Last year, Bill Thom won the first Munsey Award, given “to a deserving person who has given of himself or herself for the betterment of the pulp community, be it through disseminating knowledge about the pulps or through publishing or other efforts to preserve and to foster interest in the pulp magazines we all love and enjoy” for his hard work on Coming Attractions, an indispensable resource on Pulp-related news that I peruse each week and where I found dozens of news items to announce on The Cimmerian these last six months. This year, essayist (and Cimmerian journal-contributor) Don Herron is nominated.  Don Herron authored several seminal pieces on Robert E. Howard –you can read Brian Murphy’s appreciation of Don’s “milestones in Howard studies” here on the Cimmerian blog.

Besides his literary criticism about the Bard of Cross Plains, Don Herron is also an authority on Dashiell Hammett, Charles Willeford, Philip K. Dick and the Emperor of Dreams, Clark Ashton Smith. He created the Dashiell Hammet Tour in 1977 and has lead Hammett aficionados through San Francisco every year since then.

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It’s fair to say that Steve Tompkins brought me back to Robert E. Howard.

I never lost my appreciation for Howard’s work; how could I? It had inspired me to become a writer. But by millenium’s turn it had been years since I’d actually read a Conan story or plunged into the adventures of El Borak or Solomon Kane. I never decided to put aside Howard, it just sort of happened as I explored new horizons, new frontiers.

As the Internet developed into a massive cultural resource, I got curious about what the Web could tell me about Howard. I found The Barbarian Keep and read Don Herron’s The Dark Barbarian. It was gratifying to see that the stories that had brought me so much pleasure in my youth still had resonance for so many people.

Then I found the Robert E. Howard United Press Association Web site and discovered an essay by one Steven Tompkins: “Grinning, Unappeased Aboriginal Demons — Every Pict Sure Tells a Story — and an American One At That.”

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Exactly one year ago, on March 23, 2009, Steve Tompkins passed. Tempus fugit…

Morgan Holmes once wrote on the REHupa blog how he mourned the loss of his friend. He noted back then that some Cimmerian bloggers never knew Steve Tompkins. Indeed, I had not that privilege. When our managing editor Deuce Richardson asked me to join the shieldwall, one of my fears was that my English would not be up to the standards that TC‘s readers were accustomed to. Steve Tompkins’ essays — his weekly production was above and beyond mere “blogging” — set a high standard. I don’t even think that my mastery of French equals his English skills, so how could my skills in the latter language be good enough to not disappoint? I would probably have had about the same feeling if Deuce had asked my overweight self to run after Usain Bolt!

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In this article I’ll be giving a brief overview of the works of Clark Ashton Smith from the perspective of the collector. As the longest lived of the Weird Tales “Big Three,” Smith produced a great number of poems and stories throughout his life in a career that spanned a half a century. The primary online resource for all things CAS-related is the exhaustive EldritchDark.com website, which gives thorough information on all of Smith’s publications. The most useful print reference is Don Herron’s article “Collecting Clark Ashton Smith” in the October 2000 issue of Firsts magazine.

One notable difference between Clark Aston Smith and his Weird Tales counterparts Lovecraft and Howard is that he had his work published in book form a number of times while he was still alive. He also signed quite a few books and his signature is fairly easy to obtain. As general rule of thumb, signed copies of Smith’s works usually sell for around two to three times what an unsigned copy in similar condition would sell for.

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H. Harksen productions has just released a book on August Derleth by  Cimmerian award-winning scholar, John D. Haefele. Don Herron provides the foreword.

Here’s the blurb:

AUGUST DERLETH REDUX: THE WEIRD TALE 1930-1971

This monograph, published during the centennial year of August Derleth’s birth, contains comprehensive, cutting-edge scholarship that will revitalize scholarship in Derleth, the man and his work. With rare clarity, Haefele demonstrates the essential role Derleth played in the “tale” of the literary Weird Tale genre, while carefully examining the events which led to millions of books by H. P. Lovecraft and others circulating worldwide. Here we find Derleth firmly re- established alongside S. T. Joshi as the eminent champion of Lovecraft he was.

Foreword by Don Herron, cover artwork by Natalie Sorrentino. Limited Edition. 150 copies only.

  Karl Edward Wagner (1945 -1994) died fifteen years ago today. I never knew Karl. Nevertheless, his work as an author, essayist, editor and REH scholar has affected my views regarding the entire field of weird literature since I was barely a teenager. I believe that he should be remembered and due attention paid.

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Last week, Robert E. Howard got name-checked in the New York Times Magazine, due in equal measure to Jack Vance and Carlo Rotella. Jack’s contribution consisted of being the subject of the article and of having been a fan of Weird Tales during the Depression. Rotella did his part by being an assiduous journalist and a reader of discerning tastes.

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My copy of REH: Two-Gun Raconteur #13 came in the post on the same day that a long-awaited guest arrived. Due to previously scheduled essays, I’m only now getting around to singing this issue’s praises. Morgan Holmes has already weighed in on the REHupa site, but I hope that this review will complement his.

I must admit that I never read the earlier issues of “TGR” when they were published back in the 1970s. I was but a wee lad back then. However, I have perused the “Out of Print” section on Damon C. Sasser’s website. REH: Two-Gun Raconteur has always been a worthy publication, mixing real Howardian scholarship, quality art and fannish fun. That was definitely my impression when I bought the first “relaunch” issue in 2003.

REH: Two-Gun Raconteur #13 greets you with a full-color cover depicting Kull and Brule whaling away at serpent-men. Sasser went with color covers (one of the advancements of civilization we can all be thankful for) a while back. That move got my unequivocal support at the time, and this cover changes that opinion not one whit.

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In studying Howard’s philosophy, one thing becomes abundantly clear: if there is a single overriding reason for critically analyzing Howard outside of the pulp ghetto, it’s that he so often managed to write himself out of it. In Howard’s best work one sees fantasy clichés bowled over like ten-pins in his pulsing rush to portray hate and vengeance. In doing so Howard forces the stories, at sword-point, out of the clichéd trappings of genre and into a different realm altogether: the realm of real literature.

–Leo Grin, “The Reign of Blood,” from The Barbaric Triumph

This year marks a milestone for two classic anthologies of Robert E. Howard criticism: The Dark Barbarian (1984) and its sequel, The Barbaric Triumph (2004) turn 25 and five years old, respectively. If you don’t already own these volumes, now is the time to go hunting on Ebay: According to editor Don Herron’s Web site, the two books have recently gone out of print, and prices are likely to climb:

The five-year contract with Wildside Press just ran out on Don’s two critical anthologies about Robert E. Howard, The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph, and he’s decided to let them lapse out-of-print and see where the prices go on the collectors market. The Dark Barbarian has been in-print for twenty-five years, originally in a 1250 copy hardback edition from Greenwood Press — looks like the trade paperback reprint from Wildside moved out approximately 275 more copies. The Barbaric Triumph is going to be tougher to land someday, since it was only available in print-on-demand for that five-year window and critical anthologies don’t tend to sell fast — the Wildside hardback seems to have sold approximately 150 copies while the trade paperback state edged close to 300 copies sold. Hardcore collectors have a perverse love for those low numbers, since they make the game all that much tougher and correspondingly more fun — and good hunting to the folk who didn’t get their copies while they were easy to order new.

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Essayist/raconteur Don Herron is best known ’round these parts for his outstanding Robert E. Howard criticism, which includes essays and editing duties in seminal works like The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph. Elsewhere he’s also regarded as an expert on the works of renowned mystery and noir writer Dashiell Hammett.

Based on this photo, he also wears a fedora and trenchcoat better than anyone.

But a lesser-known side of Herron’s resume includes his Stephen King criticism. I myself was unaware of Herron’s work as a reviewer of the king of horror until coming across his essay, “King: The Good, the Bad, and the Academic” from Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King (1986, NAL/Plume).

Seeing as how I’m writing for The Cimmerian website, whose now defunct print journal was home for many Herron essays, this next statement may make me seem like a suck-up, but that’s fine, I’ll say it anyway: I think Herron’s essay is perhaps the best in Kingdom of Fear. This is no mean feat, given that some of the other contributors to the volume include horror immortals like Robert Bloch, Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, and Harlan Ellison.

Whether or not you agree with that assessment, it’s rather indisputable that Herron’s essay is the most provocative of the lot. I first started typing “equal parts criticism and praise,” but upon further review it’s decidedly tipped in favor of the negative. Considering that Kingdom of Fear was published in 1986 — arguably the height of King’s creativity and popularity — Herron’s final analysis of King as a talented but flawed writer is rather ballsy. Herron pulls no punches, neither for King nor his legions of fans and admirers. For example, he rips Douglas Winter’s book Stephen King: The Art of Darkness for containing too much fan-worship and not enough honest appraisal. Writes Herron: “[It] strikes me as remarkable because Winter never once disagrees with a King dictum, he does not suggest that one of the novels under discussion might, just possibly, have a minor flaw or two. In this respect it is typical of most of the new criticism, where the critics, like the audience of teenage girls who buy so many of the King books, find everything to be just wonderful.”

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