Warriors of Noomas (Powell, May 1969). Cover by Albert Nuetzel

Back when the internet was young and I was in a group called REHupa, The Robert E. Howard United Press Association, I heard about Charles Nuetzel, who’d written some Howard-like and Burroughs-like tales.

I’d stumbled on his book called Warriors of Noomas. After a search on the net, I found an email address and sent one flying into the void. I wasn’t sure he was even alive, but he answered and we became frequent correspondents and friends. He too was a huge fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs and quite a bit of his writing was ERB inspired. He’d become a pulp writer and book packager for Powell Publications.

[Click the images for planet-sized versions.]

Raiders of Noomas (Powell, June 1969). Cover by Albert Nuetzel

Then he was put in charge of their science fiction line. The majority of his one hundred or so book publications came in the 1960s and 70s, although many were reprinted in the early 2000s by Wildside Press.

I did a lengthy interview with him that ran in REHupa and was later published in his autobiography: Pocketbook Writer: Confessions of a Commercial Hack. Charles is the man who put me in contact with Robert Reginald, which resulted in the book sales for the Talera series.

Slavegirl of Noomas (Borgo Press, February 9, 2008)

CAN, as I generally call him (he calls me CAG for our initials), wrote two S&P novels published in 1969. These were Warriors of Noomas and Raiders of Noomas, in which a human citizen of a galactic civilization gets transported to the planet Noomas and wakes up with no memory of who he is.

His adventures are very ERBian. The covers and interior illustrations were done by Louis DeWitt. Can wrote a sequel to the two Noomas stories in 2007 with a co-writer named Heidi Garrett. This was called Slavegirl of Noomas.

Swordsmen of Noomas (Powell, January 1969). Cover by Albert Nuetzel

CAN also wrote some other SF/Fantasy books, including Swordmen of Vistar, which is set on an ancient Earth and influenced more by Robert E. Howard than ERB, and The Slaves of Lomooro, a space opera tale written under the pseudonym Albert Augustus Jr, which were his father’s first and middle names. He even wrote an ERBian like Jungle novel.

He knew personally such writers as Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch, and Forrest Ackerman was his agent. His father was a commercial artist with plenty of cover credits to his name.

The Slaves of Lomooro (Powell, October 1969). Cover by Bill Hughes

CAN talks a lot about his ERB influence in Pocketbook Writer. He even wrote, under various pseudonyms, some soft-core porn books for various publishers. These are very very tame by today’s standards.

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Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for Black Gate was Part V of The Fundamentals of Sword & Planet.