Howard Andrew Jones, fantasy author, editor and the man who gave Harold Lamb to the twenty-first century, just put the news out over the æther that the final two volumes in Bison Books’ “Harold Lamb Library” are available for pre-order and will ship on May Day, 2010. Y’all feast your eyes on these tasty blurbs…

Swords From the Sea:

Vikings, pirates, heroes, rogues, and explorers . . . all have heard the siren call of the sea, and master storyteller Harold Lamb chronicled some of their most daring exploits. This single volume contains all of Lamb’s historical seafaring stories, drawn from rare and fragile pulp magazines. Never before collected, these short stories and novels are a treasure trove of adventure. Best known for his stirring tales of Cossacks and crusaders, Lamb was no stranger to swashbuckling, and his sea stories deliver it in buckets.

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Gbo (or close enough)

Charles R. Saunders has posted a very helpful blog entry for the bovinically-challenged on his website. Saunder’s utterly bad-ass Sword-and-Sorcery heroine, Dossouye, is partnered in her exploits by an equally deadly “side-kick” named Gbo. Gbo is not to be trifled with, nor is he an Asian water buffalo. Mr. Saunders sets the record straight.

I first read about Dossouye and Gbo in Amazons! around 1980 (the story in question was “Agbewe’s Sword”). At the time, I was struck by how unique CRS’ pairing of warrior and bull was in fantasy fiction. Unique, but not unlikely. Having grown up around cattle all my life, it seemed far more probable that a (woman-) warrior would bestride such a steed than, say, a dragon. Bovines, even domesticated ones, are formidable beasts. Generally speaking, for any herd animal to survive, it must possess one of two traits: speed or lethality. Bovines aren’t renowned for their speed. There is a perfectly logical reason why the very capable predators of sub-Saharan Africa have never wiped out the Cape buffalo. Cape buffalos are bad news.

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In the latest The Dark Man, Charles Hoffman’s “Elements of Sadomasochism in the Fiction and Poetry of Robert E. Howard” has some interesting comments on “The Hyena“, a very early Howard story written while Howard was still in his teens.
It is interesting to find that he also used this setting with two other tales, “The Slayer“, and “The Wings of the Bat“, both unprinted until The Last of The Trunk. Both tales also involve Ju-Ju men, or witch-doctors, plotting mayhem against the whites. One would conclude that “The Slayer“ is a direct sequel to “The Hyena“, as the narrator refers to having killed Senecoza previously. But we are told by Hoffman that “The Hyena“ was written in 1924, and the editor of Trunk tells us the other stories are “pre-1924”. So either Howard wrote the sequel first, or more likely someone is in error. In a homage to the Alan Quatermain stories, the king of the Zulus in “Bat“ is named Umslopogas. It still amazes me that out of all the material available to him, August Derleth included “Hyena“ in the second Howard collection, The Dark Man and Others.

DEUCE ADDS: A couple years ago, over at conan.com, Patrice Louinet had this to say about “The Slayer”:

REH actually began a sort of sequel to the story, featuring the same hero and mentioning Senecoza. This fragment, tentatively titled “The Slayer” by Glenn Lord, will be included in The Last of the Trunk, the book collecting the immense majority of as-yet-unpublished Howard fiction, forthcoming from the Robert E. Howard Foundation.

“The Wings of the Bat,” to my ear, definitely sounds like it was partially a riff on Sax Rohmer’s Bat-Wing, a book we know REH read. [redacted] blogged about it [redacted].

As for Derleth selecting “The Hyena” for The Dark Man, I’m not particularly surprised, considering Derleth’s blinkered and untrustworthy taste in regards to REH’s fiction. On the other hand, just before The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard was released, there was a certain REH fan shambling about the blogosphere who practically called Rusty Burke a Howardian anti-christ for leaving “The Hyena” out. He cited Derleth’s unerring judgement for support.

Poul Anderson would be eighty-three years old today. That means I’ve been reading his fiction for about thirty years now. The realization of that would be even more twinge-inducing if I didn’t constantly remind myself that I was a mere thirteen years old when I started.

My love for Poul’s writing began when I bought a first-edition copy (1952) of Vault of the Ages from the Oswego Public Library (the same institution from whence I purchased my first Harold Lamb and Merritt books). Alex Schomburg dustjacket/endpapers and everything. All for one shiny quarter (the library ended up rebuying the book in paperback). The second (or first?) Anderson novel ever published.

“Vault” was a pretty good introduction to Poul Anderson for a thirteen year-old. The book was written for the “Young Adult” market, with a certain proportion of the sermonizing that genre usually requires. On the plus side, Poul based his novel around a post-apocalytic setting, provided numerous great combat/battle scenes and featured “northern barbarians” as sympathetic antagonists whose narrative purpose was to give a stagnant culture a shot in the arm.

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The Persian slaughtered the Apis Bull;
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
And the brain fermented beneath his skull.
(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)

He rode on the desert raider’s track;
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
No man of his gleaming hosts came back,
And the dust winds drifted sombre and black.
(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)

 
The eons passed on the desert land;
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
And a stranger trod the shifting sand.
(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)

 
His idle hand disturbed the dead;
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
Til he found Cambysses’ skull of dread
Whence the frenzied brain so long had fled,
That once held terrible visions red.
(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)

 
And an asp crawled from the dust inside
(Ammon-Ra is a darksome king.)
And the stranger fell and gibbered and died.
(Egypt’s curse is a deathly thing.)

“Skulls and Dust,” by Robert E. Howard

“No man of his gleaming hosts came back.” Indeed. What REH (and Herodotus) said. Verification of Herodotus’ tale concerning Cambyses’ lost army has been a long time coming (sort of like what Howard said about the Picts and the Basques). The archaeological findings of twin Italian brothers in the sands of the eastern Sahara might finally solve a millennia-old mystery. Naysayers have scoffed at the veracity of the Man From Halicarnassus, but they may have to rearrange their paradigms now.

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I was still in high school when I found a copy of “Magazine of Horror” #19, the January 1968 issue. I had read some of Howard’s poetry by then, but mostly as headers in the fiction, and a few from comics, and an old Arkham anthology I found in a library, Fire and Sleet and Candlelight.
I remember how shocked I was by the clear-cut suicidal statement it was.

Better the silence and the long black rest;
Better the grey grass growing through my brain —

and

Better the shot, the fall, the growing stain,
Then one long blindness, shot with crimson pain

Howard speaks of black agony, iron thorns and womwood, gall and vemon, coming years that are long and gloomy black, and finishes with the thought “Even such brains as mine may crash to dust.”
The entire poem can be found on pages 412-3 of The Collected Poetry.

Later I would encounter other Howard poems in a similar light, like “The Tempter” in one of Dennis McHaney’s fanzines, and the two from Skull Face Omnibus, but none will ever succeed in shocking me as that first encounter with Howard’s death-wish expressions did. And to top it off, editor R.A.W.Lowndes used a spot illo from “Weird Tales” of Death on a horse riding a dusty trail to illustrate it. How spot on, as the British say.

Charles R. Saunders, legendary Sword-and-Sorcery author and Friend of The Cimmerian, has posted a guest blog over at the Black Gate website. It’s a review of Lee Child’s “Jack Reacher” series. A big reason why it should interest readers of  The Cimmerian (besides the obvious), is that Mr. Saunders compares Child’s peripatetic protagonist to Robert E. Howard’s Conan. (Continue reading this post)

Over on the Official Robert E. Howard Forum, [redacted] (at right) let the bulldog out of the bag. Here’s what he had to say…

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CROM!

WARNING: The review below has been written in full “snark” mode. It is about four thousand words long. You might want to grab a drink (a strong one) or a sandwich (or both)…

In the past few weeks, there have been persistent rumors of Jared Padelecki, the co-star of the series, Supernatural, being cast as a “young Conan.” This provoked dismay amongst many Conan fans. Personally, I had a “wait and see” attitude about it.

More troubling news was posted on the Official Robert E. Howard Forum recently, thanks to Pete Roncoli. A “casting breakdown,” to be used for casting actors to appear in the projected new Conan movie (set to begin shooting in Bulgaria in February 2010), has been leaked to the Internet. This guideline does more than reveal what a casting director is to look for.  Putting together the clues within it provides a fairly detailed synopsis of the script. Many fans have already done so, and they are on the war-path like blood-mad Picts. Below you’ll find my commentary, accompanied by excerpts from the guideline as posted on Moviehole.net: (Continue reading this post)

  Karl Edward Wagner (1945 -1994) died fifteen years ago today. I never knew Karl. Nevertheless, his work as an author, essayist, editor and REH scholar has affected my views regarding the entire field of weird literature since I was barely a teenager. I believe that he should be remembered and due attention paid.

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