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Atlantis, Vikings, and the Hordes of Kublai Khan: Merlin’s Ring by H. Warner Munn: Part I

Atlantis, Vikings, and the Hordes of Kublai Khan: Merlin’s Ring by H. Warner Munn: Part I

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Merlin2-smallMerlin1-smallA few months ago I wrote an article about H Warner Munn’s excellent books The King at the World’s Edge and The Ship From Atlantis. Munn wrote both in the 1930’s, although the latter was only published later. By all accounts he took a hiatus from professional writing to concentrate on raising a family and providing the financial security that entails.

His passion for writing had not totally subsided, and as his “day job” career wound down, Munn embarked upon what many consider to be his magnum opus: Merlin’s Ring. Please note that this article does contain a few spoilers, which are necessary to explain certain concepts.

The volume sat on my shelf for years, like so many under the “one day I’ll read it” tag, but having undertaken the previous two books in what is now considered the Merlin’s Godson Cycle, I felt obliged to start Merlin’s Ring.

Merlin’s Ring continues the tail of Gwalchmai, whom we last encountered in The Ship From Atlantis. The book was published by Ballantine in 1974 with a cover by Gervasio Gallardo. It appears to have been republished a few times under the same imprint and later by Del Rey, with the same cover, until 1981. (Click on the images at left and right for more detailed versions.)

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Discovering Robert E. Howard: Pigeons From Hell From Lovecraft by Don Herron

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Pigeons From Hell From Lovecraft by Don Herron

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Herron_DarkBarbarianBefore the Cumberbunnies took over and flooded the internet with “I heart Sherlock” memes, the term ‘Sherlockian’ referred to those who studied (and often wrote about) Arthur Conan Doyle’s sixty stories of Sherlock Holmes. Some  of it was dead serious, some was tongue in cheek and much was in between. Monsignor Ronald Knox’s 1921 “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes” is the cornerstone of Holmes studies.

With that, I tell you that that Don Herron is THE Ronald Knox of Robert E. Howard. “Conan vs. Conantics” and the ensuing “The Dark Barbarian” showed that Howard could be analyzed and treated as literature. As well as something to stir up debate! If you haven’t read the over-600 page essay collection, “The Dark Barbarian That Towers Over All,” you need to pony up $4.99 and get the kindle version now.

And with that, Herron, who is also a noted expert on Dashiell Hammett (this man knows good writing) is going to treat you to a little Howardiana regarding REH’s most chilling horror story, “Pigeons From Hell.”

Recently I did a reread on H. P. Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth sonnet cycle and had a Hey, Wait a Minute moment. . .

Deep into his follow-up book to A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos, John D. Haefele had asked me to look the poems over. Haefele is surveying Lovecraft’s Great Tales — not just the top achievements, but how the fiction developed as it went along, leading to the break-out stories — not just Lovecraft’s own writing, but how his discoveries of authors such as Robert W. Chambers and Arthur Machen and the ongoing cross-influences of his fellow pulpsters such as Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard display in the ongoing saga that would become known as the Cthulhu Mythos.

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Ramblings on REH

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Ramblings on REH

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Ramblings_KullAxeIn a way, Robert E. Howard’s career is similar to that of Dashiell Hammett. Both men had huge impacts on their genres (Howard wrote many styles, but he’s best known for his sword and sorcery tales). Both were early practitioners in said genres. Both men wrote excellent stories for about a decade. And both men ended their careers on their own.

Hammett, who seemed more interested in a dissolute lifestyle than in writing, effectively walked away from his typewriter. He wrote his last novel in 1934 (The Thin Man) but produced literally nothing for the remaining twenty-five years of his life. He could have gone back to writing the hard-boiled stories that made his career, but he voluntarily ended his writing life.

In 1936, Howard’s mother was failing in a coma. He walked outside to his car, pulled out a gun and killed himself. His writing career was more effectively finished than Hammett’s would be.

Both were supremely skilled writers who chose to deprive the world of their talent and left decades of stories unwritten. But there was a key difference between the two. From the beginning, Hammett was acclaimed and recognized as the leader in his field. Though Carroll John Daly came first (barely), there is no comparison between the two in critical view.

Howard was not critically lauded. His first Conan tale, “The Phoenix on the Sword” (a rewriting of the Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule!”), appeared in Weird Tales in December of 1932. The next two Conan tales were outright rejected!

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Discovering Robert E. Howard: Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read “The Phoenix on the Sword”

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read “The Phoenix on the Sword”

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The Phoenix on the Sword Weird Tales-smallOver at Howard Andrew Jones’ blog, Bill Ward and Howard Andrew Jones continue their re-read of the first Del Rey Conan volume, The Coming of Conan, with the very first Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword,” originally published in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales magazine. Here’s Howard:

Look at the story’s opening quote. That’s practically the gold standard of quotes from imaginary historical sources. That fabulous “Know, O Prince” and all that follows has been imitated but rarely, if ever, equalled. This, fellow fantasy fans, is the way it’s done. Admittedly, there are a few phrases in the middle of the paragraph that are less inspired. I’m looking at “Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem.” Most of the rest of the quote paints lovely word pictures, but those phrases don’t remotely approach the poetic majesty of the rest — what does Zingara look like? What does Koth look like? But the rest is lovely, and the quality picks right back up with “dreaming west” and powers on to that fantastic finish, “Hither came Conan…”

Look at the opening line of the story: “Over shadowy spires and gleaming towers lay the ghostly darkness and silence that runs before dawn.” Damn. Why doesn’t anyone write like that any more? Howard sets the scene with sharp, sensory laden description. He’s a film director guiding the camera with a fantastic establishing shot.

Their first post on this topic discussed Howard’s “The Hyborian Age.” Read the complete exchange here.

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Martian Pirates, Brain Creatures, and Hive Minds: Rich Horton on Ray Cummings and John Brunner

Martian Pirates, Brain Creatures, and Hive Minds: Rich Horton on Ray Cummings and John Brunner

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Wandl the Invader-small I Speak For Earth-small

Brigands of the Moon-smallRich Horton’s personal blog, Strange at Ecbatan, is a great place to hang out if (like us) you love vintage paperbacks and magazines. In addition to his reviews here at Black Gate (not to mention his editing duties for The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, the 2015 Volume of which just arrived last month), Rich also reviews forgotten bestsellers, neglected classics, and obscure books by writers who later became highly regarded. This week he takes a look at an Ace Double from 1961.

This week’s Old Bestseller post is on a book that was by no means a bestseller — it’s another Ace Double review, this time a new one (for me) — the 1961 pairing of a rather dreadful 1932 pulp serial by Ray Cummings (Wandl the Invader) with one of John Brunner’s better early short novels (I Speak For Earth), written as by “Keith Woodcott.”

Wandl the Invader was serialized in Astounding in 1932. It was a sequel to Brigands of the Moon, which began its serialization in the third issue of Astounding, in 1930. It is set in a future in which space travel is well-established within the Solar System, and essentially human civilizations have been discovered on both Venus and Mars. (Interbreeding is possible, for instance.) A small planet called Wandl has appeared in the Solar System, and Gregg Haljan (hero of Brigands of the Moon) is recruited to captain a spaceship to resist the evil intentions of the planet’s inhabitants.

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Discovering Robert E. Howard: Jeffrey Shanks on The Worldbuilding of REH

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Jeffrey Shanks on The Worldbuilding of REH

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Conan_WBHyboriaWe are trying to look at as broad a range of topics related to Robert E. Howard as we can in this series. Characters, genres, events, themes: Black Gate really wants to showcase the many facets of the man and his works.

Today’s guest post is such an example. Jeff Shanks wrote the introduction to the just published facsimile edition of Howard’s essay, The Hyborian Age and is the REH consultant on Modiphius’ upcoming Conan RPG  (we’re gonna have a post for that, too!). I can’t think of anyone better to write about one of my favorite subjects,  world-building.

While Robert E. Howard is known as the creator of a number of memorable heroic protagonists, such as Kull of Atlantis, Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and, of course, Conan the Cimmerian, his efforts as a pioneer in fantasy world-building are often overlooked. When it is remarked upon at all, Howard’s creation of the Hyborian Age of Conan is generally described as a fairly impromptu effort — a hodge-podge of fictitious kingdoms based on thinly-disguised real world historical analogues, thrown together hastily in early 1932 after the first Conan story was accepted by Weird Tales.

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Vintage Treasures: Fantastic Stories: Tales of the Weird & Wondrous, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Patrick L. Price

Vintage Treasures: Fantastic Stories: Tales of the Weird & Wondrous, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Patrick L. Price

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Fantastic Stories Tales of the Weird & Wondrous-small Fantastic Stories Tales of the Weird & Wondrous back-small

Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR acquired Amazing Stories, the longest running science fiction magazine in the world, in 1982, as a vehicle to help promote their family of games to SF readers around the world. By the mid-80s, TSR had their first fiction bestseller on their hands with the first Dragonlance trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, which sold well over three million copies worldwide and spawned dozens of sequels, and TSR quickly became very adept at leveraging all aspects of publishing to support their properties. If publishing D&D novels helped introduce millions of young readers to their products, why not try the same with Amazing Stories?

So TSR contracted Martin H. Greenberg to produce five mass market anthologies, mining six decades of Amazing fiction. The results weren’t particularly big sellers (and they didn’t save Amazing from eventually folding), but they were nonetheless a fabulous boon for collectors. Best of all, they included the most comprehensive survey ever done of the pulp Amazing Stories, a three-volume set containing nearly 1,000-pages, covering 1926 to 1955. I looked at all five volumes in 2012, in a Vintage Treasures article on TSR’s Amazing Science Fiction Anthologies.

The long-running companion magazine to Amazing, Fantastic — which published some of the finest early sword & sorcery in the field, including stories by Fritz Leiber, John Jakes, Poul Anderson, Avram Davidson, James Tiptree, Jr., John Brunner, George R. R. Martin, Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, Michael Moorock, and Dean Koontz — merged with Amazing in 1980, and the rights fell to TSR. As part of their initiative to promote their magazine properties, TSR also commissioned Greenberg and new Amazing Stories editor Patrick L. Price to compile a deluxe anthology collecting 30 years of Fantastic fiction, with new artwork and an 8-page color section reproducing some of their most famous covers. The result was a fine collection, and one of the only anthologies dedicated to one of the all-time great S&S magazines.

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Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read The Coming of Conan

Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Re-Read The Coming of Conan

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The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian-smallBill Ward and Howard Andrew Jones have wrapped up their detailed and highly entertaining look at Fritz Leiber’s famous Lankhmar stories over at Howard Andrew Jones’ website. But without pausing for breath, they’ve leaped into a re-read of Robert E. Howard’s classic tales of Conan, starting with the Del Rey edition of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, and Howard’s essay on the world Conan adventured in, “The Hyborian Age.” Here’s Bill:

“The Hyborian Age” isn’t the place to start if you are new to Conan, in fact I’d say it’s really only interesting if you are already familiar with Conan’s world, as well as the enthusiasms of Conan’s creator. REH himself didn’t start with “The Hyborian Age,” either, he started with the character of Conan, only settling down to iron out his “world bible” once he had three Conan stories under his belt and realized he wanted to write many more… It’s the history of a lost age before the rise of the civilizations we are familiar with, but it’s also a way of getting around history. REH wrote fast and he wrote for publication and, though he loved history and writing historical fiction, he felt it took too much time to get the research just right. Enter the secondary world of his own slice of pre-history, a way of not only having a world he didn’t have to exhaustively research, but also a vehicle for bringing together the character and flavor of many different cultures and eras that would allow Conan to adventure in the equivalent of everything from the Ancient Near East to Medieval France. That may not be completely clear just from reading “The Hyborian Age,” but it is clear from the stories themselves, as well as by glancing at the two maps REH used when planning his world — his Hyborian Kingdoms superimposed over a map of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East is probably even more eloquent than his essay…

Join the discussion here.

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Discovering Robert E. Howard: Wally Conger on “Rogues in the House”

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Wally Conger on “Rogues in the House”

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BG_RoguesComicOne of the cool things about being an active member in the Sherlock Holmes community is that I run across a broad spectrum of people with other common interests outside of the world’s first private consulting detective. Wally Conger and I have had back and forth conversations on versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles and other topics.

We may not agree on season three of Sherlock, but we do both enjoy reading Conan. So, I asked him to review “Rogues in the House,” which I knew he had just read. He was kind enough to do just that…

By the time Robert E. Howard launched into writing “Rogues in the House” in January 1933, he already had 10 Conan tales under his belt. He was very comfortable with the character.

In fact, upon publication of the story in the January 1934 issue of Weird Tales, Howard wrote to fellow writer Clark Ashton Smith:

Glad you liked ‘Rogues in the House.’ That was one of those yarns which seemed to write itself. I didn’t rewrite it even once. As I remember I only erased and changed one word in it, and then sent it in just as it was written. I had a splitting sick headache, too, when I wrote the first half, but that didn’t seem to affect my work any.

I wish to thunder I could write with equal ease all the time. Ordinarily I revise even my Conan yarns once or twice, and the other stuff I hammer out by main strength.

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Vintage Treasures: Midnight Pleasures by Robert Bloch

Vintage Treasures: Midnight Pleasures by Robert Bloch

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Midnight Pleasures Robert Bloch-smallRobert Bloch isn’t a name that gets tossed around much these days. Even before his death in 1994, he was primarily known as the author of Psycho, and this one fact overshadowed most of his other accomplishments.

But Bloch was also the author of hundreds of short stories, and over 30 novels, virtually all of which are out of print today. He was one of the most gifted and prolific short story writers in the horror field, and his best short stories are compact treasures. He won a Hugo Award for his 1958 story “That Hell-Bound Train,” and multiple Bram Stoker awards (for the 1993 collection The Early Fears, the novelette “The Scent of Vinegar,” and his 1993 memoir Once Around the Bloch.)

He received a World Fantasy Award in 1975 for Lifetime Achievement, and a Lifetime Achievement Bram Stoker Award in 1990.

Bloch was also one of the youngest members of The Lovecraft Circle, those writers who corresponded with and often consciously emulated H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was one of the first to encourage Bloch’s writing, and a lot of Bloch’s early work for the pulps was Cthulhu Mythos fiction (most of which was gathered in his 1981 collection Mysteries of the Worm.)

Midnight Pleasures is one of Bloch’s last fiction collections (two more appeared before his death: Fear and Trembling in 1989, and The Early Fears in 1994). It’s a fine sample of late horror fiction from one of the best short story writers the genre has seen.

It was nominated for a 1987 Bram Stoker Award for Fiction Collection (it lost out to The Essential Ellison). It contains chiefly later short work, dating from 1977-1985, published in anthologies like New Terrors 2, Shadows, Masques, Analog Yearbook, Dark Forces, Chrysalis 3, and others.

It also includes one pulp story (from the August 1939 issue of Weird Tales), and two stories that appear here for the first time: “Comeback” and “Die–Nasty.”

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