one Alice l’Anson, had appeared in Weird Tales in January 1931—”I believe that only one familiar with that ancient land could so reflect the slumbering soul of Aztec-land as she has done”—and the allusions in “The Thunder-Rider” to “mighty cities far in the serpent-haunted jungles of the dim South” and “the days of the Golden Kings” suggest that Howard had realized that the immensities of myth and memory symbolized in stone by Tenochtitlan, Tula, and Teotihuacan were available as a New World equivalent of Acheron and Stygia in the Conan series. Perhaps he would have gone on to give us a Mesoamerican fantasy to rank with Montezuma’s Daughter, Terra Nostra, and The Chalchiuhite Dragon.

Even L. Sprague de Camp mustered enough depth perception to see that “a reason for the ferocity of Howard’s barbarians is that the barbarians he knew the most about, the Comanche Indians of Texas, were one of the most warlike peoples on earth.” The derivation of the noun “Comanche” from a Ute term for fractious cousins, Koh-Mahts, “those who are always against us,” may remind those familiar with Howard of Khor-nah’s boast in “Exile of Atlantis”: “For Atlantis, thank Valka, is the foe of all men.” Something of the incorrigibility that so intrigued Howard is captured in T. R. Fehrenbach’s Comanches: The Destruction of a People: “The horse lifted them to riches as they understood riches and made them the most dangerous predators on the continent. These dark-eyed hunter-killers must be remembered as long as men remain men. For something in their lives—the hot thrill of the chase, the horses running in the wind, the lance and shield and war-whoop brandished against man’s fate, their defiance to the bitter end—will always pull at powerful blood memories buried in all of us.” Buried in all of us, but most easily unearthed by a Comanche like Garfield, who offers us a hint as to how Howard’s own mind might have reddened even more had it not gone dark instead: I see the dry grass waving under the southwest wind, and the tall white house of Quanah Parker looming against the steel-blue sky.

If we wish to champion this writer, it must be on the basis of what he wrote, not what it is possible that he would have written; but the excerpts from Howard’s correspondence presented at the end of this collection under the found title “The Classic Tale of the Southwest” can be regarded as appetizers from a withheld banquet. When Howard left the world in June of 1936, he surely left unwritten a Quanah Parker-centric Comanchiad in which nature and nurture, barbarism and civilization, would have circled each other before closing for the death-grapple. The result might have been more searching than The Searchers; to adapt Howard’s own words, a new star might have flashed redly across the frontier of serious Western fiction. But at least we have “The Thunder-Rider,” evidence that at the end of his life, in a state of mind bleaker than that of John Garfield in his skyscraping office, Howard came to much the same conclusion as Philip Deloria in his study Playing Indian: “In the end, Indian play was perhaps not so much about a desire to become Indian—or even to become American—as it was a longing for the utopian experience of being in between. . . . Americanness is perhaps not so much the product of a collision of European and Indian as it is a particular working out of a desire to preserve stability and truth while enjoying absolute, anarchic freedom.” If the inner-directed outlets available to John Garfield and James Allison in their quests for “absolute, anarchic freedom” are denied to us, there is some consolation in our abiding ability to draw upon classic American artists like Hawthorne, Melville, and Faulkner, Sam Peckinpah and Cormac McCarthy, and at his best, Robert E. Howard—none of them much good at choking down pablum and placebos, all of them subversive in ways that no Congressional committee could ever weed out.

Working wherever possible from original typescripts, the goal of this Bison Books project has been to release Howard’s imagination into its natural habitat, to stand back and let his Juggernauts of immediacy and momentum shake the purple mountains’ majesty.We hope that his words will resound across the decades as if chanted to accompany his hammering on the keys of that long-suffering Underwood, transforming readers into rapt listeners. If you believe that allusion is just a misspelling of illusion, if you object to strip-mining text in search of subtext, no worries; enough blood to glut an Ares—or the real Tezcatlipoca—and several Ragnaroks worth of thunder await you within these pages. But if you suspect that classic is as classic does, if you’re willing to grant a pulp prodigal the chance to crash the canon and penetrate the pantheon, we’re pulling for these stories to move you to a proclamation like that the poet Hart Crane made on behalf of his magnum opus The Bridge: “Here one is on the pure mythical and smoky ground at last!” Maybe we can no longer be born into even a desolate Eden, but we can be borne there by Robert E. Howard’s storytelling.

The Riot at Bucksnort and Other Western Tales

Introduction

Mayhem, Mirth, and Myth: Robert E. Howard’s Humorous Westerns

There is no denying that Robert E. Howard’s heroic fantasy tales are his most popular, but some who have been inspired to dig deeper (or have been lucky enough to encounter the random fugitive paperback) have discovered the wealth and depth of the author’s range and versatility. Conan, Kull, and their breed have been adapted into comics, served as the basis for several movies, and inspired seemingly countless pastiches and continuations. Howard’s historical adventures, westerns, and boxing tales all have strong followings, and his horror stories have also received modest attention and have been included in numerous anthologies. But many of those familiar with Howard’s writings and characters would probably be surprised to learn that humor was a dominant theme in his published works. In fact, there are fewer completed stories featuring Conan of Cimmeria (twenty-one stories), easily Howard’s best-known character, than there are of either of his most successful humor characters: Sailor Steve Costigan (twenty-five stories) and Breckinridge Elkins (twenty-two stories).

I have a special affection for Howard’s humorous westerns. These larger-than-life tales have an amazing vitality and power. The combination of intense action and broad slapstick carries the stories like a runaway freight train toward the inevitable conflagration. Howard created three unique characters for these tales: Breckinridge Elkins of Bear Creek, Nevada; Buckner J. Grimes of Knife River, Texas; and Pike Bearfield of Wolf Mountain, Texas. “Breck” was the original creation—Pike and Buckner were primarily created to sell to different markets, although they certainly have discriminating features (both in character and in story structure). There can be little doubt that this is due, at least partially, to practical rather than artistic considerations. As a writer working in the Great Depression, Howard saw many magazines (and hence markets for his writing) come and go. It was very important for him to sell to a variety of publishers so that his livelihood would not be jeopardized by the financial problems of a single market. Conan, for example, was published solely by the magazine Weird Tales. There was no guarantee that a Conan tale would be accepted by that magazine, and once a story was accepted and published, payment was notoriously tardy. With Sailor Steve Costigan and, later, Breckinridge Elkins, both sold to Fiction House publications, Howard managed to develop an important secondary market.

Still, there is more to these works than just tackling a market. From his earliest days of writing, Howard showed an active and sharp sense of humor. The letters to friends from his teen years are full of wit, including bawdy poetry, parodies of popular songs and poetry, and political commentary. It was natural, therefore, for Howard to combine this sense of humor with his love of tall tales and his knowledge of the Southwest. And this combination developed into Breckinridge Elkins, the central character in most of the stories included in this volume.

But before diving more deeply into Howard’s humorous westerns, let’s step back a few years. One cannot understand the genesis of the westerns that make up this volume without some knowledge of the humorous boxing stories that were their direct precursors. From July 1929 until March 1932, eighteen Sailor Steve Costigan stories were published in Fight Stories and its sister publication Action Stories. These stories built on Howard’s well-documented following of the sweet science and showed the rapid development of a very broad, slapstick style. Unfortunately both Fight Stories and Action Stories suspended publication in 1932. As the Costigan stories formed a significant percentage of Howard’s sales during the preceding two years, this was a serious blow to his finances. Howard did manage to sell a few yarns to other boxing periodicals but with nowhere near the reliability and regularity he had previously enjoyed. So it was doubtless excellent news when Howard learned that Action Stories was resuming publication in late 1933. As he wrote to August Derleth around December 1933:

Recently—or rather a few months ago—an old stand-by of mine, Action Stories, returned to the wars on a bi-monthly basis, but I’ve been so busy trying to learn to hammer out detectives that I haven’t given it the consideration I intend to. So far, since coming back into circulations, I’ve landed only one yarn with them, but I hope to work out a series, as I used to in the past with Steve Costigan, the fighting sailor. (Whom, if you read the latest Magic Carpet, you encountered under the cognomen of Dennis Dorgan.) My new character is one Breckinridge Elkins, a giant of the Humbolt mountains whose exploits are of the Pecos Bill style.

Howard’s concentration on detective stories turned out to be fairly shortlived, and the suspension of his best detective markets coincided nicely with the resurrection of Action Stories. As a result, the Breckinridge Elkins series soon became Howard’s most reliably saleable character.

From his debut in “Mountain Man” in the March-April 1934 issue until Howard’s death in June 1936, a Breckinridge Elkins story appeared in every issue of Action Stories. In fact, Breckenridge continued to appear for several months after Howard’s death as the stories already sold were published.

Breckinridge is larger than life, a veritable man in a world of boys. Just about the only folks he meets who come close to his sheer physical stature are other members of his own family. He is, as Howard noted in the letter to Derleth, a direct literary descendent of Pecos Bill, the mythical prototypical cowboy. Breckinridge first strode onto the scene in “Mountain Man,” and from the very first page, he showed the seeming invulnerability that would become his trademark:

He come up, and said: “Breckinridge, ain’t that a bee settin’ on yore ear?”

I reached up, and sure enough, it was. Come to think about it, I had felt kind of like something was stinging me somewhere.

In the first story alone, Breckenridge encounters bee stings, cactus needles, clubs, fists, knees, bullets, and buckshot. These things are shaken off like you or I might deal with a splinter or a pebble in our shoe. And yet Breck’s legend is not yet fully formed. His steed is a most unflattering, if physically impressive, mule named Alexander—hardly a suitable mount for one such as Breck. This deficiency is quickly addressed in the very next Elkins story, “Guns of the Mountains.” Here we catch our first glimpses of a character who was to appear in every subsequent story in the series: Breck’s horse, Cap’n Kidd. Though to call Cap’n Kidd merely “Breck’s horse” is to underestimate greatly his contribution to the series. In some stories, Cap’n Kidd has a presence almost as dominating as Breck himself. And only Breck has the strength to keep Cap’n Kidd’s temper in some semblance of check. But what happened to Alexander? Therein lies a tale, but we have to jump ahead a bit.

The success of the Breckinridge Elkins series eventually led to Howard’s first book publication, A Gent from Bear Creek, published in England in 1937. Howard had been trying to break into the British markets since at least 1933, as a potentially lucrative source for second sales. He tried a fantasy short story collection first but was told that there was a prejudice against such in Britain at the time and that he should try a novel. He tried again in 1934 with the Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon, written specifically for this purpose, and was again rebuffed. Finally, he reworked several of the previously published Elkins stories and wrote several new stories to create the episodic novel A Gent from Bear Creek.

I call Gent an “episodic novel” because it shows its short story origin rather clearly. Most of the original stories have received only minor editing, primarily the inclusion of references to a running romantic thread that serves to tie the stories together. New stories were written to begin and end the volume (and to introduce and tie up the romantic thread). In addition, one more new story was written that covers the previously unexplained transition in the Elkins stories: the advent of Cap’n Kidd in the story “Meet Cap’n Kidd.” Chris Gruber notes in his introduction to the Bison Books edition of Boxing Stories that Howard did not introduce “the final missing piece to the Costigan formula,” his bulldog Mike, until the second story. In an interesting parallel, Howard introduced the key series component of Cap’n Kidd in the second published Breckinridge Elkins story. And unlike the other new Gent stories, “Meet Cap’n Kidd” actually works quite well as a stand-alone story outside of the novel.

Although immensely successful, the Elkins stories were not a guaranteed sale for Howard. One example is the story “The Peaceful Pilgrim,” which was rejected by John Byrne, editor of Action Stories, in a letter to a representative of Howard’s agent dated March 1, 1935. The letter begins:

I didn’t think that Breckinridge Elkins was up to snuff in “The Peaceful Pilgrim.” It seemed to me that the plot was rather lightweight, and I didn’t like the arsenic business—I thought it too slap-stick.

I think, however, that Howard can take the same set-up and build a better yarn around it, saving a great deal of the present action. I am jotting down a few ideas which I have in this connection. Howard may get some suggestions from them.

He proceeds to describe an entire story plot, based only vaguely on “The Peaceful Pilgrim.” Howard did indeed write this new story—as “Cupid from Bear Creek,” which appeared in the April 1935 Action Stories, but only about the first 15 percent of it was actually reworked from the originally rejected story. The original version of “The Peaceful Pilgrim” would not see publication until 1968. Is “Cupid” really a better story? Obviously this is a matter of taste, but I find “The Peaceful Pilgrim” all the better for having some elements that are different from most of the Elkins tales; hence its inclusion in this volume.

“War on Bear Creek” begins with what is possibly my favorite opening among these stories:

Pap dug the nineteenth buckshot out of my shoulder and said, “Pigs is more disturbin’ to the peace of a community than scandal, divorce, and corn-licker put together. And,” says pap, pausing to strop his bowie on my scalp where the hair was all burnt off, “when the pig is a razorback hawg, and is mixed up with a lady school-teacher, a English tenderfoot, and a passle of bloodthirsty relatives, the result is appallin’ for a peaceable man to behold. Hold still till John gits yore ear sewed back on.”

The image of Breck’s pap using his bare scalp to sharpen his bowie knife is sheer magic and a perfect embodiment of the casual acceptance of the extraordinary that forms the heart of these tales. This story has several other aspects that help make it something of a prototype for much of what follows. It has its mayhem enhanced by the presence of several of Breck’s kin, in particular his uncle Jeppard Grimes (a name Howard was to make further use of, as we will see later). It has Breck falling for a pretty “Eastern gal” who has no idea what to make of his advances. And it has a complete outsider in the form of an Englishman who serves to draw an even greater contrast between the denizens of Bear Creek and the mere mortals who inhabit the normal world.

Although the Breckinridge Elkins stories make up the bulk of Howard’s output in this genre, he was alert for other opportunities to make sales in the same vein. The Breckinridge Elkins series was so successful that Howard ultimately developed two more series to allow him to branch into other publications. When John Byrne moved from Action Stories to Argosy, Howard approached him with the idea of a series for that magazine. This represented a major coup, since Argosy was both a more prestigious and better paying publication than either the Fiction House’s Action Stories and Fight Stories and than his other most steady market of Weird Tales. It was also a weekly and hence had the potential for even greater sales. This was the origin of Pike Bearfield, who appeared in three issues of Argosy published in October 1936.

While superficially similar to the Elkins stories, there is a very specific style to the Bearfield stories that sets them apart. For example, Howard decided to use a consistent story device: every story will be told, to one degree or another, through correspondence written from one character to another. The exact approach did vary from story to story, but the basic device is always present. In “A Gent from the Pecos,” we have a short letter that serves to set up the remainder of the story. By contrast, the entire body of “Gents on the Lynch” consists of a single letter. “The Riot at Bucksnort” is told entirely through a dizzying sequence of newspaper articles, letters, and telegrams. The unfinished “The Diablos Trail” also keeps with this structure.

The final character we will meet in this collection is Buckner J. Grimes of Knife River, Texas. Grimes first saw the light of day in “A Man-Eating Jeopard” in the June 1936 issue of Cowboy Stories and appeared again in July of the following year in “Knife-River Prodigal.” The Grimes stories do not have an obvious story device like the one used in the Pike Bearfield stories to set them apart; nonetheless, they do have a different feel from the Elkins stories. Buckner is a bit less thick-headed than Breck. He’s certainly as naive, but he actually manages to outthink his enemies on occasion rather than just outmuscle or outgun them.

Although Howard had a steady market in Action Stories, he still did get the occasional rejection. Never one to waste a story, Howard did a very slight rework of the tale “A Elkins Never Surrenders,” mainly to change place and character names, and it saw print as “The Curly Wolf of Sawtooth” in the September 1936 issue of Star Western. The star of this odd one-shot was Bearfield Elston. The original Breckinridge Elkins version would not see print for more than forty years.

It is interesting to speculate what the future of Howard’s humorous westerns would have been had he not taken his own life in June 1936. At the time, he had three active characters, at least two of which were running as regular series. This at a time when he had already begun transitioning away from fantasy and beginning to work more on serious westerns as well. As Howard wrote to H. P. Lovecraft in May 1936, “If I can get a series running in Argosy, keep the Elkins series running in Action Stories, now a monthly, and the Buckner J. Grimes yarns in Cowboy Stories, I’ll feel justified in devoting practically all my time to the writing of western stories.” While it is clear that Howard’s most lasting literary legacy has been in the fantasy genre, and in particular in the area of heroic fantasy, he had the potential to have as significant an impact in the field of the western. And count me among those who feel that a Howard leaving fantasy to devote himself to the western would have been as much a gift as a loss.

But this is not the time to dwell on what might have been. Grab yourself a drink, prop up your feet, and prepare yourself for a headlong dive into some of the finest tall tales ever to see print. Just make sure that you won’t wake anyone with your belly laughs. And I’ll let Pike Bearfield sign off for me in his own inimitable way:

I am going to kick the seat of yore britches up around yore neck and sweep the streets with you till you don’t know whether yo’re setting or standing. Hoping this finds you in good health and spirits, I am,
Yore affectionate brother,

p. bearfield esquire.

The End of the Trail: Western Stories

Introduction

I�’m seriously contemplating devoting all my time and efforts to western writing, abandoning all other forms of work entirely; the older I get the more my thoughts and interests are drawn back over the trails of the past; so much has been written, but there is so much that should be written.

—Robert E. Howard to August W. Derleth, November 28, 1935

The Texas author Robert Ervin Howard (1906-36) is best known for his tales of heroic fantasy featuring such mighty heroes as Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane. But in the last few years of his too-short life, Howard turned his attention more and more to tales of the West. His most commercially successful westerns were the rollicking tall tales involving Breckinridge Elkins. Appearing in every issue of Action Stories between March 1934 and October 1936, these stories proved so popular that when the editor of Action Stories moved to Argosy, he asked Howard to create another such character for that magazine. “If I can get a series running in Argosy, keep the Elkins series running in Action Stories, now a monthly, and the Buckner J. Grimes yarns in Cowboy Stories, I’ll feel justified in devoting practically all my time to the writing of western stories,” Howard wrote to H. P. Lovecraft in May 1936, only a month before his death.

But while the humorous western tales were his bread and butter, Howard was showing increasing confidence in his handling of the traditional western, as the stories in this volume will attest. Many critics believe that, given a few years, Howard might have become an important western writer. H. P. Lovecraft, in a memorial tribute to his friend written shortly after Howard’s death, stated: “Steeped in the frontier atmosphere, Mr. Howard early became a devotee of its virile Homeric traditions. His knowledge of its history and folkways was profound, and the descriptions and reminiscences contained in his private letters illustrate the eloquence and power with which he would have celebrated it in literature had he lived longer.” And in the first collection of Howard’s stories, Skull-Face and Others, the Arkham House editor and publisher August Derleth said, “He had in him the promise of becoming an important American regionalist, and to that end he had been assimilating the lore and legend, the history and culture patterns of his own corner of Texas with a view to writing of them seriously.” In this, Lovecraft and Derleth concur with Howard’s own sentiments: “I have always felt that if I ever accomplished anything worthwhile in the literary field, it would be with stories dealing of the central and western frontier.”

“I was born,” Howard wrote, “in the little ex-cowtown of Peaster, about 45 miles west of Fort Worth, in the winter of 1906, but spent my first summer in lonely Dark Valley among the sparsely settled Palo Pinto hills. From then until I was nine years old I lived in various parts of the state—in a land-boom town on the Staked Plains, near the New Mexican line; in the Western Texas sheep country; in San Antonio; on a ranch in South Texas; in a cattle town on the Oklahoma line, near the old North Texas oil-fields; in the piney woods of East Texas; finally in what later became the Central West Texas oil belt.” In 1919 the family finally settled in Cross Plains, in the house where Robert would spend the rest of his life. He held the usual assortment of jobs for a young man in a small town, but he seems to have decided very early on that he would become a writer. In the rough-and-tumble atmosphere in which he grew up, this was a most unusual ambition, and even young Bob’s closest friends did not quite understand it.

It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments. I became a writer in spite of my environments. Understand, I am not criticizing those environments. They were good, solid and worthy. The fact that they were not inducive to literature and art is nothing in their disfavor. Never the less, it is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign and alien to the people among which one’s lot is cast; a profession which seems as dim and faraway and unreal as the shores of Europe. The people among which I lived—and yet live, mainly—made their living from cotton, wheat, cattle, oil, with the usual percentage of business men and professional men. That is most certainly not in their disfavor. But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality. Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.

Howard submitted his first story for professional publication, �“Bill Smalley and the Power of the Human Eye,�” to Western Story when he was just fifteen. Although the story is a tale of the North Woods, it is nevertheless interesting that his first professional submission was to a magazine of western fiction. Nor was the tale of the West neglected in the young author�’s work: his first published stories, �“ �‘Golden Hope’ Christmas” and �“West Is West,” were of this type. The latter is a short, humorous piece about a tenderfoot who stays atop an unrideable bronco only because his gunbelt and lariat get tangled up with the saddle. “ �‘Golden Hope’ Christmas,�” included herein, shows the clear influence of O. Henry and Bret Harte but stands up well as a charming Christmas fable, and already shows flashes of Howard’s later style, particularly in his portrayal of gunman Red Ghallinan. Both stories were published in the December 22, 1922, issue of The Tattler, the student newspaper of Brownwood High School, where Howard spent his last year of school. “ ‘Golden Hope’ Christmas” won a ten dollar prize, while “West Is West” was awarded five dollars.

Howard made his first professional sale to Weird Tales in 1924, and he concentrated his efforts over the next few years on stories of fantasy and horror, with occasional submissions to Adventure and Argosy, the two most popular general fiction pulps, and a few other magazines as well. In a listing of his stories made in 1929, he shows one story, now lost, sent to Western Story in 1925, but no other westerns until 1928, when he sold “Drums of the Sunset” to his hometown newspaper, The Cross Plains Review, for twenty dollars. A traditional western, perhaps showing the influence of such writers as Eugene Manlove Rhodes and Zane Grey, the story features one of Howard’s more memorable eccentrics, �“Hard Luck�” Harper, and also gives us a hint of Howard’s love of folk songs, particularly cowboy songs. The story ran as a nine-part serial from November 1928 through January 1929. Howard later retitled it �“Riders of the Sunset” and attempted to sell it to Argosy and Western Story without success.

By 1929 Howard’s professional career was beginning to take off. He was by this time a regular contributor to Weird Tales, and he had made a few sales to other magazines, so he began spreading his literary net a bit wider, writing stories in a variety of genres and submitting them to Argosy, Adventure, Liberty, Ghost Stories, True Stories, and others. He caught on with prize-ring tales for Fiction House’s Fight Stories and Action Stories: the Steve Costigan series would prove one of his most successful. But after one sale each to both Ghost Stories and Argosy—both boxing stories—he had little success with these other magazines. �“The Extermination of Yellow Donory�” failed to catch on with Adventure, Argosy, or Western Story, although it is a clever character piece. “The subject of psychology is the one I am mainly interested in these days,�” Howard had written earlier in describing the stories �“The Dream Snake�” and �“The Shadow Kingdom�” as studies in psychology. During the period in which �“Yellow Donory�” was written, Howard was writing a number of other psychological tales, such as “Crowd-Horror,�” in which a boxer loses all self-control when he hears the crowd roar, and �“The Touch of Death,” in which a man sitting in a room with a corpse is overcome by his own fear. In “Yellow Donory” we find Howard’s first real foray into a subject that would come to fascinate him: the psychology of the gunman.

“The Judgment of the Desert,�” another 1929 story unsuccessfully submitted to Argosy, is a more traditional western tale that certainly might have found a home a few years later, when the demand for westerns led to a significant increase in the number of western magazines. Here we find the first instance of what would become a staple of Howard’s westerns, a less-than-happy ending.

Howard apparently abandoned western writing for a time; in 1930 his interests resided primarily in Irish history and legend, resulting in stories of Irish adventurers such as Turlogh O’Brien and Cormac Mac Art. These stories were an important step toward the later creation of Conan and Howard�’s histories of the Crusades. In the latter half of the year, however, two men began to turn Howard’s thinking back toward western themes. His good friend Tevis Clyde Smith, of Brownwood, Texas, began selling articles about Texas history to newspapers in both Brownwood and Dallas: in researching the articles, Smith had been interviewing old-time pioneers and their descendants, which may have inspired Howard to do the same as his interest in the West grew. In June Howard began corresponding with another notable Weird Tales contributor, H. P. Lovecraft, whose interest in the Texan’s brief mentions of local lore or legends prompted more discussion of these topics. By January 1931 Howard had submitted an article, “The Ghost of Camp Colorado,” to The Texaco Star, a magazine published by the oil company that featured occasional historical articles. He also revised and retitled “Drums of the Sunset” in an attempt to sell it; wrote a new story, “A Killer’s Debt”; brought his boxing sailor, Steve Costigan, closer to home in “Texas Fists”; and began writing stories for Weird Tales using a southwestern setting.

“Gunman’s Debt” is the first of what we might call the truly “Howardian” western stories, in that it is much grimmer than his previous work in the form and shares certain characteristics with his heroic fantasy work, particularly in its bleak viewpoint and the cataclysmic violence of its climax. There are no “good guys” in the story: the ostensible “hero,” John Kirby, is a gunman and feudist, merely the best among a very bad lot. Howard was fascinated by the psychology of outlaws and feudists: no story better illustrates this than “The Man on the Ground,” which appeared in Weird Tales in 1933. “One of the main things I like about Farnsworth Wright’s magazines,” Howard wrote, “is you don’t have to make your heroes such utter saints.” Wright edited Weird Tales and Oriental Stories (later The Magic Carpet Magazine), through which Howard’s grimmest, most somber characters stalked. It is regrettable that Wright did not edit a western magazine, so that Howard might have gone further toward fulfilling his promise in that field. Howard’s protagonists did not fit the standard mold for the western hero; as some have pointed out, they would have been more at home on the mean streets of Black Mask than in Western Story.

Howard had a particular fascination with outlaws, notably John Wesley Hardin and Billy the Kid, and most of his heroes have more than a little outlaw in their nature. Even his heroic fantasy characters—Kull, Conan, Turlogh, Cormac and others—are, at one time or another in their careers, outlaws. Howard was a thoroughgoing populist in his politics, and the outlaw, driven to crime by the depredations of corrupt authorities, is a staple of populist literature. Jesse James, Wes Hardin, and Billy the Kid are the forerunners of those outlaws of Howard’s own day, such as Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger, who were seen as heroes by some, particularly the rural poor. Howard’s own admiration for Hardin and the Kid, and for other outlaws, shines through his letters to Lovecraft: “Your real gunman was always a man of keen perceptions and a high order of intelligence. It was not merely physical superiority that made such men as Billy the Kid, John Wesley Hardin, John Ringgo and Hendry Brown super-warriors. It was their razor-edged intelligence, their unerring judgment of human nature, and their natural knowledge of human psychology.�” The influence of such figures may be seen in Howard’s Steve Allison (The Sonora Kid), hero of �“The Devil’s Joker” and �“Knife, Bullet and Noose.�”

Like Howard’s contemporary Middle-Eastern adventurer Francis X. Gordon (El Borak), Steve Allison was an early creation who figured in a number of incomplete stories written when Howard was in his teens. In fact, these two characters were teamed up in several such abortive tales. The early Steve Allison, like the early Francis X. Gordon, seems to have been a man of the world, as much at home as a guest in a German castle or a New York hotel as on a ranch or in an Afghan hill village. The later incarnations of these characters would lose the more cultivated side in favor of the man who has �“gone native.�” El Borak found his milieu in the Middle East, while The Sonora Kid found his place along the Texas-Mexico border: both were modeled on the gunmen that Howard admired. Allison was the first to be resurrected when Howard sent �“The Devil’s Joker�” and “Knife, Bullet and Noose” to his new agent, Otis Adelbert Kline, in the late spring of 1933, but Allison did not find the publication success his erstwhile partner met with a year later. The Sonora Kid stories failed to sell during Howard�’s lifetime.

“Law-Shooters of Cowtown,” received by Howard’s agent on the same day as the two Sonora Kid stories, also featured a character from an earlier story, this time Grizzly Elkins, the buffalo hunter of �“Gunman�’s Debt.�” �“Law-Shooters�” features one of Howard�’s most graphically brutal fistfights and a scene in which Elkins wades through the lynch mob with an iron bar. Either scene alone was probably enough to sink the story’s chances with most editors of western magazines (it�’s hard to imagine Western Story or Wild West Weekly printing a line like �“Blood and brains spattered in his face”), and to boot, the story also features crooked lawmen, definitely not standard fare for the traditional western. In this regard the story anticipates �“Vultures of Wahpeton.�”

“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 to Lovecraft, regarding the plot of his Breckinridge Elkins story “A Gent From Bear Creek,” which had just appeared in Action Stories. 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 attempted to rob the bank. Not long afterward, he told August Derleth that he had just written a thirty-thousand-word western story in which �“my main character was drawn from Hendry Brown.” This story was �“Vultures of Wahpeton,�” and Howard called it �“one of the best stories I’ve ever written.” He told Derleth he�’d written the first draft of the story in two and a half days and expressed doubt that anyone would accept it. Unfortunately, Howard�’s assessment was correct: although the story is Howard’s best nonhumorous western and although the western magazine market was becoming more receptive to grim, violent stories, “Vultures of Wahpeton�” had difficulty finding a home. The story�’s merits are considerable, however: in �“Vultures,” Howard accomplished for the Western story that which he had already done for the sword-and-sorcery story, in which he had blended the adventure, fantasy, and horror genres. To the western story Howard added the populist sensibility of the hardboiled detective, himself an amalgam of outlaw and policeman (�“an agent of law and an outlaw who acts outside the structures of legal authority for the sake of a personal definition of justice,” says Richard Slotkin). The critic George Knight wrote, �“Doubtless, had Howard lived, his efforts with the Western story could have led him to approach that form with the same tough attitude that characterizes his fantasy. It is interesting to think that he might have taken the Western along a similar line of development as Hammett took the detective tale.” As Steve Tompkins pointed out, “Howard had begun doing exactly that: it is not very far at all from Wahpeton to Poisonville, the former Personville of Dashiell Hammett�’s Red Harvest.�”

Stephen Marcus said, �“One of Hammett�’s obsessive imaginations was the notion of organized crime or gangs taking over an entire society and running it as if it were an ordinary society doing business as usual. . . . It is a world of universal warfare, the war of each against all, and of all against all. The only thing that prevents the criminal ascendancy from turning into permanent tyranny is that the crooks who take over society cannot cooperate with one another, repeatedly fall out with each other, and return to the Hobbesian anarchy out of which they have momentarily arisen.�” It is easy to imagine why authors such as Hammett and Howard were obsessed with this notion: in many American cities in the 1920s, mobsters corrupted high-ranking officials while warring among themselves. �“We are organized,�” says Sheriff Middleton to Steve Corcoran in �“Vultures.” �“We know who to trust; they don’t.” But it soon becomes clear that even within the gang no one knows whom to trust. �“His hapless deputy McNab,�” writes Tompkins, “is just one of the characters in ‘Vultures’ to sense �‘that he was beginning to be wound in a web he could not break,�’ to deem himself �‘too tangled in a web of subtlety to know where or how or who to smite.�’ ” The characters might have been modeled on Hendry Brown and on Henry Plummer’s �“Innocents�” gang in 1860s Montana, but they could just as easily have been modeled on Capone’s or Luciano’s mobs.

This mistrust of everyone, verging on paranoia, harks back to Howard’s earliest sword-and-sorcery story, �“The Shadow Kingdom,�” in which King Kull learns that serpent men with the ability to assume the appearance of any human have insinuated themselves into his palace, and that absolutely no one can be trusted. Mistrust of appearances, and in particular mistrust of authority, is a constant theme of Howard’s work, another characteristic that would have made him more at home in the hard-boiled detective field than the western, where the good guys wore white hats. Yet Howard �“actively detest[ed]” detective stories: “I can scarcely endure to read one, much less write one.” Thus he had to bring his hard-boiled sensibility to fields he liked better: heroic adventure and the western. Fearing that no editor of the day would want to publish “Vultures” with its bleak ending, Howard supplied another, happier conclusion as well. The editor of Smashing Novels, in December 1936, for some reason chose to publish both endings, calling the darker one �“more powerful, dramatically,” a judgment with which most would concur.

Shortly before writing �“Vultures of Wahpeton” Howard had completed revising an unsold story by another writer, Chandler Whipple (writing as “Robert Enders Allen�”). According to Whipple, Howard�’s agent, Otis Kline, had dropped by to see him when he was working as an editor at Popular Publications, and during the course of the conversation, “asked if he couldn’t try to sell something of mine that I had failed to market. I gave him �‘The Last Ride.’ He told me he thought he could get Bob Howard to turn it into a saleable piece, and I told him to go ahead.” It is not known how much of “The Last Ride” is Howard and how much is Whipple, who got top billing when the story was published as �“Boot-Hill Payoff” in Western Aces.

In early 1936 John F. Byrne, who had been regularly buying Howard’s stories for Fiction House since 1929, took over the editorship of Argosy and asked Howard to create a series for that magazine along the lines of the Breckinridge Elkins stories that had been appearing in every issue of Action Stories. Howard obliged with his tales of Pike Bearfield, but he also took the opportunity to work in some nonhumorous stories as well. The first of these to appear in print was �“The Dead Remember,�” a tale of voodoo vengeance that would have been right at home in Weird Tales. That magazine was well over a thousand dollars in arrears to Howard, though, so he was trying other markets first. The last of Howard’s five Argosy stories to appear was �“Vulture’s Sanctuary,” a more traditional western with a conventional happy ending but with a veritable Conan of a cowpuncher as its hero.

Howard�’s letters to H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth contained sometimes lengthy accounts of episodes from Western history or the lives of gunfighters. Some, such as his stories of John Wesley Hardin and Billy the Kid, appear to have derived largely from his reading. �“Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War” (selected for this volume and titled by the editor) shows the influence of Walter Noble Burns�’s best-selling The Saga of Billy the Kid but is told with the passionate intensity characteristic of Howard. �“Beyond the Brazos River” (again selected and titled by the editor) seems to come from Howard’s interviews with old-time pioneering Texans or their descendants. �“In this country,�” he wrote Derleth, “frontier days were yesterday.” In another letter he said:

San Antonio is full of old timers—old law officers, trail drivers, cattlemen, buffalo hunters and pioneers. No better place for a man to go who wants to get first hand information about the frontier. The lady who owned the rooms I rented, for instance, was an old pioneer woman who had lived on a ranch in the very thick of the �“wire-cutting war�” of Brown County; and on the street back of her house lived an old gentleman who went up the Chisholm in the ’80s, trapped in the Rockies, helped hunt down Sitting Bull, and was a sheriff in the wild days of western Kansas. I wish I had time and money to spend about a year looking up all these old timers in the state and getting their stories.

The title �“Beyond the Brazos River” was chosen quite deliberately. This passage from a 1931 letter seems very clearly to presage the theme of Howard’s Conan story “Beyond the Black River” (the rivers in the story even begin with the same letters as the Texas rivers, Black/Brazos, Thunder/Trinity). Novalyne Price Ellis, who knew Howard well from 1934 to 1936, insisted that �“Beyond the Black River” was a Texas story.

“I hope,�” Howard told Lovecraft, �“to some day write a history of the Southwest that will seem alive and human to the readers, not the dry and musty stuff one generally finds in chronicles. To me the annals of the land pulse with blood and life, but whether I can ever transfer this life from my mind to paper, is a question.” Certainly the stories retold in his letters, of Hardin and Billy, of Bigfoot Wallace and the Marlow boys and others, show that he could bring blood and life to chronicles: in his retelling the stories are even more vividly intense than the accounts of participants in the events. But he was not to get his chance to create an epic of the Southwest. In June of 1936 his beloved mother sank into her final coma, and an exhausted, dispirited, and ultimately despondent Robert E. Howard came to the end of his own trail at the age of only thirty. He left behind a legacy of stories and poems that have continued to be enjoyed by generations of new readers. For all that he wrote during the Great Depression, there is about his stories something always modern, always meaningful. And of course, there is always the headlong narrative pace and the explosive action that makes Howard one of the most entertaining writers ever to spin a yarn.

Index