Those who enjoy the work of Robert E. Howard often find themselves caught up in one or another of his series characters. Some people are Conan aficionados; others prefer Solomon Kane or Bran Mak Morn; there’s also the humorous adventures of Sailor Steve Costigan or Breck Elkins. There’s a series character for practically every taste. There’s even a detective character (two, if we count Hawkshaw, but we’ll worry about him another time). Howard’s contribution to the detective genre is Steve Harrison, the hard-boiled champion of River Street. Often overlooked, or worse, unappreciated, this series character is well worth the read; unfortunately, getting your hands on all of his adventures will take some work.

As far as the Complete Steve Harrison goes, you don’t have to buy any hardcover books, although it would probably be easier to get them all if you did. There’s two ways to do it. First you pick up Graveyard Rats and Others through Wildside Press, now available in trade paperback. This gives you “Fangs of Gold” (aka “People of the Serpent”), “Graveyard Rats,” “Names in the Black Book,” and “The Tomb’s Secret” (aka “The Teeth of Doom”), as well as a couple of weird menace stories. True, “The Tomb’s Secret” was changed from a Steve Harrison story into a Brock Rollins adventure, but we’ll just look past that (otherwise you’ve got to find a way to acquire Writer of the Dark, and that’s not easy). Next, you need The Second Book of Robert E. Howard for “The House of Suspicion,” its only appearance.

Now the trouble begins. Cryptic publications are hard/impossible to find, and you need two of them to complete your Steve Harrison collection. Bran Mak Morn: A Play and Others contains the only appearance of “The Black Moon,” and Two-Fisted Detective has the only appearances of “The Silver Heel,” “The Voice of Death,” and the untitled synopsis that begins “Steve Harrison received a wire.” Good luck finding these two publications.

That brings us to the hardcover solution. “Lord of the Dead” and “The Mystery of Tannernoe Lodge” are available in Donald Grant’s Lord of the Dead, a hardcover. But “Lord of the Dead” is also available in Berkley’s Skull-Face, and “Mystery” is in Joe Marek’s New Howard Reader #8. It’s probably easier to get the Grant book.

And there you have it, the complete Steve Harrison saga. Until some enterprising Howard-Head collects all of the stories into a single volume, this is the only way to read ALL of the adventures. Sigh, maybe, someday . . .

One need not necessarily like the work of H.P. Lovecraft to like that of Robert E. Howard — witness biographer/blogger Mark Finn, who has been known to break into the Special Collections section of the Brown University Library in Providence for the sole purpose of rubbing spoiled seafood against the Lovecraftiana kept there. But one can’t be a serious Howard aficionado without recognizing that REH really liked HPL’s weird fiction and striving to understand why. And being forced, or forcing oneself, to choose between the 2 writers, championing one while cold-shouldering the other, is a form of self-inflicted impoverishment like forcing a choice between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Sure, it can be done, but why would one want to? Joseph Curwen and Xaltotun both make life better (although they might not be pleased to hear it).

It won’t be long before a set of shelves designed in accordance with non-Euclidean geometry will be required to house all the new books “by” or about Lovecraft. One of the most enjoyable is Andrew Migliore and John Strysik’s The Lurker in the Lobby: The Guide to Lovecraftian Cinema, which has been expanded and updated from the 2000 edition. The fact that expansion and updating were so obviously warranted serves to underscore the realization that an equivalent book for Howard would cry out for a title like The Hours of the Drag-On or Clay Pigeons from Hell and make for brief and depressing reading. The Lurker in the Lobby comes tricked-out with a preface by S.T. Joshi and “Pickman’s Gallery,” a full-color midsection of “preproduction art, movie stills, and promotional posters” by Richard Corben, Mike Mignola, William Stout, Bernie Wrightson, and other artists.

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I’ve been visiting the Conan.com message boards for a while now, mostly because of the subsection for posting about Robert E. Howard. Several of the sysops and admins were onhand for Robert E. Howard days, and they told me that the plan, now that Paradox had the rights to all of Robert’s literary properties, was to redo the boards to encompass all of the characters.

Well, it looks like they’ve gone and done it. And it’s a pretty nice job they did of moving the threads around so that there are a few posts in everything. For now, Conan.com will stay where it is, but it may get subsumed in a larger Robert E. Howard website later. Overall, this is great news for Howard fans, and a nice intention on Paradox’s part.

STEVE ADDS: The explanation/description of the Kull forum needs a little tinkering– “For discussing the king of Atlantis” is wrong. “For discussing the Atlantean-turned-king” or “For discussing the Atlantean who became king of Valusia” would be better.

On one of the bus tours of Cross Plains that took place during Howard Days, my dad asked me about Robert E. Howard’s car. I didn’t know much, so I asked Rusty Burke, who was our tour guide. He said that Howard owned a ’31 Chevy first, and then upgraded to a ’35 Chevy. I thought that was the end of it.

About a week later and I’m still unpacking boxes from my recent move. My dad calls and asks about pictures of Howard with cars. I tell him that I don’t know of any. Then, on Father’s Day, I go over to his place for our usual Father’s Day six-pack in his Ham radio shack, and what does he do? He gives me a dissertation on the differences between the 1931 Chevrolet and the 1935 Chevrolet; he elaborates further on the differences between the “standard” and “master” models of the ’35 line. Very interesting. Of course, I wanted to know how he’d found all of this information. With a twinkle in his eye he pulls down a book, one in a series, called Cars of the Classic ’30s (© 2004, Publications International, Ltd.). We look at the pictures, he talks some more, and then, just as we’re getting ready to go inside, he says, “Oh yeah.”

On page 243, the first page of “Chapter 7: 1936,” he shows me this quote:

“The great British author Rudyard Kipling died this year. Death also took philosopher Oswald Spengler; writers G. K. Chesterton, Maxim Gorky, and Conan creator Robert E. Howard; playwright Luigi Pirandello; physiologist Ivan Pavlov; and aviation pioneers Billy Mitchell and Louis Bleriot.”

REH shows up in the strangest places.

I thought about inaugurating this blog by pointing out just how mistaken Patrice Louinet, the prolific and otherwise perceptive Howard scholar, is in his belief that Monica Bellucci would make a better Dark Agnes de la Fere than would the French actress Virginie Ledoyen — mais non! Bellucci would be hard pressed to get out of the way of her own mammaries while fencing. But instead I’m going to revisit TC V3n5, which is fondly remembered in Tompkinsian precincts as The Special Apoplexy Issue. Gary Romeo’s “Viagra for the Soul,” Richard A. Lupoff’s “Long Ago and Far Away,” and Leon Nielsen’s “Pseudo Boom” all contained assertions that had me glimpsing the world through an echt-Howardian crimson mist for hours after I encountered them.

Each and every paragraph of Nielsen’s “Pseudo Boom” could not be more sincere in its concern, from a bookseller-cum-collector’s perspective, about How Well Howard Is Doing. Such a perspective is of course valid and valuable, but hardly panoptic — monitoring eBay transactions can tell us a lot about copies sold, but next to nothing about worlds rocked and doors opened. Nielsen overlooks or under-esteems significant developments while bizarrely fawning upon the Baen Books Howard paperbacks of the mid-90s, which he applauds for their “higher degree of textually pure versions” and “Ken Kelly’s splendid cover paintings.” (Splendid? Seriously, splendid? Like I said, Special Apoplexy Issue) He contrasts the scads of reprintings of the Lancer/Ace/Sphere Conans — Gary Romeo used to hand them out at homeless shelters and Vegan restaurants once a month — with the lone printing of the Baens, but we need to keep in mind that the latter were packaged with covers representing Kelly at his worst rather than those that represented Frazetta at his best, and were unified as a series only by their author, not by a gigantomorphic protagonist.

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The following cartoon appeared in the Los Angeles Times supplement West magazine this morning, showing the Governator in the role that made him famous, and once again cementing the cultural iconography of Howard’s best-known character into our consciousness. (click on pic to enlarge)

A few bloggers who attended Howard Days have posted pics and commentary for your edification.

Over at Rough Edges, prolific author James Reasoner has his report. James is a Howard Days regular, having attended for many years now, so he gives a veteran’s take on the festivities.

Meanwhile, professional horror writers Christopher Fulbright (We Have Returned…) and his wife Angeline Hawkes (Back from R. E. Howard Days and More Pictures of Robert E. Howard Days) have their own takes on the event, complete with many photos. Christopher attended a few years ago (you can read his trip report of that one here), but this was Angeline’s first time.

Just heard an update from Ethan Nahté, the Dallas man working on a Howard documentary, on the continuing American adventurers of Cornelius Kappabani, leader of the German band Bifrost, who came all the way from across the pond to attend Howard Days this year, and who put on Cross Plains’ first-ever German New Age/punk/heavy metal performance of tunes set to Howard’s poetry.

Ethan says, “We’ve been showing Cornelius a good time. Took him to a party last night to play guitars. He stayed the night with us last night and tonight. We live next to the airport so we’re taking him to catch his flight Monday morning and ship him back to Germany.”

Texas will never be the same again.

In an effort to improve the experience of Cimmerian readers and to further Howard studies on the Net in general, I am making some changes at the website for The Cimmerian that I hope will make a difference.

As you can see from the blog posts below, I have invited well-known Howard scholars Mark Finn, Rob Roehm, and Steve Tompkins to blog at thecimmerian.com along with me. Each brings a new set of opinions and skill sets to the discussion, and as a result this blog should finally grow wings and become a place for Howard fans to check each morning.

In addition, I will begin the process of converting all of the old Cimmerian website into this new blog format, with the blog page eventually becoming the main Cimmerian homepage. This should allow for a much more content-rich browsing experience, with everything searchable and indexed for readers.

One of the fun new things I’ve included on this new blog homepage is a Robert E. Howard random quote generator. Each time you visit or refresh, a new Howard quote appears at the top of the screen. Right now there are only a few dozen in the database, but I will be gradually adding more until they represent swaths of inspirational and electric writing spanning the whole of Howard’s career. If you have any favorites you want to see there, email me with the quote and the name of the story or letter it came from, and I’ll add it to the database.

Now that this blog is officially on-line, stay tuned for regular updates containing news, reviews, scholarship, and opinions about REH and related genres and writers. Welcome to The Cimmerian Online.

No, it’s not out yet, but Amazon.com is showing that the book can be pre-ordered, for those of you who don’t have an independent bookstore to visit, or don’t want to give money to the large chains. You can get to Amazon by yourself, or zip over to the Monkeybrain website for a peek at the rough concept art for the cover, as well.