One of the Best Swordfights in Fantasy: Dray Prescot 20: A Sword for Kregen by Alan Burt Akers
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Dray Prescot 20: A Sword for Kregen (DAW Books, August 1979). Cover by Richard Hescox
About 1979, while in college at Arkansas Tech University, I visited a local used bookstore and found a copy of A Sword for Kregen.
The great cover, drawn by Richard Hescox (who I got a chance to meet), had what looked like a human locked in a sword fight with a creature with four arms and a tail with a hand on it. The four arms immediately reminded me of the Tharks of Barsoom. No way I was leaving the store without that book. It only cost me $1.17. (The price is still written on the cover.)
The book proved to be Sword & Planet and had one of the best swordfights I’d ever read. And, the human hero turned out ‘not’ to be the best swordsman in the fight. I’d never imagined such a thing from reading Edgar Rice Burrough’s Barsoom books and the works of Gardner Fox and others. I fell in love. And best of all, the cover said this was #20 of a series! I had a lot more good reading ahead of me, and I didn’t know the half of it.
[Click the images for larger versions.]
The first 36 volumes of Dray Prescot (DAW Books, 1972 – 1985). DAW published a total of 37.
The inside cover of the book claimed that the author was “Dray Prescot,” “as told to Alan Burt Akers.” Prescot was the hero so it was clear to me that Akers must be the author.
Edgar Rice Burrough himself had used a similar kind of frame to set up the first Barsoom books. I began searching for the series and even wrote to the publisher (DAW Books) to order more.
Interior art by Richard Hescox
Soon, I had a little cache of the series, which I tore through at a fast pace. It was quite a few years before I discovered that Alan Burt Akers was really a tremendously prolific British writer named Kenneth Bulmer.
The Dray Prescot series is the longest Sword & Planet series ever produced, and — I would argue — the most detailed. I’m going to spend several posts talking about it at the Swords and Planet League on Facebook.
We must be of an age because I remember reading them starting in grade 8 and on through high school. I should probably give them another read but I don’t want to spoil my memories
I understand your hesitation. I’ve wondered that about some of the authors I enjoyed as a kid and teenager but have not enjoyed as much as an adult. I suspect this one holds up but you can never be sure.
I love ERB so I read the first couple of these… and found them hard going, though I’ll probably read another one sometime. For my money, the best non-Burroughs Burroughs is still old Otis Adelbert Kline.
I like Kline quite a bit too, although not as much as ERB. I often find the first book in these kinds of series to be relatively weak because there’s so much set up. In my opinion, the Prescot series got better and better over the first dozen books or so. My personal favorites are 12-14.
Bulmer did these in more or less self-contained “cycles” of three or four books, didn’t he? I’m obsessive about reading things in sequence, but if that’s the way he did them, maybe I’ll jump back in farther along.
He did separate them into “cycles,” sometimes up to 6 books in a cycle. Volumes 12 to 14 make up a three book cycle called the Krozair Cycle. 12 has a bit of set up, and then 13 and 14 really kick things into high gear.
There were fifty-two books, total, plus a few associated short stories. DAW Books had a change of direction after #37 and dropped the series, but the German firm that had been issuing translations wanted to continue the series, so Bulmer kept writing them, and they kept getting translated into German and published in Germany without prior English publication, right up until he had his stroke and couldn’t write them any more. More recently, the whole series of 52 has been reissued in ebook form, with door-stop POD print volumes compiling the cycles (sometimes into two paperbacks in a cycle was a long one). Republication was held up for a while because the English manuscript of one book could not be found; eventually they had to REtranslate this one from German back into English! All the ebooks are still available from Mushroom eBooks; the print publisher was Bladud Books, but its website seems to be defunct.
Yes, I’ve got all the books and the short stories, and the one Novella published by DAW. Wizard of Scorpio. I’ve read the first 40 or so. Got some more to go, which I picked up in those Bladud versions. Maybe when retirement roles around. I may have to get the ebooks too because the print on the Bladud compendiums is pretty small.
I saw a bunch of these at a library book sale and picked up #33 “Werewolves of Kregen” strictly because of the terrific cover. It was a good story. Thanks for the pics of the variety of covers – wow! When I see all those great covers I’m reminded of how neat it would be to make a collage of all the great sci-fi/fantasy covers but I would never ruin a book by removing the cover – after they’re read, the books go back into “circulation” through donation)
I saw a picture of a quilt recently that had old paperback covers as the panels. Very cool. Would love to have something like that with some old Pulp SF/Fantasy
i picked up the first 3 on kindle a while back but havent started yet, it will be a while before i get to the sword fight but at least it is something to look forward to, haha
there’s a lot of action throughout that series
Awesome post, Charles! There are few authors who can capture your imagination so profoundly that you end up collecting a mega- series of their work. (I’ve followed several like that, a few for more than 40 years now). . .
And seeing as I’m going to be revisiting some vintage stories in the near future, I may give this a try 🙂
Thank you. I love talking about books
I picked up some number of the original DAW paperbacks a while back, but never quite made any headway with them. Someday …
so much going on in most of our lives these days that it’s hard sometimes to really focus on even a good book
To divert slightly – to the actual title of this post – my favorite fantasy swordfight is the battle between Oscar “Scar” Gordon and the the Eater of Souls in Robert A. Heinlein’s Glory Road.
I actually read that about a year ago. I’ve seen it described as Sword and Planet but I don’t know that I agree. I don’t specifically remember that fight. I’ll have to go back and reread that section
Great to see this series getting noticed!. I’ve loved these books since I was a kid and never understood why they aren’t more well known. I’m finally getting to read the last few that were originally published in German.