The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1

As the stories in this book will prove, Robert E. Howard was a writer who could make any genre his own, and even create a new genre when circumstance called for it. In these pages, you’ll encounter stories of fantasy, horror, adventure, and humor. Taken individually, they are a real treat to illustrate. Taken as a collection, however, they present a unique challenge.

Our art director, Marcelo Anciano, made it clear that our job was to find a way to unify these stories, rather than schizophrenically shift art styles to suit the mood or character of specific tales. We had to find a common visual cue that could carry us from the ancient Hyborian kingdoms of Conan, through the Elizabethan world of Solomon Kane, to the battlefields of the American Civil War and the hills of 1930s Afghanistan. Robert E. Howard’s deeply held philosophy of absolute, rugged individualism was the obvious common thread. No matter the genre, Howard wrote of individuals standing tall against the forces that would oppose them–seen and unseen, natural or otherwise–preferring to be crushed into the ground and flattened rather than to give so much as an inch.

The trick is how to express this in pictures.

Last year, on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, we saw a small painting by Thomas Eakins. It was a study of a bearded man set against a neutral background, his face and torso falling away into darkness. Despite the simplicity of presentation, the figure had a look of majesty that was nothing short of biblical. Eakins had carved out his subject in harsh light and deep shadow—a yin and yang of values combined to create elegant graphic shapes that told a complex story in one striking design.

It was this simple image that gave us our direction for the illustrations and fed nicely into our existing fascination with the streamlined poster style of the 1920s and ’30s (Howard’s own era). This approach was pioneered and best exemplified by the German master Ludwig Hohlwein (a devotee of the “Beggarstaffs”), whose graphic simplicity could make even an illustration for a lady’s hat monumental. We tried to stay true to this artistic legacy of form and design: concise and bold with a minimum of strokes, the physical power of the individual immediately recognizable at a glance.

Of course, our efforts are not the point. We’re all here for the words of Robert E. Howard. So, it’s time to sit back, and prepare for REH to put steel in your arms and fire in your eyes.

Jim & Ruth Keegan
Studio City, California
January 2007

Introduction

Excitement and adventure!

That’s what the readers want, and that’s what I give them.

So says Robert E. Howard to Novalyne Price as they drive along beneath the Texas moon in the movie
The Whole Wide World
, and while the quotation is not attested in any written source (including Price’s memoir upon which the film is based), it’s hard to beat as a concise statement of what the reader will find upon first encountering the fiction of REH, as he’s known to his legions of fans. As with any great writer, there is more to it than that–people don’t keep reading an author’s work seventy years after his death if all it offers is excitement and adventure–but Howard always lived up to the first obligation of the storyteller, which is to tell a ripping good yarn. In this volume and its forthcoming companion, you will find excitement and adventure aplenty.

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) lived his entire life in small Texas towns, chiefly Cross Plains, far from the literary world. Yet by the time he was a teenager he had apparently decided upon a career as a writer. “It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments,” he wrote to his fellow weird fictionist H. P. Lovecraft. “I became a writer in spite of my environments. Understand, I am not criticizing those environments. They were good, solid and worthy. The fact that they were not inducive to literature and art is nothing in their disfavor. Never the less, it is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign and alien to the people among which one’s lot is cast; a profession which seems as dim and faraway and unreal as the shores of Europe. The people among which I lived–and yet live, mainly–made their living from cotton, wheat, cattle, oil, with the usual percentage of business men and professional men. That is most certainly not in their disfavor. But the idea of a man making his living by writing seemed, in that hardy environment, so fantastic that even today I am sometimes myself assailed by a feeling of unreality. Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.”

After three years of unsuccessfully sending stories to magazines, at the age of eighteen Howard sold his first professional story to a new magazine of “the bizarre and unusual,” the now legendary
Weird Tales
(which introduced the world not only to Howard, but to H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, and Ray Bradbury, among many others). In a brief, twelve-year career, Howard wrote some 300 stories and more than 800 poems. His work covered a variety of genres–fantasy, boxing, westerns, horror, adventure, historical, detective, spicy, even confessions–and graced the pages of such pulp magazines as
Action Stories, Argosy, Fight Stories, Oriental Stories, Spicy Adventure, Sport Story, Strange Detective, Thrilling Adventure, Top Notch
, and a number of others. Pulp writers often found that a character who was popular with readers could be a significant meal ticket, but Howard had difficulty keeping a series going indefinitely. Once he found himself “out of contact with the conception,” he was “unable to write convincingly” of that character. If he was to convince the reader, he had to be convinced himself. As Lovecraft famously noted, the thing that makes a Howard story stand out is that “he himself is in every one of them.” Fortunately, characters seem to have come easily to him. He is most famous, of course, for Conan of Cimmeria, who has taken on a life of his own as “Conan the Barbarian,” far removed from Howard’s brilliantly original conception; herein you will find other great characters, like Kull of Atlantis, king of fabled Valusia; Solomon Kane, the swashbuckling Puritan adventurer; Bran Mak Morn, last king of an ancient race; Sailor Steve Costigan, the champion of the forecastle; Breckinridge Elkins, the man-mountain who can’t seem to avoid walking into trouble; Steve Harrison, the detective who’s as likely to solve the mystery with his fists as with his wits; and many others. They run the gamut from dark fantasy to broad humor, from brooding horror to gentle love story.

Given such a wealth of riches to choose from, one who has the audacity to select the “best” of a writer’s work should provide some explanation as to how the stories were chosen. It must be admitted that this is, fundamentally, my personal selection of the stories and poems I think Howard’s best, but with a caveat: we wanted a representative sampling of his best work, and so necessarily had to limit the number of selections for any single character. I have long wished there were a volume of Howard stories that I could hand to a friend who expressed interest in his work, a book full of great stories that illustrated the full range of his repertoire. We’ve ended up with a two-volume collection, rather than one, because, frankly, it was just too hard to whittle it down any further. As it is, some of my favorite stories and poems are not included, and I’m sure that there will not be many Howard fans who don’t find some of their own favorites missing.

While I made the selections, I did have some assistance from a poll I conducted among long-time Howard fans, asking for their favorite stories or those they found most memorable. Of the top twenty-five stories in that poll, nineteen are included in these volumes, and five of those left out are Conan tales: to make room for other characters and stories, I made the arbitrary decision to include only two Conan stories in each volume, and the ones chosen ended up being the top four vote-getters in the poll. In most other cases, the story selected for these volumes was the highest ranking tale of its type in the poll. The top vote-getter overall was
Worms of the Earth
, followed by the Conan stories
Red Nails
(which will appear in the second volume) and
Beyond the Black River
.

The Shadow Kingdom
is often cited as the first story of what has come to be known as “sword and sorcery,” a genre Howard is credited with having invented, and thus is important as a milestone in the history of fantasy literature, but it is also a terrific story, one Steven Trout has called “a memorable piece of purest paranoia.” Lovecraft believed that the Kull stories were the best of Howard’s heroic tales, and many have agreed with his assessment, though Howard was able to sell only two stories of the series during his lifetime.
Weird Tales
editor Farnsworth Wright asked readers to name their favorite stories in each issue, and tallied the results.
The Shadow Kingdom
was the favorite of readers in the August 1929 issue, and ranked second overall that year, behind only Lovecraft’s
The Dunwich Horror
.

The Curse of the Golden Skull
has only the barest mention of Kull, but is included here as a fine example of Howard’s prose poetry. Howard was a natural poet, often filling his letters to his friend Tevis Clyde Smith with page after page of apparently spontaneous poetry, and his friends recalled him being able to memorize long passages with only a reading or two. (He is alleged to have memorized
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
after only two readings!) His father later recalled that Robert’s mother “loved poetry. Written poetry by sheets and reams, almost books of it, were stored in her memory so that from Robert’s babyhood he had heard its recital day by day.” His love of poetry infuses most of his best fiction, and in prose poems like
The Curse of the Golden Skull
we find it in concentrated form.

Red Shadows
, the first published story of Solomon Kane, has its supporters for the title of first sword and sorcery tale, having been published a year before
The Shadow Kingdom
. Kane is one of Howard’s most fascinating, complex characters, a man who believes himself to be doing the will of God, while consorting with a witch-doctor and, in occasional moments of self-awareness, realizing that he is driven by lust for adventure. The story is an early one, written when Howard was only twenty-one, so it has a few rough patches, but it is a favorite of most REH fans and includes many memorable moments, not least Kane’s vow of vengeance that sets him on the trail of Le Loup.

Lovecraft told E. Hoffmann Price, after Howard’s death, “I always gasped at his profound knowledge of history…and admired still more his really astonishing
assimilation
and
visualisation
of it. He was almost unique in his ability to
understand
and
mentally inhabit
past ages…” The Solomon Kane poem
The One Black Stain
provides an outstanding example, as Howard places himself (through his Puritan adventurer) at the scene of an incident during Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe. Another fine example herein is the poem
An Echo from the Iron Harp
, narrated by a warrior of the Cimbri who defeated Roman legions in several battles before being defeated themselves at Vercellae.

The Dark Man
is one of three tales in this volume that feature Bran Mak Morn, though in this one he is a distant historical memory, living on only as a lifeless statue–or
is
it lifeless? The real protagonist of the story is the Irish outlaw Turlogh Dubh O’Brien, “Black Turlogh,” whose pronouncement at the end of this savage tale seems to be all too true. So intense was Howard’s interest in and admiration for the Irish that he created for himself an Irish and Celtic ancestry. Characters such as Turlogh O’Brien and Cormac Mac Art, and martial poetry like
The Marching Song of Connacht
and
The Song of the Last Briton
reflect this interest. At the time Howard was writing, the Irish war for independence from Britain and the creation of the Irish Free State were recent memories, and resentments were still raw.

Kings of the Night
is quite an unusual story for Howard, in that it unites two of his characters from disparate eras, Kull of antediluvian Atlantis and Bran Mak Morn of Roman-era Britain, in a pitched battle against a Roman legion.
Weird Tales
readers voted it the best story of the November 1930 issue, and it got more votes than any other story that year.

In 1930 also Howard began corresponding with H. P. Lovecraft, and the initial exchanges apparently inspired him to try his hand at Lovecraft’s style of fiction. HPL (also known to his fans by his initials) had created an artificial mythos (now widely known as the “Cthulhu mythos,” after his story
The Call of Cthulhu
) which he sprinkled through his stories and those of writers whose work he was revising for publication, in order to give an impression of verisimilitude, and which he encouraged other writers to borrow from and add to.
The Black Stone
is Howard’s best story of this type, featuring such contributions to the shared mythos as the German occultist Von Junzt and his hellish “Black Book,”
Nameless Cults
(later dubbed, after much correspondence among the
Weird Tales
writers,
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
) and the mad poet, Justin Geoffrey (who could well have been the composer of
The Song of a Mad Minstrel
).

One of Howard’s most successful series was about as far from the field of fantasy and horror fiction as one can go. An avid boxing enthusiast, Howard also had an antic sense of humor, and both of these went into the rollicking misadventures of Sailor Steve Costigan, who has a heart of gold, a head of wood, and fists of iron. An able-bodied seaman on a tramp steamer, he gets matched against the champs of other ships in exotic ports around the world, and manages to get hoodwinked by dames, cheated by shifty promoters, and victimized by misunderstandings, yet emerges (somewhat) victorious–at least in the ring. Twenty-one of the Costigan stories were published during Howard’s lifetime (twenty-two if we count a story in which his name was changed to “Dennis Dorgan”), compared to seventeen Conan tales, yet Howard’s boxing yarns had, until recently, gotten short shrift from fans and scholars, possibly due to the decline in popularity of the sport itself. Thanks to the work of Mark Finn and Chris Gruber, among others, these stories are again taking their rightful place in Howard’s body of work, and fans are getting a chance to see the more exuberant side of REH.

In 1931, hoping to break into a magazine featuring historical fiction, Howard wrote a story called
Spears of Clontarf
, a fictionalized account of the battle in 1014 in which the Irish under Brian Boru routed the Vikings who had established themselves in Dublin. When the story was rejected, he revised it, adding a weird element in hopes of selling it to either the new magazine
Strange Tales
or his old standby
Weird Tales
. In this, too, he was unsuccessful, but not because it wasn’t a fine story–it is. Farnsworth Wright, the
Weird Tales
editor, returned it with the comment that “the weird element is not as strong as I would like it to be.” Possibly he had just received a letter, later published in the magazine, complaining that the story
The Dark Man
was not really weird. Fortunately, we are not required to worry about whether the story is “weird enough,” and can include this fine tale of the twilight of an age.

As previously mentioned, the story most often named by Howard fans as their favorite or most memorable is the best of the Bran Mak Morn tales,
Worms of the Earth
. Here Bran swears an awful vengeance against Rome, but he pays a terrible price. No other of his fictional creations had the enduring appeal to Howard of his Picts, who appear in his fiction from 1923 to 1935, and in not only the Bran Mak Morn series, but also the Kull and Conan series, and a number of stand-alone stories.
Worms of the Earth
, though, stands out from the rest of the Pictish stories, and Howard himself explained the reason: “My interest in the Picts was always mixed with a bit of fantasy–that is, I never felt the realistic placement with them that I did with the Irish and Highland Scotch. Not that it was the less vivid; but when I came to write of them, it was still through alien eyes–thus in my first Bran Mak Morn story [
Men of the Shadows
]–which was rightfully rejected–I told the story through the person of a Gothic mercenary in the Roman army; in a long narrative rhyme which I never completed, and in which I first put Bran on paper, I told it through a Roman centurion on the Wall; in
The Lost Race
the central figure was a Briton; and in
Kings of the Night
it was a Gaelic prince. Only in my last Bran story,
The Worms of the Earth
which Mr. Wright accepted, did I look through Pictish eyes, and speak with a Pictish tongue!”

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