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Discovering Robert E. Howard: Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read “The Black Stranger”

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read “The Black Stranger”

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The Conquering Sword of Conan-smallHoward Andrew Jones and Bill Ward are wrapping up their re-read of The Conquering Sword of Conan by Robert E. Howard, the third and final omnibus volume collecting the complete tales of Conan, with what Howard calls “my most pleasant surprise so far during the re-read,” the story “The Black Stranger.” It was never published during Robert E. Howard’s lifetime, appearing for the first time in Karl Edward Wagner’s anthology Echoes of Valor in 1987. Here’s Bill:

Like “Beyond the Black River” which precedes it, “The Black Stranger” is a tale set in the Pictish wilderness of Hyboria that sees a vulnerable outpost of civilization overrun by the wild men of the wood. But this time around the threat of the Picts — still an Amerindian analog — serve as more of a backdrop to the infighting and machinations of pirate captains, an exiled nobleman, and a cagey Conan. Again REH draws on the American frontier for inspiration, but it isn’t the dominant theme of the piece, which also manages to end on a far more up tempo note despite the carnage. Wild battles, double-crossing, pirate treasure, and a mysterious demonic stranger are all skillfully woven together into a complex but nonetheless fast-paced adventure that stands solidly alongside the better Conan stories.

Read the complete exchange here.

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Post-Modern Pulp: Speaking With Indie Action Writer Jack Badelaire

Post-Modern Pulp: Speaking With Indie Action Writer Jack Badelaire

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COA_SmallToday we’re talking to Jack Badelaire, author of numerous action books in the tradition of the 70s “Men’s Adventure” genre. His best known work is his Commando series of WWII action novels. Jack reflects on indie publishing and the state of the genre.

Full Disclosure: Jack is a critique partner of mine. He’s also a fellow member of the secret commando group Sicko Slaughterers (“SS,” we really need a new acronym), which goes after terrorists and human traffickers. So far I’ve killed 1,487 sickos, while wimpy little Jack has only killed 1,059. He gets props for killing that ISIS commander in Raqqa with a blender, though.

Anyway, on with the interview.

The Men’s Adventure fiction of the 60s and 70s is obviously a huge influence on your work. You’ve mentioned that you think there’s a lot more going on in these books than many people think. Could you expand on that?

This genre of fiction was brewed up during an especially turbulent period of history. The Cold War, Vietnam, rejuvenated organized crime syndicates, the rise of international terrorist organizations, the War on Drugs… and those are just the chart-toppers.  These post-modern pulps of the period were a direct reflection of, if we want to get Freudian for a moment, society’s collective Id. The Executioner went out and slaughtered Mafiosi because we wished someone would, and Phoenix Force obliterated terrorists because we wished someone would. Even today, the modern successors to these stories feature ex-SEALs and former Delta Force operators hunting terrorists and organized crime syndicates, stories little different than those written thirty or forty years ago.

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Frankenstein and R. J. Myers’ Domination Fantasies

Frankenstein and R. J. Myers’ Domination Fantasies

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NOTE: The following article was first published on May 30, 2010. Thank you to John O’Neill for agreeing to reprint these early articles, so they are archived at Black Gate which has been my home for over 5 years and 250 articles now. Thank you to Deuce Richardson without whom I never would have found my way. Minor editorial changes have been made in some cases to the original text.

Myers Slave 2Myers Slave 1A couple weeks ago I reviewed R. J. Myers’ The Cross of Frankenstein. It was the respected political commentator’s first foray into fiction. He followed it with a sequel, 1976’s The Slave of Frankenstein and despite the promise of a third book, his only other genre efforts were a late seventies soft-core vampire title and a privately-published guide to blood-drinking as an alternative lifestyle.

I always feel a pang of guilt when I come down hard on a fellow pastiche writer. I’ve been on the receiving end of disappointed Sax Rohmer and Conan Doyle fans who felt I had no business continuing the adventures of characters they love. At the same time, I believe I have been fair and honest in my assessments when reviewing pastiches. I have the utmost respect for Joe Gores, Michael Hardwick, Cay Van Ash, and Freda Warrington as writers who tried hard to stay true to the original author in terms of style and spirit. I can still enjoy Peter Tremayne and Basil Copper who, despite falling short of the mark, can still spin an entertaining yarn. Consequently, I feel justified when I confine Myers to the lowest pit of literary Hell alongside Ian Holt and Richard Jaccoma for The Slave of Frankenstein, while a very different beast than Myers’ first effort, is equally contemptible.

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A Crossover Too Far

A Crossover Too Far

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Combined-ForcesBulldog_Drummond_1st_edition_cover,_1920A. J. Smithers is a respected author of fiction and non-fiction titles with a special dedication to the Clubland fiction of Dornford Yates, John Buchan, and H. C. “Sapper” McNeile. His 1983 novel, Combined Forces was subtitled Being the Latter-Day Adventures of Richard Hannay, “Bulldog” Drummond, and Berry and Co. Clubland literary scholar Richard Usborne praised the book and Smithers’ willingness to expose the dark sides of its characters’ lives. Wold Newtonians sometimes seek out this rare work because of the literary crossover within its pages. I approached the book first as a Bulldog Drummond completist and secondly as a fan of Richard Hannay.

While most people know of The Thirty-Nine Steps thanks to Alfred Hitchcock’s celebrated film version, they are unaware of how different the character of Richard Hannay is in John Buchan’s fiction. Most are unaware that Hannay appeared in a total of seven spy thriller novels by Buchan published between 1915 and 1940. Unlike many long-running series, Buchan chose to have Hannay age in real time and grow as a person as he marries and settles down and even retires. Buchan’s approach appears to have influenced some of Gerald Fairlie’s modifications to Hugh Drummond’s character and life as he continued the series after Sapper’s death.

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Tracking Down Frank Kelly Freas’ Planet Stories Cover for “The Ambassadors of Flesh”

Tracking Down Frank Kelly Freas’ Planet Stories Cover for “The Ambassadors of Flesh”

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Planet Stories Summer 1954-small

A little while ago, I posted one of our two big IlluxCon purchases — a Hubert Rogers Astounding cover that we had arranged to buy over the summer from a friend, and the deal was completed at IlluxCon. This is the other major piece we picked up there, also from the same friend (click for a bigger version).

It’s by the great Frank Kelly Freas, and is the cover for the Summer 1954 issue of Planet Stories. It illustrates “The Ambassadors of Flesh” by Poul Anderson, which was the third of his Dominic Flandry stories. Needless to say, Flandry saves the day, and the girl.

Like all of the original Planet Stories covers I’ve seen, the block where the magazine’s logo went was just painted as a solid color. My friend had the logo scanned and printed onto mylar, which is laid in on top of the painting as it’s framed, so the logo is actually not on the artwork. Freas won the first of his ten Best Artist Hugos in 1955, about a year after this painting was published.

On a side note, artist Herman Vestal, a Fiction House regular, contributed a double-page spread which ran as the interior illustration for this story. Several years ago at Windy City, I managed to pick up the left half of that illo (still looking for the right half!), which has Flandry in a good action scene. I’ll post that down the road.

Can You Help Date This John W. Campbell Pic?

Can You Help Date This John W. Campbell Pic?

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John W Campbell-small

A few weeks ago I talked about Hubert Rogers’ Astounding covers, and his fascinating correspondence with Robert A. Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp.

During one of his trips to visit editor John W. Campbell at Astounding‘s offices, Rogers took along his camera. Here’s one of several shots that Rogers took that day of Campbell at his desk. [Click the image for a bigger version.]

None of the photos are dated, unfortunately, but my guess is that it’s sometime in the 1940’s. If anyone can pin down a more precise date, I’d love to hear it!

Vintage Treasures: Travelers of Space, edited by Martin Greenberg

Vintage Treasures: Travelers of Space, edited by Martin Greenberg

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Travelers of Space 1951-small

Gnome Press, the brainchild of Martin Greenberg and David A. Kyle, was founded in 1948, and it published some of the most important science fiction and fantasy of the 20th Century in hardcover for the first time — including Sixth Column by Robert A. Heinlein (1949), The Castle of Iron by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt (1950), Conan the Conqueror by Robert E. Howard (1950), I, Robot (1950) and Foundation (1951) by Isaac Asimov, City by Clifford D. Simak (1952), Robots Have No Tails by Lewis Padgett (1952), Judgment Night by C.L. Moore (1952), and Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke (1952). The Gnome Press hardcovers — gorgeously designed and made with great care — are some of the most collectible books in the field.

For me however, the most desirable Gnome Press books are their original titles, and especially their anthologies, which gathered neglected short fiction from the Golden Age of science fiction pulps for the first time. They published several in their Adventures in Science Fiction series, all edited by Martin Greenberg, including Men Against the Stars (195), Journey to Infinity (1951), The Robot and the Man (1953), and Travelers of Space (1951).

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Vintage Treasures: The Walking Drum by Louis L’Amour

Vintage Treasures: The Walking Drum by Louis L’Amour

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WalkingDrum
I read this book so you don’t have to.

I read this book so you don’t have to.

Perhaps this review will make you want to read it.

Perhaps you shouldn’t.

It’s complicated.

The Walking Drum is the only medieval adventure written by Louis L’Amour, the mindbogglingly prolific author of a zillion Westerns. That alone makes it a retro must-read. A medieval romp by a horse-opera yarn-spinner who had also been a professional boxer and merchant seaman. How can we resist?

In actuality, the book is… odd. It fulfills expectations, both positive and negative, exceeds them, falls well short of them, and — ultimately — could have done with an edit before being released into the wild.

Reading it has made rethink my choice of reading matter (and also my strategy as a writer, but that’s for another article). Let me start from the beginning

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Discovering Robert E. Howard: Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read “Beyond the Black River”

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read “Beyond the Black River”

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Beyond the Black River Robert E Howard-smallHoward Andrew Jones and Bill Ward continue their re-read of The Conquering Sword of Conan by Robert E. Howard, the third omnibus volume collecting the complete tales of Conan, with “one of the most famous Conan stories of all,” and one of the last, “Beyond the Black River.” It was originally published in in the May-June 1935 issue of Weird Tales.

“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,” the borderer said, still starring somberly at the Cimmerian. “Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarism must ultimately triumph.”

Bill: So concludes “Beyond the Black River,” a story that might almost be REH’s thesis on his philosophy of civilization. It is a story that introduces new elements to Conan’s world, demonstrating again how flexible and expandable REH’s Hyborian blueprint was even after sixteen complete short (and not so short) stories and a novel. But it also maintains a continuity with what has come before, giving us perilous adventure with supernatural antagonists and, of course, Conan being Conan.

Howard: I think it builds nicely on what we’ve seen before. As it happens, though, it’s not exactly a great introduction to Conan himself, or even the Hyborian Age… It’s very different from the preceding Conan stories, feeling very much like a tale of Indian warfare, and Conan himself, while busy doing incredible things, is almost a secondary character.

Read the complete exchange here.

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Vintage Treasures: The Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

Vintage Treasures: The Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

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The Compleat Enchanter-small The Compleat Enchanter-back-small

I’ve been on something of a Fletcher Pratt kick recently, ever since I purchased a fine collection of old paperbacks that included five of his books, including The Well of the Unicorn and Tales From Gavagan’s Bar (co-written with L. Sprague de Camp), both of which I recently wrote up as Vintage Treasures.

Way down in the bottom of that box was a copy of The Compleat Enchanter. I didn’t pay much attention to it at first. Everyone who collects classic American fantasy has two or three (or five or six) copies of The Compleat Enchanter. It’s something of a classic, in a worn sort of way. It doesn’t get much attention these days, because it’s a light, humorous tale, the very opposite of the kind of thing that usually interests me. And so, out of habit, I didn’t give it much attention.

That was a mistake. I’ve ignored The Compleat Enchanter for the better part of 40 years, but when I finally picked it up this week I was quickly captivated. Yes, it is a screwball fantasy, about a psychology professor named Harold Shea who stumbles on equations that transport him into parallel universes, and who uses this ability to visit magical worlds shaped by the mythologies and legend of Earth. But it’s also crammed full of crisp dialog and surprising twists, and the unique charm of De Camp and Pratt, two American masters who were obviously having a lot of fun with the their creation.

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