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[September 14, 1969] More Gems from the Pulps: Bran Mak Morn by Robert E. Howard and Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore

September 14, 2024 Cora Buhlert 2 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

For a Modern West Germany

The streets of West Germany are currently plastered with campaign posters, because a federal election, the sixth since 1949, will happen on September 28.

1969 CDU campaign poster — This campaign poster by the conservative CDU reminds us that the chancellor is important.

1969 SPD campaign post Willy Brandt — This SPD campaign poster features foreign secretary and vice chancellor Willy Brandt and asks people to vote for him so we can live in peace tomorrow.

SPD campaign post 1969 Karl Schiller — This SPD campaign poster features the popular secretary of the economy Karl Schiller, who promises a stable economy and secure jobs.

1969 SPD campaign poster featuring Helmut Schmidt — This SPD campaign poster features social democratic floor leader Helmut Schmidt who promises to create a modern Germany with vigour and energy.

1969 campaign post FDP — The liberal party FDP forgoes the usual black and white headshot and promises to abolish antiquated customs and laws.

The posters are eerily similar across parties, usually consisting of a party logo, a slogan in Helvetica typeface and a black and white photo of a candidate. Hereby, the conservative CDU mainly points out that they provide the current chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and that he does a good job (which is debatable).

1969 SPD campaign poster — This SPD campaign poster features images of the modern West Germany they want to create and also reminds voters that the SPD "has the right men".

The SPD, meanwhile, has made "For a modern Germany" the focal point of their campaign, though the tagline "We have the right men" made quite a few woman voters grumpy. In response, the SPD launched a campaign where women – both celebrities like actress Inge Meysel and ordinary citizens like Johanna Lammers, miner's wife from Castrop-Rauxel – explain why they vote SPD.

SPD campaign poster Johanna Lammers — Johanna Lammers, miner's wife from Castrop-Rauxel, poses with her sewing machine in this SPD campaign flyer and praises secretary of the economy Karfl Schiller for preserving mining jobs.

SPD campaign flyer Inge Meysel — Popular actress Inge Meysel explains why she votes SPD in this campaign flyer.

In general, it is notable that the SPD enlisted several celebrities, including writers Günther Grass, Siegfried Lenz and Heinrich Böll, actors Romy Schneider, Götz George, Marianne Hoppe, Sabine Sinjen, Inge Meysel, Horst Frank and Horst Tappert, TV personalities Peter Frankenfeld and Hans-Joachim Kuhlenkampf, directors Victor de Kowa and Wolfgang Menge and singer Katja Ebstein, to campaign for them, something that is common in the US, but almost unheard of in West Germany.

SPD campaign poster with celebrities — This SPD campaign poster lists all the celebrities who endorse the SPD.

A Small Step

But whatever the outcome of the September 28 election, it's very likely that the current great coalition of the conservative CDU and the social-democratic SPD will not continue.

Due to its large majority, the great coalition actually got a lot done in its three years in office, for better or for worse. Under "for worse", most people would classify the controversial and unpopular emergency powers act, which passed last year – in spite of massive protests.

On the positive side, there is the Great Reform of the Criminal Code, which passed in June and took effect on September 1, which got rid of outdated laws (many of which dated back to the Third Reich or even the Second German Empire) and brought particularly morality related offences more in line with our modern age.

Among other things, adultery is no longer a criminal offence in West Germany. The so-called "Kuppelei" paragraph, which under the guise of combating prostitution forbade landlords from renting apartments and hotels from renting rooms to unmarried couples, and prevented parents from allowing their adult children's boyfriend or girlfriend to sleep over, has been significantly modified.

But most importantly, homosexual relationships between men have been decriminalised, at least if both participants are over twenty-one and there is no employment or service relationship between them. Homosexual prostitution remains illegal.

These are small steps forward, especially since most of the legal limitations applied to homosexual relationships between men do not apply to heterosexual relationships or relationships between women. But they are important steps, because every year between two thousand and three thousand men are tried and convicted for consensual homosexual relationships on the basis of a law dating back to the Second German Empire and significantly tightened by the Nazis.

The end of WWII is often viewed as a liberation, but for homosexual men incarcerated by the Nazis it was anything but, for they remained in prison, while other victims of Nazi persecution were set free. And while the Federal Republic of Germany distanced itself from the Third Reich, it displayed the same zeal in persecuting homosexual men. In 1950, the public prosecution of Frankfurt on Main dragged some 170 men into court on homosexuality charges, based on the questionable statements made by a nineteen-year-old male prostitute named Otto Blankenstein, later revealed to be a notorious liar. Many of the accused were found guilty and jailed, six men committed suicide, others lost their jobs or were forced to flee Germany.

Otto Blankenstein, the nineteen-year-old male prostitute who set off an unprecedented persecution of homosexual men in Frankfurt on Main in 1950, when he ratted out his clients to save himself from prison.

In the light of events such as those that happened in Frankfurt nineteen years ago, the decriminalisation of homosexual relationships between consenting adults is an important step forward. And indeed, the immediate effect of the new law was not the sudden eruption of homosexual orgies in West German streets that conservatives feared but that many men who had been convicted under the old law were set free, because there was no reason to keep them in jail any longer.

More Treasures from the Pulps

But while old and outdated laws are best left behind, older fiction is often ripe for rediscovery. Particularly the pulp magazines of thirty to forty years ago contain many hidden gems and secret treasures just begging to be rediscovered by a new generation of readers. And thanks to the twin success of Lancer's Conan reprints and the Ballantine paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings, many other fantasy works from the first half of the century are coming back into print.

I recently got my hands on two paperbacks reprinting some fantasy gems that until recently could only be found in the crumbling pages of thirty to forty year old copies of Weird Tales.

The enormous success of Lancer's Conan series has also brought other works by Robert E. Howard, either long forgotten or never published at all, back into print. In a previous article, I already took a look at recent reprints of the adventures of Kull of Atlantis, Solomon Kane, and Almuric, as well as Wolfshead, a collection of horror stories by Robert E. Howard. Now another of Howard's heroes from the pages of Weird Tales has made it into paperback form.

The Last King of the Picts: Bran Mak Morn by Robert E. Howard

Bran mak Morn Paperback — cover by Frank Frazetta

Nowadays, Robert E. Howard is mainly remembered as the father of what Fritz Leiber called sword and sorcery. However, Howard was also fascinated by history and wrote a lot of historical fiction, with or without fantastic elements. The Bran Mak Morn stories sit on the boundary between fantasy and history. The titular hero is the king of the Picts, a native tribe living in Scotland in ancient times.

Howard was clearly fascinated by the Picts, because they appear throughout his work. The best friend and frequent saviour of Kull of Atlantis is a Pictish warrior named Brule the Spearslayer. The Picts also appear in two Conan stories, "Beyond the Black River" and "The Treasure of Tranicos", where they are portrayed as fierce warriors and sworn enemies of Conan's people, the Cimmerians.

The Bran Mak Morn stories take the Picts out of fantasy and into history, though it must be noted that Howard's Picts bear scant resemblance to what little we know about the actual ancient inhabitants of Scotland. Mostly set in Roman Britain during the second or third century AD, the stories recount the conflict between the technologically superior Roman colonisers and the Picts, who at this point in their history have devolved into Neanderthal-like primitives. Their king Bran Mak Morn knows that his people are doomed, but he is not willing to go down without a fight.

The Lost Race by Robert E. Howard — Cororuc is about to meet an unpleasant fate in "The Lost Race" by Robert E. Howard-

Though the first story in this collection, "The Lost Race", does not feature Bran Mak Morn at all, but instead follows Cororuc, a traveller in Roman Britain, who is captured by Picts and taken to their underground lair. The Picts are described as diminutive – in Howard's time some historians believed they were pygmies – and the likely source of legends about dwarves and little people. They are quite hostile and want to burn Cororuc at the stake – after a history lesson delivered by their chief. But Cororuc's life is spared due to the intercession of a werewolf he'd saved earlier.

"The Lost Race" is one of Robert E. Howard's earliest stories, published in the January 1927 issue of Weird Tales, when Howard was only twenty-one, and is clearly the work of a beginning writer. Three stars.

Bran Mak Morn does appear in "Men of the Shadows", though once again the protagonist is another character, a Norseman who became a Roman citizen and legionnaire. He's part of a squad sent north of Hadrian's Wall on a mysterious mission. The legionnaires are slaughtered in a series of battles with the Picts, until only a handful remain. The survivors try to make it back to safety beyond Hadrian's Wall, but are picked off one by one, until there is only a single survivor who is captured and brought before Bran Mak Morn himself. The Picts want to kill him, but Bran spares his life and also reveals the reason why the legionnaires were sent into Pictish territory, namely because a wealthy Roman had taken a liking to Bran's sister and wanted to take her for his own. Bran's refusal to kill the legionnaire leads to a staring contest between Bran and a Pictish wizard upset that Bran is forgetting the old ways. Bran wins the contest, whereupon the wizard launches into a lengthy explanation of the history of the Picts and also prophesizes the fall of the Roman Empire.

This story was never published in Howard's lifetime and it's easy to see why. It's a disjointed mess and Howard forgets both the plot and even the protagonist, once the wizard launches into the extended history of the Picts. We never even learn what happened to the legionnaire. Perhaps he was bored to death by the lecturing wizard. Two stars.

Kings of the Night by Robert E. Howard — A ghostly Kull appears on the battlefield in the interior art for "Kings of the Night".

In "Kings of the Night", Bran Mak Morn is preparing for battle against a Roman legion marching on his land. Bran's Picts have joined forces with Gaels and Britons, but Bran also needs to persuade a group of Norsemen to join the battle. However, their chief has been killed and the Norsemen refuse to fight until they find a new leader. So the Pictish wizard Gonar casts a spell and conjures up none other than Kull of Atlantis, brought forward through time. Kull is understandably confused and mistakes Bran for his Pictish friend Brule the Spearslayer, implying that Bran is a descendent of Brule. However, he also agrees to lead the Norsemen into battle. But is the victory worth the price in blood?

First published in the November 1930 issue of Weird Tales, this is a highly enjoyable story and the return of Kull of Atlantis is most welcome, though it's interesting that Bran outbroods even the traditionally broody Kull. Four stars.

Worms of the Earth by Robert E. Howard — Bran Mak Morn confronts the witch Atla who wants his body in "Worms of the Earth".

"Worms of the Earth" starts with an incredibly visceral and brutal crucifixion scene. A Pict is executed for killing a Roman merchant who'd swindled him. Presiding over the execution is Titus Sulla, Roman governor of Eboracum (nowadays known better by its British name York), as well as a Pictish emissary. Unbeknownst to the arrogant Sulla, this emissary is none other than Bran Mak Morn in disguise.

Infuriated by the way the Roman colonisers treat his people. Bran vows revenge upon Titus Sulla and he is willing to go to great lengths to get it. And so against the warnings of the wizard Gonar, Bran enlists the aid of the titular worms, the remnants of a pre-human civilisation who may be descendants of the Serpent Men from the Kull stories. But in order to find the worms, Bran first has to consult the witch Atla, who is not entirely human herself, and whose price is nothing less than Bran's virtue. So Bran leans back and thinks of the Picts, while Atla has her way with him.

Bran finally locates the worms and they agree to help him get his revenge on Sulla. But things don't go the way Bran expects…

Published in the November 1932 issue of Weird Tales, this is a great story, which perfectly balances sword and sorcery, history and horror. "Worms of the Earth" is the highlight of this collection and worth the price of admission alone. Five stars.

"The Night of the Wolf" is another story which remained unpublished during Howard's lifetime. Set during Arthurian times, it's the tale of Cormac Mac Art, an Irish reiver who gets embroiled in a conflict between Vikings and Picts in the Shetland Islands, where Cormac tries to negotiate the release of an important prisoner.

"The Night of the Wolf" is a well written story full of action and excitement, but I'm not quite sure why it was included in this collection, because it is not a Bran Mak Morn story, even though the Picts appear. Four stars.

Weird Tales December 1931 — The statue of Bran Mak Morn gloomily looks on, as the kidnapped Irish maiden Moira is about the escape a forced marriage by the only means she can.

Bran Mak Morn does appear in "The Dark Man", at least after a fashion — because the story is set in the ninth century during the Viking invasion of Ireland, i.e. at a time when Bran is long dead. Instead, he appears in the form of a statue that is worshipped by the surviving descendants of the Picts.

Our hero is an Irish outlaw named Turlogh Dubh O'Brien who's on a mission to rescue his childhood sweetheart Moira, daughter of an Irish chieftain, who was kidnapped by Vikings. Turlogh comes across the statue of Bran and decides to take it along. He crashes the forced wedding of Moira to the Viking chief Thorfel and takes bloody vengeance. The statue of Bran, the titular dark man, comes in handy as well, for where Bran goes, or rather his statue goes, the Picts are not far behind and they are still formidable warriors.

First published in the December 1931 issue of Weird Tales, "The Dark Man" is another fine historical adventure story and unlike "The Night of the Wolf", it has at least some connection to Bran Mak Morn, albeit rather tenuously. Four stars.

I have to admit that I was very eager to finally get my hands on Robert E. Howard's Bran Mak Morn stories. Though I have no Scottish ancestry, I recognise the parallels between Bran and his Picts struggling against Roman rule and the history of my own homeland. For just like the historical Picts, my own ancestors, the Germanic tribes of Northern Germany, managed to kick the Romans out of North Germany and drive them back beyond the Limes Germanicus in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.

Postcard of the Hermann Monument near Detmold, which reminds us that Arminius knocked the Romans out of their sandals somewhere around here.

The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest is extremely important to German history. The so-called Hermann Monument near Detmold, a 53 meter tall statue of the Cherusci chieftain Arminius a.k.a. Hermann, is a popular destination for school trips and much beloved. Whenever I'm in the area, I always pay a visit to good old Arminius, even if the statue is not even remotely accurate and the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest most likely did not take place anywhere near Detmold. Archaeologists are still looking for the actual location of the battle

Arminius is to the Germans what the Gaul leader Vercingetorix is to the French, a national hero who fought back against the arrogant Roman invaders. Unlike Vercingetorix, Arminius was victorious and lived to tell the tale. And just like the fictional Bran Mak Morn, Arminius was driven by vengeance, for according to legend he was an officer in the Roman army who turned against his former allies, when the Romans paraded his pregnant wife Thusnelda naked through the streets of Rome in triumph. The veracity of the tale of Thusnelda is debatable, but it is a compelling story and always made me sympathise with Arminius. Bran's story and motivation, though entirely fictional, are just as compelling and I'm sure that Arminius and Bran would find a lot to talk about over a jug of ale or mead.

For all that, the actual collection is a little bit of a letdown. Robert E. Howard just didn't write very many stories about Bran Mak Morn, so Dell topped off the collection with unpublished stories and fragments, poems, juvenilia and vaguely related stories that feature the Picts.

Nonetheless, "Worms of the Earth" is a top tier Howard story and most of the other stories are at the very least entertaining, even if Bran isn't actually in them.

Four stars.

Women's Lib, Sword and Sorcery Style: Jirel of Joiry by C.L. Moore

The yellowing pages of Weird Tales contain treasures beyond the stories of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, whose work Arkham House is doing a good job of keeping in print. One of those treasures that I was extremely excited to get my hands on are the stories C.L. Moore wrote about the medieval French swordswoman Jirel of Joiry. At last the stories are available again for the first time in more than thirty years.

Weird Tales October 1934 — Jirel kisses the Black God in Margaret Brundage's cover art for the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales.

"Black God's Kiss" first appeared in the October 1934 issue of Weird Tales and introduced Jirel of Joiry to the world. The story opens with the iconic and much imitated scene of the warlord Guillaume conquering Castle Joiry. The captured lord of the castle is brought before Guillaume in full armour. When Guillaume orders his captive's helmet removed, the Lord of Castle Joiry is revealed to be a lady, the red-haired firebrand Jirel. Guillaume is quite delighted by this discovery and forces a kiss on Jirel. Jirel is considerably less delighted and tries to bite his throat out.

The revealing of Jirel's gender is an iconic scene and remains impactful even thirty-five years later. I can only imagine how female readers in 1934 reacted to this revelation, even if the surprise was spoiled both by Weird Tales cover artist Margaret Brundage and interior artist H.R. Hammond.

Black God's Kiss interior art — H.R. Hammond's interior art for "Black God's Kiss" sadly spoils the revelation of Jirel's gender.

For her troubles, Jirel is thrown into her own dungeon, but she quickly escapes, plotting revenge against the overbearing Guillaume. She has no illusions about what Guillaume will do to her, namely rape her and then either kill her or sell her into slavery. So she goes to see Father Gervase, the resident priest of Castle Joiry, to ask for his help and forgiveness. For in order to avenge herself on Guillaume, Jirel is willing to descend into hell itself. And luckily, there happens to be a passage to the underworld deep beneath the foundations of Castle Joiry. It's interesting how much this scene mirrors the scene in "Worms of the Earth" where Bran Mak Morn plots revenge against Titus Sulla. Both Bran and Jirel are willing to do whatever it takes, even if it means selling their soul (and in Bran's case, his body) and enlisting demonic aid. And in both cases, their spiritual advisors, respectively Gonar or Gervase, strongly advice against this course of action, noting that some weapons are too terrible to use.

Like Bran, however, Jirel is determined and so she descends into the underworld beneath the castle. The bulk of the story is given over to Jirel's journey through the underworld and the fantastic things she encounters there. It is notable that even though Jirel wears a crucifix which she has to discard in order to enter the underworld and has a theological argument with a Catholic priest earlier in the story, the dreamlike land underneath Castle Joiry does not resemble the traditional Christian depictions of hell in the slightest—it is much stranger.

Jirel finally finds the titular black god in a temple in the middle of a lake of fallen stars and begs him to give her a weapon against Guillaume. The black gods grants her this wish, but just like Bran Mak Morn in "Worms of the Earth", Jirel realises that the revenge she gets isn't what she wanted after all.

This is an amazing story that stands shoulder to shoulder with the best the sword and sorcery genre has to offer. Five stars.

Only two months later, in the December 1934 issue, Weird Tales published the sequel to "Black God's Kiss" entitled "Black God's Shadow". Jirel is still haunted by the events of the previous story. She's having trouble sleeping, the memories of Guillaume forcing a kiss on her keep resurfacing and by night, Jirel hears Guillaume's voice, begging her to save his soul from hell.

Jirel's feelings towards Guillaume are very conflicted. On the one hand, he was an overbearing pig who assaulted her, but on the other hand Jirel was also attracted to him. So she decides to descend into the underworld once more to save Guillaume's soul. But in doing so, Jirel will not only have to fight the black god, but also her own conflicted emotions and come to terms with what happened to her.

This story is more quiet and philosophical than its predecessor and the battles Jirel fights are purely in her mind. From a psychological standpoint, this story is fascinating, because Jirel's feelings and reactions mirror those of women who have been sexually assaulted or raped, suggesting that Guillaume did more than merely steal a kiss.

An unusual but excellent story. Five stars.

"Jirel Meets Magic" first appeared in the July 1935 issue of Weird Tales. The title is rather weak, especially since Jirel already encountered more than her share of magic in her first two adventures.

The story opens with Jirel leading the charge against a castle, whence the evil wizard Giraud has fled. Once again, the hotblooded Jirel is out for vengeance, because Giraud had ambushed and killed some of her men. However, as Jirel and her men comb the castle, Giraud is nowhere to be found. Bloody footprints lead to a window, which doubles as a portal into a fantastic world. Undeterred, Jirel climbs through the window in pursuit of Giraud and quickly finds herself tangling not just with the wizard, but also with his patroness, the sorceress Jarisme.

This story establishes what will become a pattern with the Jirel of Joiry stories, namely that Jirel keeps venturing into fantastic dream landscapes. "Jirel Meets Magic" is not quite as dark as the Black God duology, but still a great story. Five stars.

Weird Tales January 1936 — Not Jirel either, but a strikingly erotic cover for a Seabury Quinn story, courtesy of Margaret Brundage.

"The Dark Land" opens with Jirel lying in bed in her castle, mortally wounded in battle. Father Gervase is called in to give her the last rites, when Jirel abruptly vanishes. When she comes to, she finds herself in yet another fantastic dreamland called Romne. Its king Pav informs Jirel that he saved her from death, because he wants her to be his bride. Jirel has other ideas, especially once she learns what happens to Pav's discarded wives…

Published in the January 1936 issue of Weird Tales, this is a good story, but not quite as strong as the previous tales. Four stars.

"Hellsgarde" opens with Jirel on her warhorse outside the haunted castle of Hellsgarde. The castle, we learn, has been shunned and abandoned for two hundred years, ever since its previous lord stole a mysterious treasure and was tortured to death by those eager to take that treasure for themselves.

Jirel has come to Hellsgarde for just this treasure, though she doesn't want it for herself. No, a villainous nobleman named Guy of Garlot has taken several of Jirel's men hostage and demands the treasure of Hellsgarde as ransom.

As the previous stories have shown, Jirel is perfectly willing to descend into hell itself and so she enters the haunted castle to face of the horrors awaiting her within. As for Guy of Garlot, he fares about as well as all overbearing men who try to force Jirel to do something against her will.

First published in the April 1939 issue of Weird Tales, "Hellsgarde" is a very much a haunted house story, but what a haunted house story it is. Five stars.

Reading the Jirel of Joiry stories in the year of the lord 1969, it's hard to image that these stories are already more than thirty years old, because they feel so very modern, both with regard to Jirel's adventures in psychedelic dreamlands and her conflicts with overbearing men which many a modern feminist will sympathise with. Jirel is very much a heroine for the 1960s, a strong woman willing to brave even hell itself to get what she wants.

C.L. Moore only ever wrote six stories about Jirel of Joiry (one of which, a story featuring Jirel and Moore's interplanetary outlaw Northwest Smith, is not included in this collection) and sadly retired from writing altogether after the untimely death of her husband Henry Kuttner eleven years ago. However, the Jirel stories are so good that I hope that Moore will eventually return to writing and revisit this groundbreaking character.

If you are looking for the two-fisted adventures of Conan or the hijinks of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser, this collection is very much not that. Jirel's adventures are internal conflicts given form in her journey through dreamlike and often nightmarish landscapes. Nonetheless, these stories are among the best the sword and sorcery genre has to offer. Five stars.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[March 28, 1969] Life Beyond Conan: The Other Heroes of Robert E. Howard

March 28, 2024 Cora Buhlert 4 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

A New President

West Germany has a new president, the seventy-year-old Social Democrat Gustav Heinemann, who up to now was secretary of justice in the grand coalition cabinet. Heinemann was elected with the narrowest of majorities, beating his conservative opponent by only six votes.

Gustav Heinemann and Helmut Schmidt — West Germany's new president Gustav Heinemann is sharing a laugh with Social Democratic floor leader Helmut Schmidt.

The West German president is mainly a ceremonial figure; he has very little political power. The president is also elected by the members of the West German federal and state parliaments rather than the people. Apparently, we cannot be trusted to elect our own president, because our parents and grandparents elected Paul von Hindenburg more than forty years ago.

But even though I had no chance to vote for Gustav Heinemann, I welcome his election, because I've come to know Mr. Heinemann as a highly principled politician who stands for peace and justice and opposed the rearmament of West Germany.

In his first speech after his election, Gustav Heinemann promised that he wanted to be a president for the people, even if the people did not get to elect him. Personally, I believe that he is exactly the right president for these difficult times.

More than just Conan

When Lancer started reprinting the adventures of Conan the Cimmerian three years ago, exactly thirty years after Robert E. Howard's untimely death, they not only pushed the already simmering revival of the genre Fritz Leiber called sword and sorcery into overdrive, but also opened the floodgates for other vintage fantasy stories and novels to come back into print.

No longer do you have to sift through the crumbling pages of Weird Tales or Unknown or pay extortionate prices for Gnome Press or Arkham House hardcover reprints to track down an early adventure of Conan or Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. On the contrary, the heroes of yesteryear are right there in the spinner rack of your local newsstand, gas station, grocery store or bookstore, sporting striking covers by talented artists like Frank Frazetta or J. Jones. The sword and sorcery revival has truly been a boon for fans of vintage weird fiction.

Among the authors of yesteryear coming back into print is none other than Robert E. Howard himself. For while Howard will probably always be associated with Conan first, he was extremely prolific, penning more than two hundred stories in various genres in his short life. In this article, I want to take a look at some of the other Robert E. Howard heroes whose adventures you can find on the shelves right now.

The Philosophical Atlantean: King Kull

Spurred on by the success of their Conan reprints, Lancer made a foray into the rest of Howard's oeuvre and reprinted the adventures of Howard's other Barbarian hero, Kull of Atlantis.

Like Conan, Kull is a wandering adventurer who winds up becoming king of the civilised kingdom of Valusia after slaying the previous ruler. Kull only appeared in two stories in Weird Tales, though the ever enterprising L. Sprague de Camp found several unpublished and sometimes unfinished Kull stories in Howard's trunk (and I have it on good authority that it really is a trunk), had Lin Carter finish the incomplete stories and assembled King Kull.

Because of his superficial similarities to the Cimmerian Barbarian, Kull is considered a prototype Conan. But that would be unfair, because even though they are both adventurers turned kings, Kull is a very different character from Conan, quieter, more introspective, more philosophical, more – dare I say it – gullible.

The Conan stories cover the entire spectrum of Conan's career, from teenaged thief to middle-aged king. The Kull stories, on the other hand, focus almost entirely on his time as King of Valusia – with one exception. Because for Kull we get something we never got for Conan: the story of why he left his home Atlantis in the first place. And no, it's not for the reason you think.

"Exile of Atlantis" introduces us to a teenaged Kull, an outsider adopted into a tribe of Atlantean barbarians. Most of the story is given over to a hunting expedition as well as a dream sequence, where Kull sees his future as king. But what spurs Kull into leaving home is seeing a young woman from his village about to be burned at the stake for daring to fall in love with a Lemurian pirate. Kull is disgusted by this and mercy-kills the woman before the flames can reach her. Then he flees, pursued by furious tribespeople.

"Exile of Atlantis" was never published during Howard's lifetime and it's easy to see why—it's more vignette than story. But it does set the tone for the adventures that follow and introduces Kull both as a perpetual outsider as well as someone who is willing to question and defy tradition, if necessary. Finally, forbidden love as well as Kull's firm believe that love should trump tradition, custom and law is a recurring theme throughout the stories, as Kull helps several young couples to get together with their one true love, against legal and parental opposition.

"The Shadow Kingdom" was the first of the two Kull stories published during Howard's lifetime in the August 1929 issue of Weird Tales and very much sets the stage for what is to follow. The story introduces us to King Kull, as he is watching a parade in his honour, while musing about identity, the nature of reality and the great questions of life.

However, Kull has more immediate problems to deal with, because the Pictish ambassador, Ka-nu the Ancient, warns him of a conspiracy in his own court and sends one of his warriors, Brule the Spear-Slayer, to aid and protect Kull. Those who have read the Conan stories have encountered the Picts before. Based on the ancient inhabitants of Scotland, the Picts reoccur throughout Howard's work, though Howard's Picts bear no resemblance to their historical counterparts.

Kull is initially irritated by Brule, who seems to know the royal palace better than Kull himself. But the two men quickly become fast friends, when Brule informs Kull that an ancient pre-human race of shapeshifting Serpent Men has invaded the kingdom and the royal palace and are quietly replacing guards, courtiers and councillors and are planning to murder and replace Kull, too.

Hugh Rankin: The Shadow Kingdom — Hugh Rankin's interior art for "The Shadow Kingdom" shows Kull and Brule battling the Serpent Men.

"The Shadow Kingdom" is a chillingly paranoid story reminiscent of John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?" and the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though it predates both. Apparently, there are folk who believe that the Serpent Men from "The Shadow Kingdom" really existed and still exist today, similar to how some people believed that the Shaver Mysteries which infested Amazing Stories some twenty years ago were real.

After their ordeal in "The Shadow Kingdom", Brule remains Kull's constant companion and frequently has to rescue his friend from conspirators and assassins as well as from Kull's own gullibility and tendency to get lost in his thoughts. In "The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune", the only other Kull story published during Howard's lifetime, Kull becomes fascinated with the House of Thousand Mirrors inhabited by the wizard Tuzun Thune and keeps gazing into those mirrors, wondering whether he is real or merely a mirror image himself. Just as Kull is about to be sucked into the mirror completely, Brule appears, kills the wizard and smashes the mirrors.

Interior art: The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune — Brule has smashed the mirror and the wizard, once again saving Kull, in the interior art for "The Mirrors of Tusun Thune".

"The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune" will seem familiar to anybody whose ever visited a hall of mirrors at a fun fair or carnival. The story "Delcardes' Cat" also clearly appears to be inspired by travelling fun fairs and fraudulent sideshow attractions. This time around, Kull becomes fascinated with Saremes, an ancient and wise talking cat owned by the noblewoman Delcardes who asks Kull's permission to marry a commoner. Kull has deep and philosophical discussions with Saremes and never once wonders why this regal feline is always carried around by the masked slave Kuthulos.

Things come to a head, when Saremes informs Kull that his friend Brule is in danger and that Kull must dive into a lake inhabited by an ancient amphibian race to rescue him. Brule, however, is not in danger, but once again has to rescue Kull from a plot by his archenemy, the skull-faced wizard Thulsa Doom. As for the cat, she may be wise and ancient and beautiful, but she obviously cannot speak. Instead, her voice was provided by the masked slave Kuthulos. It's easy to imagine Howard witnessing a similar performance in a small carnival somewhere in rural Texas in his youth.

"By This Axe I Rule!" features yet another plot against Kull, instigated by disgruntled noblemen and a rabble-rousing poet. Kull himself, meanwhile, is depressed that some people still mourn the tyrannical king Borna whom Kull slayed and replaced and that even the Cult of the Serpent Men still has worshippers. Kull is also frustrated that even as king he is still constrained by the ancient laws of Valusia, such as a law which forbids free men to marry slaves, even though a young nobleman petitions Kull to allow him to wed the slave girl Ala with whom he has fallen in love. Not long thereafter, Kull meets Ala herself and confesses to her that even as a king, he is still slave to Valusia's cruel ancient laws.

The conspirators strike that night and invade Kull's bedchamber. Kull fights them off with battle axe, but there are too many of them. However, he is saved in the nick of time, because Ala overheard the plot against the king and sounded the alarm. Grateful, Kull takes his battle axe to smash the stone tablets containing Valusia's outdated laws and declares that he is the law now. Then he personally sees to it that Ala and her lover are allowed to marry.

If "By This Axe I Rule!" seems a little familiar, that's maybe because it is. For after the story failed to sell, Howard rewrote it as "The Phoenix on the Sword", the story which introduced Conan the Cimmerian to the world. But while "The Phoenix on the Sword" is a great story, I still prefer "By This Axe I Rule!" because the touching love story between Ala and the young nobleman and the scene of Kull taking his battle axe to the outdated laws of Valusia are sadly absent from the Conan story.

It is notable how many of the Kull stories are concerned with forbidden love and how Kull is clearly frustrated by outdated marriage laws keeping lovers apart until he literally smashes those laws to pieces. Considering that the US Supreme Court struck down state laws forbidding mixed race marriages in several southern states only two years ago (not using a battle axe), I for one can only cheer on Kull and his creator.

But while there is a lot of romance in the Kull stories, Kull himself has no romantic entanglements with women – very much unlike Conan – and even muses at one point that the love of a woman is not for him. One can see homoerotic undertones in Kull's relationship with Brule, though Howard could not clearly spell this out in the late 1920s. Or maybe Kull just prefers celibacy.

It may be blasphemy, but I prefer Kull to Conan. Everybody who enjoys the adventures of the Cimmerian Barbarian should pick up King Kull.

Five stars.

The Avenging Puritan: Red Shadows

Another Robert E. Howard character who predates Conan is Solomon Kane, a sixteenth century Puritan who is on a mission from God (or so he believes) "to ease evil men of their lives". The idea sounds fascinating, but once again the Solomon Kane stories are only found in forty-year-old issues of Weird Tales and have never been reprinted. Until now.

Luckily, my friend Bobby, who shares my interest in the works of Robert E. Howard and other Weird Tales authors of yesteryear, sent me a copy of Red Shadows, a collection of all the Solomon Kane stories, including those that were never published and sometimes not even finished during Howard's lifetime. Red Shadows is a hardcover volume with interior illustrations by J. Jones published by the small press Donald M. Grant Publisher Inc. which also published two collections of Howard's humorous westerns about a very big, very strong and not very bright hillbilly named Breckenridge Elkins and his chaotic family. Sadly I don't own either of those.

The Solomon Kane stories, however, are excellent, mixing historical adventure of the sort that used to be found in the pages of the pulp magazine Adventure with horror elements. Unlike with Kull, we never learn why Solomon Kane does what he does. There are hints, particularly in the poems included in the collection, that Kane was always a violent man and sailed with Sir Francis Drake, but we never learn how Solomon Kane came by his strong religious convictions or how he came to believe that he is on a mission from God.

Early stories show Solomon Kane wandering around England and later the Black Forest in Germany, tangling with pirates and observing several cases of vengeance from beyond the grave. These are fine adventure stories and suitably spooky gothic morality tales. But then Solomon Kane's wanderings literally take him into the heart of darkness with the novelette "Red Shadows", first published in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales.

Weird Tales August 1928 — C.C. Senf's cover for the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales shows the villainous Le Loup murdering a young woman.

"Red Shadows" begins in France, where Solomon Kane finds a mortally injured young woman by the side of the road and comforts her as she dies. Before she draws her final breath, the woman tells Kane that she was assaulted and left for dead by a bandit named Le Loup. "Men will die for this," Kane vows darkly and embarks onto a hunt for Le Loup and his associates which will take him several years and across the world.

Kane finally tracks down Le Loup in a village in the darkest heart of Africa. When the opponents finally come face to face, Le Loup asks Kane whether the woman he murdered was Kane's bride, wife, or sister and is stunned when he learns that Kane had never met the young woman before that fateful day.

In the course of "Red Shadows", Kane also meets and befriends N'Longa, an African shaman, a so-called juju man. Though a sympathetic character, N'Longa initially appears to be an outdated and racist stereotype speaking broken English. However, as Solomon Kane and N'Longa share further adventures, it gradually becomes clear that N'Longa is much more than a mere stereotype. Not only is his magic real, he is also clearly the smartest person in the Solomon Kane stories. Indeed, N'Longa even calls out Kane on his prejudices at one point. Finally, N'Longa also gives Kane a magical weapon, an ancient juju staff, which turns out to be the biblical Staff of Solomon, now wielded by his latter day namesake.

Pulp fiction set in Africa is often full of offensive and downright racist caricatures. Howard does not completely manage to avoid these pitfalls, when describing Kane's wanderings through Africa, encountering vampires, harpies, hidden cities and monsters sealed away in ancient tombs. However, it is also notable that Solomon Kane himself makes no racial distinctions between the people he helps and is as willing to save an angelic blonde English girl from being sacrificed to an ancient god as he is to protect an African village from winged monsters and liberate African slaves from their Arab captors.

Weird Tales June 1930 — Hugh Rankin's colourful cover art for the June 1930 issue of Weird Tales illustrates the Solomon Kane story "The Moon of Skulls", where Kane rescues the kidnapped English girl Marilyn from the African vampire queen Nefari.

During his wanderings through Africa, we also see Kane's religious convictions gradually crumbling. As a devout Puritan, he initially abhors magic, but he also sees that N'Longa's magic, though not even remotely Christian, is nonetheless a force for good as is the Staff of Solomon, which predates both Judaism and Christianity.

Solomon Kane is a complex and fascinating character. He has the religious zeal of Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, memorably portrayed by Vincent Price (who would be perfect to play Solomon Kane) on film last year, only that he is a heroic figure, whereas Hopkins is the darkest of villains.

Gothic horror at its very best.

Five stars.

The Time and Space-Displaced Fugitive: Almuric

Almuric is an oddity even for Robert E. Howard's extremely varied oeuvre. It's his sole foray into Burroughs style planetary romance and one of only two novels Howard wrote. Almuric was serialised posthumously in Weird Tales from May to August 1939 and reprinted by Ace in 1964.

Taking his cue from Burroughs' Barsoom novels, Almuric opens with a framing story. The scientist Professor Hildebrand recounts his meeting with Esau Cairn, whom the Professor describes as "definitely not a criminal", but "a man born in the wrong time". Cairn stumbles into Hildebrand's observatory while on the run for murdering the corrupt politician Boss Blaine (don't worry, he had it coming), the police hot on his heels. Cairn is determined to go down fighting and die in a shootout with the police just like Bonnie and Clyde, who to Howard were not just the subject of a popular movie, but outlaws who operated in his home state of Texas and were shot dead not far from his hometown Cross Plains. Luckily, Professor Hildebrand has a better idea and uses a machine he invented to teleport Cairn to the planet Almuric.

Once there, Cairn takes over as the narrator and has the sort of adventures you would expect from a Burroughs style planetary romance. He encounters the local wildlife as well as a species of ape men named the Guras. After putting his boxing skills to good use and proving his mettle, Cairn is adopted into a tribe of Guras and falls in love with Athla, daughter of the chief. Lucky for Cairn, female Guras look like regular human women.

More adventures follow, as Cairn is captured by a rival tribe, has to fight various monsters and must rescue Athla from a species of winged humanoids called the Yagas whose queen Yasmeena not only has carnal designs on Cairn, but also wants to sacrifice Athla to her gods.

In theory, Robert E. Howard would seem to be the perfect writer for a Burroughs style planetary romance. In practice, however, Almuric is the weakest work by Howard I've read so far. The novel feels choppy and disjointed and there are lengthy passages where Cairn gives us all sorts of information about the world of Almuric and its inhabitants. This is very uncommon for Howard who normally doesn't resort to lengthy encyclopaedic descriptions, but integrates the information into the plot. It almost feels as if Howard's private notes about the world of Almuric, similar to "The Hyborian Age" essay which details the world of Conan, had somehow ended up in the novel itself.

So why is Almuric so different from Howard's other works? The answer is simple. Almuric was published posthumously and very likely remained unfinished at the time of Howard's death and was completed by another writer. We do not know who this writer was, since Weird Tales does not credit them. A likely suspect is fellow Weird Tales author as well as Howard's literary agent Otis Adalbert Kline, who penned several planetary romances himself. Alas, Kline died in 1946, so we will never know for sure.

Even a weak novel by Robert E. Howard is still better than those by many other writers at their best.

Three and a half stars.

Lovecraftian Terrors: Wolfshead

Following the success of their Conan reprints, Lancer is gradually branching out into other works by Robert E. Howard and brought us not only King Kull, but also Wolfshead, a collection of seven horror stories by Robert E. Howard with a striking cover by Frank Frazetta.

Unsurprisingly, the titular story, which appeared in the April 1926 issue of Weird Tales, published when Howard was only twenty years old, is a werewolf story and apparently the sequel to another story, which Lancer in their infinite wisdom chose not to include. "Wolfshead" is not a bad story by any means, though very much the work of a beginning writer.

Weird Tales April 1926 — "Wolfshead" was the first Robert E. Howard story to make the cover of Weird Tales, illustrated by E.M. Stevenson.

In "The Horror From the Mound", first published in the May 1932 issue of Weird Tales, Howard puts his unique spin on that other classic monster of modern horror, the vampire. However, his vampire is not residing in a coffin in the bowels of a castle in Transylvania, but much closer to home (at least from Howard's point of view) in an Indian burial mound in Texas, which a white rancher unwisely disturbs after having been warned not to do so by his Mexican neighbour.

Weird Tales May 1932 — The cover of the May 1932 issue of Weird Tales features a vampire, but not Howard's vampire.

The remaining stories are clearly influenced by H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos and feature mysterious tomes of black magic and unspeakable monsters from beyond. The Lovecraft influence is not that surprising, since Lovecraft and Howard did not just both write for Weird Tales, but were also pen pals who kept up a voluminous correspondence, much of which apparently survives and will hopefully see print someday.

But even though they influenced each other, Robert E. Howard was a very different writer than H.P. Lovecraft and also brings a very different sensibility to his stories. For while Lovecraft's protagonists tend to be driven mad by their encounters with the unspeakable, Howard's protagonists usually fight the monster or die trying, though the poet Justin Geoffrey, protagonist of "The Black Stone", does go mad after an encounter with a cursed stone, an unspeakable cult and a terrifying monster.

Weird Tales November 1931 — The cover of the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales does not illustrate "The Black Stone", but it's still a great cover.

Howard's stories also have a wider range of settings from Texas via Ireland, France and Hungary all the way to Middle East, which is the setting of "The Fires of Asshurbanipal", which combines Lovecraftian horror with the high adventure of the Conan stories.

Weird Tales, December 1936 — The cover of the December 1936 issue of Weird Tales by J. Allen St. John illustrates Robert E. Howard's "The Fires of Asshurbanipal"

"The Valley of the Worm" and "The Cairn on the Headland", include two more subjects that are dear to Howard's heart, reincarnation and Norse mythology. "The Valley of the Worm" features James Allison, a terminally ill man on his deathbed, remembering a previous life as Niord, a Norse tribesman who fights a giant snake in a scene strikingly illustrated by Frank Frazetta on the cover and later takes his revenge on a monstrous Lovecraftian entity that slaughtered his tribe. The Picts, another subject that clearly fascinated Howard judging by their repeated appearances in his stories, also show up. Apparently, Howard wrote several stories about James Allison remembering his past lives and I hope that all of them will eventually see print again.

"The Cairn on the Headland" is set in Ireland, where the two-fisted scholar James O'Brien not only relives the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 AD, in which he took part in a previous life as the Irish warrior Red Cumal, but also has to save Ireland from the wrath of the Norse god Odin who took part in said battle disguised as a Viking chieftain and lies buried in the titular Cairn, which O'Brien's villainous companion unwisely disturbs. Howard has Irish ancestry and was clearly fascinated by the history and mythology of his forebearers.

Wolfshead includes but a small selection of the many horror stories that Howard wrote, but it also offers a taste of how varied Howard's works were. I hope that this is but the first of many collections of Robert E. Howard's horror stories to come.

A great and varied horror collection by a true master of the genre.

Four and a half stars.

There's Gold in Them Pulps and in That Trunk, Too: Other Howard works we may hopefully see again soon

The untimely death of Robert E. Howard is one of the great tragedies of our genre. Whenever I read a Howard story and marvel at what a great writer he was, I also mourn all the stories he never got to write, all the tales that remain untold. Howard pivoted to the more lucrative western market towards the end of his life, but would he have returned to Conan or even Kull or Solomon Kane later in life, just as his nigh contemporary Fritz Leiber keeps returning to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser? We will never know.

However, the success of the Conan reprints is giving us the chance to explore the rest of Howard's work. Another Howard hero, Bran Mak Morn, last king of the Picts who defends his people against Roman occupiers, is set to be reprinted later this year. There is still so much more to discover such as the tales Howard wrote for Weird Tales' sister magazine Oriental Stories and other adventure-focussed pulps like Top-Notch or Thrilling Adventure, featuring the adventures of the American treasure hunter Kirby O'Donnell and the Texan gunfighter Francis Xavier Gordon a.k.a. El Borak in Kurdistan and Afghanistan at the turn of the century. For Oriental Stories, Howard also wrote several historical stories set during the Crusades, which are allegedly excellent.

Thrilling Adventures December 1936 — Francis Xavier Gordon a.k.a. El Borak is a cover boy for the December 1936 issue of Thrilling Adventures.

Oriental Stories February 1931 — Donald von Gelb's striking cover art for the February 1931 issue of Oriental Stories illustrates Robert E. Howard's "Red Blades of Black Cathay", co-written with his friend Tevis Clyde Smith.

For the infamous shudder pulps, Howard penned several tales featuring the occult investigator Steve Harrison and for Weird Tales, he wrote the Fu Manchu type thriller "Skull Face". Howard also had a funny side, which is in full display in the humorous westerns featuring the big and dumb hillbilly Breckenridge Elkins as well as his stories featuring the boxing sailor Steve Costigan, which first appeared in the pulp magazine Fight Stories. I've read one of the Steve Costigan stories and it was hilarious. I hope that eventually we will get to read them all.

Thrilling Mystery February 1936 — This gruesome cover of the February 1936 issue of Thrilling Mystery illustrates Robert E. Howard's story "Graveyard Rats".

And then, of course, there is also Howard's trunk of unpublished stories. Who knows what gems still lurk in there?

Bravo March 24, 1969 — Belgian Italian singer Salvatore Adamo is not only the second bestselling musician in the world after The Beatles, but also adorns the cover of the latest issue of the West German teen magazine Bravo.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[February 14, 1967] Three Facets of Conan: Conan the Warrior by Robert E. Howard

February 14, 2022 Cora Buhlert 7 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

Winter in the City and the Park

An aerial view of the Bremen Bürgerpark with the luxurious Park Hotel and the Holler Lake.

It's cold a wet February here in my hometown of Bremen, but the first signs of spring are already visible and audible in the form of the red and white pavilions and the shouts of the barkers of the Bürgerpark tombola.

Bürgerpark Kaffeehaus am Emmasee — The modernist coffee house at the Emma Lake in Bremen's Bürgerpark opened only three years ago, replacing a building which was destroyed in WWII.

The Bürgerpark (citizen's park) is a roughly 200 hectare big park in the heart of Bremen, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. The park contains several lakes, a luxury hotel, a restaurant, a coffee house, a theatre, a small zoo as well fountains, bridges, benches, statues and lots of beautiful scenery. Beloved by the people of Bremen, the upkeep of the park is financed almost entirely by donations as well as the Bürgerpark tombola, a charity raffle that has been going on every year since 1953 in the late winter and early spring.

Dromedary Bobby — The dromedary Bobby is one of the most popular inhabitants of the zoo in the Bremen Bürgerpark.

Llamas and Zebra in the Bürgerpark — The llama Chacca and her baby Roland, who was born en route from South America to Bremerhaven, are the newest inhabitants of the Bürgerpark zoo. A longtime inhabitant, the Zebra Timmy, looks on.

Whenever I chance to find myself in the city center at Bürgerpark tombola time, I inevitably buy a few tickets. After all, it's for a good cause and you can win some great prizes such as cars, holiday trips, sports tickets or cruises. Though so far, all I won was a packet of rice.

More from the Cimmerian Barbarian

But even though I only won an underwhelming prize from the Bürgerpark tombola, I did hit the reading jackpot this month with yet another great collection of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories from the 1930s courtesy of Lancer Books.

After Conan the Adventurer, which I reviewed last month for the Journey, I cracked open the purple edged pages of the follow-up collection Conan the Warrior with a mix of excitement and apprehension. For while I was happy to spend more time with the Cimmerian, I was also worried that this collection would be a let-down, compared to the high quality of the previous installment.

However, I need not have worried, because Conan the Warrior is even better than Conan the Adventurer, collecting one good and two excellent stories.

Red Nails

Weird Tales July 1936 — Margaret Brundage's striking cover illustrates a pivotal scene in "Red Nails"

The novella "Red Nails" was serialised in Weird Tales from July to October 1936 and has the distinction of being the last Conan adventure that Robert E. Howard completed before his untimely death in 1936. And what an adventure it is.

Once again, the story opens not with Conan, but with another character, Valeria of the Red Brotherhood, a female pirate and mercenary, who had to go on the run when she killed an officer of the army in which she had enlisted, after he tried to rape her. Now Valeria makes her way through the uncharted jungles of the Hyborian Age equivalent of Africa. Unbeknownst to Valeria, Conan, who served in the same mercenary army, has fallen for Valeria and followed her into the jungle, quietly dispatching any other pursuers.

Weird Tales August 1936 — Not Conan or Valeria, but an illustration for Edmond Hamilton's "The Door Into Infinity"

Valeria is a marvellous character, a warrior woman who is Conan's equal in many ways. "Why won't men let me live a man's life?" Valeria laments at one point. "That's obvious," Conan replies with an appreciative look at Valeria's body. Robert E. Howard is usually considered a writer of masculine fiction and Conan is clearly a man's man, but I was pleasantly surprised by the variety and competence of the female characters in these stories. Not every women in these stories is as impressive as Valeria or Yasmina from "The People of the Black Circle", but they are all characters with personalities and lives of their own and every one of them is given a chance to shine.

Weird Tales October 1936 — This hellish scene by J. Allen St. John illustrates not "Red Nails", but "Isle of the Undead" by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach

At first, Valeria is not too pleased to see Conan, but this quickly changes when Valeria and Conan find themselves pursued by what they call a dragon, but which twentieth century readers will quickly recognise as a dinosaur who has survived the extinction of its brethren. Now I was not expecting to see Conan and Valeria fighting a dinosaur, but my inner ten-year-old who loved dinosaurs was delighted.

Red Nails Hugh Rankin — Conan and Valerie fight the "dragon", as imagined by Harold S. DeLay

Together, Conan and Valeria manage to kill the dinosaur, but fearing there might be more in the jungle, they flee into the desert, where they spot yet another mysterious and seemingly abandoned city on the horizon. However, Xuchotl, which is not so much a city but a giant enclosed maze, is far from abandoned. Instead, it is home to two rivalling factions who are engaged in a generations long blood feud to the exclusion of all else. The title refers not, as I had initially assumed, to women's fingernails, but to copper nails which are hammered into a column to keep a tally of enemies killed.

Red Nails Harold S. DeLay — Conan and Valeria meet the people of Xuchotl, as imagined by Harold S. DeLay

In spite of their best efforts, Conan and Valeria cannot avoid getting dragged into that feud. But other dangers lurk in Xuchotl as well, including a treacherous king, a vampiric queen with an unsavoury interest in Valeria and a mad sorcerer.

Robert E. Howard clearly enjoyed writing stories about mysterious cities in the desert inhabited by drugged out or otherwise insane inhabitants and monsters both human and supernatural, since no less than five of the seven stories in these collections include a variation on this theme. "Red Nails" is the best of these and it almost seems as if the previous stories were practice runs for this one.

Red Nail Harold S. DeLay — More "Red Nails" interior art, courtesy of Harold S. DeLay

Howard also contrasts the madness and inhumanity of Xuchotl's inhabitants and their endless feud with the warmth and humanity of both Conan and Valeria. There is a wonderful moment where Conan's interrupts the pompous King Olmec's victory speech with a gruff "You'd best see to your wounded." We also see Conan and Valeria taking care of each other and treating each other's injuries. Fantasy fiction rarely pays attention to the physical cost of battle, but the Conan stories repeatedly show that characters, including Conan, can and will be wounded. Robert E. Howard's father was a Texas country doctor, so Howard knew a thing or two about injuries.

Another amazing (and very bloody) adventure with a heroine who's Conan's match in every way. Five stars.

The Jewels of Gwahlur

This novelette appeared in the March 1935 issue of Weird Tales and finds Conan still (or once again) in Africa, climbing the sheer walls of a cliff surrounding the ruined city of Alkmeenon. Inside this city, there rests a legendary treasure of priceless jewels known as the Teeth of Gwahlur.

Weird Tales March 1935 — Margaret Brundage's evocative cover for the March 1935 issue of Weird Tales illustrates not "The Jewels of Gwalhur", but "Clutching Hands of Death" by Harold Ward

Conan is eager to get his hands on this treasure and has ingratiated himself with the King of Keshan in order to steal the jewels, which happen to be sacred to the people of Keshan.

However, Conan isn't the only one who's after the jewels. There's also his rival Thutmekri and his accomplice, the fake oracle Muriela. Furthermore, the city of Alkmeenon once again is not nearly as deserted as everybody believes, but is still being stalked by the monstrous servants of its former masters.

Jewels of Gwalhur interior art — Muriela is assaulted by an offensive racial stereotype, while an uncharacteristically blonde Conan intervenes.

So far in this collection, we've seen Conan the mercenary, Conan the warlord and Conan the pirate. This story adds a new dimension to the Cimmerian and gives us Conan the con man, who is literally running a long con to get his hands on the jewels. The city of Alkmeenon, located in the center of what a modern reader will recognise as an extinct volcano, is a very evocative setting. Though unfortunately, the descriptions of the black characters who appear in the story are once again dated and no longer appropriate to the civil rights era. The heroine Muriela is no Valeria either, but closer to the stereotype of the clinging and whimpering damsel.

A fun heist story starring Conan. Four stars.

Beyond the Black River

Weird Tales May 1935 — This rather dull Margaret Brundage cover for the May 1935 issue of Weird Tales illustrates "The Death Cry", an adventure of scientific detective Craig Kennedy by Arthur B. Reeve

This novella was originally serialised in the May and June 1935 of Weird Tales and is set on the northern edge of Aquilonia, the Hyborian age equivalent of France and also the kingdom Conan will eventually come to rule. Aquilonia has recently expanded its borders northwards into the wilderness inhabited by the barbarian Picts. The Picts are understandably not happy about this.

Beyond the Black River interior art Hugh Rankin — A giant snake wreaks havoc on a Pictish village that is seemingly inhabited solely by naked women in the interior art by Hugh Rankin for Part I of "Beyond the Black River"

The historical Picts were a people who lived in what is now Scotland during the late Roman era and the early Middle Ages. Little is known about them and so Howard uses a lot of poetic licence to turn his version of the Picts into analogues for American Indians, setting up a frontier conflict. The Picts are very much depicted as offensive stereotypes here, though Howard also wrote several stories chronicling the struggles of a Pictish chieftain named Bran Mak Morn with the Roman Empire, where the Picts are portrayed in far more sympathetic light.

Once again, the novella opens not with Conan, but with a young man named Balthus who has come to Aquilonia's newly opened frontier, lured by promises of cheap and abundant land. However, Balthus quickly encounters the Picts and is saved by none other than Conan, who has come to Fort Tuscelan to serve as a mercenary. Since Conan's homeland Cimmeria borders on Pictish territory (though the Cimmerians and the Picts are ancestral enemies), the Fort's commander puts Conan's wilderness skills and knowledge of the enemy to good use by sending him on scouting missions.

Weird Tales June 1936 — Margaret Brundage is back on form with this striking cover for the June 1935 issue of Weird Tales, which illustrates "The Horror in the Studio" by the unjustly forgotten Dorothy Quick.

Conan is convinced that Aquilonia's expansion plans will eventually fail, when the various Pictish tribes rally together to kick out the invaders. After all, that was what the Cimmerians did when Aquilonia attempted to annex their territory. Balthus has heard stories of that legendary battle for the Aquilonian Fort Venarium and asks Conan if he was there. "Yes," Conan says and calmly tells Balthus that he fought on the Cimmerian side as a fifteen-year-old. So Conan fought the very people at the age of fifteen that he will come to rule as a king some twenty-five years later and sees absolutely no contradiction in this.

Conan's prediction proves to be accurate, for the Pictish wizard Zogar Sag has rallied the tribes and is gearing up for an assault on Fort Tuscelan. Conan and a party of scouts, including Balthus, sneak into Pictish territory to take out Zogar Sag. But they are ambushed and only Conan and Balthus survive. However, the attack on Fort Tuscelan has already begun and all Conan and Balthus can do is to warn the Aquilonian settlers, so they can flee before they are slaughtered.

Hugh Rankin Beyond the Black River — Conan fights a demonic creature in Hugh Rankin's interior art for part 2 of "Beyond the Black River"

Of all the Conan stories I've read so far, this one is the bleakest, since it literally ends with everybody except for Conan dead. This includes Balthus who makes a heroic last stand together with a feral dog named Slasher to allow the settlers to escape to safety.

Now I'm very much not a dog person and Slasher, who went feral after the Picts murdered his owner and now takes revenge on the slayers in his own fashion, is very reminiscent of the slobbering and barking menaces that chased after me behind much too low fences when I rode my bicycle to school as a kid. That said, Slasher is a marvellous character in his own right and the mix of total savagery towards the Picts and affection towards Balthus rings so true that I wonder if Howard owned a dog. I'm not someone who cries at movies or books and managed to sit through all of Doctor Zhivago without shedding a single tear. However, the heroic sacrifice of Slasher and Balthus made even me misty-eyed.

"Beyond the Black River" also showcases Howard's versatility, since he plops Conan into what is basically a western. And considering Howard grew up in Texas at a time when the so-called Old West was still within living memory, it seems only natural that he would draw on the frontier era in his fiction.

To someone from West Germany, the Old West is just as exotic as the Hyborian Age. Nonetheless, I connected to this story, because I noticed many parallels between the Cimmerians and later the Picts kicking the Aquilonians out of their respective homelands and my own ancestors, led by the Cherusci chieftain Arminius, kicking the Romans out of Northern Germany in the battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.

"Beyond the Black River" also ends with what is probably one of Howard's most famous lines: "Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural; it is a whim of circumstance… And barbarism must always ultimately triumph!"

A bleak and grim story that will stick in your mind for a long time. Five stars.

A Multi-faceted Barbarian

So far, I have read a few of the Conan stories in scattered reprints in magazines and collections as well as two of Lancer's new paperback collections and I'm struck by the variety of settings and themes in the stories that Robert E. Howard wrote about this character. But even though the various stories reveal different aspects of the Cimmerian, Conan always remains recognisably the same character.

Those who have heard of Conan, but have not read the actual stories featuring him, inevitably cite Conan's violence, his physical strength and his womanising as his most notable characteristics. Nor are they wrong, because Conan is clearly a violent man. Those at the receiving end of his sword or his fists usually deserve their fate, but it's also difficult to overlook that Conan outright murders the pirate captain Zaparavo in "Pool of the Black One" to take over his ship and also murders a rival in "Drums of Tombalku" to usurp his position.

A lot of people also think that Conan is stupid, an illiterate Barbarian, big of muscle and small of brain. They could not be more wrong, because the Conan depicted by Robert E. Howard is actually a very intelligent man. He speaks, reads and writes multiple languages. He is a also a brilliant military strategist and tactician and – at least in "The Jewels of Gwalhur" – a clever con man.

As for the womanising, like many men, Conan does think with the dangly bit on occasion. In "Red Nails", Conan literally walks across half a continent in order to go after and protect the woman he has fallen for.

In the seven stories collected in Conan the Adventurer and Conan the Warrior, Conan is without female companionship in two of the stories and with a different woman in the each of the remaining five. And even though most Conan stories end with Conan walking off into the sunset with his current lover, the woman in question is usually nowhere to be seen in the following story. This is a pity, for while some of the female characters in these stories are insipid non-entities like the woman clinging to Conan's leg on Frank Frazetta's cover for Conan the Adventurer, Conan is also paired with some remarkably strong women like Valeria from "Red Nails" or Yasmina from "People of the Black Circle".

But then, Conan is extremely charismatic. He may be a loner and wandering outlaw for much of his career, but Conan never has problems persuading people to follow him. In "Drums of Tombalku", Conan goes from prisoner marked for death to leader of the warriors who have captured him within the space of a few days. And in "Pool of the Black One", Conan steals the crew of the pirate captain Zaparavo from under his nose by gaining their loyalty. Even though those stories haven't been reprinted yet, it's easy to see how Conan will wind up becoming King of Aquilonia, the very country whose warriors he helped to kick out of his native Cimmeria at the age of fifteen.

Though for Conan, loyalty is not a one way street. In fact, the most notable of Conan's traits that appears in story after story is his deep loyalty towards friends, lovers, comrades in arms and people he feels responsible for. In "People of the Black Circle", Conan's main goal throughout the story is freeing the seven of his men who have been captured by the authorities of Vendya. Nor will Conan abandon the people he has adopted, even after they try to kill him. And when one of his friends is killed, as happens in "Drums of Tombalku" and "Beyond the Black River", Conan swears bloody vengeance on the killers.

Closely linked to Conan's deep loyalty towards people he feels responsible for is a trait that is not often brought up in connection with a violent Barbarian warrior, namely his compassion. For these stories demonstrate again and again that Conan deeply cares about people, whether it is his budding friendship with Balthus and Slasher in "Beyond the Black River", his protectiveness towards Valeria in "Red Nails" or Conan freely foregoing the great treasure he has been chasing after for the entire story in order to save a life at the end of "The Jewels of Gwalhur". Indeed, it is when pitted against a merciless and utterly inhuman opponent, whether it's the wizards of Mount Yimsha in "People of the Black Circle", the blood-mad inhabitants of Xuchotl in "Red Nails", the apathetic pleasure seekers of Xuthal in "The Slithering Shadows" or the murderous Pictish warriors and wizards in "Beyond the Black River", that Conan's humanity shines most brightly.

Now that Lancer is reprinting all the stories, you owe it to yourself to get to know the real Conan, this fascinating and multi-faceted character that Robert E. Howard created more than thirty years ago.

Three fabulous tales of the Cimmerian Barbarian. Five stars for the collection.

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Book, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 22, 1967] The Return of the Cimmerian: Conan the Adventurer by Robert E. Howard

January 22, 2022 Cora Buhlert 4 Comments

by Cora Buhlert

1967 is off to a cold and wet start here in West Germany, so it's the perfect opportunity to stay indoors and read. Thankfully, I have a plethora of magazines to keep me company.

Bravo January 1967 — Teen magazines Bravo profiles Uwe Beyer, who plays Siegfried in the upcoming fantasy epic The Nibelungs, this month.

Für Sie January 1967 — The women's mag Für Sie offers costume and make-up tips for the upcoming carnival season.

Das Motorrad January 1967 — Motorbike magazine Das Motrrad tests the new Honda CB-250.

What is more, during my latest visit to my local import bookstore, the trusty spinner rack yielded not one but two treasures: Conan the Adventurer and Conan the Warrior by Robert E. Howard.

The Cimmerian Barbarian and the Texas Pulpster

The untimely death of Robert E. Howard thirty years ago is one of the great tragedies of our genre. The lifelong Texan Howard had his first story, the prehistoric adventure "Spear and Fang" published in Weird Tales in 1925, when he was only nineteen years old. In the following eleven years, Howard published dozens of stories in Weird Tales as well as in long forgotten pulp magazines such as Oriental Stories, Fight Stories, Action Stories, Magic Carpet Magazine or Spicy Mystery. In the introduction to Conan the Adventurer, editor L. Sprague de Camp calls Howard "a natural story-teller, whose tales are unsurpassed for vivid, colorful, headlong, gripping action."

In 1936, tragedy struck, when Howard's beloved mother was about to succumb to tuberculosis. Overcome with grief, Howard took his own life. He was only thirty years old.

Howard's most famous creation is undoubtedly Conan the Cimmerian, a barbarian warrior whose adventures in the so-called Hyborian Age some twelve thousand years before our time Howard chronicled in eighteen published and several unpublished stories in Weird Tales between 1932 and 1936. At the time, the unique mix of pseudo-historical action, adventure and supernatural horror that Howard pioneered in the Conan stories had no name. Some thirty years after the appearance of the first Conan story, Fritz Leiber finally bestowed a name on this nameless subgenre: sword and sorcery.

It was the fate of many pulpsters, including popular and prolific writers, to be forgotten as the pulps faded. Howard, however, was never forgotten in the thirty years since his untimely death. His fiction has inspired authors like Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock and Lin Carter. There is a club devoted to his works, the Hyborian Legion, and the popular fanzine Amra started out as a Howard fanzine before branching out to cover the entire subgenre now known as sword and sorcery, a subgenre Howard created out of whole cloth in his parents' house in Cross Plains, Texas.

However, until now the actual stories of Robert E. Howard have been unavailable outside the yellowing pages of thirty-year-old copies of Weird Tales. There have been occasional magazine reprints, and Gnome Press reprinted the Conan stories in several hardcover collections in the early 1950s, but those editions are almost as difficult to find as vintage copies of Weird Tales.

Luckily for all of us sword and sorcery fans, Lancer Books has decided to reprint all the Conan stories in paperback format with striking covers by last year's Hugo winner Frank Frazetta. I was a little sceptical about Frazetta's Hugo win last year, since at the time he was mainly known for his Edgar Rice Burroughs covers. However, now that I've seen his take on Conan, I'm a fan.

Howard wrote the Conan stories, which follow the Cimmerian from his time as a thief in his late teens to his time as King of the Aquilonia in his forties, out of order, but editor L. Sprague de Camp has rearranged them into chronological order for the Lancer editions. For reasons best known to themselves, Lancer began its Conan reprints with two volumes set in the middle of Conan's career, during his time as a mercenary and warlord.

The People of the Black Circle

Weird Tales September 1934 — Margaret Brundage's take on the Devi Yasmina and the Master of Mount Yimsa

Conan the Adventurer begins with "The People of the Black Circle", a novella that was serialised in the September, October and November 1934 issues of Weird Tales.

The story opens not with Conan – and indeed, it is a pattern with these stories that they open with other characters, before the Cimmerian appears – but with the King of Vendya, the Hyborian Age equivalent of India. The King is dying. In a moment of clarity, he tells his sister, the Devi Yasmina, that wizards have drawn his soul out of his body. Should he die in this state, his soul will be doomed forever. However, now that his soul has briefly managed to return to his body, the King begs Yasmina to kill him to save his soul from eternal damnation. Sobbing, Yasmina stabs him.

After a beginning like that, who could not read on? And so Howard leads us into a fabulous adventure that follows several competing factions as they vie for control over the Hyborian Age equivalents of India, the Himalaya and Afghanistan (thankfully, there is a handy map at the beginning of the paperback).

Weird Tales interior art — Hugh Rankin's interior art for Weird Tales feature Yasmina, Conan and a giant snake.

The Devi Yasmina, unsurprisingly, wants revenge for the death of her brother and her chosen instrument of vengeance is none other than Conan. The mercenary Kerim Shah wants to kidnap Yasmina and conquer Vendya on behalf of his employers, the neighbouring kingdom of Turan, and has conspired with the wizards of Mount Yimsa to murder the King. One of those wizards, Khemsa, is not satisfied with being merely a tool. He wants to overthrow both the wizards and the Devi with the aid of his lover Gitara, one of the Devi's handmaidens. Conan, finally, who is a warlord of the Afghuli hill tribes at this point in his life, merely wants back seven of his men, who have been captured by the forces of Vendya.

Things come to a head, when Conan infiltrates the palace to negotiate the release of his seven hill chiefs with the governor of the Vendyan province of Peshkauri. Yasmina happens to blunder into the governor's study at just this moment and Conan winds up kidnapping her and going on the run. Conan intends to use Yasmina as leverage to secure the release of his men, while Yasmina still hopes to use him to avenge herself on the wizards of Mount Yimsa. Only one of them will get their will.

What follows is a glorious adventure. Conan finds himself faced with treachery from those he thought his allies, as well as unexpected alliances with enemies, as he takes on the wizards of Mount Yimsa and falls for Yasmina in the process.

Weird Tales November 1934 — Margaret Bundage's striking cover for the November 1934 issue of Weird Tales.

After reading "The People of the Black Circle", I understand why Lancer and de Camp chose this particular story to reintroduce us to Conan. This story has it all, adventure and romance, political manoeuvrings and the blackest of magics. Conan's loyalty to the people whose leader he has become and his determination to rescue his captured men make him an incredibly likeable character for all his faults. And even though she was created more than thirty years ago, Yasmina is the sort of strong woman that is still all too rare in contemporary fantastic fiction. One of the most story's most memorable scenes occurs as the Master of Mount Yimsa forces Yasmina to relive all her previous lives, subjecting her to the violence and pain that women have suffered across time. I was surprised to see such insight from a male author.

Fellow traveller Victoria Silverwolf reviewed this story, when it was reprinted in the January 1967 issue of Fantastic and gave it three stars. I enjoyed this story a lot more than Victoria did.

A fabulous adventure by a writer at the height of his powers. Five stars.

The Slithering Shadow

Weird Tales November 1933 — Margaret Brundage's illustration of Thalis whipping Natala, while the slithering shadow lurks in the background, was Weird Tales' most popular cover of all time.

This story originally appeared in the September 1933 issue of Weird Tales, which featured one of the most popular covers Margaret Brundage ever created for the unique magazine. But even though Brundage's predilection for painting scantily clad women in suggestive poses is well-known, the cover accurately illustrates a scene from this story.

"The Slithering Shadow" opens with Conan staggering through the desert of Kush in the Hyborian Age equivalent of Northern Africa, after the mercenary army in which he fought was defeated and wiped out. He is accompanied by Natala, a blonde woman he rescued from the slave market and made his companion.

Conan is at the end of his line and he knows it. He and Natala are out of water and there is no end to the desert in sight. Conan considers mercy-killing Natala to spare her the pain of dying of thirst, when they spot a mysterious city on the horizon.

However, the city Xuthal turns out to be just as deadly as the desert. And so Conan and Natala face Xuthal's drugged out inhabitants and the treacherous Stygian (the Hyborian equivalent of Egypt) Thalis who takes a liking to Conan and subjects poor Natala to the whipping that Margaret Brundage so memorably illustrated for the original Weird Tales cover. Finally, there's also Thog, a Lovecraftian horror (Howard and Lovecraft were pen pals) and the Slithering Shadow of the title who preys on the people of Xuthal…

Another great adventure. Not quite as good as "The People of the Black Circle", but then what could be? Four stars.

Drums of Tombalku

This novella is brand-new, based on an incomplete draft that was found among Howard's papers after his death and was completed by editor L. Sprague de Camp according to Howard's outline.

Like "The People of the Black Circle", "Drums of Tombalku" opens not with Conan, but with a young mercenary named Amalric. Conan and Amalric were comrades, until their mercenary army was wiped out (the armies in which Conan enlists sure tend to be unlucky). They fled into the desert, were attacked by raiders and separated. Amalric believes Conan dead, though the reader knows that the Cimmerian is still alive.

The novella opens with Amalric resting at a water hole with two bandits whose band he has joined, when the leader appears, bearing a young woman he found unconscious in the desert. The bandits plan to rape the young woman, but Amalric discovers his sense of chivalry and kills his companions.

This opening scene, which was presumably written by Howard, is the one point in Conan the Adventurer where the fact that these stories were written more than thirty years ago becomes apparent. For the bandits are black men and the physical descriptions of these characters are dated and downright uncomfortable to read in this era of progressing civil rights. And the fact that these bandits want to rape a (white) woman is unpleasantly reminiscent of Southern fears of sexual violence committed by black men. Though it is notable that Conan himself does not seem to suffer from racial prejudices and befriends people of all races. Indeed, both Conan and Amalric explicitly state in this story that white people are just as capable of both good and evil as black people.

Amalric attempts to return Lissa, the young woman he rescued, to her home and finds himself in yet another mysterious city in the desert whose hopped up inhabitants are stalked by the monstrous god Ollam-Onga. Clearly, this was a theme Howard loved, since it appears several times in his Conan stories.

Amalric slays Ollam-Onga and makes his escape together with Lissa, the god's worshippers in mad pursuit. He is reunited with Conan who is not dead after all. Instead, Conan was captured by the raiders of the desert metropolis Tombalku, but has risen to their captain by now, since Tombalku's king is an old friend of Conan's from his days as a pirate on the coast of what is now Africa.

Conan takes Amalric and Lissa to Tombalku, where racial tensions between the vaguely Middle Eastern and black population come to a head. The fact that Amalric slew the god Ollam-Onga, who is worshipped by Tombalku's inhabitants, does not help either.

Sometimes, stories are left unfinished for a reason and this was probably the case here. For Amalric is simply not as interesting as Conan and the first half of the story is very reminiscent of "The Slithering Shadow" (and Howard may well have reused ideas from this unfinished story).

As evidenced by his novels Lest Darkness Fall and The Tritonian Ring, L. Sprague De Camp is a very different writer than Robert E. Howard. He makes a decent effort to match Howard's style, but while Conan's dialogue does ring true most of the time, De Camp's action scenes don't have the energy of Howard's. Nor does De Camp have Howard's poetic sensibility and some of his word choices like "condottiere" don't match the prehistoric milieu of the Hyborian Age.

The weakest story in this collection, but nonetheless entertaining. Three stars.

The Pool of the Black One

Weird Tales October 1933 — Margaret Brundage's stunning cover for the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales

This story originally appeared in the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales and opens quite spectacularly with Conan clambering dripping wet aboard the pirate ship Wastrel in the middle of the Western Sea (we call it the Atlantic Ocean) after a fallout with the Barachan pirates. The Wastrel's captain Zaparavo is not particularly pleased with the mysterious stranger who boarded his ship, though he grudgingly makes him part of the crew. Meanwhile, Zaparavo's lover Sancha is fascinated by Conan.

As we've seen in "The People of the Black Circle" and "Drums of Tombalku", Conan is very charismatic and a natural leader and so he quickly wins the respect of the Wastrel's crew. He is also clearly aiming to become captain of the Wastrel, just as he became warlord of the Afghuli hill tribes and captain of the raiders of Tombalku.

Conan gets his chance to take over the Wastrel, when the clearly insane Zaparavo takes the ship to a mysterious island far off the coast in search of some great treasure. What he finds instead is death at the business end of Conan's sword.

But the island is not as deserted as it seems and soon Conan has to defend Sancha and the pirate crew against its inhuman inhabitants and their strange and terrible rites…

"The Pool of the Black One" starts off as a pirate adventure-–and indeed, this makes me question De Camp's chronology, for in "Drums of Tombalku" it is clearly stated that Conan's pirate days are in the past-–but takes a turn into Lovecraftian territory, once the Wastrel reaches the nameless island. The horror of the island, a mysterious pool which turns people into figurines, is certainly a unique idea, but Howard never fully explores it.

Another enjoyable adventure of the Cimmerian barbarian. Four stars.

There's Gold in Them Pulps

Sword and sorcery has been undergoing something of a revival ever since Michael Moorcock introduced Elric of Meniboné in the pages of Science Fantasy and Cele Goldsmith Lalli rescued Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser from oblivion and also gave the world John Jakes' Brak the Barbarian and Roger Zelazny's Dilvish the Damned in Fantastic. Furthermore, the enormous success of Ace's (unauthorised) paperback editions of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings has shown that fantasy has the potential of being just as successful as science fiction.

However, until now it has been very difficult to read the original stories of Robert E. Howard as well as other sword and sorcery writers of the 1930s such as C.L. Moore, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner or Clifford Ball that started it all.

I have read a few of the Conan stories in scattered reprints in magazines and collections and my own Kurval sword and soccery series was directly inspired the novel The Hour of the Dragon a.k.a. Conan the Conqueror, which features Conan as King of Aquilonia. But in spite of scouring used bookstores, I have never been able to track down all of the stories. Therefore, I'm grateful to Lancer and L. Sprague De Camp for reprinting the Conan stories, including the ones that Robert E. Howard never got to finish. I hope that sales are good enough that they will complete this project.

Furthermore, I hope that the Conan reprints are only the beginning of a movement to bring the fantasy of thirty years ago back into print. For while there was a lot of dross published in the pulps, there also were a lot of wonderful stories that deserve rediscovery. For example, I would love to see some of the other characters Robert E. Howard created for Weird Tales such Kull of Atlantis, the Puritan avenger Solomon Kane or Bran Mak Morn, last King of the Picts, back in print. C.L. Moore's stories about the interplanetary outlaw Northwest Smith and the medieval swordswoman Jirel of Joiry from Weird Tales also deserve to be rediscovered as do the lyrical and truly weird fantasy and horror stories of Clark Ashton Smith. Finally, I also hope to see all of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories collected eventually, including the early ones that were published in Unknown some twenty-five years ago.

Conan the Adventurer is an excellent collection of what we now call sword and sorcery fiction and also serves as a great introduction to the author and the character who gave birth to the subgenre.

Four stars for the collection.

But what about Conan the Warrior, the second Lancer Conan collection, you ask? Well, stay tuned, cause I will be reviewing that one next month right here at Galactic Journey.

Snow in East Berlin in 1967 — Winter has come to East Berlin, giving children the chance to get out their sleds.

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[December 8, 1966] Flesh and Blood (January 1967 Fantastic)

December 8, 2021 Victoria Silverwolf 2 Comments

by Victoria Silverwolf

Burning Curiosity

It's probably just my morbid imagination, but it seems to me that the most intriguing, if horrifying, event in recent days was the demise of Doctor John Irving Bentley earlier this month. The elderly physician was reduced to a pile of ashes (except for part of one leg) in what some people are calling a case of spontaneous human combustion.

The scene of the fire. Notice the large hole in the floor caused by the flames. I have deliberately avoided sharing more gruesome photographs.

Church Music

After that piece of news, it's a relief to turn to a piece of light entertainment. The unique novelty song Winchester Cathedral by some British folks calling themselves the New Vaudeville Band, currently at the top of the American music charts, is a deliberately old-fashioned number. It sounds like something Rudy Vallee might have offered in the 1920's, complete with singing through a megaphone and a finishing chorus of oh-bo-de-o-do.

Rumor has it that the song was recorded by session musicians hired for the occasion, and that the band was hastily put together when it became a hit.

Well, that got me to thinking about all the folks buried in Winchester Cathedral. (There's that morbid imagination at work again.) The most familiar one — to me, at least — is the great author Jane Austen.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a dead woman in possession of a good reputation must be in want of a lengthy epitaph.

Gore on the Pages

Given my grim mood, it's appropriate that the
latest issue of Fantastic is full of violence, horror, and bizarre manipulations of the human body.

Cover art by Frank R. Paul, stolen from the back cover of the March 1941 issue of Amazing Stories.

The original, with brighter colors. The Reptile Men (no women?) are cute.

The Ultimate Gift, by Bryce Walton

We begin our journey into the macabre with the magazine's only original work.

Illustrations by Gray Morrow.

Aliens arrive at the Moon. They seem ready to conquer the world, but are hesitant about humanity's ability to put up a fight. They allow envoys to pay a visit, but kill them for some unknown violation of protocol. The dying words (thoughts, really, but let's not get into that subplot) of the most recent victim lead to an unusual choice for the next diplomat.

The so-called Basket Man was born without arms or legs. After years of misery, he winds up as a sideshow freak, making use of advanced technology to move around and manipulate things. In his bitterness, he refuses to have artificial limbs attached to his torso. A representative from the United Nations, based on the hint noted in the paragraph above, convinces him to acquire robotic arms and legs, and to head to the Moon to meet the aliens.

The fact that they're reptilian, sort of like the creatures on the cover, is relevant.

A little knowledge of zoology may lead you to predict the reason for the aliens' violent reaction to their visitors. As you may have guessed from my description, this is a ghastly little story, with a particularly disquieting scene near the end. It has a certain raw power, I suppose. Given the infamous thalidomide tragedy of not so many years ago, the premise may strike many readers as being in poor taste.

Two stars.

The People of the Black Circle, By Robert E. Howard

Dominating the issue is a bloody sword-and-sorcery adventure, featuring a hero who seems to be making a comeback of sorts. This novella was originally serialized in three parts, in the September, October, and November 1934 issues of Weird Tales.

All cover art by Margaret Brundage.

Brundage often painted scantily clad young ladies for the magazine.

Two scantily clad young ladies.

Before I get into the story itself, let me talk about the revival of interest in Robert E. Howard and his most famous creation. The tales of Conan were left in the yellowing pages of old pulp magazines until specialty publisher Gnome Press starting collecting them in several volumes.

Cover art by David A. Kyle. The novella under discussion appears in this book, number two in the Gnome Press series, from 1952.

Earlier this year, the story appeared in a paperback collection. (It should be noted here that L. Sprague de Camp completed some of Howard's unfinished works about Conan.)

Cover art by Frank Frazetta.

The setting is an imaginary ancient past. There are clues that this takes place in a fantasy version of the Afghanistan/Pakistan/India region. (Some of the hints are a bit too obvious, such as a chain of mountains called the Himelians.) We begin with a king whose soul is about to be stolen by evil sorcerers. Rather than allow this to happen, he orders his sister to kill him.

Illustrations by Hugh Rankin.

This opening scene is just a hint of the carnage to follow. The plot is a complex one, with various factions scheming against each other, betrayals, allies becoming enemies, and foes forced to work together. Frankly, I had some trouble following it. In brief, the sister wants to force Conan, now the leader of a group of hill people, to wreak revenge on the sinister forces that attacked her brother. This involves several of his men who have been taken prisoner by another realm. (It's complicated.)

Instead, Conan kidnaps the sister, hoping to exchange her for the freedom of his men. This plan is ruined when a sorcerer, betraying the dark forces for whom he was working, works with the sister's disloyal servant on their own scheme to rule the land, which results in the death of Conan's men. (I said it was complicated.)

Conan, his captive, and a horse.

After a whole bunch of wild adventures, with plenty of killings, the pair wind up at the mountain where four powerful sorcerers dwell, along with their less powerful minions and one ultra-powerful sorcerer. By this time, the sister's hatred for Conan has turned to love, just in time for her to be kidnapped from her kidnapper, if you see what I mean.

One of the many torments to which the sister is subjected.

I hope this gives you some idea of the breakneck pace, non-stop action, and frequent plot twists in this story. I lost count of how many people are slaughtered by sword or magic. (At one point, Conan acquires a magic item that protects him from deadly sorcery. This seems awfully convenient.) There are even battle scenes, with hundreds or thousands of warriors massacring each other.

There's plenty of weird magic as well, which may be the most interesting part of the story. I was particularly impressed by the floating cloud on which the four sorcerers travel.

Howard had an undeniably important influence on sword-and-sorcery fiction, and his imitators continue the tradition. (Brak the Barbarian, created by John Jakes, comes to mind.) The raw intensity of Howard's style and the bloodthirstiness of his plots aren't for all tastes. Personally, I prefer the wit and elegance of Fritz Leiber's tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.

Three stars.

The Young One, by Jerome Bixby

From the April 1954 issue of the magazine comes this supernatural yarn.

Cover art by Augusto Marin.

Jerome Bixby is probably best known to SF fans for his chilling tale It's a Good Life and the memorable episode of Twilight Zone adapted from it. He has also dabbled in screenwriting, coming up with the kind of B movies I enjoy, such as It! The Terror From Beyond Space.

Illustration by Sanford Kossin.

A young boy meets a fellow his own age, newly arrived in the United States from Hungary. He seems nice enough, but all animals hate him. What's even stranger is that his parents eat raw meat and have very sharp teeth. (You can already see where this is going, can't you?)

The immigrant boy says he absolutely has to be back home before seven at night. The American kid tricks him by taking him into a cave, then pretending to be lost, so the Hungarian lad can't return until after his strict curfew. You can probably guess what happens.

It's an decent story, if predictable. (The exact way the plot is resolved may be a little bit unexpected.) The description of the cavern is intriguing, if nothing else.

Three stars.

The Ambidexter, by David H. Keller, M.D.

This Kelleryarn comes from the April 1931 issue of Amazing Stories.

Cover art by Leo Morey

The world's two greatest surgeons, one American and one Chinese, have a meeting. The American has a brain tumor, so he wants the Chinese physician to remove part of his brain and replace it with part of a brain from another person. Can you guess that this is going to go very badly wrong?

Illustration by Leo Morey also.

This tale of Mad Science reminds me of old horror movies, the kind that show up on Shock Theater. In particular, the transplant theme brings to mind things like Mad Love, although that was about hands and not brains.

The partial brain transplant concept is unique, as far as I know, and Keller's background as a physician makes the crazy idea seem somewhat plausible. The character of the Chinese surgeon reeks of the old Yellow Peril stereotype, unfortunately. Replace him with, say, Boris Karloff and you might have the basis for a decent black-and-white chiller. I don't think the censor would care for the ghastly ending, however.

Two stars.

Mad House, by Richard Matheson

The January-February 1953 issue supplies this reprint.

Cover art by Robert Frankenberg.

Like Bixby, Matheson is associated with Twilight Zone and has written screenplays for feature films. His movies are too many to list, but a couple worth mentioning are the Jules Verne adaptation Master of the World and The Last Man on Earth. (Apparently Matheson wasn't happy with this version of his novel I am Legend, so he used the pseudonym Logan Swanson for his share of the screenwriting credit. I actually thought it was pretty good.)

As with Howard's novella, Matheson's story has already been reprinted in a couple of collections. The first one is named after his first published story, already considered a classic.

Cover art by Mel Hunter.

The second one is sort of a reduced version of the first one, omitting some stories.

Cover art by Charles Binger.

This psychological horror story features a frustrated writer who ekes out a living as a poorly paid instructor of literature. He's nearly always boiling over with anger about his inability to be published, lashing out at his students and just about everyone else. Fed up with his rage, his wife leaves him.

Illustrations by Bill Ashman.

He also fights a daily battle with inanimate objects around the house. They seem to be conspiring to harm him. An acquaintance — he can't be called a friend, given the fact that the main character is as nasty to him as he is to everybody else — suggests that the house is sort of absorbing his anger.

Chaos ensues.

Like other stories in this issue, it leads to a blood-soaked conclusion. It's also similar in that it's pretty predictable. The best part of it is the author's style, full of short, rage-filled sentences that really get you into the main character's head. That's not a very nice place to be, of course.

Three stars.

Worth All That Suffering?

The magazine ends with this appropriately macabre anecdote, which I offer without comment.

I don't believe it. Oh, wait a minute, that was a comment, wasn't it? Sorry about that.

Not a great issue, although a bare majority of the stories were at least worth reading. The Conan story is of historical importance, anyway. I suppose the magazine would be enjoyable enough if you happen to be in a situation where you need to be waiting around.

Cartoon by somebody called Salame, from the same issue as the Matheson story.

[Join us tonight for the next episode of Star Trek — airing at 8:30 PM Pacific and Eastern!]

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Magazine, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Serial

[September 16, 1965] Blessed Are The Peacemakers (November 1965 Worlds of Tomorrow)

September 16, 2020 Victoria Silverwolf 2 Comments

by Victoria Silverwolf

Ain't Gonna Study War No More

As my esteemed colleague David Levinson recently noted, war is currently raging, as it so often does, in various places around the globe. Fortunately, voices are beginning to be raised against this lamentably common human evil.

Benjamin Spock, the famous baby doctor, leads a group of folks protesting the conflict in Vietnam on a march to the United Nations in April of this year.

Whether these peace-loving people will have any effect on the escalating presence of American forces in Southeast Asia remains to be seen. Meanwhile, we can turn to the pages of the latest issue of Worlds of Tomorrow for a fictional look at an unusual way to change war into peace.

They Shall Beat Their Swords Into Plowshares

The cover reproduces, in shrunken and edited form, various illustrations from the pen of Virgil Finlay, subject of an article within the magazine. I recognize the one in the middle, showing the face of a ape-man, as coming from the January 1965 issue. Maybe some of you clever readers can tell me the sources of the others.

Project Plowshare (Part One of Two), by Philip K. Dick

Illustrations by Gray Morrow. I don't know if that artist also came up with the rather eccentric, pseudo-archaic introductory paragraph shown here. Maybe it's the work of the author, or possibly editor Frederik Pohl. In any case, it's very odd, not really in keeping with the mood of the novel.

The time is the early twenty-first century. There are references to space travel within the solar system, but that's way in the background. We have the usual flying cars and such that we're used to in tales of the fairly near future.

Like I said, flying cars. Also, people wear capes and funny-looking hats.

Our main character — I can't really call him the hero — is one Lars Powderdry. I assume his peculiar name is an allusion to the phrase keep your powder dry, attributed to Oliver Cromwell. The intent must be ironic, as Lars does the exact opposite of getting ready for battle (the literal meaning) and is not otherwise prepared for future events (the metaphoric meaning.)

That requires some explanation. You see, Lars has a most peculiar job. He's a weapons fashion designer. This is even weirder than it sounds. It involves going into a trance, with the aid of mind-altering drugs, in order to enhance his natural psychic abilities. While in this state, he perceives images of complex designs for very strange weapons. These are passed along to military folks, who in turn give them to manufacturers.

Why, then, do I say that Lars is not keeping his powder dry? That's because the so-called weapons are nothing of the kind. The elites make the ordinary folks think they are, but in reality the designs are used to make unusual consumer products, generally of a trivial, frivolous nature.

Here's an example, taken from a sidebar in the magazine. Again, I don't know if this is the work of the author or the editor.

In order to fool the public, the manufacturers produce faked films showing the phony weapons in action. This situation came about because of a secret agreement between the two sides in the Cold War. The ignorant masses believe their governments are ready to attack the other side, while their rulers avoid the possibility of a real, destructive war.

An example of the deception in action. The zombie-like guys, supposedly criminals subjected to the mind-destroying guns shown here, are really robots.

Lars has a counterpart on the other side, a woman named Lilo Topchev. Although he doesn't know anything about her, having only seen a photograph so blurry that it doesn't reveal anything at all, he feels an unexplained attraction to her. (The author doesn't say, but maybe this has something to do with their extrasensory powers.)

There's another woman in his life as well. Maren Faine runs the Paris office of his weapons fashion house. She's also his mistress. They annoy each other much of the time, but there seems to be genuine affection between the two. Their relationship has a touch of sadomasochism to it. Maren enjoys mocking her lover, who is well aware that he's not as smart as she is.

Maren Faine. The artist nicely captures her personality. Intelligent, capable, self-assured, cynical, and maybe a little bit cruel.

While visiting her in Paris, Lars finds a device made from one of the ersatz weapons he dreams up in his trance states. The gizmo is a sphere that answers questions. For most people, it's just a toy, sort of like a super-fancy version of those Magic 8 Ball things most of us have fooled around with.

Did I have one of these things? Reply hazy, try again later.

Lars treats the sphere more seriously, asking it about himself. He gets some uncomfortable answers, discovering that his reservations about the way he's helping the elite deceive the public aren't really a matter of ethics, but due to his own fears of losing his psychic powers.

Lars and the mechanical oracle.

As if that were not enough of a painful look into his soul, Maren is a bit psychic herself, able to detect her lover's subconscious emotions. She knows about his obsession with Lilo, for example, explaining it in Freudian terms.

Things get complicated when satellites appear in orbit, not launched by either side. Robots sent to investigate the objects are destroyed. The assumption is that they are the work of hostile aliens. Faced with the possibility of an attack by extraterrestrials, the elite bring Lars and Lilo together in Iceland. Their mission is clear. Work together, using their psychic abilities to come up with a design for a real weapon, or face the consequences.

An agent for the other side shows Lars what the consequences will be.

There's lots of other stuff I haven't mentioned. In particular, an important subplot involves an unpleasant fellow named Surley G. Febbs, who is drafted to become one of the six average citizens who work with the military, dealing with the designs envisioned by Lars. It's not yet clear what part he'll play in the plot, but I suspect it will be a vital one.

Although not a comedy, there's a strong satiric edge to this novel. Both sides in the bloodless Cold War engage the services of the same private espionage agency, which gives them just enough information to keep them paying for more.

The many characters are complex and varied, with flaws and quirks that make them seem real. (A notable exception: There's one minor character whose only function seems to be to have the author describe her breasts.) I'm definitely interested enough to wonder what's going to happen two months from now.

Four stars.

Me, Myself, and Us, by Michael Girdansky

This nonfiction article deals with the connections between the two halves of the brain, and what happens when they are cut. The author goes on to describe a highly speculative way in which to give someone two separate personalities in one body, making reference to the well-known story Beyond Bedlam by Wyman Guin. The suggestion is that such a person would be the perfect spy.

Cover art by Emsh.

Although there's some interesting information here, I found it distressing to read. Not only is the suggested creation of a human being with two minds disturbing, but the author describes real surgical experiments on animals that are horrifying. Maybe that's only my squeamishness, but I wish he had just talked about those unfortunate people who have had the link between the hemispheres of their brains severed.

Two stars.

Last of a Noble Breed, by Mack Reynolds

Illustrations by Normal Nodel.

We begin in the city of Estoril, Portugal, a luxurious resort community. A couple married for only six months is there for business as well as pleasure. The husband, a nuclear engineer, is trying to win a position by meeting with various members of the European upper class.

In this future world, being an aristocrat is vital to one's success. Annoyed by the snobs and a little drunk, the man half-jokingly announces that his wife's grandmother was the hereditary Sachem of the Cherokees, which is true enough. This leads to a worldwide movement to have the United States government restore tribal lands to her people, even though the woman is only one-quarter Cherokee, at most. (Her grandmother, whom she met exactly once, might not have been one hundred percent Cherokee.)

Uncle Sam faces a problem. I'm not sure what that sign is supposed to say. Unfair to what? Queens? That doesn't make sense, as a Sachem is not at all a monarch.

This isn't the most plausible premise in the world, even for a comedy. There are some enjoyable bits of satire, and the author provides some accurate information about the Cherokee people, as far as I can tell. But the lighthearted mood doesn't match well with the truly tragic history of the Cherokees. The husband has a habit of calling his wife a squaw, which annoys me as much as it does her.

Two stars.

The Sightseers, by Thomas M. Disch

Rich people have themselves placed in suspended animation for thousands of years at a time, emerging to enjoy a lavish lifestyle for a while, then jumping back inside their time capsule. Oddly, things never seem to change. These time tourists stick to the fabulous hotels and restaurants that cater to them, which remain unaltered over millennia.

The only other people they encounter are the Nubians who serve their every whim. The suspension device breaks down, and a couple of the tourists, more curious than their much older consorts, investigate the world outside their sumptuous lodgings.

You'll probably predict the true nature of the Nubians, and why vast amounts of time appear to have no effect on the world. Although there are no surprises, the story is decently written. Disch has a knack for this kind of sardonic tale.

Three stars.

Virgil Finlay, Dean of Science Fiction Artists, by Sam Moskowitz

Here's a detailed biography and account of the career of a great talent. I don't know where the author dug up all of this information, but you'll learn a heck of a lot about the artist's life and work. There's only one problem.

No illustrations!

I know there are probably legal and budgetary reasons why this article doesn't include any examples of Finlay's drawings, but it's really frustrating to read about his artwork and not see it. In particular, Finlay's illustration for Robert Bloch's story The Faceless Gods, from the May 1936 issue of Weird Tales, is talked about quite a bit. We're told that readers were excited by it, and that H. P Lovecraft even wrote a poem about it. At least we get half of the poem, but we have no clue what the illustration looked like.

To save you from the same agony I underwent, I dug deep into piles of moldering old pulps and pulled out the drawing, as well as the complete poem. You're welcome.

Two stars.

Worldmaster, by Keith Laumer

Illustrations by John Giunta.

The narrator is the sole survivor of a huge space battle. Both sides were completely destroyed. It turns out that this was deliberate on the part of the admiral who directed his side of the battle. He held back his gigantic flagship, which would have won a victory without the loss of the other vessels in his fleet.

His plan is to return to Earth in command of the only remaining warship, and thus take control of the planet. (Apparently this takes place at a time when the Cold War has heated up, but only in space. We're told that planetary forces are of little importance.)

And there are flying cars.

He offers the narrator the opportunity to join him, but our hero refuses. A couple of goons try to kill him, but he overpowers them and manages to get back to Earth through trickery. What follows is a series of chases and fight scenes, as the narrator tries to stop the admiral's fiendish plan.

And there's a big fire.

Typical for the author in his action/adventure mode, this story moves at a breakneck pace, and features a protagonist who overcomes all obstacles with wits, fists, and not a little luck. It's an efficient example of that sort of thing.

Three stars.

Mother, Is the Battle Over?

We started off with peace disguised as war, and wound up with the aftermath of war. Was it worth fighting for? Well, Philip K. Dick's novel-in-progress definitely piques my interest, although I suspect it will not appeal to all tastes. The rest of the issue is something of a disappointment, like a hasty retreat after an inconclusive skirmish. At least the only casualties of the conflicts inside these pages are imaginary ones. There are far too many in the real world. I wish you all peace.

The design scrawled on this guitar case, spotted on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley this year, was created by British pacifist Gerald Holtom, as a symbol for the nuclear disarmament movement. It has since shown up a lot of places, as a sign for peace in general. I like it.

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