I admit I was a bit taken aback a few months ago when Deuce Richardson approached me about writing for The Cimmerian. My first impulse was to turn him down.

After all, I have a lot irons in the fire: I edit a weekly newspaper for a living, front a Western folk band, have a family I love dearly and jealously guard my woods-running time.

All that wasn’t really the cause of my hesitancy. I wasn’t sure I could meet the high standard that kept me coming back to TC over and over again. I wasn’t worried about the writing chops; writing is what I do. No, I was afraid I couldn’t match the analytical skills of Al Harron, the hawk-like eye for the scoop of Miguel Martins (thanks for putting the X where it belonged Miguel) or the mythic sensibilities of Brian Murphy. I told Keith Taylor that I felt profoundly under-credentialed in his company and the same goes for Bill Maynard. I wasn’t sure I could match Barbara Barrett’s erudition (thanks for the kind words Barbara) and I am noways the scholar Jeffrey Shanks is.

And, of course, over all loomed the ghost of Steve Tompkins, the man who brought me back to Howardia (you gonna let me get away with that Steve?).

Besides, I thought, I’m really a guns-and-historical-adventure kind of guy, not a sword-and-sorcery guy. Outside of REH,  Tolkien and a taste for the epic grit of A Song of Ice and Fire, I hardly touch fantasy. (I do love Conan. Named my dog Conan, though he has a hard time living up to it). Of course, Howard wrote more boxing and Western yarns than he did fantasy and the Del Rey El Borak volume was proof that REH was the master of the  Oriental adventure. I always loved best that El Paso gunfighter adventuring in Afghanistan.

For me, Howard was an historical adventure writer above all. But I figured most Howard fans and TC readers love his fantasy first and foremost and I just wasn’t sure my bent would serve the readers or the blog. I felt like a gypsy in the palace. Surely the invitation had been misaddressed?

Fortunately, my wife is much wiser than I. When I told her about Deuce’s offer and said I thought I should say no, she looked at me with that cute little “why are you so stupid” look and said, “I think it would be good for you.”

Crom! but she was right.

I’ve loved every minute of my short run on The Cimmerian. Turns out that my interest in the historical and things “frontier” was welcomed and encouraged. I should never have doubted it;  a vibrant diversity and wide-ranging intellectual curiosity are, of course, hallmarks of The Cimmerian. Nothing makes me happier than being told that I was an asset to this blog. I am proud to have ridden for the brand. And I know my friends will miss my weekly reminder to head this way for a dose of historical arcana.

The short ride brought me many joys in exploring the varied and distant fields of my historical interests, some that had lain fallow for a time. Working on TC helped me understand and reconcile the deep connections that mark my various passions — musical, historical, even spiritual. Passions I share with Robert E. Howard, the man who first inspired me to become a writer.

Studying his letters, I found proof of what I had felt in my bones since I was a youth: here was a kindred spirit. Like Howard, I have always felt out of place and time, regretted that I did not live on the American frontier. It is hard to explain, this intense, painful nostalgia for a time I never saw; yet Howard understood.

If I could choose the age in which I was to live, I can think of no better epoch than this: to have been born about a hundred years earlier than I was, to have grown up on the Southwestern frontier, to have fought through the Texas Revolution and taken a part in San Jacinto, to have served as a soldier in the war with Mexico, to have gone to California with the ’49ers, and to have fallen in some great battle of the Civil War. If I could have grown up and lived in primitive virile surroundings, if I could have taken part in stirring events, if I could have shot straight, lived like an Indian, run like a mustang and fought like a grizzly, I would not care whether I could read a line or write my own name.

–To H.P. Lovecraft, ca. August 1931.

I want, in a word, the frontier — which compassed [sic] in the phrase, new land, open land, free land — land rich and unbroken and virgin, swarming with game and laden with fresh forests and sweet cold streams, where a man could live by the sweat of his hands unharried by taxes, crowds, noise, unemployment, bank-failures, gang-extortions, laws, and all the other wearisome things of civilization.

– To H.P. Lovecraft, ca. July 1933

No one has ever expressed the longings of my own heart more clearly. Writing here helped me figure out how I might incorporate that longing into tales of my own. For that, I am profoundly grateful.

Finally, I must make clear my appreciation for Deuce Richardson and Leo Grin. Having myself spent years in a volunteer capacity building something of great worth with no financial recompense, I am acutely aware of the mixed feelings of pride, weariness and regret that must accompany  a decision to let it go.

I will miss standing in the shield wall with my fellow bloggers. On the flank. With a rifle. I hope to see you all down the trail.

Bid ’em all adieu
We can’t turn the world about
The cowboy left the country
The campfire has gone out

– “The Campfire Has Gone Out” — Traditional cowboy ballad as performed by Don Edwards

*Art by Frank Frazetta

We know that Robert E. Howard was a big fan of the movies. His letters to Tevis Clyde Smith and Harold Preece mention numerous films that Howard saw and many, such as The Mark of Zorro (1920) and Robin Hood (1922) with Douglas Fairbanks, no doubt had some influence on his yarns (a full list of films mentioned by Howard, along with an brief discussion on the subject by Rusty Burke is available on the REHupa website). One film, though, that Howard never explicitly mentions, but that scholars have often wondered if he saw, is King Kong (1933). King Kong was revolutionary film when it came out, with incredible stop-motion animation that would influence future filmmakers for decades. It was the Star Wars or Avatar of its day. And with its theme of savagery versus civilization and hints of a lost advanced culture on a Pacific island it had elements that surely would have appealed to Howard. But if he did see it, there is no mention of it in the existing corpus of his letters.

Howard biographer Mark Finn summed up the conundrum several years ago in a post on the official REH Forums:

This is one of those things that’s frustrating to REH scholars. King Kong came out in 1933. It got a wide distribution. IF Robert saw it, he never talked about it. There’s no evidence that he used it in his work (the “slipped back into savagery” line from Kong was well in place in Robert’s fiction already). But it’s a real shame that we can’t say for sure if he did or didn’t. Maybe there’s no mention of Kong because he saw the movie with Smith and Vinson and they talked for hours about it afterward. Maybe it never came to Brownwood. I haven’t gone through the Brownwood Bulletin (reading the Cross Plains Review was bad enough), so I can’t say what was showing, or where.

Barry Windsor-Smith's interpretation of the dragon from "Red Nails."

There are some tantalizing hints, however. Howard does mention being a fan of King Kong stars Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong, though of course he could have seen them in other films. More recently, Charles Hoffman, in his article “’The Shadow of the Beast’:A Closer Look,” published in the most recent issue of The Dark Man (vol. 5, no. 1), cites Howard’s appreciation of Wray and Armstrong, as well as his penchant for using large apes in his stories, as being possible evidence that he saw King Kong. Hoffman also notes that the stegosaurus that appears in the film might have been the inspiration for the description of the dragon in “Red Nails”:

Through the thicket was thrust a head of nightmare and lunacy. Grinning jaws bared rows of dripping yellow tusks; above the yawning mouth wrinkled a saurian-like snout. Huge eyes, like those of a python a thousand times magnified, stared unwinkingly at the petrified humans clinging to the rock above it. Blood smeared the scaly, flabby lips and dripped from the huge mouth.

The head, bigger than that of a crocodile, was further extended on a long scaled neck on which stood up rows of serrated spikes, and after it, crushing down the briars and saplings, waddled the body of a titan, a gigantic, barrel-bellied torso on absurdly short legs. The whitish belly almost raked the ground, while the serrated backbone rose higher than Conan could have reached on tiptoe. A long spikedtail, like that of a gargantuan scorpion, trailed out behind.

Did the log scene in King Kong influence a similar scene in a Breckinridge Elkins yarn?

Howard’s ‘dragon,’ with its barrel-shaped body, short legs, and spiked tail, does sound very much like a stegosaurus (albeit carnivorous rather than an herbivore) , and of course this interpretation was popularized by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith in their now-classic adaptation of “Red Nails” for Marvel’s B&W comic magazine Savage Tales. Even if one accepts the accuracy of this interpretation, however, it is not conclusive evidence. It is true that the stegosaurus in King Kong was one of the most widely seen early depictions of that type of dinosaur in popular culture, but it was certainly not the only one.

I would suggest that there is a much more convincing piece of evidence that Howard saw King Kong, though it does not appear in his weird fiction or in an adventure tale as one might expect, but a somewhat more unlikely place: a humorous western. In one of the more memorable scenes in the film, the giant ape is pursued by Jack Driscoll, Carl Denham, and several crewmen across a large log bridge lying over a deep ravine. Kong turns on his pursuers as they attempt to cross, lifts the log, and, after shaking off several hapless sailors, hurls it into the ravine. All of the pursuers, with the exception of Driscoll and Denham, plunge to their death (the entire scene can be viewed here).

This “log bridge” scene is closely echoed by a similar episode in the Breckinridge Elkins yarn, “Cupid from Bear Creek.” According to Patrice Louinet, the story, originally entitled “The Peaceful Pilgrim,” was written around February 1935 — two years after King Kong was released — then subsequently re-written before being published in its final form in the August issue of Action Stories. In the yarn, Breckinridge is pursued across a log bridge by outlaws and he reacts in a very Kong-like fashion:

I bent my knees and got hold of the end of the tree and heaved up with it, and them outlaws hollered and fell along it like ten pins, and dropped their Winchesters and grabbed holt of the log. I given it a shake and shook some of ‘em off like persimmons off a limb after a frost, and then I swung the butt around clear of the rim and let go, and it went down end over end into the river a hundred and fifty feet below, with a dozen men still hanging onto it and yelling blue murder.

The similarity of this scene to its counterpart in King Kong, with Breckinridge playing the part of the giant ape (not much of a stretch), is so close that to my mind it cannot be a coincidence. I believe that, taken together with the other circumstantial evidence, this passage from “The Cupid of Bear Creek” makes it possible to say with reasonable certainly that not only did Howard see King Kong, but it also had a least a small influence on his work. As a fan of both Howard and the film, I have to confess that I find that an appealing thought.

[PLEASE NOTE - Not long after posting this piece, it was pointed out to me that Brian Leno had discussed this very topic two years in an article published in the print version of The Cimmerian (which Leo quotes below). I was unaware of Brian's work and I would like to give him due credit for being the first one to make the connection between King Kong and "The Cupid from Bear Creek." Brian posted a response to my piece at Two-Gun Raconteur in which he suggests that the fact that we came to this same conclusion independently helps strengthen the argument and I have to agree. In my opinion there is little room for doubt that Howard saw King Kong. -- Jeff]

LEO GIVES CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE: Great minds think alike, Jeff: Brian Leno made this exact correlation between Elkins and Kong in the print Cimmerian a few years back. In his essay “When Yaller Rock Came to Chawed Ear” which appeared in V5n5 for October 2008, Brian stated:

Such animalistic antics are common in these tales — in fact, A Gent from Bear Creek has Breckinridge Elkins called “my brawny but feeble-minded gorilla of the high ridges,” by one of the supporting cast of characters. And so he is. Elkins has strength beyond mortal men — strength beyond even a normal-sized ape. One is tempted to quote the memorable Jim Croce lyric from “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”: “Badder than old King Kong / And meaner than a junkyard dog.” Breck’s power is so hilariously great it oftentimes merits genuine comparison to “the eighth wonder of the world,” King Kong himself, which leads me to yet another possible influence for Howard’s comic westerns, this one the most unexpected yet. It was Morgan Holmes who said in The Cimmerian V2n6 that “A question I have had for a long time and one that I know other Howard enthusiasts have thought is: did Robert E. Howard see the original King Kong in 1933?” That question, I think, is answered by one of Howard’s Elkins tales, “The Peaceful Pilgrim,” which seems to slyly borrow a famous scene from what was, at that time, a recent state-of-the-art hit in movie theaters.

King Kong, according to the revised edition of George E. Turner’s Spawn of Skull Island (2002), was released on April 10, 1933. Howard’s “The Peaceful Pilgrim,” rejected in 1935, was later revamped and used in his collection A Gent from Bear Creek (1937) as “Cupid from Bear Creek,” making the timeline correct. The scene of King Kong carrying Fay Wray into the jungle is probably one of the most familiar in cinema, and few can forget the sequence immediately following, where Bruce Cabot and some sailors are trapped on a log-bridge which covers a vast abyss. Kong is determined to stop the pursuit and, leaving Ms. Wray in a tree, returns to the crossing. Once all the men are upon the log, the ape reaches down, wrests his end of the log into the air, and starts shaking it. Cabot scrambles for safety in a cave beneath the bridge, where he watches in horror as a few of the other men are knocked off the log and vanish into the canyon far below. Those who manage to keep a firm grip on the log are outmaneuvered, when with a great heave Kong tosses the entire works down into the chasm, the poor devils screaming all the way down to oblivion. It’s a memorable scene that audiences have marveled over ever since.

Apparently Howard found it hard to forget as well. In the first version of his Bear Creek story, Elkins is attempting to stop the pursuit of a gang of men on horseback from following him over a similar log-bridge. “But I got to the end of the bridge in about three jumps,” he writes, “…I bent my knees and got hold of the end of the tree and heaved up with it. It was such a big tree and had so many hosses and men on it even I couldn’t lift it very high, but that was enough. I braced my laigs and swung the end around clear of the rim and let go and it went end over end a hundred feet down into the canyon, taking all them outlaws and their hosses along with it, them a-yelling and squalling like the devil.”

The revised section from his A Gent from Bear Creek is even closer to the movie version. This time, the outlaws try to cross without their horses, and when Elkins shakes the log, they hurriedly drop their rifles and attempt to hold on. But, as in King Kong, some fall off just the same, and finally Breckinridge swings the end of it over the rim and then releases his hold, causing all to vanish into the depths which, in this telling, have now deepened to one-hundred-fifty feet. In the case of King Kong it was beauty that killed the beast, and while beauty never killed off Breckinridge Elkins it sure got him into some peculiar predicaments — and the literature left to us by Robert E. Howard is much richer because of it.

So full credit to Brian Leno for being the Amundsen planting his flag on this particular South Pole, leaving our blogging pal Jeff gasping out his life on the Howardian critical tundra, all his hopes for being first reduced to those of a doomed Scott!

Just one example of why anyone who professes a serious interest in REH needs to be the owners of a complete collection of The Cimmerian. They are floating around out there on eBay and other book sites, waiting to be scooped up by all the latecomers to the party. Right now I can see complete Deluxe sets, in slipcase (advertised by the seller as “absolutely beautifully produced material, fascinating and informative”), of both Volume 1 and Volume 2 on the Advanced Book Exchange for $150 (those are steals, in my opinion — for comparison, a single issue from this set is currently sitting on eBay for almost $50 all by itself). There’s also a number of issues from various Volumes available for $23 a pop (although you’ll have to ask whether they are truly Deluxes or Limiteds, as the advertisements seem to conflate the two, saying the issues come from a “deluxe edition of 150 numbered copies” — of course, the Deluxe edition was 75 copies, and the Limited was 150, so one part of the other of that blurb is misstated).

It will probably be awhile (if ever) before I deign to release some sort of Best of Cimmerian anthology in book form. But one thing I probably should do is get a full Cimmerian Index online, so new scholars can at least find out whether something was originally covered in the print mag, and then ask us old-timers for any necessary details.

JEFF RESPONDS: Well, apologies to Brian. I was not aware of his earlier essay on this topic as I do not have that issue of The Cimmerian. In my defense, I did briefly discuss my topic with a noted REH scholar who did not mention that the idea had been published earlier; nor did Hoffman mention it in his recent article that I referenced above. To be perfectly frank, the lack of availability of back issues of The Cimmerian is very frustrating to new scholars such as myself who were not able to get them all before the unsold stock was destroyed (though I know Leo had his reasons for doing so). For what it is worth I have been trying to acquire back issues when resources and availability have permitted and will continue to do so, but it will likely be a process that will take years rather than months. Leo, I do hope you will consider creating an index as you suggested as that would be a great help to us “latecomers.”

Of songs sung on the Western frontier, most of them, especially cowboy songs, originated in Texas, since that state was the first Anglo-American region to truly deserve the designation of “West” in the proper sense. Texas songs went up the Chisholm with the longhorn herds and spread all over the West, being changed in other states to correspond with the locality in which they were sung. Other songs – hunter’s and rivermen’s – came through the Middle-West. A few originated in America, most were old British ballads changed by ignorance or intent, taken from, and added to, to suit the minstrels’ notions. Its strange how old some of those songs are, and how long the old ballads lingered.

– Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. October 1931

Sixty-four years after Robert E. Howard touched on the connection between his beloved cowboy songs and the British Isles from whence his bloodline hailed, an ace mandolin player from Alberta, Canada, embarked on what was then a unique project. David Wilkie and The McDades blended cowboy songs with traditional “Celtic” instrumentation — the tin whistle, the harp, the fiddle, and, of course Wilkie’s mandolin in an infectious CD titled “Cowboy Celtic.”

The 1995 CD created such a stir that Wilkie put together band called Cowboy Celtic and released another CD, this one titled “Cowboy Ceilidh” (a Ceilidh being an Irish or Scottish gathering of friends with music, dancing and storytelling).

Wilkie explained the connection of Celtic music with the folk music of the American West:

On the western plains of nineteenth century North America, intoxicating Gaelic melodies drifted through the evening air at many a cowboy campfire and during lonely shifts at night guard. These songs were brought over from the old country and often refitted with lyrics to suit the singer’s new occupation.

The Celtic origins of cowboy music are well documented. Traditional Irish, English, Scottish and Welsh folk music served as the foundation and model for countless cowboy classics. Cowboy Ceilidh melts the rolling hills of Ireland into the dusty trails of Texas; the rugged Scottish Highlands into the majestic Alberta Rockies; and the gentle English chalk streams into the roaring rivers of Montana.

Perhaps the most classic example of Celtic roots for a cowboy song is found in “The Streets of Laredo, or The Cowboy’s Lament,” which was “The Unfortunate Rake” in Scotland and “The Bard of Armagh” in Ireland. They lyrics change with the local, but the theme remains the same: a dying man warning others not to follow the path of sin that leads inexorably to “beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly and play the dead march as you carry me along…”

Celtic music of any kind always reminds me of Robert E. Howard. When I hear Dougie Maclean’s “The Gael” in The Last of the Mohicans, I am transported not so much to the forests of French and Indian War-era New York but to the misty hills of Cimmeria.

There is a similar effect to Cowboy Celtic’s “The Betrayal of Johnnie Armstrong,” the tale of the execution of a Border Reiver during the 16th Century.

Border Reivers depicted by the great Angus McBride.

Wilkie notes that:

Across the sea in Scotland, centuries earlier, scenarios similar to those in the old West were being played out. Cattle men were swimming herds through rivers, trailing cattle through glens controlled by rival chieftains, getting ambushed by reivers (cattle thieves) and being hung for rustling.

The lyrics of “The Betrayal of Johnnie Armstrong” are in the fine old tradition of rough-edged epic poetry that Howard loved and wrote so well:

Come all you border riders
And listen to my song
My story has been told before
I’ll not detain you long.
It’s the tale of Johnnie Armstrong
And the king who did betray
A man of trust and honesty
His cattle taken from the enemy
But they hung him from the gallows tree
Johnnie Armstrong’s gone away.

I distinctly remember thinking when I first heard that song on “The Drover’s Road”: “That’s a Howard song!”

Cowboy Celtic’s music ensures that the old ballads linger just a while longer — and gives those of us who treasure our Celtic heritage and nurture a love for the tales of the American West and of Robert E. Howard a fine soundtrack for our dreams.

*Art by Angus McBride

A previously unknown copy of the exceedingly rare 1937 Herbert Jenkins first edition of A Gent from Bear Creek has been just been discovered by noted Robert E. Howard scholar Patrice Louinet. This is only the thirteenth known copy of Howard’s first published book to be located and it could very likely be one of the nicest copies in existence. Judging from the photos, it appears to be in better condition than the Darrell Richardson copy, which sold at auction last month for over $12,000. Louinet found the book last week with an automated online search and quickly purchased it from the UK bookseller that had listed it. The exact events are best described by Louinet himself (as posted at TGR):

“Just like every Howard collector, I’ve always wanted to own a copy of the Jenkins Gent. I knew that I would have to get lucky if I ever wanted to find one, because my pockets were not deep enough to buy one at full price. When the Darrell C. Richardson auction was announced a few weeks ago, I did raise a good chunk of money to go after the Phantagraphs and some desired pulps, but the copy of Gent that was in the lot was never on my radar.

Now, I suppose every hardcore collector is aware that a few years ago an American bookseller listed a Jenkins edition of Gent for $15, obviously having no idea as to its real value. This copy was immediately snatched up by a Canadian bookdealer and ended up on eBay, selling for $8,500 a few weeks later. I suspect that a lot of people had the same idea I had – that history could repeat itself, so I added Gent to my list of automated notifications from ABE [Books] and patiently waited.

Last Tuesday (April 20), a little before 6:00 pm French time, I received the email. I remember seeing A Gent from Bear Creek in the subject field, which surprised me because I usually don’t get notifications for the book, and then I saw the year – 1937. I don’t remember registering anything as to the condition except that it lacked the dustjacket, and the price: £20 ($30 American). It took me a few seconds to digest all this, and then I literally went dizzy, immediately clicked on the item, logged in, and bought it. The whole transaction took 30 seconds, tops. I didn’t know how much I had paid for postage, and was not really sure I hadn’t made a mistake.

I tried to cool down, re-read everything, took a deep breath and decided to give the bookseller a call. I told him I was simply inquiring if my order had gone through, because I had been looking for that book “for years.” I offered no further details. The bookseller said it usually took a couple hours before they get the notification, but he did some checking and thus the book was pulled off the ABE list within the hour. I didn’t ask him to confirm it was indeed a 1937 Herbert Jenkins edition, as I didn’t want to arouse suspicion. The conversation ended when he told me the book would go out the next day.

For the next 48 hours, the butterflies in my stomach were killed by the pins and needles I had in there. On Thursday, I received notification that the book had shipped and I became hopeful, but still remained wary. It arrived today in a plain padded envelope. Fortunately it made the trip safely and didn’t suffer any damage in transit.”

Even after receiving confirmation from the seller that the book had shipped, Louinet was still trying to keep his hopes and expectations tempered. As he wrote to me in an email last week, “It can still get lost, or be the Don Grant, McHaney’s facsimile, something else, I don’t know. Sure, the description is that of an old book, but I don’t want to believe it. Yet.”

After a nerve-wracking week of waiting for Louinet, the book finally arrived this morning and he confirmed that it was indeed the real thing. As with all but one of the known copies, it lacks the elusive dust jacket, but it appears to be in excellent condition. According to Louinet, “the book is in amazing shape; by far the best copy I have seen. No fading whatsoever — some very light foxing, some minor rubbing and shelf-wear, and that’s it.”

With this find, Louinet will no doubt be the envy of REH collectors everywhere. After recently acquiring several rare Howard related pulps and fanzines, he has topped it off with one of the most sought-after of Howard collectibles. Amazingly, he does not consider this rare book to be the best item in his incredible collection:

“Now, I know that A Gent from Bear Creek is the Holy Grail for most heavy-duty Howard collectors, so I am on Cloud Nine, no doubt about it. But my state of mind is nowhere near what I felt when I came into possession of the original of the iconic 1934 Fedora/Al Capone photograph. Receiving that rare gift still gives me shivers. It is a one of a kind item, one that has a real connection to Bob Howard. This copy of Gent is only a book – well, a really, really rare book.”

“Only a book,” it is true, but what a special book it is. The first edition of A Gent from Bear Creek was published posthumously in 1937, in the UK by Herbert Jenkins. Its unusual scarcity is thought to be due to most copies being destroyed during World War II from bombing and paper drives. Only one copy with an intact dust jacket is known to exist; it originally belonged to August Derleth, but has been owned by Glenn Lord for many years. For collectors it is a moot point anyway as this copy will likely never be on the market — it will eventually end up in the collection of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.

The copy belonging to long-time REH and ERB collector Darrell Richardson (mentioned above) had been in his collection for many years until his recent passing, when it was auctioned off by his estate. Isaac Howard’s former copy is now in the collection of Ranger Junior College in Ranger, Texas. In addition to lacking the dust jacket, it was taken apart in order to create the photo-offset first American edition published by Donald Grant in 1965, and then subsequently rebound. An ex-library copy, once owned by Mel Stein, is now in a private collection in Canada. Four known copies exist in library collections (1 in the British Library, 1 in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, 1 in the National Library of Scotland, 1 in the Trinity College Library in Dublin).

For many years, these were the only known copies, but in the last decade the internet has led to the discovery of five more examples. A jacketless copy with restored endpapers was offered on eBay several years ago. Another copy originating from a bookstore in South Africa was purchased by Leo Grin and donated to the Robert E. Howard Museum in Cross Plains. A copy was purchased in 2005 by English collector Alistair Durie from a Charing Cross bookseller in London for over £2,000. The copy mentioned above by Louinet that appeared on ABE Books several years ago for $15, was then sold on eBay to a pulp collector, who traded it to Ed Gobbett for a valuable run of Shadow pulps. And now, this latest copy, also found on ABE, makes the thirteenth known copy.

While this book is unquestionably scarce, I have little doubt that there other copies out there in the “wild” that have not been recognized for what they are — perhaps even copies in jacket. Even among collectors of this type of material, the Jenkins A Gent from Bear Creek is not a well-known item. For the typical bookseller, even if they might have heard of Howard through his Conan stories, they might not connect the name with this collection of humorous western tales. If Howard’s first book had been Hour of the Dragon (which was almost the case), then you can be sure that most of the known copies would have been accounted for long ago and you would not have many copies flying under the radar like this. That makes A Gent from Bear Creek somewhat unique among well-known author’s first books, in that it is clearly still possible for savvy collectors to make that lucky find and acquire a copy on the cheap.

So how much does Louinet think his £20 purchase is worth?

“A copy that was not in such great shape, the Richardson copy, fetched about $12,000 a few weeks ago in a little-publicized auction. With that in mind, one can only wonder as to the value of the copy now in my possession.”

One can only wonder indeed. I suspect that if sold by a high-profile auction house like Heritage or Christie’s, it could easily fetch $15,000 to $20,000. But, that will have to remain in the realm of speculation, as Louinet has no plans to sell it:

“You might ask if I am planning to sell my copy. Well, no, I have no intention of parting with it – unless you have some original Howard typescripts to trade. That I would consider.”

I announced an upcoming Breckinridge Elkins webcomic here at The Cimmerian last December. Australian artist Gary Chaloner posted today on The Official Robert E. Howard Forum that his new website dedicated to his comic adaptation of Howard’s Gent from Bear Creek is now fully operational:

Just letting everyone here know that the brand-spanking new webcomic and website has launched over at www.BreckinridgeElkins.com ! Pages will update weekly initially, but if the feedback is good, we hope to increase the frequency. More articles and extras will be added as the weeks roll by as well.

So please pop on over and give the online adventures of Breck Elkins a go!

Heading this blog entry, you can see the first page of his take on “The Mountain Main,” REH’s tale first published in the Mar.-Apr. 1934 Issue of Action Stories. Below is a preview of the second page.

As Chaloner put it himself  ”His romping tales are perfect for comic books.” Indeed, there is little doubt that ‘cartoonish’ characters like Sailor Steve Costigan and Breckinridge are splendidly fitted to such a medium. A lot of fans principally focused on Robert E. Howard’s Sword-and-Sorcery stories might discover another — lighter– facet of the Texan’s multiple talents thanks to this adaptation of his humorous Breckinridge Elkins western tales.

A Hasidic Jewish mystic roams the West, battling demons of the astral plane, relentlessly pursuing his renegade teacher. This is the premise of a new set of four novellas by Edward Erdelac, a screenwriter and storyteller who names Robert E. Howard as his “all-time favorite writer.”

The key to spinning a successful weird tale is for the author to “believe” the story he is telling. A hip, ironic, tongue-in-cheek approach might make for good campy fun, but it destroys any sense of the strange, the menacing, the macabre. By rooting his the mystical adventures of The Rider in actual Jewish folklore, Erdelac creates depth and resonance that no mere make-believe demonology an match. And he plays it straight.

The four tales in Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter have a skewed, bizarre Spaghetti Western feel — and that’s when they’re working in the “real” West. Things get really strange when The Rider abandons his body for extraplanar travel. The setting owes more to the Sergio Leone aesthetic than to the authentic West. However, there are a few obscure nuggets that make a Western history aficionado smile — like the True Name of Sadie in “The Nightjar Woman. And in the second novella in the collection, “Dust Devils,” there is a wonderful direct homage to Howard’s “Kelly the Conjure-Man.

Sadie is that you? We can only wish...

Merkabah Rider will appeal to fans of the Weird Western genre, the only segment of that genre ghetto (sorry for the pun) that remains commercially healthy. It will also appeal to Steampunks. The Rider’s armament alone is a Steampunk’s dream. His Volcanic pistol is marginally effective for a mediocre gunfighter — but it is a deadly weapon on the astral plane.

In a Fantasy Book Critic interview, Erdelac traces the origins of Merkabah Rider to the horror stories of Robert E. Howard:

I’ve had an abiding love of westerns since a family vacation to Deadwood, South Dakota when I was in middle school and I had dabbled in weird western stories in high school after reading Robert E. Howard’s excellent “The Horror From The Mound” and “Old Garfield’s Heart,” plus Joe R. Lansdale’s Jonah Hex series “Two-Gun Mojo.” But, my own forays into the genre never really came together, so I shelved them. Then a couple years ago I came across the term ‘merkabah rider’ in an angelology book, and the image of a Hasidic man with blue glass spectacles embossed with the Seals of Solomon, riding a fiery ethereal horse and wearing a gun belt just jumped into my mind.

Erdelac’s discovery of Howard’s work follows a familiar track (and reinforces the importance of film adaptations in introducing new people to Howard’s characters). Erdelac told The Cimmerian:

I think I discovered Howard the same way a lot of people did, by seeing the Schwarzenegger Conan movie when I was in eighth grade or so. That led me to the fantastic Frazetta cover paperbacks in a local used book store. Reading them I found a character and setting superior to the movie, and eventually realized there was a subtle but noticeable difference in quality between the stories penned solely by Howard and those completed by other authors (DeCamp, Carter, etc.).  Conan led me to Kull, which led me to Solomon Kane, and then Cormac Mac Art and Bran Mak Morn (and eventually Breckinridge Elkins, which is a marvelous and entirely different character). I read Howard ravenously throughout high school and early college, and although my tastes branched out to other authors in the interim, I’ve continuously found myself going back to him, my eye drawn to his name on the shelves, usually on some new collection of stories. Even though I’ve read a lot of what he has to offer (even the Fight and Oriental stories), I always seem to find a title I’m not familiar with.

Every couple years I’m compelled to go back to the old standby stories and revisit them, whether it’s “Old Garfield’s Heart” or “Wings In The Night.” And they still hold up.

Merkabah Rider, published by Damnation Books, is an enjoyable foray into a weird landscape of signs, seals, demons and angels. Howard fans might want to saddle up their white mule and follow along.

John Wesley Hardin by Michael Shreck

Long narrative dreams are fairly common with me, and sometimes my dream personality is in no way connected with my actual personality…  I’ve wandered all up and down the 19th Century as a trapper, a westward-bound emigrant, a bar-tender, a hunter, an Indian-fighter, a trail-driver, cowboy — once I was John Wesley Hardin!

– REH to H.P. Lovecraft, February 11, 1936

Robert E. Howard was fascinated with John Wesley Hardin, probably the deadliest Western gunman of them all. It’s not hard to see why: the Texan possessed the qualities of skill at arms, physical prowess, indomitable will  and go-to-hell attitude that Howard infused into all his protagonists. In fact, Hardin might have been one of Howard’s characters. He once wrote, “Some day I hope to be able to use the life of John Wesley Hardin, either as a biography, or a basis for a historical novel.”

Hardin has been a figure of controversy since the day in 1868 when he shot down a former slave whom he claimed had attempted to brain him with a club. The teenaged Hardin killed the man named Mage and three Federal soldiers sent to bring him in. Thus began the career of the most famous and deadliest of all of Texas’ Reconstruction era outlaws.

He was the deadliest man in Texas, on that they all agreed. Otherwise, they might have been talking about two different men…

Some said he was nothing but a hero. Hellfire, didn’t he take up a gun against the bluebellies riding roughshod over Texas in the dark days after the War? …Sure he killed men, a lot of men — men who were trying to kill him! Self Defense is the First Law of Life; everybody knows that…

…Others were of different opinion. He was a rebel by nature, they said, a bad seed. No, worse, much worse than that. He was Evil at Heart. A killer, natural-born…

– James Carlos Blake, The Pistoleer

Howard was clear as to where he stood:

It would be hypocritical for me to pretend that I did not feel a certain keen admiration for such men as John Wesley Hardin, Simp Dixon, Bob Lee, etc. But I do not consider these men ordinary criminals, in the first place. Anyway, whatever crimes they may be said to have committed were more than balanced by the war they waged against the vandals who were looting the South at that time.

…John Wesley Hardin had one of the finest minds that this continent ever knew. He was, at various times, a school-teacher, a lawyer and a writer. His autobiography is remarkably vivid and lucid. Under different circumstances he would have been a statesman; possibly governor of the state.

But instead, Hardin was a killer, and a prolific one. His most recent biographer, Leon Metz of El Paso, says that Hardin’s body count can reliably be pegged at no less than 20 men and may rise as high as 50.

Metz is no Hardin apologist. He casts a jaundiced eye on Hardin’s self-justifications in his “vivid and lucid” autobiography.

You have to wonder about a man who killed so massively, so methodically and so remorselessly.

You have to think of the boy, John Wesley Hardin, being raised in a staunch religious tradition, steeped in Christian virtues, who became a sort of wrathful Old Testament figure, a dark angel slaying enemies real and perceived.

You have to wonder about the wicked brew of ideas and ideals that bathed and shaped the mind of the boy Hardin. He had a fierce fire and brimstone religiosity, a rigid code of family loyalty and that indelible sense of honor that was part and parcel of the lives of Southerners, rich and poor.

And you have to mix the brew with the awful period of Hardin’s youth, when the South lay beaten down, praying for hate and praying for vengeance.

– Leon Metz, John Wesley Hardin: Dark Angel of Texas

Modern criminology offers some insight into the kind of conditions that create a killer like Hardin. Sgt. Rory Miller, in his brilliant book Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training and Real World Violence, says that “Lonnie Athens’ ‘violentization’ process as outlined in Richard Rhodes’ book Why They Kill fits my experience best…”

Athens’ theory of “violentization” (a play on the concept of “socialization”) describes how the experience of violence — and the success and rewards of violent behavior — locks in a pattern of behavior and creates a very dangerous predator. A killer.

The violentization follows four stages: Brutalization, Belligerency, Violent Performances, and Virulency. With the exception of the “brutalization” phase — there is no evidence of Hardin being physically brutalized or subjected to horrifying attacks on his loved ones — the template fits and explains Hardin’s career.

Brutalization usually means some form of physical abuse. In Hardin’s case, it seems reasonable to believe that he internalized the defeat and “brutalization” of his people’s subjugation to an exceptional degree.

I had seen Abraham Lincoln burned and shot in effigy so often that I looked upon him as a very demon incarnate, who was waging a relentless and cruel war on the South to rob her of her most sacred rights. So you can see that the justice of the Southern cause was taught to me in my youth and if I never relinquished thesed teachings in after years, surely I was but true to my early training. The way you bend a twig, that is the way it will grow, is an old saying, and a true one. So I grew up a Rebel.

– John Wesley Hardin

The belligerency stage, Athens says, also includes violent coaching. Hardin’s entire culture enforced aggressive, physical response to any slight to the honor and Hardin was often in school scrapes. That’s not so unusual for the time and place. Yet Hardin’s youthful scrapes escalated swiftly. He was nearly expelled for stabbing a rival with a jack knife.

Hardin had demonstrated many “violent performances” by the time he confronted the freed black man, Mage. Killing him was his penultimate “violent performance” and far from prompting horror and revulsion among his people, Hardin was regarded as a hero by his kin for standing up for himself.

John’s boyhood friend and classmate, attorney William B. Teagarden, who would outlive Hardin by forty years, wrote Hardin’s daughter Mollie a letter in 1931. He offered insight into the early times of her father’s career, explaining that, in those days “it was not, under any circumstances, permissible for a Negro to assault a white man, and death was always the penalty. That was the result in this Negro’s case.”

– Leon Metz

Race spurred Hardin’s actions and race shaped his people’s response to it. It is acutely uncomfortable to read Howard’s statements about Hardin’s first killings, for they reveal a racism that had scarcely diminished at all between 1868 and Howard’s day:

John had the misfortune to be on the losing side of a war — something that has always been considered inexcusable by the human race. A price was put on his head by the Carpet-baggers. He was to be brought in by nigger soldiers, tried in a nigger court before a nigger judge and jury. Remarkable fairness! Not being a complete fool, John hid in the brakes of the Navasota. A Federal officer and three or four nigger soldiers in blue went hunting for him. They’re there yet. At least their bones are, rotting in the marshes where the people threw them after they had walked into the trap the fourteen-year old boy laid for them single-handed.

Held up as a hero, admired by other violent young men, the newly minted cock-of-the-walk of Texas, Hardin quickly moved into the virulency stage.

Filled with feelings of exultancy… he becomes pugnacious to the point where he will without the slightest hesitation strongly rebuke anyone who would foolishly criticize him…

– Richard Rhodes, Why They Kill

Virulent indeed. Hardin would kill and kill again, on the cattle trails to Kansas, in the Sutton-Taylor feud, and in countless personal scrapes, always believing he was justified, a verdict Howard would affirm: “John Wesley Hardin killed thirty-five men during his brief career. And I can not find an instance where the victim didn’t merely get what was coming to him.”

Hardin finally crossed a line in killing a deputy sheriff named Charlie Webb in the town of Comanche, Texas. Texas Ranger John B. Armstrong tracked Hardin to Alabama and apprehended him (after buffaloing him with the barrel of his Colt).

Arrested John Wesley Hardin, Pensacola Florida this P.M. He had four men with him. Had some lively shooting.  One of their number killed.  All rest captured. Hardin fought desperately.  Closed in and took him by main strength. We are waiting for a train to get away on. This is Hardin’s home and his friends are trying to rally men to release him. Have some good citizens with, and will make it interesting.

- John B. Armstrong, telegram to Rangers HQ

Hardin was sentenced to 25 years in prison, where during the first years he continued to be pugnacious to the point of madness, fighting with guards, attempting to escape and enduring beatings and repeated stints in “the Hole.”

He finally appeared to reform and was paroled. He drifted to El Paso, fell into drinking heavily and gambling and his old pugnacious nature reasserted itself. Constable John Selman, fearful after a quarrel with the deadly gunman, finally took him down, shooting him in the back of the head in an El Paso saloon while Hardin rolled the dice.

Hardin’s story is a dark one. The “violentization” of a boy universally regarded as exceptionally bright and capable could rightly be regarded as a Western tragedy rather than as a Western epic.

But it is doubtful that either Hardin himself or Robert E. Howard, writing of him forty years after his death, would see it that way. Howard never made apologies for his attraction to the rough times of the frontier — and the dangerous nature of frontier gunmen .

I once said that I wish I could have lived on the Texas frontier. I simply say that in spite of its unquestioned drawbacks and hardships, the time and place suited my partic- [sic] temperament better than any other.

– REH to H.P. Lovecraft, February 11, 1936

A product of his environment and times, his character his destiny, Hardin was simply the deadliest man in his world. You can’t get more Howardian than that.

This Cimmerian blog entry is a bit out of the ordinary. Following Damon C. Sasser’s recent post on the REH:Two-Gun Raconteur blog, fellow blogger Al Harron and myself both started to work on articles about proposed Howardian movies. Thus, instead of posting two blog entries with some overlap, we decided to revive the Auld Alliance and to provide a joint entry. Hence, this piece is a collaborative effort, co-signed by Alexander Harron and Miguel Martins.

The film purportedly based on REH’s mighty-thewed “Dark Barbarian” from Cimmeria has begun shooting in Bulgaria, but sadly, the positive news on the Conan project provided by Patrice Louinet tends to be drowned in a miasma of depressing, outrageous and otherwise unpleasant news. Damon Sasser was the messenger of doom last week, as he brought a number of upcoming Paradox projects to our attention.

Let’s start with the bad news which, sadly, outweighs the good.

Untitled El Borak Project
(Action /Adventure New Media Series)

Jason Bourne meets Lawrence of Arabia. Disillusioned after years of U.S. black ops, lethal CIA operative Francis Gordon disappears. Years later, he resurfaces as a mercenary for Afghani warlords and seeks to keep U.S., Russian, and British influence out of the region. In their quest for power, these nations bid for the services of shadowy gun-runner “El Borak,” once known as Francis Gordon.

We don’t know if a screenwriter provided this execrable blurb, or if the person who produced it is only working for Paradox’s website. The latter seems more probable. This film project is not listed on IMDB yet.
Damon has already said a lot of things which needed to be told on the upcoming “El Borak” and “Pigeons from Hell” “adaptations.” His thoughts on the former:

Okay, first of all you know you are in trouble when the blurb for a movie begins something like: “think Godzilla meets The Parent Trap.” Summing up the entire plot of a movie in this way must mean the money guys who are pitched these movies have the attention span of a gnat, which also calls into question the intelligence of those pushing the concept.

Second, the CIA wasn’t around during the time of El Borak’s adventures. It was created in 1947 and by that time Gordon would have been a senior citizen.

Thirdly “mercenary; shadowy gun-runner” to me spells “criminal element” and the El Borak I know is far from a criminal. He is a good guy adventurer, not shady at all. Also, it appears, Gordon has discarded his real name and become simply “El Borak.”  So, assuming they cast Matt Damon in the role of El Borak, he will doubtless be a highly-skilled chop-socky jockey instead of a master swordsman and deadly gunfighter like the real El Borak.  In other words, more of the same old watered down pap Hollywood has been feeding us for years.

Fourth, judging by the description, this mish-mash of a plot takes place during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979 -1989). Also, the British left Afghanistan in 1919, so other than returning after 9/11, they have no real interest in the country. The whole premise of this movie makes no sense at all, which is par for the course.

Fifth, I’ve seen this move before – it’s called Rambo III.

What did you expect, Damon? Instead of being inspired by Robert Ervin Howard, they’re leaning toward a mix between a Delta Force installment and a spy movie. It was predictable…

Someone familiar with the history of the cinematographic adaptations/bastardization of Howard’s material already knows that if one thing is certain, it’s this trend. Bassett took more inspiration from Peter Jackson’s adaptations of the Lord of the Ring trilogy than from any REH yarn for his Solomon Kane pastiche; the leaked script of the new Conan film, presenting yet again an ultra-clichéd tale of revenge, last-of-his-kind story, bore more similarities to John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian than to any Howard yarn. The Curse of REH is once again palpable here.

Damon profoundly dislikes the “X” meet “Y” pitch. Right on, though if someone had written: it’s “The Man Who Would Be King” meets “Lawrence of Arabia,” it would have been slightly less worrying. Incidentally, if passing a judgment on a mere blurb seems harsh, it should be noted that the sole references of the people who wrote it appear to be other movies. Expecting mentions of writers, like for instance some of the Man from Cross Plains’ major influences as Harold Lamb, Rudyard Kipling or Talbot Mundy, would probably have been too much. You have to wonder if the person who penned this blurb has actually bothered to read the El-Borak stories or if she only went by a vague description.

Pigeons From Hell
(Gothic Horror)

Stephen King called Robert E. Howard’s tale “one of the finest horror stories of the 20th century.” Tonally like The Shining and The Others. When a construction crew is hired to renovate a dilapidated mansion in post-Katrina New Orleans, they become trapped when the basement collapses and releases an unspeakable evil. The mansion holds the grisly legend of its previous owners, an influential family who performed grotesque experiments on their servants before a revolt sent them into hiding. One of the construction workers becomes possessed and sabotages all means of escape. The group must then survive the night while being hunted by the wraith of the former owner.

Damon’s comments:

While it is unclear what type of project “Pigeons From Hell” is, I assume it is a movie.

Okay, for starters they threw out 90% of the plot, leaving only the “dilapidated mansion” part.  The traveling friends became construction workers and the “horror” moved from the upper floors to the basement.

This is actually sounds more like a famous New Orleans ghost story than “Pigeons From Hell,” so why not just tell that story and leave “Pigeons” out of the equation altogether?

Again, I’ve seen this movie before – it’s called Session 9.

Plus, was ‘modernizing’ the story by relocating it to ”post-Katrina” New-Orleans really necessary? Joe R. Lansdale already tried to give “a new take on it, a modern feel” to “Pigeons From Hell.” The answer to Damon’s (rhetorical) question might be: it’s easier to market a film based on a written work. There is a potential audience among aficionados of a printed œuvre and the credibility boost is not negligible, more so when the screenwriter and persons responsible for the project are not well-known –as it was the case for Michael J. Bassett when he was helmed to direct his Solomon Kane.

However, let it not be said that these are the only projects that don’t look particularly great.

Age of Conan: Hyboria!
Writer: Mike Fasolo – Comedy/Fantasy
Based on award-winning MMO game Age of Conan, irreverent comedy set in Conan’s world of Hyboria populated with barbarians, sorcerers, and mythical creatures. In lieu of employing traditional animation, we will manipulate the actual game engine graphics to showcase a look which has been embraced by millions of viral video fans around the world.

Mitra wept… Well, it speaks for itself. The late Steve Tompkins would have profoundly disliked to see yet another appearance of the dreaded “Hyboria,” though since the people from Funcom, keepers of this game’s “lore,” are still promoting this inaccurate appellation, it should not be surprizing that Paradox would use it here. This sounds suspiciously like the phenomenal (and genuinely funny) internet hit Red vs. Blue, an anarchic screwball comedy that is unquestionably the greatest thing ever done with the Halo Engine, as well as the popular South Park episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” featuring Age of Conan’s mightiest rival World of Warcraft. Age of Conan’s previous foray into popular culture was in The Big Bang Theory’s “The Barbarian Sublimation,” and while it deserves mighty kudos for referencing Robert E. Howard, one can’t help but think seeing pretty go-getter Penny transform into an unkempt slob through unhealthy playing habits can’t have been good for the game’s reputation.

Mike Fasolo’s current claim to fame is his work on Robot Chicken, which is essentially Family Guy stripped of any pretenses of a formal narrative, though using stop-motion animation instead of traditional animation. Fasolo has been thrice nominated for an Emmy, and the recipient of an Annie, so there’s a slim –slim– possibility that this could be something more than a further embarrassment to Howard’s legacy, though don’t count on it.

Dark Agnes
Action/Supernatural
Dark Agnes, a swordswoman in 16th century France, flees her small town after killing her violent, arranged-marriage fiancé and journeys to find her true calling as a freedom fighter. Along the way, she meets up with a mercenary and aids him in his quest to recover a powerful amulet from the descendant of an evil witch who seeks to use it to destroy the land.

Dammit, it was going so well. Everything was there: it looked like it was going to be a twofer adaptation of “Sword Woman” and “Blades for France,” and it was alluring. Then… they rip off Red Sonja. What in Crom’s name are they doing? Why does every fantasy film have to involve a hoary old quest for a magical MacGuffin that could save or destroy the world? Why would the descendant of an evil witch want to destroy the land, when that would mean their own destruction? Why not arm Agnes with a fancy magical sword while you’re at it? Also, don’t forget to array her in ineffective armor mostly composed of breastplates which barely contain her pulchritude. After that, don’t forget to write a part for the inevitable and irritating comical sidekick. At that point, the list of all the idiotic prerequisites for a bad, generic fantasy movie would be complete.

Sadly, it appears that this is going to follow Gerald W. Page’s lackluster completion of “Mistress of Death,” which ended on a truly pathetic note, where the woman who could “drink, swear, march, fight & boast like any man” is reduced to cowering and wailing in the arms of a man!  If they have to do this, then they could at least make Agnes more proactive and less the sidekick of John Stuart, the real hero of Page’s account. Whenever re-reading “Mistress of Death,” it’s always best to stop before “Stuart led the way,” so as to avoid seeing “I whimpered like a child” attributed to Agnes de la Fere.

Why must pasticheurs adhere to previous pastiches, even in new adaptations? Dark Horse did the same thing when they adapted the Yaralet Fragment into “The Hand of Nergal” despite the titular hand and god (way to work in a deus ex machina, Linwood Vrooman Carter!) having nothing to do with Howard’s original manuscript. Funcom felt that characters created by Lyon Sprague de Camp and his acolytes, like Juma, integrally belonged to their “Conan universe.”  Places and clan names from John Maddox Robert’s Cimmeria found their way into Loren L. Coleman’s “Kern” series. If you’re going to adapt the unfinished Dark Agnes story –instead of trusting Howard and going by the yarns he completed, but that would be too much asking– why can’t you just do your own thing?

Al would be profoundly depressed if he had to pen an “Accept No Substitutes: Dark Agnes” post for one of his very favourite Howard characters; Miguel, equally disturbed by this blurb, would likewise not be thrilled to compose an “Agnes de Chastillon Film: quite as bad as feared” blog entry for The Cimmerian.

It should be noted that Dark Agnes is no longer listed on IMDB. Denise Di Novi, a person whose apparent involvement in this project –as with the development of the Kull film– aroused some hopes earlier does not now appear anywhere as a producer of any movie based on Howard’s characters. IMDB is not always accurate, but it could also mean that this project has been postponed…

Aiming for an ever-elusive “generic” audience by filming movies reduced to lowest common denominators often results in films that nobody wants to see. Howard’s creation was original, feminist, independent and inspiring. It was ahead of its time, in direct contradiction to the false belief that Howard’s stories were only about clichés of damsels-in-distress rescued by iron-thewed (and dull-witted) men. With a complex person like REH, nothing was ever that simple. Agnes de Chastillon spurred enthusiastic comments from the Great Queens of Swords C.L. Moore (“I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed “Sword-Woman”) and Leigh Brackett, who penned the introduction of the Zebra volume The Sword Woman in 1977. Watering down Agnes (like Page did) and/or reducing her to a mere “generic fantasy chick #45″ would be stupid beyond words.

We’ve already had to put up with people thinking Howard was responsible for the chainmail bikini-clad warrior woman who only gained her powers from a supernatural gift after being gang-raped; or those who thought that Conan was a former slave fond of fur underwear with an Austrian accent who grew muscles by pushing (aimlessly) a wheel for a decade; now we have to deal with those who believe that Solomon Kane was an evil man fighting minions of the Judaeo-Christian Devil to save his own soul; don’t mess up Dark Agnes as well.

James Allison
Action/Fantasy
Crippled man, James Allison, finds out his recurring dreams and delusions are not merely figments of his imagination, but are actual memories from his countless past lives. He’s been reincarnated for centuries and now vividly remembers all of his adventures. In the past, he was always a warrior who battled an evil force. In present day, he realizes he’s had the same enemy throughout time and knows he must now fight this enemy in his current form. As we jump between past and current lives, James Allison finds he can summon every skill from the past and use it in the present to defeat his nemesis. Award-winning comic book writer Kurt Busiek created a complete mythology for this project. The first graphic novel, Bloodstar, was based on Robert E. Howard’s “James Allison” mythology.

Are you kidding? Regular readers will be aware that Kurt Busiek’s work on Conan is not viewed highly at TC. Busiek’s otherwise excellent adaptation of “The Tower of the Elephant” was marred by elements of his ludicrous Hyperborea arc, “Born on the Battlefield” turned the Cimmerians into Braveheart-style Scottish peasants, and the less said about “Storyteller” the better. However, at least he was confined to comics: now we have a feature film with his pastichery? Was this one of the reasons Truman was brought in to replace him on Dark Horse‘s Conan, so that Busiek could work on this?

Part of the power of those tales is that Allison is crippled and housebound, yet he is simultaneously consoled and tormented by the memories of past lives, where he was a man of mighty proportions and storied adventures. Apparently, this film is going to jettison that tragic element so that Allison can conjure up his skills to battle some hitherto unseen and unmentioned nemesis. Whoever thought eliminating the contrast and the tension between James’ former heroic lives and his crippled present self is a fool. Part of the appeal of the character and possibly the most poignant aspect of these tales (along with the heroic deaths and sacrifices of some incarnations) come from this contrast. Is this James Allison or The Wheel of Time? Is James Allison the time-traveling equivalent of the Eternal Champion? These stories were written à la Jack London, now they would become ‘Moorcockian’? The idea of someone using skills earned through several lifetimes has been well used in some Science-Fiction stories, as was the case with the Trills on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine –but it isn’t a James Allison story. One of Robert E. Howard’s important themes is the passing of things, be it races, kingdoms, civilizations, individuals –to the very shape of the earth. And this bleak, touching message would be eliminated, now that the crippled Texan can use skills learned in the past instead of being confined to a sick-bed? Bassett and Milius both willingly ignored Robert E. Howard’s pivotal “barbarism vs civilization” theme, one in favor of a done-to-death, Good vs Evil, redemption story, the other to narrate the zen-influenced character development of a pseudo-samourai. Has no filmmaker any clue regarding the themes explored by the Bard of Cross Plains? Or do they simply don’t care?

The worst is that there is a great story that could be told with the James Allison stories… just the way they are. “The Valley of the Worm” and “Marchers of Valhalla” are perfect as it is, grand and epic. “The Garden of Fear” would be fine too. An anthology film with the Taduka Fragment, “The Tower of Time” and “The Guardian of the Idol” could work if you just filmed them in succession, since the stories provide a perfectly acceptable bridge. There’s no need to turn this into Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem or Assassin’s Creed 2 as written by the man who brought you Astro City.

Untitled John Kirowan Project
Mystery /Supernatural
John Kirowan, scholar of the supernatural, travels the world soaking up knowledge of the occult and cursed artifacts. Ultimately sickened by his findings, Kirowan renounces this world, only to get caught up in supernatural occurrences beyond his control. Kirowan must deal with these dangerous new mysteries, despite trying to rid himself of the paranormal world forever. In the vein of Supernatural and Fringe.

Yet again we return to the “hero renounces the life of adventure and violence, but has to return to it because the plot demands it” that we already visited upon Solomon Kane. All it does is eat up time and provide gratuitous tension that nobody believes for a second, and we have to sit and impatiently wait for the hero to see the light and return to his destiny. It’s artificial, overplayed and Robert E. Howard did not use it, precisely because it’s unbelievable. How could Kirowan hope to escape the supernatural world when he knows full well that there is no escape from the horrors lurking in the dark corners of the earth? In a world inhabited by ‘Cthulhoid’ monstrosities, such a flight from cold, bleak, cosmic horror is not in the cards. Since Howard’s characters are more proactive than (most) of HPL’s, they have only one option: to fight, even against hopeless odds.

Paradox actively promotes comparisons to Supernatural, the story of two gunslinging ghostbusters who travel across America ridding the world of evil and naughtiness. Can you imagine what would happen if Paradox openly compared Solomon Kane to Van Helsing in their promotional material? That’s pretty much what would happen here: anyone unversed concerning Kirowan and Conrad might consider a film or television series with the two (how could you have a Kirowan film without his buddy?) as plagiarism of the Winchester Brothers. That sort of misapprehension is proving to be a common phenomenon with Howard-related movies. Earlier, some people on the IMDB boards accused Solomon Kane of ripping off the Lord of the Rings films (sadly, it had some truth in it). People could soon be accusing El Borak of being a Jason Bourne knockoff, or Dark Agnes as Red Sonja.

Still, there is hope that references to Supernatural and Fringe –television series, not films– could mean this is a series itself. In that way, the horrible premise could merely be used for the pilot, and follow up with some actual adaptations of stories! This could be much more exciting, since of all the Howard translations into a non-comic visual medium, Thriller’s “Pigeons from Hell” came the closest to an honest-to-Crom adaptation. Thus, we could look forward to “The Black Stone,” “The Haunter of the Ring,” “The Dwellers Under the Tombs,” “The Children of the Night,” “Dig Me No Grave” et al in hour-long adaptations akin to The Outer Limits. Maybe they could be two-parters or feature-length episodes. If this is a film treatment, and if there is indeed a screenplay hidden somewhere behind all the nonsense, then the solution seems simple: burn this scenario or use it as toilet paper.

Kull of Atlantis
Epic Fantasy
Kull is about a fearless warrior, an exile and sole survivor of fabled Atlantis who wins the crown of Valusia, only to find it as much a burden as a prize. With its fascinating mythology including the destruction of Atlantis, supernatural creatures, and phenomenal battle scenes, Kull is a great opportunity to create a huge world.

What?

Create a huge world?

It already exists. It is Robert Ervin Howard’s pre-Cataclysmic, alternate version of our earth’s prehistory.

Evidently, the person who wrote this blurb has not read Howard’s essay The Hyborian Age – or simply doesn’t care. In it, the Thurian civilization was wiped out in the Great Cataclysm while the Atlanteans survived, not the other way round!

They just can’t help it, can they? We have two adaptations where Conan is the last of the Cimmerians–or at least the last of his tribe–and now we have Kull as the last Atlantean? What an incredible display of  imagination! Already, we have Conan as The Last Cimmerian (until the film comes out and says otherwise, there’s no reason to hope they make a point of making it only his tribe), messing up the idea central to Howard’s mythology that the Cimmerians were the ancestors of the Gaels, who, after their move southward and their conquest (and the Nordheimers’) of a significant portion of the world, would contribute to the ancestry of the Goths, Anglo-Saxons, Cymry, Cimbri, Scythians, and historical Cimmerians — as per The Hyborian Age essay. Now we are to believe that Kull, too, is The Last Of His Kind. At least with Conan’s sexual appetites matching Don Giovanni‘s, it’s not a big stretch to believe that he could sire an entire ethnos single-handed, in a Genghis Khan writ large hyperbolic sorta way. But Kull? The philosopher-king who’s noted for his marked lack of interest in women? Are we expected to believe that he could repopulate the entire Atlantean race in time for their Stone-Age wars with the Pictish Empire? Or are we supposed to somehow forget about all that pesky backstory? Then there’s the fact that this is all set during or after the sinking of Atlantis. This just compounds the matter.

Is this a summary of Matthew “Ninja Assassin” Sand’s screenplay? If yes, then there’s only one suggestion worth repeating to the executives: destroy his piece. Ask this screenwriter to take his inspiration from Howard or hire someone else. Arvid Nelson’s comic already mocked the character’s nature and played hell with the Picts. Now it’s gonna be the Atlanteans, for the sole purpose of telling yet another Last-of-His-Kind story? All the stupid screenwriters and their brothers will one day firmly imprint upon the movie-going public that Robert E. Howard was obsessed with this kind of premise…as with crucifixion scenes. As with Dark Agnes, this project has vanished from IMDB. Given what we read above, it could mean a good thing: this movie might never exist.

Untitled Vikings and Monsters Project
Adventure /Supernatural
In the vein of Pirates of the Caribbean, Irish pirate, Cormac, roams the North Sea and raids countries of the British Isles with his commander, Wulfhere the Skull-splitter and his band of Danish Vikings. Decades after the fall of the Roman Empire, at the onset of the Dark Ages, they battle and plunder with ease until they discover an ancient evil which is hell-bent on destroying the world.

“In the vein of Pirates of the Caribbean.” Now this is just getting silly.

Instead of making a rip-roaring adventure based on “Swords of the Northern Sea,” we get a Dark Ages riff on one of the more obnoxious Bruckheimer franchises. One wonders if they’ll make Cormac a quirky, punch-drunk eccentric modeled after a popular rock musician. And then we see the “ancient evil hell-bent on destroying the world” again. Again. What’s wrong with the Cormac stories as they are? Cormac is a sly, sympathetic rogue, Wulfhere a jolly yet deadly giant, and any of their completed stories would be great flicks. What’s this about yet another beastie who sets out to destroy the planet, even though that would mean destroying themselves?

Still, it isn’t all bad. If we try to be optimistic (despite appearances) there are three adaptations that just might be decent, in that the outlines don’t fill one with outrage, and could point to something halfway good.

Almuric
Sci-Fi /Action /Fantasy
Esau Cairn, a hot-tempered Texas brawler, faces a murder rap after killing a crooked political boss, but finds escape in a secret device that transports him to the alien planet of Almuric. There, he battles his way to honor among savage tribes and gains a reputation for courage and toughness to rival the mightiest of warriors. His valor is tested when he ventures to the horrific land of Yagg, where the seductive winged queen Yasmeena rules an empire of terror from her dark citadel filled with monsters and magic…

Do our eyes deceive us? Are we really reading a plot outline that resembles the source material upon which it is based? Valka, it feels good to be excited for a Howard adaptation! True, there’s every possibility that the adaptation will still make divergences, but Crom’s Devils, as it’s written here, the film’s actually adapting the story! Everything you see there is found in the original novel: that’s a whole league better than any Robert E. Howard film to date. The success of Avatar and the upcoming John Carter film may have been responsible for renewed interest and could possibly lead to adequate– that is, huge– financing for an Almuric project.

Of course, this is one of the only cases where fidelity to the source material might not be as wonderful as one would think, since if we got a 100% faithful adaptation, that means everything written by The Unknown Posthumous Collaborator would appear–including the wishy-washy final chapter. It would be nice if the only Howard adaptation to achieve total fidelity was a completely unambiguous Howard tale, as opposed to one that has a significant percentage written by unknown hands, but these two Howard fans are sick to death of the Kull the Conquerors, so let’s take what we can get. If we see some of the best elements from Almuric –Esau’s flight from civilization, the battle for supremacy, the exotic creatures, the conflicts between the Ghori– that’d more than make up for the ending.

Vultures
Action/Thriller
Highly-stylized action/thriller. High Plains Drifter with the visual appeal of 300 or Sin City. A mysterious Stranger lands a job as deputy of the boom town of Heavenly to help protect it from a gang called the “Vultures” who are robbing and killing any and all prospectors who try to leave with their gold. When the Stranger discovers that his boss, Middleton, is the secret leader of the Vultures, he’s recruited into the scam. Stranger is not without scruples and when murders and double crosses pile up, he must decide whether to remain involved with the gang or let his pistols dispense their own brand of justice.

Obviously, this is “Vultures of Whapeton.” Now, you could raise an eyebrow over “highly-stylized” with “the visual appeal of 300 or Sin City.“ One can either be hopeful if this means that the power of the original story is allowed to shine through, or a  pessimist, and think that an aesthetic so over-the-top as 300‘s has nothing to do in this kind of western. The capitalized “Stranger” can either be a cause of concern, since we know the character’s name, or a relief if this is a further hint that they’re trying to aim for the Clint Eastwood-esque feel suggested by the mention of High Plains Drifter. “Vultures of Wahpeton” is probably one of Howard’s finest western stories, certainly one of the most celebrated, and the twists and turns of the narrative and complex protagonist make it ideal for cinematic adaptation. With the recent popularity of Deadwood and the precedent of morally-ambiguous westerns like Unforgiven seeing a small revival in 3:10 to Yuma and others, Vultures will fit right in.

Warrior (aka Bran Mak Morn)
Universal/Working Title
A mythical king of ancient Britain forges an alliance with supernatural troops to contest the unstoppable forces of the Roman Empire.

Sounds like “Worms of the Earth.” Being desperate to find something good, we’re willing to ignore the fact that they don’t seem to be using Bran Mak Morn or a Howard story for the title, in favour of “Warrior” –let’s hope that’s just a working title. “Forging an alliance with supernatural troops” might sound a bit too much like Hellboy 2: The Golden Army and others. The pessimistic might fear a complete subversion of the original story’s plot. Instead of the titular Worms being harbingers of not just the Romans’ doom, but that of the Picts –and Bran Mak Morn’s very soul– these could end up like a pale imitation of the Army of the Dead in Jackson’s Return of the King. Thus, instead of being integral to the tragedy and horror of the story, it turns into a deus ex machina of the most odious kind. Such washes away even the toughest Orc-stains! Now let’s hope that it is only a slip of language, and that the supernatural army is indeed composed of the Worms that even the heart-ripping sorcerer Gonar fears (and advises his king not to summon).

So overall, there is much to be skeptical about. There’s sufficient precedent to raise the concern that all the REH film adaptations may end up as disasters. However, it’s possible to hope that at least some –even one– of the eleven Howard-inspired projects will end up at least alright. Its sickening to watch the trainwrecks of Howard film adaptations go by in slow motion, while we REH fans can only watch, aghast.

This was Damon C. Sasser’s conclusion:

So the $64,000 question is will these concepts become movies? Perhaps, but this is one moviegoer who is holding out for the real deal. Something tells me I am going to be holding out until Delhi the cow comes home.

A ghastly curse looms over Howard’s writings. A true fan (of any writer) would tell you that no filmmaker can do his favorite author’s works justice… the Curse afflicting the writer of Cross Plains, more powerful than Rotath’s or the Sea-Witch’s, seems to be that, until now, none has even bothered to try.

But come on! The Curse has to be broken some glorious day. There’s eleven Howard adaptations in the pipeline. Eleven. At least one of them must turn out alright.

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.”

The essay was an in-depth exploration of my first and favorite Conan story, “Beyond the Black River” and the fragment “Wolves Beyond the Border,” but it was not just this that grabbed my attention.

As one who had made a cultural study of the American frontiersman the centerpiece of his college education, I was knocked out by the depth of this Tompkins’ reading on the subject — and that he took Howard seriously enough to link him into that study.

I don’t know many people who have read Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence, an academic study of the manner in which the conquest of the American frontier and the displacement of the Indians shaped the American cultural mind. I don’t know anybody who “got it” like Tompkins.

I was intrigued. I remember printing out the essay (dial-up modem, dot-matrix printer) and carrying it around and rereading it repeatedly. There was just so much in there. I would later learn that this was the prime characteristic of Tompkins’ writing. He was massively well-read in a broad range of fields and he saw patterns and interconnections where others would see only disconnected fragments, like a shooting range where someone had blasted forty different brands of beer bottles to bits.

And I really liked his rapier wit, the kind that can skewer the shallow critic. Noting Darrell Schweitzer’s dissing of “Beyond the Black River as “Cowboys and Indians. Pretty poor,” Tompkins responded in a manner that left the critic gutted.

“His remarks in “Conan’s World and Robert E. Howard” on the most American sword-and-sorcery story ever written show that you can lead a horse’s ass to water, but you can’t make him drink.”

Still makes me chuckle. Of course, such verbal jabs don’t mean anything by themselves. Tompkins proceeded to throw body blow after left hook after right cross, demonstrating the mighty power of Howard’s work.

After that, I had to read Howard again.

Other essays had nearly as profound an effect. His defense of Tolkien — since elaborated by Brian Murphy — helped me come to terms with my growing ambivalence about the Professor’s work and restored an appreciation that had fallen away as I aged and grew more cynical.

Tompkins felt like a kindred spirit to me. Many times I thought, “I oughta e-mail Tompkins.” I wanted to get to know him. Alas, I never did. I let it slide and now he’s gone.

The most any writer can hope for — as an artist anyway — is to touch lives, to reach people and make them see some part of the world in a different way. Tompkins did that. He had a passion and he articulated it well and by celebrating all that he loved and defending it from the slings and arrows of fools and poltroons, he lit a fire that burns brightly and timelessly, a fire The Cimmerian continues to tend and stoke.

That’s glory enough for any warrior.

Two Towers — and the shortest distance between them. Tompkins was a staunch defender of Tolkien's S&S cred.

They were of a new breed growing up in the world on the raw edge of the frontier — men whom grim necessity had taught woodcraft. Aquilonians of the western provinces to a man, they had many points in common. They dressed alike — in buckskin boots, leathern breeks and deerskin shirts, with broad girdles that held axes and short swords; and they were all gaunt and scarred and hard-eyed; sinewy and taciturn.

– Robert E. Howard. “Beyond the Black River”

It is a game most Howard fans indulge in — at least those who share his taste for history. Who could fit the bill as a real-life Conan?

For a young boy reading his first Conan story (thought by many to be Howard’s best) there was no doubt. For at the time I looted and devoured my brother’s Conan books, the same rascal gave me a copy of Allan W. Eckert’s The Frontiersmen.

Certainly he knew that I’d enjoy the book. Little did he know that he was bending a twig and shaping the tree.

In The Frontiersmen I found the story of Simon Kenton, a runaway Virginia youth who became a giant of a man and the most skilled, deadly and respected frontiersman in the Dark and Bloody Ground of 18th Century Kentucky. He was much bigger than most of his contemporaries, over six feet tall, a superior athlete and woodsman. Perhaps not a wolf among the watchdogs like Conan, but certainly the alpha watchdog.

Far more than most pioneer Kentuckians, Simon Kenton invited apotheosis, as he embodied those special traits which heroic societies prize and wrought as impressively as a hero ought. From the year of the first settlement until the elimination of the Indian threat, Kenton continually engaged the Ohio tribes both as an individual and as a member of expeditions and he achieved unequaled renown as a scout and spy. No other looms so large in (the) frontier pantheon, though legend has been far kinder to (Daniel) Boone.

— Arthur K. Moore, The Frontier Mind: A Cultural Analysis of the Kentucky Frontiersman

Kenton was probably the most effective irregular combatant against the Indians in the Ohio Valley, but there were others. Captain Sam Brady led Brady’s Rangers in the upper Ohio country and won fame for  his exploits.

Then there was the merciless Lewis Wetzel, Deathwind in Zane Grey’s legendry.

Lewis Wetzel by Timothy Truman

Kenton was a combatant. Wetzel was a killer. In his old age, Kenton expressed regret at one incident where he tomahawked a Shawnee warrior he had pinned beneath him in a fight “for he was in my power and I need not have one it.”

Wetzel never had such qualms. He murdered at least one minor chieftain during a peace conference.

Eckert covers Wetzel’s activities in That Dark and Bloody River, a relatively recent sequel to The Frontiersmen. He believes, with evidence to back it, that Wetzel ended his days in the Brazos country of Texas, presumably killing Comanches whenever he could, extending his frontier rampage from the Ohio country to the land that would breed Robert E. Howard.

REH spoke of Wetzel in a 1931 letter to H.P. Lovecraft:

…Bigfoot Wallace was really a gigantic figure in the old days of the Southwest, when individual prowess and courage meant so much in the development of the frontier. Wallace was well qualified to rank with the more widely known Indian fighters, such as Wetzel, Kenton, Boone, Kit Carson, and Buffalo Bill — if you might call the last an Indian fighter, one  of the most over-rated and over-advertised figures west of the Mississippi. If there ever was a greater Indian fighter than Wallace it was Wetzel, and the only reason for that is that Wetzel was a monomaniac and lived only to take Indian scalps…

Bigfoot Wallace is worth a post of his own, which we’ll get to as the frontier marches West.

The Ohio River frontier is a fertile land of legends. Timothy Truman, who has wielded brush in making the Cimmerian come to life, created a masterful collection of short biographies of frontiersmen titled Straight Up to See the Sky and depicted the legendary renegade Simon Girty (blood brother to Simon Kenton, though they fought on opposite sides of the Revolutionary War) in the stunning graphic biography Wilderness.

Since my first reading of “Beyond the Black River” I have read of the influence of  Robert W. Chambers’ Revolutionary War frontier fiction, set in New York, and I readily acknowledge the Texas influence — “He was excited about it because it was about this country and it sold!”

And Al Harron is right to note:

…that’s not to say that the story is only about the plight of American settlers, Manifest Destiny, colonists-and-injuns, and other such tropes of Western literature: it could also be applied to the heaving Roman Empire’s expansion into dark Germanic territory, or Spain’s conquest of Mexico, or even the Vikings’ struggles with the Skrælings. “Beyond the Black River” is more universal, and deeper, than a mere “Conan of the Mohicans” escapade.

But when I read of Kenton, I saw Conan; when I read of Conan, I thought of that Celt-descended frontiersman. I still do.

If “Beyond the Black River” hits you where you live, track down Simon Kenton. He is close kin of the mighty Cimmerian.