Search Results for: solomon kane

A (Black) Gat in the Hand: Frank Schildiner on Solomon Kane

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A couple weeks ago, I reposted James Reasoner’s excellent  ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ essay on REH and trail towns in his Westerns. Another Pulp-centric post from that series was from my New Pulp (and Solar Pons) buddy, Frank Schildiner. He wrote about one of my favorite REH characters, Solomon Kane. There are a lot of Kane fans here at Black Gate. And for a couple years now, I’ve been trying to follow up ‘Discovering Robert E Howard,’ and ‘Hither Came…

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Vintage Treasures: Solomon Kane 1: Skulls in the Stars by Robert E. Howard

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I’m treading a little on Bob Byrne’s territory with this lengthy post, so I hope he’ll forgive me. The first Robert E. Howard character I discovered wasn’t Conan, but Solomon Kane. The story was “Skulls in the Stars,” originally published in the January 1929 issue of Weird Tales, and which I read in the 1969 Centaur Press collection The Moon of Skulls. Kane is about to cross a great moor when a lad from the village he’s just left races up behind him,…

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Discovering Robert E. Howard: Frank Schildiner on Solomon Kane

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Martial arts expert Frank Shildiner has forgotten more about Adventure Pulp than I’ve ever known. His writings have included new tales starring  pulp characters Richard Knight and Thunder Jim Wade (if you’re a Doc Savage fan, you should check big Jim out). Solomon Kane is probably Robert E. Howard’s second best-known character after a certain well-muscled barbarian, and one which influenced Frank very early on. So, I turned to Frank for a look at the puritan sword slinger, as Black…

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Vintage Treasures: Solomon Kane: Skulls in the Stars

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Back in October, I featured the Robert E. Howard collection Solomon Kane: The Hills of the Dead, the second of two Bantam paperbacks published in the late 70s. The first was Skulls in the Stars, released in 1978. The Solomon Kane tales are some of my best-loved Howard fiction. “The Skull in the Stars” was one of the first Robert E. Howard tales I ever read, and for many years it was my favorite of his short stories. He was the Puritan,…

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Vintage Treasures: Solomon Kane: The Hills of the Dead, by Robert E. Howard

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With all the recent discussion around these parts about Conan and Robert E. Howard, I figured the best use of my time this week would be to sit back and enjoy some genuine Robert E. Howard. With output as vast as Howard’s, the biggest challenge was choosing what to read. One of my favorite Howard pieces is “Skulls in the Stars,” a genuinely creepy tale in which Solomon Kane investigates a moonlit moor trail haunted by a vindictive spirit, so…

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Solomon Kane Movie Needs More Solomon Kane

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The sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane is my favorite of Robert E. Howard’s serial characters: a fascinating mixture of obsession, religion, righteousness, history, and dark fantasy awesomeness. However, it’s the character I love, not necessarily the stories in which he appeared. With the exception of “Wings in the Night,” the Solomon Kane stories are mid-range pieces in Howard’s canon, not at the consistent level he delivered later with Conan, King Kull, or many of his one-shots. Solomon…

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Solomon Kane Crosses the Atlantic to U.S. Movie Theaters in September

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Update: My review. Next month, we colonials will finally have the chance to view Solomon Kane, the film version of Robert E. Howard’s famous puritanical hero, in movie theaters. It has been a long sea voyage over the Atlantic: the movie, directed by Michael J. Bassett and starring James Purefoy in the title role, and co-starring Max von Sydow, Rachel Hurd-Wood, and the late Pete Postelthwaite, was released in England and other territories in 2009, but lacked a U.S. distributor….

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Forgive Me, Solomon Kane, For I Once Wrote a Screenplay about You

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The movie Solomon Kane has gotten released in the U.K., and although it doesn’t have U.S. distribution yet, we will eventually see it on this side of the pond, either in theaters or on DVD. A Solomon Kane movie after so many years of patient waiting is a sword-and-sorcery/Robert E. Howard lover’s dream. But Al Harron at The Cimmerian, who has seen the movie in the U.K., doesn’t have a high opinion of the Howard-side of the results. Although he…

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Sword and Solomon: The Beginning of Sword and Sorcery

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I haven’t been the most reliable blogger on the Blog Gate lately–something like the least reliable, in fact: my day job and nightly visits from werewolves have conspired to keep me out of the blogosphere almost entirely, these days. But I wanted to show my virtual face here and raise a virtual glass of something intoxicating in honor of Robert E. Howard’s birthday–and in honor of someone who never existed, and probably wouldn’t approve of me toasting him even in…

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The Swashbuckling Horror of Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter

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Caroline Munro in Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter (Hammer Film Productions, April 1974) Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter is a classic Hammer Horror film that features supernatural horror combined with swashbuckling action. This is one of my favorites of the Hammer Horror series of films. It stars Horst Janson as the vampire-hunting swordsman, Captain Kronos; John Cater as the hunchbacked scientist, Professor Grost; and the lovely Caroline Munro as Carla, the clever assistant.