The latest Harold Lamb volumes from Bison books, Swords from the Sea and Swords from the East, already announced last December on The Cimmerian, are now available.
Richard L. Tierney’s poetry collection Savage Menace and other poems of horror is also out now. Some additional information not included in my January 26th blog post on this promising book can be read below.
This is a saga, to be read round a fire against the lurking dark.
– Robert Low on The Whale Road
Most Robert E. Howard fans find a good Viking saga hard to resist. Many have delved into the treasures hoarded by H. Rider Haggard and Poul Anderson seeking the “Northern thing” that inspired Tolkien and sang with moody restlessness in the blood of Robert E. Howard.
All that is deep and gloomy and Norse in me rises in my blood. I would go east into the sunshine and the nodding palm trees, but I bide and the dream of the twilight of the gods is on me, and the dreams of cold and misty lands and the ancient pessimism of the Vikings.
It seems to me, especially in the autumn, that that one vagrant Danish strain that is mine, predominates above all my Celtic blood.– To Harold Preece, ca. October 1930
Robert Low, right, lives his tales of the Oathsworn. His deep knowledge of his period gives his writing depth and power.
Scotsman Robert Low has written a saga worthy to stand with the greats of yore. The Whale Road launches the four-book Oathsworn series, which follows a band of Norse mercenaries through adventures across Europe and into Asia, from the market towns of Scandanavia to the steppes of Russia to the Great City of Constantinople, known to the Norse as Miklagard.
The saga follows the growth of Orm Rurikson from a green and fumbling youth into a seasoned fighter and leader of men.
Several books of interest to Howard fans published by Black Dog Books will soon be available, as well as a few older items not mentioned thus far on TC.
Volume four of the Talbot Mundy Library, The Letter of his Orders, collecting three short novels (The Guzzler’s Grand Prix, Hookum Hai and the titular one) from Adventure magazine, will soon be published.
Howard Andrew Jones, fantasy author, editor and the man who gave Harold Lamb to the twenty-first century, just put the news out over the æther that the final two volumes in Bison Books’ “Harold Lamb Library” are available for pre-order and will ship on May Day, 2010. Y’all feast your eyes on these tasty blurbs…
Vikings, pirates, heroes, rogues, and explorers . . . all have heard the siren call of the sea, and master storyteller Harold Lamb chronicled some of their most daring exploits. This single volume contains all of Lamb’s historical seafaring stories, drawn from rare and fragile pulp magazines. Never before collected, these short stories and novels are a treasure trove of adventure. Best known for his stirring tales of Cossacks and crusaders, Lamb was no stranger to swashbuckling, and his sea stories deliver it in buckets.
These fragmentary histories were jotted down on “date leaves, bits of leather, shoulder blades, stony tablets or the hearts of men.” But, put into words by men born and bred to war who spent most of their lives in the saddle, the written hadith have a real ring to them. Here we find no lengthy memoirs, no monastery-compiled chronicles, or histories written long after events. We have the word-of-mouth narrative of men who were on the scene.
- Harold Lamb, in a letter to Adventure magazine, concerning the traditions of the Arabs.
While Swords From the Desert (Bison Books) is a light-weight in page-count when matched against its hefty companion volume, Swords From the West, it definitely holds its own in quality. Weighing in at a “mere” three hundred and seven pages, it’s crammed full with the timeless adventure tales for which Harold Lamb should be more justly renowned.
Adventure was considered the most prestigious pulp magazine in America. It was the very best that the pulps had to offer. And the very best author in Adventure was Harold Lamb.
Robert Weinberg, excerpted from his introduction to Swords From the West
I have been waiting for Swords From the West (or something very like it) for a long time. A massive book (over six hundred pages) bursting at the bindings with tales of conflict and courage, all sprung from the masterful pen of Harold Lamb.
The common thread which connects all the stories in this volume is that each one of the main protagonists are of European extraction. Sometimes their foes are fellow Europeans, other times the antagonists hail from points further East. As series editor, Howard Andrew Jones *, notes in his foreword:
What may be surprising is Lamb’s unprejudiced eye when portraying non-Western peoples. Lamb’s Mongolians and Arabs are painted with the same insight into motivation as his Western protagonists. He takes no shortcuts via stereotype: foreign does not necessarily equate with evil and villains can be found on either side of the cultural divide.
Lamb’s obituaries in 1962 barely mentioned his fiction. By then, the cheap magazines that had published his yarns were long forgotten except by a few passionate collectors. Like a burial mound’s hidden hoard of treasure, they lay undisturbed, awaiting their rediscovery by Mr. Jones — and now a growing band of admirers.
Such is the coda of John J. Miller’s article concerning Harold Lamb’s career and the publication of Swords From the West, one of a brace of (very recently published) editions collecting Lamb’s work put out by Bison Books.
Two new books collecting Harold Lamb’s pulp adventure fiction are on the horizon and I could not be happier. Swords From the West and Swords From the Desert are slated to thunder into bookstores this September, courtesy of the Bison Books imprint from the University of Nebraska Press. Scott Oden (who wrote the introduction for Swords From the Desert) and Morgan Holmes have both weighed in on their respective blogs. I thought I would toss in my two debased dinars.
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.
Howard Jones, Managing Editor at Black Gate and the major Harold Lamb scholar working today (see his website dedicated to Lamb), has announced on his blog that the four volumes of Lamb’s Cossack stories published by the University of Nebraska’s Bison Books imprint have sold well enough for Bison to agree to publish a further three volumes of Lamb’s best work.
For those of us who have enjoyed the Lamb books Bison has published to date, this is great news. Harold Lamb was one of Robert E. Howard’s all-time favorite authors, a regular in top-tier pulps like Adventure as well as many other popular magazines of the day. He was also a scholar of barbaric times and cultures, and his many biographies and histories remain valuable. Just a few months back I heard popular radio talk-show host Michael Savage off-handedly recommending Lamb’s biography of Genghis Khan to listeners, a tome I myself recently found at a used bookstore’s going-out-of-business sale.
Reading Harold Lamb’s work today, one can see why REH was so taken with his writing. While he lacks the primal fire and prose poetry that fuels Howard at his best, Lamb was the superior plotter, expertly utilizing the pulp template to lace his thrilling tales of warfare and derring-do with enough twists and turns to make a Stygian wizard’s head spin. His stories about the elderly but still feral Khlit the Cossack struck me as a shadowy glimpse into how Conan might have looked and acted at that age, had Howard ever gotten around to writing about his twilight years.
Jones promises that the three new volumes will contain much of Lamb’s very best work. Crusader yarns, Mongol stories, Viking tales. Robert E. Howard fans who value books like Lord of Samarcand will have a lot of fun with Lamb’s breakneck pacing and deft evocation of the Middle East during the Middle Ages. These days it’s all too rare to find and enjoy pulp pleasures of the kind offered by writers like REH and Lamb. meaning collected short stories that can be leisurely read, one per night, over a glass of wine — the perfect sedative to a hard day spent at the office.
So if you haven’t yet, pick up the four Cossack volumes, and keep an eye out for the next three. REH adored these tales, and you will too.
