Paul Herman at The Robert E. Howard Foundation recently sent me the following information concerning the much anticipated Foundation release The Last of the Trunk, which collects most of the remaining unpublished detritus of Howard’s career.

PAUL: The Last of the Trunk is now available for pre-order. Well, as soon as the website is updated, that is, today or tomorrow. Book should ship in November.

Robert E. Howard generated an enormous volume of written works, around 3.5 million words. In his tiny room in his house in Cross Plains, REH kept a trunk to hold all his output that was still awaiting a sale, as well as works that were rejected, unfinished, something he especially wanted to save, or simply copies of early drafts that he would reuse the back of in typing up another story. At the time of his death, that trunk held literally tens of thousands of pages of material, all hand-typed by REH.

In the early 1960s, Glenn Lord obtained the contents of REH’s trunk. He had the duty, pleasure, and challenge of sorting it all out, and to begin sheparding those works into print. Hundreds of stories and poems poured forth, to see print in assorted books, magazines, and fan publications.

Ever since the publication of Glenn Lord’s The Last Celt in 1976, collectors of the works of REH have been aware of, but unable to read, more than a hundred unpublished stories and fragments. A few were published in the intervening years, but not many.

Finally, in this volume, The Last of the Trunk is being revealed. Virtually all the remaining unpublished prose will be included. While this certainly is not his most memorable or impressive work (those works are already in print), it does fill in lots of blank spaces for the scholars and collectors, and perhaps yield a little more understanding of one of the greatest pulp writers.

This will be the largest REHF publication to date, at 672 pages. Hardback with dust jacket by Tom Foster. Edited and with an introduction by Patrice Louinet. Design by Dennis McHaney. Many of the works are incomplete or unfinished. Many of the complete stories are either boxing or high school papers.

A detailed list of the contents:

Blue River Blues; The Battling Sailor; The Drawing Card; The Jinx; The Wildcat and the Star; Fistic Psychology; Untitled (“Huh?” I was so dumbfounded . . .); Fighting Nerves; The Atavist; A Man of Peace; The Weeping Willow; The Right Hook; A Tough Nut to Crack; The Trail of the Snake; The Folly of Conceit; The Fighting Fury; Night Encounter; The Ferocious Ape; The Ghost Behind the Gloves; Misto Dempsey; The Brand of Satan; Incongruity; The Slayer; The Man Who Went Back; Untitled Synopsis (Hunwulf, an American . . .); Untitled (Thure Khan gazed out . . .); Untitled (As he approached . . .); A Room in London (outline); The Shadow in the Well (draft); Fate is the Killer; The Grove of Lovers; The Drifter; The Lion Gate; Untitled (Franey was a fool.); The Ivory Camel; Wolves – and a Sword; Untitled (I’m a man of few words . . .); Untitled Synopsis (First Draft: James Norris . . .); The Dominant Male; The Paradox; Untitled (Mike Costigan, writer and self avowed futilist . . .); The Splendid Brute; Circus Charade; The Influence of the Movies; Untitled (William Aloysius McGraw’s father . . .); A Man and a Brother; Man; Pigskin Scholar; The Recalcitrant; Untitled (“Arrange, Madame, arrange!”); Untitled (“Yessah!” said Mrs. . . .); The Question of the East; In His Own Image; The Punch; The Female of the Species; The Last Man; The Treasure of Henry Morgan; Untitled (The lazy quiet of the mid-summer day . . .); Through the Ages; The White Jade Ring; The Roving Boys on a Sandburg; Westward, Ho!; The Wild Man; What the Deuce?; The Land of Forgotten Ages; The Funniest Bout; The Red Stone; A Unique Hat; Untitled (“A man,” said my friend Larry Aloysius O’Leary . . .); Untitled (. . . that is, the artistry is but a symbol . . .); Untitled (I met him first in the Paradise saloon . . .); Untitled (Maybe it don’t seem like anything interesting . . .); Untitled (So there I was.); Untitled (Trail led through dense jungle . . .); Untitled (Two men were standing in the bazaar at Delhi . . .); Untitled (When Yar Ali Khan crept . . .); Untitled (Who I am it matters little . . .); A Twentieth Century Rip Van Winkle; The Ghosts of Jacksonville; A Boy, a Beehive, and a Chinaman; Mr. Dowser Buys a Car; A Faithful Servant; A South Sea Storm; The Ghost of Bald Rock Ranch; A Fishing Trip; Friends; Ten Minutes on a Street Corner; The Wings of the Bat

The price will be $53 for REHF members, $59 for non-members. Shipping costs will be posted at the website.

Any questions, let me know!

So you’ve got the Sailor Steve Costigan stories; you’ve got the Kid Allison yarns (the few that are available); what’s left of Howard’s boxing fiction?

Howard wrote two tales of Ace Jessel: “The Apparition in the Prize Ring” and “Double Cross.” The first appeared in Ghost Stories for April 1929 and has been reprinted a few times, most recently in Bison Books’ Boxing Stories. But “Double Cross” is a different story. It remained unpublished until 1983, when Cryptic Publications brought out the first of its Howard booklets: Bran Mak Morn: A Play and Others. Easily one of the more difficult to obtain publications, this volume goes for around $50 on eBay . . . if it ever appears. Luckily, “Double Cross” was more recently published in Robert E. Howard: The Power of the Writing Mind, which is still available on Amazon.

Of the seven remaining boxing stories, four are easily acquired. “Crowd Horror,” “Fists of the Desert” (aka “Iron-Jaw”, “Iron Men” (aka “The Iron Man”, and “They Always Come Back” are available in Boxing Stories. But, to complete the boxing collection, there’s still some work to do. The best of the three remaining stories is “The Mark of the Bloody Hand.” It has appeared twice: once in Writer of the Dark, and again in Crypt of Cthulhu #47. Both of these publications show up occasionally on eBay and other online sources. “The Voice of Doom” is only available in Crypt of Cthulhu #39 and “Fists of the Revolution” is only available in the impossible to find Fantasy Crossroads Special Edition #1.

Speaking of impossible, Howard wrote many other boxing tales that have never been published: “The Ferocious Ape,” “The Fighting Fury,” “A Man of Peace,” “Night Encounter,” “Right Hook,” “Shackled Mitts,” “Trail of the Snake,” “The Weeping Willow,” “Misto’ Dempsey” (a collection of sketches), and who knows how many others. Several of these stories are incomplete or only fragments, but for fans of Howard’s boxing fiction, they are the missing notches in the championship belt.

Oops: Rusty Burke informed me of something I missed: “The Spirit of Brian Boru.” This tale was first published, in French, in La Tombe du Dragon in 1990, one of the many Howard books published by NéO. It has only been published in English once, in 1999′s The “New” Howard Reader #6. Good hunting.

In February of 1931, Robert E. Howard wrote to Tevis Clyde Smith: “Street & Smith wrote me, wanting to take over the Steve Costigan series for their magazine Sport Stories, which they say is a bi-monthly. I told them I expected that Fight Stories would want to keep Steve, but offered them another prize-ring series instead. I hope they’ll accept.” Thus was born Howard’s other humorous boxing character, Kid Allison.

Street & Smith snatched up three Kid Allison yarns in 1931 and published them in Sport Story Magazine: “College Socks” in the September 25th issue, “Man with the Mystery Mitts” in the October 25th issue, and “The Good Knight” (aka “Kid Galahad”) in the December 25th issue. Besides these three, we know of at least seven others that were not published by Street & Smith. Howard discussed one of these, “Fighting Nerves,” in a ca. April 1932 letter to Tevis Clyde Smith:

Hear ye the tale of “Fighting Nerves”. I wrote this story — a Kid Allison yarn — as a complete novelet for Sport Story. I wrote it, I think, three times, before I sent it off. Back it came with the request to cut out the saloon atmosphere and reduce the length. I re-wrote it and returned it to the same magazine. It came back with the statement that they were all stocked up with fight stories — requested me to keep it several months and return it, with a letter reminding them of it. Not wanting to wait that long if I could help it — a natural desire of a penniless adventurer like myself — I rewrote most of it, changing the names of the characters, and sent it to Fight Stories. Back it came with the request to cut it down in length. I rewrote it and sent it back. Back it came, with the remark that it was acceptable, but that they couldn’t find a place for it just then. I should keep it a month or so, and then they’d like to see it some more. So I sent it to Sport Stories, with a letter reminding them of what they had said. It was returned with no explanation — merely a rejection slip. So I sent it to Fiction House — and back it came with the statement that Fight Stories had been — or was going to be — taken off the stands.

“Fighting Nerves” remains unpublished to this day. It is not alone. “The Drawing Card,” “Fistic Psychology,” “The Jinx,” “The Texas Wildcat,” “A Tough Nut to Crack,” and the untitled story that begins, “Huh? I was so dumbfounded . . .” are all unpublished. As bad as this is, it’s not the only bad news regarding Kid Allison. Of the three Street & Smith published tales mentioned above, only one, “The Good Knight,” has seen mainstream reprinting: once in The Second Book of Robert E. Howard and again in Boxing Stories as “Kid Galahad.” The other two, “Man with the Mystery Mitts” and “College Socks,” have only been reprinted in the pages of Fantasy Crossroads, #s 4/5 and 7, respectively. It’s probably easier to find copies of Sport Story Magazine than these two fanzines from the ’70s. These are the last of the stories published during Howard’s lifetime that have never been reprinted in book-form.

Up until very recently, collecting the complete Sailor Steve Costigan canon was very hard to do. As late as the year 2000, many of the sailor’s finest adventures were still trapped in the pages of hard to find and costly pulp magazines like Action Stories, Fight Stories, and Jack Dempsey’s Fight Magazine. Even during “The Howard Boom” of the seventies, Costigan fans had to settle for the stray reprints found in fan publications like The Howard Review, Cross Plains, and The Chronicler of Cross Plains. “The Pit of the Serpent,” which appeared in The Book of Robert E. Howard, is practically the only mainstream appearance of a Costigan yarn during those days when it seemed that everything by Howard was being slapped between covers for the Howard-hungry consumer.

Then, in March of 1990, Necronomicon Press began issuing Robert E. Howard’s Fight Magazine. The original plan was to publish ALL of Howard’s boxing material, starting with the Costigan series. But, as is the case with so many Howard publishers, the plan fell through and the series remains incomplete. Fight Magazine #4, from October 1996, was the end of the line. A few attempts have been made to kick start Fight Mag and complete the series, but thus far it hasn’t happened. By the end of the ’90s, it seemed that Costigan was down for the long count.

Then, in November of 2001, Paul Herman applied the smelling salts. Under the Hermanthis label, he published The Complete Action Stories (TCAS). 18 of the 23 stories in TCAS are Breck Elkins tales, but the remaining five are Costigans — hard to find Costigans. Herman spells it out in his introduction: “None of the Action Stories boxing tales have ever seen mainstream reprinting. ‘Blow the Chinks Down!’ and ‘Dark Shanghai’ are being presented here in English for the first time since their original pulp appearance. The remaining three boxing stories have generally only been available in small run chapbook or fanzine publications, and are being presented in paperback here for the first time.” Unfortunately, TCAS itself was a “small run” publication. But it got Costigan off the ropes.

Perhaps based on the quality of the two Hermanthis publications (TCAS and The Complete Yellow Jacket), Herman landed a deal with Wildside Press. The first of Wildside’s REH line was Waterfront Fists and Others: The Collected Fight Stories of Robert E. Howard, published May 2003. This magnificent volume collects all 15 of the Costigan adventures that appeared in Fight Stories and Jack Dempsey’s Fight Magazine, as well as a few other tales of the squared circle. And, a few months later, November 2003, Wildside reissued The Complete Action Stories in hardcovers. With these two volumes in hand, the Costigan Collector has nearly everything. But it’s never that simple in Howard-land.

At the same time that Howard was placing the Costigan yarns in Fight Stories, Farnsworth Wright, of Weird Tales fame, had started up a companion magazine: Oriental Stories, later changed to Magic Carpet Magazine. Here was an opportunity to place more Costigan tales; after all, they were set in “Oriental” ports of call. Using the pseudonym “Patrick Ervin,” and changing the main character from Steve Costigan to Dennis Dorgan, Howard managed to sell one of the Costigan/Dorgan tales, “Alleys of Darkness,” to Wright, with “Sailor Dorgan and the Jade Monkey” announced for the following issue. But the magazine died before that story appeared, and remained unpublished until 1971′s The Howard Collector #14.

Howard converted a pile of Costigan stories into Dorgans: 10 that we know of. True Costigan Crazies can’t call it quits without obtaining The Incredible Adventures of Dennis Dorgan, which collects them all. Published by FAX, Zebra, and Ace Books, all with editorial interference, this volume is easily found at most online used booksellers. True fanatics will also want to pick up the University of Nebraska Press’s Boxing Stories. Published under the Bison Books imprint, Chris Gruber, the editor, changed two of the stories back into Costigans: “In High Socity” and “Playing Journalist” were restored to their rightful titles, “Cultured Cauliflowers” and “A New Game for Costigan.” Some of Howard’s best boxing fiction, including several more Costigan yarns, are also presented in this volume.

And we’re still not done. All of the above are easily obtainable from the usual sources. It just wouldn’t be REH if it was that easy. Of the 29 known Sailor Steve stories and fragments, the above books will get you 22. Five of the seven remaining aren’t all that difficult to acquire, and at least they’re all found in the same place: Robert E. Howard’s Fight Magazine #4 from Necronomicon Press. This shows up on eBay fairly regularly and usually sells for less than $30. Fight #4 contains the only appearances of “By the Law of the Shark,” “Flying Knuckles,” and “The Honor of the Ship.” It also contains two Sailor Steve fragments that originally appeared in Dennis McHaney’s The Howard Review #2, under the title “Three Perils of Sailor Costigan.” The remaining two tales, “The Battling Sailor” and “Blue River Blues” were slated for their first ever appearance in Fight Mag #5, which of course was never published. That rounds off the Sailor Steve collection.

Oh yeah, true completists will need the third “Peril” from The Howard Review #2. It isn’t a Sailor Steve fragment — it’s an “Iron” Mike Costigan fragment, Steve’s brother. And, yes, it’s only been published once, in THR #2. That particular issue of THR was published using newspaper — it’s the same size as the TV guides included in many Sunday papers, about 12×10 — and doesn’t age well. Good luck finding one of those.

MARK ADDS: Of course, this doesn’t take into account all of the Kid Allison stories he wrote–ten of them, most of which have never seen print outside of fanzines, and the handful of non-series boxing stories that he wrote like “Weepin’ Willow” and “Crowd-Horror.” Necronomicon Press’ Fight Stories series was supposed to run eight issues and publish ALL of that. It’s a shame they never got around to it, although I’m glad that they at least got to issue #4. The sheer volume of boxing fiction that Robert wrote is enough to make even the most jaded sword and sorcery fan sit up and take notice. When it’s eventually collected, Del Rey/Wandering Star style, it’ll need to be at least two (and more likely three) volumes.

ROB RESPONDS: Of course this doesn’t take those items into account, it’s about Costigan. But I will get to Kid Allison and the rest of boxing stories soon. By the way, of the ten Kid Allison stories, only three have ever been published, fanzine or otherwise, unless you know something I don’t.

MARK REPLIES: Not a dig, just an observation about the boxing stuff in general being hard to find. If I had known about your intention to run through all of the boxing, I would have kept my big mouth shut, as you are more than capable to handle bibliographic info like this and remind me that my collection isn’t NEARLY as impressive as it could be. And no, the three stories and their reprintings are all I have ever known about. Those far-fetched imaginary boxing collections can’t come soon enough for my tastes.