The Best of Robert E. Howard, Volume 1 Read Free

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!”
    One genre in which Howard was not entirely comfortable, and therefore not especially successful, was the detective story. Abandoning the field after about three years of trying to write them, he said, “I can’t seem to