REHupa

Pulpfest 2010 starts in three days in Columbus, Ohio. I will be there, so will Rusty Burke. Don Herron, editor of the landmark collection The Dark Barbarian will be there as will George Knight, author of  “Hardboiled Fantasist,” and my co-writer of “Conan the Argonaut.”

New books from Haffner Press, Black Dog Books, Off Trail Press, Adventure House among others will be unveiled. Plus a very big room filled with boxes and boxes of pulp magazines. The pulp magazines gave Robert E. Howard a platform. There is wide world of pulp magazines to explore whether you like adventure, detective-mystery, science fiction, weird-horror, hero, western, sports, love etc. See you there.

noun

1. a seat across a boat on which a rower might sit.

[origin: ca 1736; alteration of obsolete thought, thoft, from Middle English thoft, from Old English thofte; akin to Old High German dafta rower’s seat]

HOWARD’S USAGE:

“As I were mazed I lay and gazed through emerald depths untold.
The eastern sky was rosy red, the sun was rising gold.
The lazy waves they swung the bow with a gentle sway and lift.
I laid the oars across the thwarts and the boat I let it drift.

“I watched and saw strange shadows stray for fathoms down below;
Like shimmery, gossamer things of dreams I watched them come and go.
And then sometimes, like fairy chimes or a golden Chinese gong,
Strange music echoed across the sea like tones of a wordless song.

[from “Buccaneer Treasure”; for the complete poem see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 204]

PulpFest 2010 is only a week away and some last minute updates have been posted in the Latest News section of their website.

The schedule is almost complete – one of the “New Fictioneers” readers canceled, but a replacement for the slot is in the works.

Also The Pulpster, the official PulpFest program, is finished and ready to go. This is the 19^th edition of the publication and the first to have a color cover.

One of the main focal points of PulpFest 2010 will be the 90^th anniversary of the legendary Black Mask magazine, which was launched in April 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan.

The best way to stay informed about PulpFest is to subscribe to their updates. Just fill in the blanks in the email list section of the home page, answer the confirmation email and you can stay in the loop on all things related to the convention.

So, if you are in the Columbus, Ohio area or can get there, you don’t want to miss PulpFest 2010.  And you won’t be alone – each year there is a sizable contingent of Robert E. Howard fans who attend — no doubt on the prowl for copies of Weird Tales and other pulps with Howard content.

Finally, an added incentive to attend will be Don Herron. The Godfather of Howard Scholarship will be there with high hopes of snagging this year’s Munsey Award.

This has to be my all time favorite pulp magazine title. It was a one shot by Clayton in 1930. Actually bed-sheet size instead of the usual 7 x 10 inch. It contains one long story by Lemuel de Bra and an article on the Secret Service.  The issue was reprinted later the same year as the redundantly titled Secrets of the Secret Service. I prefer the original title.

noun

1. A former Portuguese or Brazilian gold coin used from 1690 until 1722 and was also current in England in the early 18th century.

[origin: alteration of Portuguese moeda d’ouro; moeda; from Latin moneta, coin. de, of; from Latin de + ouro, gold; from Latin aurum]

HOWARD’S USAGE

“Boots of Cordovan leather, chests of ash,
Damascus steel, rare silks and silver plate;
Rough-carven gems to match the starlight’s flash,
And gold moidores cresting a piece-of-eight!
Tuns of brown ale and barrels of black rum,
And many a pipe of sharp Canary wine;
Toledo blades that shimmer, gleam and hum,
And bales of spice and idols of odd design!

[from “Drake Sings of Yesterday”; for the complete poem see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 466]

Recently, I have been getting back to the good stuff, namely Howard-Lovecraft-Smith. Researching something in Howard’s fiction, I was reminded of a dream sequence of H. P. Lovecraft that he wrote down in 1927 and sent off to Donald Wandrei. The dream had Lovecraft back in Roman Spain in the Pyrenees and the threat of “the Very Old Folk.”

I then remembered that Lovecraft gave it to Frank Belknap Long who incorporated that sequence into his short novel “The Horror From the Hills” which ran in Weird Tales as a two-parter in January and the February/March 1931 issues. Long was something of an also ran. His main claim to fame will always be that he was Lovecraft’s buddy. Most of his fiction is just not very good. Some early stories from Weird Tales are interesting, they are not generally very memorable. He later had a career switching to science fiction in the late 1930s and sold regularly to various magazines. Again, his fiction from that time is probably even less memorable.

“The Horror From the Hills” features Long’s contribution to the Lovecraft or Cthulhu Mythos, the monster Chaugnar Faugn. Chaugnar Faugn is described as:

“It was endowed with a trunk and great, uneven ears, and two enormous tusks protruded from the corners of its mouth. But it was not an elephant. Indeed its resemblance to an actual elephant was, at best, sporadic and superficial, despite certain unmistakable points of similarity. The ears were webbed and tentacled, the trunk terminated in a huge flaring disk at least a foot in diameter, and the tusks, which intertwined and interlocked at the base of the statue, were as translucent as rock crystal…Its forelimbs were bent stiffly at the elbow, and its hands–it had human hand–rested palms upward on its lap.”

The story is a pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” though Long couldn’t pull it off. There is a hilarious scene of the heroes of the story chasing after Chaugnar Faugn in a New Jersey marsh so they can zap the monster with a time-space machine and destroy Chaugnar with “entropy.” This actually got reprinted as a Belmont paperback in 1964 as Odd Science Fiction.

Fast forward to 1933 and you have Robert E. Howard’s “Tower of the Elephant.” Howard was  in the Lovecraft play ground when he revisited the elephant looking alien. Yag-kosha was also an elephant looking alien this time, but Howard injected a degree of humanity making the reader feel sorry for the imprisoned and tortured alien. There is a nice sweep of cosmicism that Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei engaged in. The ending is a classic and one not forgotten.

So you have two different writers using a similar idea, one falling flat and the other creating a classic. That’s how it works sometimes.

John Miller has posted a fine little tribute to Fritz Leiber over at the Wall Street Journal.

Leiber has long been one of my favorite writers, and for some time his stories of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser were my favorite sword-and-sorcery tales. REHupa’s 58th mailing (if I’m remembering correctly) was dedicated to Leiber, and in my contribution to that mailing I confessed that I liked F&GM better than Conan. Time, and in-depth study, has greatly increased my appreciation of REH’s most famous character, but I’ll still rank Leiber’s duo as his equals. I think my favorite account of the Twain is “Lean Times in Lankhmar,” in which Fafhrd finds religion, with hilarious results; I’m glad to note that it was one of Fritz’s favorites, too, along with “Bazaar of the Bizarre” and “The Cloud of Hate.”  I can’t imagine that there’s anyone with a taste for sword-and-sorcery who hasn’t tried Fafhrd & the Mouser yet, but if you fit that description, time’s a-wastin’! Get yourself a copy of one of the collections.  And if you’re a person who, for some reason, does not particularly care for sword-and-sorcery, you might be surprised by F&GM: try one of the stories I’ve mentioned and see what you’re missing.  The derring-do is leavened by humor, there are some intriguing, even profound, observations of human behavior, and a minimum of blood spattering and brains and entrails spilling.

As John says, Leiber “ranged from genre to genre,” winning awards in fantasy, horror and science fiction. His Wikipedia page has a decent overview, with links to discussion of some of the works. The one book of his that I always recommend is not a Fafhrd/Mouser, but Our Lady of Darkness, one of his forays into “urban horror” and absolutely the most chilling thing I’ve ever read. I also heartily recommend The Big Time, his Hugo-winning novel from 1958. And you owe it to yourself to try at least one collection of his short stories, if you haven’t already: Fritz was a real master of the form. So many great tales: “Smoke Ghost,” “Four Ghosts in Hamlet,” “Gonna Roll the Bones,” “Midnight by the Morphy Watch,” “Belsen Express,” “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,” “Space-Time for Springers,” “Try and Change the Past,” “A Deskful of Girls,” “Rump-Titty-Titty-Tum-TAH-Tee”… well, egad, looking over lists on the ‘net, one could just go on and on trying to list those that remain green in memory.

I can see I’m going to have to have myself a little Fritz Leiber weekend. Oh, and John also notes that this is Fritz’s centenary year, so we’ll have a birthday party for him in December!

And by the way, John Miller’s Hey Miller blog is worth checking out, as is his Between the Covers podcast at National Review Online. John’s a fan of genre literature, so you’ll occasionally find it discussed (along with the political stuff — well, it is National Review…): scroll down through the archives for Otto Penzler on The Vampire Archives, Gene Wolfe on The Best of Gene Wolfe, Orson Scott Card on Ender in Exile, and others. Many REHupans are fans of Bernard Cornwell: he’s there discussing Agincourt. John’s also a history buff: plenty of books on the Revolutionary Generation and the Civil War.  There’s more in the archives, like his November 2007 talk with Paul Sammon about Conan the Phenomenon.  You won’t find my dulcet tones though: John’s interview with me was pre-podcast.

noun

1. an itinerant seasonal labourer; a rascal or layabout

[Origin: Irish Gaelic spailpin itinerant labourer]

HOWARD’S USAGE:

There’s an isle far away on the breast of the sea,
A gem that is set in the stars of the bay,
And it lives in the hearts of the wanderers who stray,
(And begob it’s too good for such spalpeens as ye!)

Oh the sorrow on them that have sailed from its swards!
On the thoughts that they think and the sighs that they sigh!
Is it liquor alone that is dimming their eye?
(With the graft that they get from misvotin’ the wards.)

[from Untitled (“There’s an isle far away on the breast of the sea“); for the complete poem see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 624]

Mention the name Frederick Faust to a casual reader of pulp era fiction, you might get a blank look. Mention Max Brand and you will get recognition. Frederick Faust (1892-1944) was one of the kings of the pulps.  Faust was yet another discovery by Robert Davis who edited the Munsey magazine, All-Story. Davis helped discover Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, Ray Cummings etc and one of those seminal editors who help create an era. Faust started under his own name in 1917 but switched to using pseudonyms for his pulp fiction while saving his name for his poetry. Faust would write poetry part of the day and then grind out pages of pulp magazine fare which paid the bills. As Max Brand, he is best remembered today for a huge amount of western fiction he produced. He also produced spy stories, boxing, 18th Century swashbucklers, Renaissance Italy, dog stories, aviation stories etc. Faust produced a small number of fantastic stories and one lost race novel (“The Smoking Land”).

If one wanted to sample Faust, we don’t have to put together a hypothetical anthology. One already exists- The Collected Stories of Max Brand (Bison Books, 1994). Included are a spy story, one of the Tizzo stories, a Dr. Kildare story, some poetry, and of course westerns. Not a bad primer at all.

Faust’s writing style can be described as both smooth and poetic. He was not hard-boiled in his prose. His westerns are mythic westerns with no particular set time and place but a hazy Old West that probably never existed. There you will find reworkings of old Greek myths with a western setting. There is often a hint of the supernatural in his stories. Once you start reading him, you can see why he was so popular.

Faust moved from the pulps to the slick magazines in his last years. He became a correspondent in WWII. Faust died in 1944 in Italy during the offensive to break the stalemate at Monte Cassino and Anzio. Supposedly, he told the medics to get the other wounded out first during which he bled to death. So Faust gained his place in Valhalla.

One Faust reprint project I would like to see is getting all of his swashbucklers into book form. If Dorchester Publishing who continues to publish lots of “Max Brand” with their Leisure imprint ever decides to expand their adventure line beyond Gabriel Hunt books, Faust would be a great starting point.

It is Thorsday, so time to put up a magazine with horned helmets on the cover.  This issue of Adventure is from August, 1943. The cover is for “The Forge of Olvir Bigmouth” by DeWitt Newbury. Newbury specialized in Viking stories in the 1940s and  was in magazines such as Adventure, Argosy, Thrilling Adventures, and Bluebook. As far as I know, none of Newbury’s Viking stories have been reprinted from the pulp magazines. This particular story is about Northmen vs. Wends.  Adventure at this time had a lot of WWII fiction but there were still some historical swashbucklers showing up. Lamb, Mundy, Arthur D. Howden Smith, Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur & Farnham Bishop were gone but there were some newer writers filling the pages. Georges Surdez, the king of French Foreign Legion stories was still in Adventure on a very regular basis at this time.  The era after editor Arthur Sullivant Hoffman stepped down is sometimes given short shrift.  Adventure was not the same magazine it had been 20 years earlier but it was still interesting.  The fiction in Adventure from this period was much faster moving that what you would find in the early 1920s when Robert E. Howard was reading it. In an alternate universe, you have R.E.H in Adventure at this time with covers like this. You will notice his friend, E. Hoffmann Price was in this issue.