The Sword and Planet of Del DowDell
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Warlord of Ghandor by Del DowDell (DAW, August 1977). Cover by Don Maitz
The genre of Sword & Planet fiction means a lot to me. I read it; I write it; I review it. And sometimes I find a book in the genre I don’t much care for. I have to say so when that happens, and give my reasons. But I always stress that this is my opinion, and I can be influenced by my mood going into a book. I also know how hard it is to write a book so I have to give credit to anyone who finishes one and gets it published.
That brings me to Del DowDell. Somewhere in the 1980s I stumbled on a DowDell book called Warlord of Ghandor. The cover, by Don Maitz, suggested a Sword & Planet kind of tale, and it was published by DAW, which published the Prescot books I loved.
I took it home and read it. It featured a swordsman named Robert of Eire (Ireland) who, in 1639, was transported to the tenth planet in our solar system via a mist-like portal. Supposedly, Robert was an ancestor of the author.
The adventures of Robert are quite ERBian, but I’m afraid I didn’t find them compelling, for two main reasons. First, the gravity of the planet is so low that Robert is indeed a superman among mortal foes. Second, his sword is of much finer steel than the planet’s natives and cuts through their weapons like butter. ERB had remarked on John Carter’s experiences with Mars’ lower gravity, but that gave him a small advantage, not a huge one. The combination of these two things drained the tension of the story. At least for me. Although I know other readers who have liked the book.
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Spearmen of Arn by Del DowDell (Belmont Tower, 1978). Cover art by Doug Beekman
Warlord was published in 1977, and a year later Tower Publications brought out a second S&P book by Dowdell called Spearmen of Arn. The cover art was uncredited but some searching suggests it was Doug Beekman, and it’s much superior to Warlord’s cover.
The writing is also better. An American named Bumper Phillips is flying through the Bermuda Triangle when he disappears through a portal and arrives on the planet Arn where there are two suns and giant birds that remind one of the planets Gor and Kregen.
However, there’s not a lot of action — no swordfights that I remember — and the editing is very sloppy. At least one chapter appears to be completely missing between Chapters 12 and 13. That’s probably not the fault of the author. Though the ideas held promise in both the Dowdell books, the finished product left quite a lot to be desired. At least for me.
Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for Black Gate was a review of the Planet Stories double volume Sojan the Swordsman/Under the Warrior Star by Michael Moorcock and Joe R. Lansdale.
Never saw these books anywhere and never heard of Del Dowdell. Maybe a relation to Bob Dowdell who played Cmdr Chip Morton on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea? Could this have been a “house name” used by DAW Books? It all does sound way to reminiscent of ERB.
I think he’s a real guy who has written other books. There is a Del Dowdell author who also writes religious sorts of books but I don’t know for sure it’s the same guy. there’s not much about him on the net
Steve
From:
steveseg@aol.com
To:
del@delhelen.com
,
Thb
,
planetary-adventure@groups.io
,
Kregen
Thu, May 30, 2024 at 4:53 PM
What follows are a string of e-mails between Del Dowdell and myself back in 2013. It’s been over a decade since then but I thought this post might be of some interest to fans of Planetary Adventure. I’ll try to post to some related groups on Facebook as well.
Steve S./Seg
Here is my first e-mail to the Del Dowdell Homepage:
I am a long-time fan of Dowdell’s “Warlord of Ghandor” and “Spearmen of Arn.” I now see he has written several books since and I’d love to contact him. May I?
Sincerely,
Stephen J. Servello
Del’s response:
Thank you for your inquiry. What can I do for you?
Del DowDell
My queries:
Subject: Re: Your Inquiry
From: Steve
Date: Tue, October 15, 2013 1:08 pm
To: del@delhelen.com
Thank you Mr. Dowdell for the quick response!
I currently moderate several lists on Yahoogroups, some of which pertain to the Planetary Adventure genre. Specifically, the Kregen and Lin Carter Lists.
To that end, I read and re-read all of the Dray Prescot, Tarl Cabot, Carson Napier, etc. books over and over. Naturally, this includes your “Warlord of Ghandor” masterpiece! In fact, I just re-read it again and as usual, it left me virtually begging for at least one sequel.
So, I have two questions:
1. Have you or do you plan on writing a sequel?
2. Why did you not do so back in the late seventies under the DAW imprint?
Lastly, I am very excited to be contacted by such a talented author!
Sincerely,
Stephen Servello
Del replies:
Sorry for the delay, but I misplaced your email in my system and just now discovered it as I was purging old files. As for a sequel, it would probably be fun and I might consider it; however, getting books published today is far more difficult than in the past since most of the small publishing houses have been bought out by the two or three majors and no one else seems willing to move in and take up the slack. Big houses tend to publish sure things, either big names, or successful authors, and do a lot of reprinting in the SF field.
As for the original sequel, Robert ended up back on Ghandor after much effort to find the window again on Eire where he originally stumbled onto Ghandor. The window, as such things go, moves about since the science of anomalies of topological features in spacetime, or of an Einstein-Rosen bridge (traversable wormhole), are obviously not stable as Schwarzschild vacuum has theoretically shown. In any event, this shift causes Robert to end up on the other side of Ghandor than his first visit, in what is pretty much a water world where transportation is by ship (and as he supposed, gravitational flight is unknown to those of this region, and Robert theorizes would be unstable over such oceanic distances). He encountered several adventures among a very different set of civilizations and eventually, in the end, makes his way back to the land of his beloved only to find a startling truth–the window (wormhole) that brought him to Ghandor this second time, deposited him into a world thousands of years earlier than his previous trip, long before any of those he earlier knew had been born, or even their nations established. He realizes he must return to his own world to find an answer to the doorway that would take him back to the previous time frame, which is how the book ends.
Well, that was pretty much the jist of the sequel. The third book dealt with his adventures in trying to find another doorway back to his planet, which he finds at the end of the book, and as he steps onto Earth, he is met with a startling discovery, which is how the book ends. And the fourth book begins with his startling discover that he is now on Earth in a far future time, where he encounters, among others, a professor whose life work has been trying to proving Birkhoff’s theorem of vacuum field equations, which leads him to the von Neumann’s (and others) ergodic theorems and how they work in returning spacetime back upon itself, etc., which eventually enables Robert to gain control over the “doorways” (wormholes), but not before his experiments with them take him in the fifth book back to Earth’s distant past where he encounters, among others, his earlier ancestor who founded Eire, established the clan, built the castles, and is mired in a death struggle with invaders from the north (being so outnumbered, Robert find shimself having to save the life of his ancestor so he would someday be born), with the sixth book finally back to Ghandor, but because of a slight miscalculation on Robert’s part, to a time a little earlier than his original visit there to when his beloved does not know him or about their previous adventure, and the interesting paradox of his knowing her and she not knowing him, of a love rekindled anew, and how he, with his previous knowledge, is able to avert the war that was pending in the end of the first book.
Anyway, there was a plan, but like I said earlier, I got diverted into other matters and never really got back to an interest in that specific genre of writing again. Others encouraged me to write in other areas, which I did, and left the fantasy world entirely. Although, with the advent of greater knowledge today of wormholes, and their greater acceptance in the scientific field, it might be fun to revisit that, with the adventures on a far more science-based basis. It is a thought I’ll have to think on.
Del
I reply:
——– Original Message ——–
Subject: Re: My Inquiry-Your Response-My Response
From: Steve
Date: Tue, October 15, 2013 8:43 pm
To: del@delhelen.com
Mr. Dowdell, thank you again for the rapid and very detailed response to my queries. I consider the loss of your Ghandor sequel manuscript to rank with that of OAK’s third Martian novel (“Hunters of Mars”), a travesty!
Recognizing that it is lost and has been for over 35 years, do you recall the outline of this book (at least how our hero returned to Ghandor) and possibly where you planned to take Robert of Eirie in later sequels?
I appreciate your comments on “Spearmen of Arn” as well. I’ll remember them as I do another re-read.
Sir, would you mind if I share your comments on the Yahoogroups I mentioned as I know like-minded lovers of Planetary Adventure would be quite interested in your response to my questions?
Thank you!
Yours truly,
Stephen Servello
PS Long shot here but have you given any thought to re-writing the Ghandor sequel and thereby setting at rest your legion of fans that have wondered since 1977, did Robert make it back to Ghandor and how did the upcoming war go?
Del responds:
To: Steve
Sent: Tue, Oct 15, 2013 8:14 pm
Subject: RE: Your Inquiry
Thank you for your nice words. As for why I didn’t write a sequel under the DAW, I did, and had 11 books outlined and planned to write on the subject. Donald A. Wolheim (DAW), along with his wife, came to my house in Southern California not long after publishing my book way back then and we had a lengthy discussion about his business, my writing, and who got published and who didn’t and why. At the time he thought I wrote very well and was looking forward to another book.
Steve here: I have deled a couple of sentences at Del’s request.
Back to Dell:
So, I went on to different writing–my favorite subject matter changed to western writing (like Louis L’Amour) such as “Demon Canyon,””Guns Along the Kaibab,” and “Sacred Stones,” and military adventure (like Tom Clancy) such as “Torpedo Alley” and “Total Victory,” and from there I just wrote about anything that struck my fancy, including historical “Braccen,” humor, “Just Call Me Mack,” high-tech (2 not on the published list)–there have been two novels that some might classify SF, but nothing like Ghandor (by the way, the title of that book was submitted as Warrior Legions–Wolheim changed it to Warlord). If you are interested in a different type of SF, you can look up “Time Zones,” and “VirtualGrams,” the latter being my favorite.
If you have read “Spearmen of Arn,” you might be interested in knowing that the book was about 25% longer, with two full chapters cut out, which caused many references elsewhere in the book not to make much sense, and there was a much longer and more detailed intro that made the whole story line more understanding. However, Tower was a budget-oriented publisher, I learned later, and did some creative editing which annoyed me no end. Also, Wolheim did not publish the laboriously studied addendums about language and other explanations in Ghandor that were eluded to in the story-line that further explained some of the situational events–one of which was the very scientific method of magnetic propulsion, etc.
Anyway, that’s about it. The Ghandor sequel somewhere along the line became lost and, being typewritten in those days, there was no computer copy, etc.
Del DowDell
Me again:
Subject: Re: Ghandor Sequels
From: Steve
Date: Tue, December 03, 2013 9:21 pm
To: del@delhelen.com
Thank you so much Mr. Dowdell for the detailed response to my query concerning the plotted sequels to “Warlord of Ghandor. I sincerely hope that you will find a way to re-write and publish some of them. Wildside Press comes to mind or even Lulu for self publishing. I would promote these sequels on many of the Yahoogroups I am on, moderate or own.
To reiterate, I have re-read “Warlord of Ghandor” several times since 1977 and I want you to know that you sir, have brought much joy into my life and I thank you for this!
Yours truly,
Steve Servello
So, I had to cobble the above together and probably mixed up a time-line or two. But the jist is all there.
I have CC’d Dell on this e-mail.
Steve S./Seg the Bowman
Thanks Steve for sharing this. Some neat material as an addendum to this post.
Thanks for the article, Charles. Growing up in a small town with a limited library, I read anything that even hinted at sword & sorcery/fantasy. I’m sure I read my share of books that were subpar. Then on to college where I was introduced to the wonders of multiple used book stores and a major metropolitan library.
I grew up in Arkansas where most everything is rural or small town. Even my college was in a small town, but I got to see a bigger range of stuff when I moved to New Orleans in 1986
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