I’ve been reading up on the Solomon Kane movie, and watched the trailer.

From Moviephone:

Based on the character created by Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian), Captain Solomon Kane is a brutally efficient 16th Century killing machine. Armed with his signature pistols, cutlass and rapier, he and his men unleash their bloodlust as they fight for England in war after war on all continents.

His men?

From wildaboutmovies.com:

“Solomon Kane” – The movie “Solomon Kane” tells the origins of Solomon Kane and is hoped to be the first of a trilogy of movies. When the story opens Kane is a mercenary of Queen Elizabeth I fighting in Africa, but after an encounter with a demon, The Reaper, he realizes he must seek redemption or have his soul damned to Hell. He returns to Engand and lives a life of peace, converting to puritanism, but soon the doings of an evil sorceror upset his plans and he must take up arms again. James Purefoy stars as puritan swordsman “Solomon Kane”. “Solomon Kane” is a 16th century soldier who learns that his brutal and cruel actions have damned him but is determined to redeem himself by living peaceably. But he finds himself dragged out of retirement for a fight against evil.

You know, it might be a pretty good sword & sorcery flick, and it has a nice grim feel to it.  Too bad they only took the look and the name of Solomon Kane, and basically made their own character.  Damned instead of pious, bloodthirsty instead of on a mission, the Robert E. Howard they call “legendary” in the trailer would have a hard time recognizing this as his creation.

Maggie Van Ostrand

EDIT: Thanks to Howard fans coming together and forming a determined shieldwall, both Texas Escapes and Fandomania have made adjustments to Ms. Van Ostrand’s article. As [redacted] puts it: “Texas Escapes has pulled the article down and Fandomania has placed enough editorial padding between the piece and the site that there can be no doubt as to the veracity of the piece in question.” Van Ostrand has also apologised for not digging deeper into the research regarding Howard’s life. So, no need to email either site or Van Ostrand.

Also, readers of this blog entry should be aware that its sole purpose was to serve as a call to arms directed specifically at REH fans. In my opinion, its purpose has been served. In no way was it intended to be informative to the general public. Certain basic knowledge was assumed, since it was aimed entirely at active, informed REH fans, as the title should have indicated to any unwary reader. Uncomplimentary language was directed towards Ms. Van Ostrand. This is in no way an apology, simply a preface intended to inform readers of content.

— Deuce Richardson

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Over at the Official Robert E. Howard Forum, Paradox rep Jay Zetterberg proffered REH fandom the lowdown regarding the final contents of El Borak and Other Desert Adventures. This volume, due out February 2, 2010 from Del Rey/Ballantine, looks like another keeper. For those not willing or able to click over to conan.com, I reproduce the table of contents (and submit some random thoughts of my own) below.

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Over at the Publishers Weekly website, they just posted their newest batch of “Fiction Book Reviews.” The capsule reviews are wide-ranging, covering books in both the ‘mainstream’ and ‘genre’ categories. A review of El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (coming in March from Del Rey) is amongst them.

Considering how small a percentage of eligible books actually get reviewed by Publishers Weekly, this is a nine-day wonder. When one takes into account that El Borak is a collection of previously published stories, the fact that it got reviewed at all is even more startling. PW is a book trade magazine read by booksellers and librarians all over the country. The review definitely ups the chances of REH’s fiction getting a wider distribution in heretofore seldom-seen venues. This is what the unnamed reviewer had to say…

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Paul Herman passed on this helpful tip:

“Hey, I got an email from lulu, they are offering 20% off, just enter HOHOHO at checkout. Good till December 31.”

This means that [redacted]’s [redacted], Frank Coffman’s The Selected Poetry of Robert E. Howard and the REHF’s The Collected Drawings of Robert E. Howard are all available at four-fifths the cover price until January 1, 2010.

In addition, two of Charles R. Saunders’ Sword-and-Sorcery novels, Imaro: The Trail of Bohu and Dossouye are available at Lulu. Dan Clore, Lovecraftian fictioneer and scholar, has his expanded second edition of The Unspeakable and Others for sale at lulu.com, with brand-new illustrations from top-flight Mythos artist, Allen Koszowski. All for twenty percent off. Merry Christmas.

I have seen some complaints about the title of the Howard collection from Penguin Modern Classics, Heroes in the Wind.
It doesn’t seem out of place to me.  Evoking Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” as it may, still, that’s a very Howardian sentiment.
See, for instance “The Wheel of Destiny” on page 410 of The Collected Poetry:

Across the great world’s silent girth
The gras-grown cities rot and rust:
Still are the rulers of the earth —
Men and their worth sink back to dust.

I think Howard would agree with Kansas that all we are is dust in the wind. The book itself is an odd mix of classic Howard and little-known stories, but not a bad introduction to a new readership. It gets no points from me for the cover, though.

Alfonso Frank Frazetta

Word has gone out all over the wire and aether that Alfonso Frank Frazetta, generally called by his family, “Frank Jr.”, broke into the Frank Frazetta Museum in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania Wednesday afternoon with the aid of a backhoe and two accomplices. He attempted to remove about ninety paintings insured for twenty million dollars before being apprehended by Pennsylvania State Police. The most up-to-date account can be found at the Pocono Record website.

Frank Jr. is the son of Frank Frazetta, the legendary artist. Last month, as reported by TC, one of Frazetta’s paintings was auctioned to a private collector for one million dollars. At the time, your humble blogger thought it all a bit unusual, and wondered if it was somehow connected to the death of Frank’s wife, Ellie. Ellie Frazetta had been the guiding hand and driving force behind much of Frank Frazetta’s commercial success over the last thirty years. It was Eleanor Frazetta who started the very profitable Frazetta mail-order business and was also the one who pushed the Frazetta Museum project to its final completion.

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Whilst the bicentennial of the nativity of Edgar Allan Poe was amply commemorated here at The Cimmerian, we somehow let the one hundred and sixtieth anniversary of his death on October 7 slip right by us. However, J. Kingston Pierce over at The Rap Sheet, one of the premiere crime-fiction blogs, was on the job. In his entry, “What Happened to Edgar?”, Pierce looks at Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe by John Evangelist Walsh. The book was Walsh’s third foray into Poe-related historical research and he admits to being fascinated by Poe and his works. Check it out.

Pierce also took a look at the shenanigans surrounding the possession of Poe’s remains, as well as the lavish commemorative celebrations sponsored by the city of Baltimore this year, in “Evermore, Mr. Poe, Evermore.” Our own Steve Tompkins also commented on the nigh-Illiadic struggle over Poe’s remains in this blog post.

Considering the size of Cross Plains in comparison to Baltimore and the relatively recent date of Robert E. Howard’s passing, I would say the organizers of Robert E. Howard Days, and REH fandom in general, have plenty to be proud of.

I enjoyed the rare and original fantasy of [The Ship of Ishtar], and have kept it longer than I should otherwise, for the sake of re-reading certain passages that were highly poetic and imaginative. Merritt has an authentic magic, as well as an inexhaustible imagination.

— Clark Ashton Smith

Klarkash-Ton, as usual, was right on the money. As one who recognized a kindred genius and spirit in Robert E. Howard long before the majority of his peers, CAS knew magic, poetry and imagination when he beheld it.

My copy of the Paizo edition of The Ship of Ishtar came in the other day. Despite the fact that I own three other imprints of this fantasy classic, I’d been anticipating the delivery of this edition for months. Erik Mona and his crack team of pulp-hounds at Planet Stories have outdone themselves on this project. Going back to the 1949 Borden “Memorial Edition,” they have issued the most complete text in sixty years, included all of the classic Virgil Finlay illustrations from two different editions (something never done before) and allowed Merritt (and CAS and REH and HPL) fan, Tim Powers, to write the introduction.

Powers, a noted author in his own right, was an inspired choice. The man gets Merritt. His introduction, entitled, “On These Strange Seas In This Strange World,” is one of the best analyses and tributes devoted to The Ship of Ishtar that I have read. Here’s one passage:

This novel, like the Ship of Ishtar itself, is timeless — the opposite of timely — and in fact it may not be possible to write a book like this in these present times. Somehow, in the early 1920s, Merritt managed to write a genuinely pagan book, one that simply didn’t deal with, but assumed, the pre-Christian fatalist dualism, with its particular loyalties and indifferent cruelties. A modern writer would not let Kenton deal with slaves and conquered crews the way he does, and would be constantly aware of Freud and political correctness. A modern writer, that is to say, would not be able to unselfconsciously let his story play out naturally, with no placatory gestures toward modern sensibilities.

Exactly. When The Ship of Ishtar hit the stands in 1924 between the covers of Argosy All-Story magazine, nothing like it had ever seen print in American popular culture. Despite being drenched in blood, sex and the supernatural, the American public took to the novel like Islam to the desert. Merrit’s ground-breaking work would eventually go through twenty-plus printings and sell millions before the end of the twentieth century. It would seem almost certain that Robert E. Howard, a long-time and faithful reader of Argosy, was one of those millions of readers.

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Much as I enjoy the work of Robert E. Howard, he does occasionally write in such a rush that he makes a mistake.  One such mistake occurs in “The Hour of the Dragon” when he learns the true nature and origin of Xaltotun.

 “Acheron,” he repeated. “Xaltotun of Acheron — man, are you mad? Acheron has been a myth for more centuries than I can remember.”

 Which raises the question, how many centuries does Conan remember? Obviously Howard meant that Acheron had been a myth for so long no one knew how many centuries ago it was known to be real; instead he gives the impression of a centuries-old Conan, who seems a pretty feisty guy for someone that aged.