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

get the hang of the art. Maybe it’s because I don’t like to write them. I’d rather write adventure stuff.” There is little of “mystery” to his detective tales, but a lot of adventure, and Steve Harrison and his brethren are more likely to solve the crime with brawn than with brains. These stories have more in common with Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu tales than with Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op. Yet, as Fred Blosser never tires of reminding me, they
are
action-packed stories, and the best of them, like the novel
Skull-Face
and the story included here,
Lord of the Dead
, can stand proudly alongside Howard’s other work. I do love the over-the-top climax to this tale.
    Robert E. Howard loved folk songs, and sprinkled them liberally through his fiction. At one point in the mid-1920s he corresponded with the noted folklorist Robert W. Gordon, at the time compiler of the
Adventure
magazine department “Old Songs That Men Have Sung,” later the first head of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress (where the letters he received from Howard are held). Here we have a story built around a folk song, “
For the Love of Barbara Allen
.” It shows a gentler side of Howard, not often revealed. We see it, too, in the poem
The Tide
. Fans of the movie
The Whole Wide World
may recognize two stanzas which Robert Howard, played by Vincent D’Onofrio, reads to his mother in the film. It certainly resonates with the title of Novalyne Price Ellis’s memoir on which the movie was based:
One Who Walked Alone
.
    Scholars are divided over whether or not REH actually believed in reincarnation, but there’s no question that he used it a lot as a plot device. His James Allison stories, of which most fans consider
The Valley of the Worm
the best, probably owe something to Jack London’s novel
The Star Rover
, a book which, Howard said, “I’ve read and reread for years, and that generally goes to my head like wine.” In that book, London’s protagonist, Darrell Standing, imprisoned for murder and placed in solitary confinement, escapes from the brutal reality of the present by mentally revisiting past lives. Howard apparently liked the plot device, but he made his character an invalid rather than a convict, which provides a strong contrast with the virile heroes Allison had been in his past lives. The ethnology is certainly outdated, but the story itself is timeless.
    The People of the Black Circle
is one of the stories people first think of when they think of Conan. It has it all, the exotic locale, the beautiful (and feisty) woman, the crafty and powerful wizards, the headlong narrative pace. It is sword and sorcery at its best. The other Conan tale here,
Beyond the Black River
, is, as previously noted, one of only three stories named on more than half the ballots in my poll of Howard fans. It has aroused occasional controversy: some critics have claimed that, because it uses some names from Robert W. Chambers’ Revolutionary War novels, the setting is probably derived from upstate New York, while others (of whom I am one) claim that it is a story of the Texas frontier, played out on Conan’s Hyborian Age stage. Novalyne Price Ellis, with whom Howard discussed the story, said it was a Texas story. And we have this passage from a letter to Lovecraft: “A student of early Texas history is struck by the fact that some of the most savage battles with the Indians were fought in the territory between the Brazos and Trinity rivers…. In the old times the red-skins held the banks of the Brazos. Sometimes they drove the ever-encroaching settlers back–sometimes the white men crossed the Brazos, only to be hurled back again, sometimes clear back beyond the Trinity. But they came on again–in spite of flood, drouth, starvation and Indian massacre.” Yet whatever may be its setting, this tale of conflict on the frontier is one of Howard’s finest stories, and it concludes with one of his most memorable, and