All right, let’s everyone take a pill. I said I wasn’t going to get into this, but I can’t help myself.

The Howard Community at large has recently been thrown into blazing-pistolas-brandishing-Bowie mode by some minor-league blogging by some woman who doesn’t have one freaking clue what she’s writing about:

http://fandomania.com/was-conan-really-a-fictional-character/

Maggie Van Ostrand wrote her Crazy Bob article based on what she read in L. Sprague de Camp’s REH Biography, Dark Valley Destiny. She read the opinions and conjecture and general b.s. Sprague brought forth in his book, further  extrapolated her own opinions and conjecture, and then went looking for support for her “facts”on the internet. Well, the article she found to prop up her hack job is right here (under CRITICISM) on the REHupa Website: Revisiting Dark Valley Destiny by Gary Romeo.

I’m not going to get into the merits or demerits of Gary’s article. Gary is well-known as a de Camp apologist/supporter – I’ve always admired him for that, and I’ve said so before - our Texas friend sticks to his guns, by gawd, and stands up to ALL the heavy-hitters in Howard Fandom! And he & I are in agreement when I say that the Lancer Conan the Adventurer is probably the book that has had the most impact in the last 43 years for the career of REH. L.Sprague de Camp and Frank Frazetta notwithstanding.

But thanks to Ms. Van Ostrand’s article, Gary Romeo is now taking an unfair whupping around the Howard internet community. So, all of you who are: get off his back. Leave him alone. Gary Romeo is NOT the problem, and he is taking unfair shit for his long-standing opinions. Get Off Gary! I’ve got news for you: Gary standing up for his opinions is Howardian Behavior that we should all admire!

So, direct your ire towards Maggie Van Ostrand and her stupid hack-job article – a number of us already have in the “comments” section there – and blame HER. It’s her fault for her crappy article. Besides, she writes just like L. Sprague de Camp did while writing DVD: make your conclusions first, then only use the “information” (opinions, conjecture, 3rd party accounts) that supports your conclusions. And don’t forget to make stuff up, too. Who’s gonna check your facts, anyway? Whoa – guess she didn’t know about Howard Fandom! Duck yer haid, Maggie!

OK, that’s all I got right now – don’t make me come out there.

One of my purchases at Windy City Pulp & Paperback Show was a replica of the pulp, Golden Fleece, January 1939. For years I had wanted to read Ralph Milne Farley’s “Eric of Aztalan” (Norsemen on the Great Lakes find far flung Mayan colony in Wisconsin). The story is about a B- grade. I worked my way through the replica which includes REH’s “Gates of Empire” when I came across an L. Sprague de Camp story I had never read. I knew of it from an article by Doug Ellis on Golden Fleece in an old issue of Pulp Vault (Hey Doug–how about getting Pulp Vault back up and running?). De Camp himself mentioned, probably in Time and Chance, having a minor cave man story early on in an adventure pulp but didn’t mention story name nor magazine title. There is a reason he kept this story hidden. It is the worst L. Sprague de Camp story I have ever read. It is a Neanderthal vs. Cro-Magnon cave man story. There is not much plot, a Neanderthal (Otter) discovers the hairless ones (Cro-Magnons) are close by and the Neanderthals are in great danger as a result. A good portion of the story is taken up by Cro-Magnons engaged in banter. The Neanderthals are discovered, attempt to flee, are hunted down, and eaten by the Cro-Magnons. End of story. The writing style is not the usual light hearted de Campian action nerd story. There are a few details such as the Cro-Magnons using throwing sticks or Neanderthal young digging for grubs but the overall effect is very un-de Campian from what you would expect. I have read my share of cave man stories over the years. For some reason, that is a subgenre that never quite jelled in pulp times. Robert E. Howard realized that a storyteller could do much more with barbarians and civilization than with cave men. Jean Auel has made a successful career out of prehistoric fiction decades later. All that wonderful Pleistocene megafauna is just waiting to be used for prehistoric fiction not to mention new genetic analysis in relation to mankind’s hell bent for leather wandering. Robert E. Howard’s “Spear and Fang” is Shakespear compared to “The Hairless Ones Come” if you want to use an apples to apples comparison. I do have a fondness for P. Schuyler Miller’s “People of the Arrow” (Amazing Stories, 1935) which is another Cro-Magnon vs. Neanderthal story. Then there are Manly Wade Wellman’s Hok storie that Karl Edward Wagner was so enthusiastic about.  I have to say that “The Hairless Ones Come” is probably the worst cave man story I have ever read next to “Oogie Finds Love” (Amazing Stories in the 1940s).

L. Sprague de Camp wrote an introduction to his story “The Hibited Man” in the anthology My Best Science Fiction Story (edited by Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend, Merlin Press, 1949). The introduction to the story is interesting in that it provides a short manifesto on what L. Sprague de Camp thought on fiction.

“Although authors’ opinions of their own writings are notoriously unreliable, I like this tale for two reasons: First, it embodies my idea that the proper function of a story is to entertain, not to teach, persuade, or incite; and that the more scrupulously the writer avoids social consciousness, drawing a moral, or dragging in information for its own sake, the more successfully he will entertain. You know the historical novel wherein a character of 1850 suddenly cries to another character: ‘Egad, Rodney, d’you realize that this new foodstuff we’ve invented will one day be knowna as peanut butter? And that millions (for the population of our fair land will reach 150,000,000 a century hence) will every day eat peanut-butter sandwiches for their lunch?’ Or the science fiction story designed to show that military officers are cruel, stupid tyrants whose main amusement is thwarting noble young civilian scientists, or conversely that the officers are stainlesss heroes ever hampered by dishonest, stupid, bureaucratic politicians. Or the tale that tells us how the world will end if we don’t follow this, that, or the other course about the Atom.  Well, it’s a free country, and I suppose these stories sometimes serve a useful purpose. (Yes, I know about UNCLE TOM’S CABIN and THE JUNGLE.) However, it’s not my line. If I want an expose of conditions in the brake-band industry I’ll wade though a factual report on the subject, but not through the same report thinly disguised as fiction.  Second, I ‘ve been trying lately to focus attention in my stories, on human character and its interaction with scientific developements or assumptions, as have several of my colleagues. As I have said, the pure gadget-story is pretty well worn out; stories henceforth must be primarily about people. And while I hope to do still better some day, this is the most character centered story I’ve managed to produce so far.”

I was reading Steve Tompkins’ latest enthusings about JRR Tolkien over at The Cimmerian and went on high alert when I ran across this sentence:  “My own most cherished version of this material is likely to remain Rhinegold, because of Stephan Grundy’s fleshing-out of the fates of Sigmund, Signy, her hateful husband Siggeir, and the comparatively underexposed Sinfjotli — the strangest and cruelest part of the whole Volsunga saga, reeking of gore and the hot breath of the warg.”  This surfeit of sibilance (from the Story of Sigurd, no less) immediately called to mind one of the more infamous criticisms of REH’s names, L. Sprague de Camp’s derisive remarks on Almuric: “These Yagas take their captives to the black citadel of Yugga, on the rock Yuthla, by the river of Yogh, in the land of Yagg. Here they meet the wicked queen Yasmeena. As one critic exclaimed: “Yumping Yiminy!” [Dark Valley Destiny, p 343; the "critic" was Robert Coulson, Amra 36, 1965]

Others have echoed this criticism of Howard’s use of the same consonantal sounds for his characters’ names: now we see that he was merely carrying on a tradition from the old sagas to which his stories are not infrequently compared.  I’ll add that when I checked out William Morris’s version of the Sigurd story on Project Gutenberg (as linked from Steve’s post), I found another “overworked” consonant: the tale features Greyfell, Gripir, Gudrun, Giuki, Grimhild, and Gunnar (and those are just names from the table of contents).  Goodness Gracious!

L. Sprague de Camp is a polarizing figure today. Gone for eight years, his fiction is fading away rapidly. Recently, Mark Olson of NESFA asked one discussion group if there were any de Camp series worth reprinting. I suggested the Pusad cycle of stories. He asked if they were worth reprinting. My honest answer was they were de Camp stories and you know what means. He replied that de Camp generally seemed to lose interest in his series after a strong start. There are two L. Sprague de Camp collections from NESFA, a small press outfit. That is the last stop before oblivion. Ironic that de Camp kept up an interest in someone else’s creation.

I was once a big L. Sprague de Camp fan. In fact, there was a period of about six months or a year that I was probably a bigger de Camp fan than Robert E. Howard fan. Having exhausted all the Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and a portion of Robert E. Howard, I had moved into reading John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction golden age crew including de Camp. During that time I read too many de Camp novels and stories. Also, I read de Camp’s essays reprinted from Amra in books like The Spell of Conan and Blond Barbarians and Noble Savages. Then I became sentient. After while, de Camp was sounding to me like Cliff Clavin from the T.V. show Cheers. He was an expert on everything! There was that headmaster tone present all the time that really began to grate on me. My attitude changed. Over exposure to L. Sprague de Camp turned me off. Later on, learning things like the lawsuits against Glenn Lord, preventing a pure Howard Conan edition by Baen, all those bad Tor pastiches made me downright unappreciative of his actions.

De Camp was at his worst with his biographies. He had little empathy for his subjects and put them out like some sort of freak show while he is the expert giving congressional testimony. I recently read David Hadju’s The Ten Cent Plague which is about the hysteria about comic books in the 1950s and the supposed bad influence on America’s youth. The section on Dr. Frederic Wertham, the psychiatrist who lead the attack against comic books reminded me of de Camp. L. Sprague de Camp is the Frederic Wertham of sword and sorcery.

The guy wasn’t without his own idiosyncrasies. For example, when I was the official editor of REHupa, de Camp would have his secretary call me if he was late in getting his mailing. He wouldn’t talk on the phone. He also had an answering machine but hated it. David C. Smith told me this story recently: “This took place back in ’75 or ’76, when I used to visit Ed (Hamilton) and Leigh (Brackett) regularly in the summer and fall. My guess is that it probably was in ’75, about the time that de Camp’s HPL book came out and de Camp did all of that ‘pseudoanalyzing’ about Lovecraft. Ed Hamilton asked me, ‘Did you have a good childhood?’ and I told him I certainly thought so. I grew up out in the country, climbed trees, played outdoors, had great parents, and so on. He said that he, too, had had a great childhood. He said, Sprague de Camp had a theory that all writers must have had bad childhoods and that such childhoods figured somehow into their later creativity.”

Charles Saunders had a past memory jolted recently by this series: “Sometime in the late 60s or early 70s, I read a feature about the nascent push for Black Studies programs. In the next issue, there was a letter to the editor from de Camp, in which he called Black Studies ‘intellectual pablum’. Anyway, when I saw that letter, I thought: ‘Man, you need to stick to your fiction’” Somewhere along the line, de Camp must have irritated artist Wally Wood as he wrote a comic called Dragonella and the evil wizard is named L. Sprague de Freeb. Then there is a parody of de Camp from the 1970s called Blonde Negroes and Noble Cabbages which I have never seen. Donald Wandrei “despised” L. Sprague de Camp. The Lovecraft biography of course being viewed as character assassination. Tevis Clyde Smith had none too good to say about de Camp’s “The Miscast Barbarian.” So, there were non-admirers going back decades.

The main defense of de Camp today is the belief he saved Conan from oblivion. This is based on ignorance. Martin Greenberg of Gnome Press made a deal with Bantam Books in 1962 for paperback versions of the Gnome Press books. Why didn’t this happen? De Camp was hurriedly shopping around for a Conan deal when Oscar J. Friend died. Did the threat of lawsuit scare off Bantam? Instead of Frazetta, there might have been paperbacks with James Bama painting Conan. The early 1960s saw an Edgar Rice Burroughs boom starting in 1962 when it was discovered a fair amount of Burroughs was public domain. That is turn helped spark an interest in sword and planet fiction with reprints by Otis Adelbert Kline, Ralph Milne Farley, and Ray Cummings. There were new books by Michael Moorcock (as Edward P. Bradbury), Gardner Fox, and even Lin Carter. The Magazine of Horror started in 1963, there were those Roger Corman film adaptions of Poe starring Vincent Price, Zacherly etc. The whole sword and sandle genre of film was going on at this time. Then you had the Tolkien mass market paperbacks which took it to the next level. All sorts of old fantasy was getting reprinted. You think Fletcher Pratt’s Well of the Unicorn was getting reprinted but Conan was going to languish? What planet do you live on? Someone would have published Conan. Donald A. Wollheim at Ace Books would have been on Conan immediately the minute he heard the stories were in public domain. You would have had Emsh, Jack Gaughan, or Gray Morrow doing covers if Ace had published Conan. My own contention is Don Benson at Pyramid Books shied away from Conan because de Camp’s agenting was not on the up and up. Conan is what brought L. Sprague de Camp back, not the other way around. He had left science fiction and fantasy until the Conan paperbacks. The idea that only L. Sprague de Camp could have rescued Conan is silly.

There has been accusations that de Camp was only interested in Conan. We have seen he was interested in getting something started with Solomon Kane with his agent that went nowhere. Remember- there were only two Kull stories known at the time and another two Bran Mak Morn stories. You can’t build books around characters with only two stories. It was only after Glenn Lord tracked down the trunk that further stories came to light, and Glenn Lord was agent for the Howard copyright holders by that time. De Camp’s intrusions were blocked. De Camp had Conan and that’s it. I think this was a good thing in hindsight. I have chronicled how the exploitation of Conan became all bolluxed up when de Camp had his way at CPI. People lost interest in the character.

There were grumblings about de Camp in the 1970s with articles in the small press such as Byron Roarke’s “Vultures Over Cross Plains” and Don Herron’s “Conan vs. Conantics.”  He got permanent ill will from Karl Edward Wagner for insisting on killing the Berkley Conan series. De Camp could have won back all sorts of good will if he had allowed Baen Books to publish pure Howard Conan. De Camp wanted it both ways– on one hand he used to act that he was the professional writer. On the other hand, he knew the Carter & de Camp Conan stories were not very good or even bad but he wouldn’t allow any Conan to be published without them. Contrast that to someone like E. Hoffmann Price who used to say that he wrote grade A manure for the Spicy pulps. A true pro knows when his work is bad and should not see the light of day one too many times.

When de Camp threatened Oscar J. Friend that he would just go off and write Conan stories anyway, Friend should have dared him because de Camp couldn’t. L. Sprague de Camp couldn’t write straight sword and sorcery at least not solo. He once said in a letter to REHupa that had he been more confident in his sword and sorcery writing ability, he wouldn’t have brought Lin Carter on board. Deep down, L. Sprague de Camp knew he couldn’t write sword and sorcery. He had to mock it if left to his own devices. Maybe he could have created an alter ego or pseudonym, take some masculine Anglo-Saxon sounding name like Erik Stone and ditch the French name and write some straight sword and sorcery. Probably even then he wouldn’t have been able.

L. Sprague de Camp was a descendant of Norman French Huguenots. The Normans were an aggressive piratical people always sniffing out places for new conquests. That trait was certainly present in him the way he pushed what originally was a work for hire deal and turned it into an equal ownership of an iconic character that he did not create. Looking at his actions, he was always waiting for weakness or an opening whether it was Oscar J. Friend, forming CPI, dealing with Glenn Lord, or getting money out of the Kull movie deal. De Camp is gone, the money he made is gone, only the legacy of his actions remain and the judgment of people aware of his actions.

Glenn Lord has quite a sense of humor. For the August 1996 mailing of REHupa (#140), he sent in a review of Conan of Aquilonia by Adrian Cole. Adrian Cole is a writer from Solomon Kane country, Devon in Britain. He is one of the better writers of sword and sorcery fiction to come out of the small press in the 1970s. He may be best known for the Omaran Saga which I once described to him as reading as if Tolkien had written for Weird Tales (a description he liked by the way). He wrote a parody of Lin Carter called “Longbore the Inexhaustible” for the small press way back when. Here are some choice parts from his review of Conan of Aquilonia:

“Just what is it that makes Conan of Aquilonia so much of a disappointment–a veritable act of dishonesty? Primarily because it falls down because it lacks Howard’s two driving forces, plot and action… Where Howard threaded intrigue and strands of sub-plot throughout his Conan episodes, Carter and de Camp have made no real attempt to do so–each of these stories are very simple, straightfoward thrust towards brief confrontation between Goody and Baddy (at that sort of banal level) and Conan either clobbers them good or his son Conn leaps in and delivers a useful hack or two to save Dad’s bacon.  As for the action, well, it’s stereotyped in the fullest sense –again no attempt has been made to imbue it with any flair. Everything is so predictable, in fact inevitable. Totally contrived, it spotlights all the worst faults of the sword and sorcery genre, a major retrogression. Conan cracks heads with an almost detached boredom. There is no spirit, no dynamism; Conan is like a Grand Master playing chess with a rank beginner.  Howard was no great shakes at character portrayal — but at least his brooding menacing players added to the sombre atmosphere of his scenery. De Camp in particular is fond of a vaguely medieval touch in dialogue, putting an emphasis on wit that does little more than border on flippancy, suggesting to me at least he finds all this a trifle silly. Indeed, the dialogue of these latest Conan works has become more inane than ever — a classic example of its self-ridicule is

‘By Mamajambo’s War Club!’

If that sounds like some huge jazz/blues singer to you, it hardly surprises me. Another irritating aspect of the dialogue is the frequent lapse into anachronistic colloquialism: I would not have been surprised to hear Conan say “Good Lord, is it really?” or “Gracious me, steady on, old chap.” You think exaggerate? Read the book carefully and see just how close he gets! Although the overall style is not poor, it is notable only for its simplicity and flatness.  Granted de Camp gets his ‘historical’ facts right (with numerous references to the appropriate arms and armour and so forth) but long gone is the blazing, almost paranoid vivacity of Howard, to be replaced by the unoriginal, repetitive cliches of Carter and the tongue-in-cheek banter of de Camp. Some of the basic descriptions and settings are good– the groundwork is here, but the finishing has been slapped on with no finesse. Pure hack work. The imagery is tired-exhausted , in fact. Thus I level a charge of vampirism against the authors- they may well plead mitigation on grounds of adoration for Howard’s hero. But the most damning piece of evidence against such a plea is the cold-blooded, slap-happy manner in which they have thrown Conan of Aquilonia together. For loot, no more. Better to have changed Conan’s name and called it something else, for this is not the real thing. Let the buyer beware!

‘Mamjambo’ indeed!”

I was almost on the floor laughing with the mention of Mamajambo. For the next few years, Steve Tompkins and I attempted to gratuitously throw in Mamajambo’s name into the conversation.  I had forgotten about Mamajambo. Time to resurrect him and insert the name whenever possible. Mamajambo is most definitely a creation of L. Sprague de Camp and not Lin Carter.

Hey Adrian- if you read this, send me an e mail. It has been a while.

The 1980s was the decade that L. Sprague de Camp’s de-Howardization of Conan got into full gear.  Ace continued to publish the Lancer Conans to diminishing returns. I had written to Susan Allison, editor of Ace Books urging a collection of Henry Kuttner’s sword and sorcery. She replied that sword and sorcery fiction was not doing so well. People were not interested in Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser and even Conan sales were declining. Ballantine Books had reshaped fantasy publishing with Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara. Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey had discovered there was a large audience who wanted to read bastardized Tolkien over and over. The formula was find an unknown author writing derivative fantasy, put the money into packaging and promotion and sell more fantasy books. The fantasy reading audience shifted and by 1985 sword and sorcery was going extinct. It didn’t help that there were two bad Conan movies. John Milius hijacked Conan as a vehicle to make his Akira Kurosawa homage for the first movie. Mako dialogue at the beginning and end of the movie? You gotta be kidding me! The second movie was so bad it was the final nail in the coffin. Charles Saunders has blamed the Conan movies for killing sword and sorcery. The lure of movie money is what forced the formation of Conan Properties, Inc and the movies proved to be an albatross for the genre. The Ace editions went out of print one by one in the mid and late 1980s to general indifference.

The Robert Jordan counterfeit Conan novels proved successful enough for Tor to enlarge the operation and publish a large number of Conan pastiches. L. Sprague de Camp kept a degree of control over the series having veto power. The books had little to no mention of Robert E. Howard. In hindsight, this might be a good thing as most of the books were mediocre to poor.  John Maddox Roberts has mentioned he tried to include some dangerous elements in the stories but it was a constant battle against dumbing down, homogenizing, and making kiddie safe. This was the process of de-Howardization– overwhelm the original Howard cycle with a tsunami of Conantics novels so new readers wouldn’t know the difference. De Camp himself got back into writing his own fiction with The Unbeheaded King and The Hostage of Zir among others. De Camp wrote a timeline of Conan called “Conan the Indestructible” for the Tor pastiches. It was Clark and Miller’s timeline expanded–except there was no mention of P. Schuyler Miller and John D. Clark. De Camp removed them as efficiently as Stalin erasing Trotsky out of Party photos. And Miller and Clark had been friends of de Camp.

The 1990s brought two execrable Conan cartoons (remember the theme song?). Marvel comics finally killed off first Conan the Barbarian and then Savage Sword of Conan. Baen Books was interested in publishing the Robert E. Howard Conan stories in paperback with no pastiches. De Camp vetoed the idea. Conan was dying due to de Camp’s actions. About the same time, the Tor pastiches petered out with a wimper. John C. Hocking wrote Conan and the Emerald Lotus which was the pulpiest of the lot and perhaps the best but it was too little, too late. If you wanted Conan, you had to haunt the used bookstores.

De Camp made a move against Glenn Lord in the 1990s. Lord had been removed as agent for the Howard copyright holder in 1993 while in the process of doing his job.  De Camp petitioned the court demanding arbitration on Glenn Lord’s 5% commission on CPI’s gross as agent. The Supreme Court of New York decision stayed arbitration as the claim fell outside of the arbitration clause and “de Camp is not the proper party to raise the claim.” The court decision included that de Camp became “emboldened” with Glenn Lord’s dismissal. The original demand for arbitration mentions “disputes have proven to an unwarranted distraction and appear to have impaired the ability of CPI to exploit Conan.” Hell yeah, a series of lame movies, toys, and cartoons that ultimately damage the character are going to cause problems.

It was during this time that de Camp turned publicly against his deceased former collaborator, Lin Carter. In letters to REHupa, de Camp bemoaned that he didn’t ask Leigh Brackett to co-write Conan stories with him. Lin Carter was a derivative and sloppy writer. Most of his writing is crud, but–he enabled L. Sprague de Camp. De Camp would have never been able to write those Lancer pastiche stories if it had not been for Lin Carter.  Within REHupa, there was increasing criticism of the pastiches and de Camp attempted to deflect those charges by using Lin Carter’s corpse as the target.

L. Sprague de Camp’s career included almost as much non-fiction as fiction. If he was weak on writing sword and sorcery fiction including Conan, he made up for in commentary on Robert E. Howard and fantasy fiction in general. He was an enthusiastic contributor to George Schithers’ Amra (Vol II) over the lifetime of the small press magazine becoming the most prolific contributor. De Camp would later cut and past shorter works from Amra into larger increasingly unwieldy essays that threatened to spin out of control all the while maintaining a haughty tone.

Many of these non-fiction pieces are de Camp showing how wrong this writer or that writer was in a work of fiction. The problem is de Camp himself was often wrong in his statements. De Camp wrote a book about Atlantis, Mu, and Lemuria in Lost Continents in 1954 that is a shot at Donnelly, Spence, Elliott etc. One chapter entitled “The Creeping Continents” where de Camp gives Wegener’s continental drift theory a hard time. Turns out that tectonic plate science is proving Wegener right. De Camp came down on the wrong side. His Day of the Dinosaur (1968) is on the hoary side of paleontology even for the time with his slow, ponderous dinosaurs including the 1920s view of sauropods living in lakes and swamps to support their weight. It may seem harsh to criticize de Camp using science of the day for his non-fiction. That didn’t stop him from writing critical essays on H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard doing the very same thing.

There is a little hardback book from Borgo Press by de Camp called Blond Barbarians and Noble Savages that consists of three cut and paste jobs by de Camp. The purpose of “Lovecraft and the Aryans” appears to be to tell the reader how wrong H. P. Lovecraft was and how erudite L. Sprague de Camp is. The article itself meanders all over the place with little central focus as de Camp discusses the progenitors of Aryanism- Chamberlain and Goubineau. He takes time out for shots at Lovecraft’s attitudes toward gainful work. De Camp lectures on language and physical divisions of Europeans. There is a paragraph wherein de Camp lambasts Lovecraft for pontificating on “subjects of which he had the merest smattering.” Talk about a case of the kettle painting the pot black. The last paragraph has de Camp wrapping things up with a mention that Lovecraft “kept on learning better all his life.” This article was cut and paste into his Lovecraft biography.

A wide reading of de Camp will show he is uneasy discussing barbarians and in this case the Celts in “Howard and the Celts.” De Camp quickly sidetracks to discussion of Neanderthals and the Beaker “Folk.” It is actually the Beaker culture and de Camp got it wrong claiming there was an invasion of “Beaker Folk” into the British Isles. The ceramic beakers were locally made and did not originate from Spain as de Camp wrote. De Camp can’t keep on track as he goes off on a tangent discussing the evolution of ship building technology in Scandinavia. De Camp’s ironically anti-barbarian stand is for all to see in “The Heroic Barbarian.” You know de Camp’s attitude when he uses the phrase “Romantic Illusion” and then makes a dig at commune movements and 1960s counterculture that de Camp thoroughly hated.  De Camp goes on and on about Rousseau’s “noble savage” boring the hell out of the reader. A good portion is then taken up by de Camp describing “barbarians” he has known like the lumberjack in upstate New York. Give me a break!

The articles on writers of heroic fantasy were collected as the book Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers (Arkham House 1976). De Camp makes fun of William Morris’ barbarian novels- The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains. “The German barbarians (in history a singularly dirty, treacherous, and bloody lot) are cleaned up, prettified, and imbued with noble motives almost to the point of burlesque.” Those two Morris novels remind me a lot of the appendices found in Tolkien’s The Return of the King, which would make sense as those two novels were influences on Tolkien. De Camp makes it known for his distaste for the Norse sagas. “After the umpteenth episode in which an Icelandic woman nags a make kinsman or a servant into going out to ambush a member of a rival clan, in revenge for a previous killing, the reader may decide that enough is enough.” I recently read Egil’s Saga and found it to be a good deal better than most sword and sorcery novels I have read. I have to part ways with Mr. de Camp’s opinions on the sagas. In “The Miscast Barbarian: Robert E. Howard,” de Camp inserts “anti-Roman” in front of Bran Mak Morn’s name, something he doesn’t do describing any other Howard character. Looking through the chapter on J. R. R. Tolkien is funny because de Camp takes Tolkien to task on the different names for the same character such as Aragorn who is also “Elessar, also Dunadan…All of which seems a bit much.”

De Camp did not like fantasy laid in historical times. He didn’t like Leslie Barringer setting the Neustrian books in a quasi-historical Middle Ages. I find it astounding that he accuses Norvell Page of “There is a certain pretentiousness about them, which makes their faults stand out. They drag for long stretches. There is much windy bombast; one tires of John’s inexhaustible braggodocio.” I like the two Prester John novels by Norvell Page. I thought the novels moved along at a frantic pace and didn’t think they dragged at all. De Camp gives Page a hard time for picking a place that in actual history was in the middle of a powerful Hunnish Empire. Wrong! If you read Empire of the Steppes; there were a number of independent city-states along the Silk Road in the Tarim Basin of Chinese Turkestan. De Camp quibbled with the military organization of the fictional “Tugars” in R. F. Tapsell’s The Year of the Horsetails saying the organization, discipline, and armament would not have occurred until Genghis Khan’s Mongols. This is ignoring the Avars almost took Constantinople in the mid 7^th Century, the Khazars were fielding complex armies and holding off Muslim armies in the 8^th Century, and that the Magyars were striking deep into Western Europe in the 10^th Century. De Camp got himself into deep water consistently when he lectured about barbarians.

One time some readers responded to de Camp in Amra. He mentioned about there being no stirrups at the time of “Kings of the Night.” There were responses to de Camp on that issue that made a good case there could have been some stirrup wearing cavalry. Those responses were not collected into The Blade of Conan and The Spell of Conan. L. Sprague de Camp was actually a pretty fair book reviewer when he stuck to how well the author told the story. Going through his reviews in the pages of Amra, I found myself agreeing with his assessments more often than not. He really did enjoy heroic fantasy fiction even if he viewed it as guilty pleasure. On the other hand, his articles are pedantic and increasingly irritating if you are reading them one after another. There is a tone of superiority that here is the science fiction writer who also writes popular science books and articles and he is going to tell these fantasy fans how it really is. There is a glee in bursting bubbles such as his mini-article on “pirettes” and how most female pirate careers probably ended in pregnancy. In Dark Valley Destiny, de Camp’s infers that Howard got the idea of a python using its head as a battering ram, probably taken from Kipling. The giant snake in “The Scarlet Citadel” is a venomous snake with great fangs that drip poison. The snake “smote” the guard taunting Conan in the dungeon striking him with its fangs. What is de Camp trying to prove here? He deliberately distorts a scene in a Howard Conan story that anyone can fact check.

L. Sprague de Camp wrote a lot of short articles on science topics mostly for science fiction magazines. These were collected together in the book, The Fringe of the Unknown (Prometheus Books, 1983). The superior attitude is less noticeable though the didacticisms are still present. The articles themselves are pretty light-weight. Someone would be advised to go elsewhere if they wanted to research Roman aqueducts for example. Using de Camp’s “Appius Claudius Crassus” would not be advisable for a school paper.

Going through de Camp’s non-fiction recently has been illuminating. His anti-barbarian bias was not so apparent to me until I went through his articles and longer essays back to back. Isn’t it ironic that the man who tried to control the most famous fictional barbarian sided with the Romans?

A reader picking up a copy of the Lancer or Ace edition of the paperback, Conan might have noticed L. Sprague de Camp’s description ofÂheroic fantasy: “William Morris pioneered the heroic fantasy in Great Britain in the 1880s. In the early years of this century, Lord Dunsany and Eric R. Eddison developed the genre further. In the 1930s, the appearance of the magazines Weird Tales and later, Unknown Worlds furnished outlets for stories of this type, and many memorable sword-and-sorcery narratives were written. These include Howard’s stories of Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane; Clark Ashton Smith’s macabre tales of Hyperborea; Henry Kuttner’s Atlantean stories; C. L. Mooress narratives of Jirel of Joiry; and Fritz Leiberss Gray Mouser stories. (I might also mention Fletcher Pratt’s and my tales of Harold Shea.)”

De Camp repeated this in an afterword to The Compleat Enchanter (Ballantine, 1975): “I will say that they were certainly heroic fantasy, or swordplay-and-sorcery fiction, long before these terms were invented;neither Pratt nor I, when we started the Shea stories, had even read a Conan story or ever heard enough about Howard to recognize his name.

Catherine Crook de Camp parroted her husband’s party line in the introduction to The Enchanter Compleated (Sphere Books, 1980): “L. Sprague de Camp (1907- ) and Fletcher Pratt (1897-1956) working in collaboration, became outstanding early creators of heroic fantasy in America.”

L. Sprague de Camp’s fiction career started in the September, 1937 issue of Astounding Stories with the story “The Isolinguals.” His next story wasn’t until April 1938 with “Hyperpilosity.” He had some good science fiction stories such as “Living Fossil” and “Employment” in Astounding in 1939. De Campss debut in Unknown was “Divide and Rule” (April-May, 1939) was science fiction. “Lest Darkness Fall” (Dec. 1939) was alternate history. There is nothing suggestive of blood & thunder fantasy lurking in the background.

The catalyst was Fletcher Pratt who did a little writing for science fiction magazines and translations of European stories. He also wrote quite a bit of non-fiction, usually history and military science. Pratt was more familiar with fantasy than de Camp at the time in the form of the Norse Eddas and E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ourobouros.

The Harold Shea stories were co-written by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp. According to de Camp, Pratt would come up with the idea and then de Camp would write the first draft. Then Pratt would go over the draft and make changes. De Camp would later have Lin Carter write the first draft of Congor stories and then make revisions. De Camp mentions that Pratt conceived the idea of a hero who projects himself into a series of mythical worlds. The hero that de Camp and Pratt created was Harold Shea, a psychologist. Imagine that– L. Sprague de Camp using a psychologist as main character.

The first story, “The Roaring Trumpet,” (Unknown, May 1940) appeared just as the Battle of France got underway and Hitler overwhelmed the Low Countries and broke into France. Harold Shea is too timid to travel to many worlds of myth and decides to go to Ireland of Cuchulain. In typical de Camp fashion, his character bumbles instead to Norse myth. You have that immortal de Camp dialogue such as “This here’s my daughter Aud. She’s a shield girl; can lick her weight in polar bears.” Or ” ‘What-a-at? No kiddin’ roared the giant.I heard of guys that eat bugs and drink cow’s mild, but I ain’t never heard of nobody what eats turnips.’”  I have to throw this one in to flog a dead horse: “Aw right, aw right, butcha don’t have to get snotty about it. I was just thinking there’s some relations of Hrungnir and Geirrod that was laying for Thor. They’d just love to have a chance to get even witcha for bumping off those giants.” And it goes on and one like this. Did I forget to mention there is almost no action in this story? There is a small fencing scene with a giant. And this is probably the best one because it is the shortest. Harold Shea is a passive bystander observing and getting shoved around and embarrassed.

“The Mathematics of Magic” (Unknown, Aug. 1940) came out when the Lufwaffe was beginning the Battle of Britain. You again have dialogue such as: “Fine toots. Or I will be when I surround some grub.” L. Sprague de Camp did not talk this way. It comes off as fake and not authentic. You are supposed to have a psychologist who talks like a faux blue-collar depression era worker. I don’t know who is to blame for this, de Camp or Pratt. I have read Pratt’s fantasy novels and there is no trace of this so guilt likely falls upon de Camp. Anyway, “The Mathematics of Magic” takes Shea to the world of Spenser’s Faerie Queen. Once in Spenser’s world, the dialogue changes to something that is mock medieval. My guess is Pratt took over and added to this portion. There is a little rough and tussle and a little fencing but very little blood- letting.

Hitler was on the move conquering Yugoslavia and Greece while Rommel shredded the British 8th Army in April 1941 when “he Castle of Iron” came out in Unknown. This story is actually a short novel and a repeat of the previous two stories with a little action and no real blood & thunder. Here is some politically incorrect prose: “Behind the file of Negroes another procession of butter-faced men emerged from the shadows of the colonnades.”

There were two later Harold Shea stories–”The Wall of Serpents” in Fantasy Fiction in 1953 and “The Green Magician” (Beyond Fantasy Fiction, 1954). Again there is that priceless dialogue: “These Hoosiers sure play it for the works. Look at them sconces!” from “The Wall of Serpents.” Or, “‘Jeepers!’ he said, in a tone which carried its own message. ‘Imagine holding heavy with a zinger like you!’” from “The Green Magician.” These are random snatches I found just opening to a random page in The Enchanter Compleated.

Harold Shea is a lame character that is part of a weak series that makes for painful reading. I do not recommend anyone for any reason venturing forth to read these stories. They are execrable. This was the first non–Conan L. Sprague de Camp fiction I ever read and it almost made me swear de Camp off permanently. What is more amazing are the reprints. I can see the point of the Pyramid reprint in 1964 when all sorts of “golden age” science fiction and fantasy were being reprinted in paperback. Publishers were finding out what sold. The Incomplete Enchanter got caught up in the sword and sorcery burst of the late 1960s with a nice Jeff Jones cover that had nothing to do with the book. Del Rey Books reprinted three of the stories as The Compleat Enchanter in 1976 with three printings. I guess Lester del Rey wanted to reprint fiction from his old Astounding Science Fiction/Unknown Worlds buddies. Baen Books later reprinted some Harold Shea in the 90s. Baen had published some L. Sprague de Camp during this time and trotting out these horrible stories was probably part of the package.

De Camp’s claim that these stories put him in the ranks of sword and sorcery pioneers doesn’t hold up under examination. They are not sword and sorcery fiction and don’t even fit within the broader vaguer term of heroic fantasy. Unknown did run some out and out sword and sorcery. The two Prester John novels by Norvell Page are modeled on Conan. Fritz Leiber had the first published stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser at this time. These early Leiber stories are notably darker and more violent than later ones. Jack Williamson’s “The Reign of Wizardry,” especially in its original, shorter magazine version is very blood and thunder. The de Camp & Pratt collaborations are very similar in tone to some short fantasy novels by L. Ron Hubbard such as “The Ultimate Adventure” and “The Slaves of Sleep.” Interesting that de Camp didn’t include Hubbard in the list of early sword and sorcery writers to the introduction of Conan. L. Sprague de Camp was too busy writing light fare that became synonymous with the magazine. Making a claim that the Harold Shea stories are part of the first wave of heroic fantasy/sword and sorcery is stretching it not a bit but by a lot.

The first real sword and sorcery fiction by L. Sprague de Camp is “The Eye of Tandyla,” (Fantastic Adventures, May 1951) and “The Tritonian Ring,” a novel that was in Two Complete Science-Adventure Books (Winter, 1951). He had read the Gnome Press edition of Conan the Conqueror and got the itch to try this sort of fiction for himself. He was probably familiar with E. R. Eddison and Lord Dunsany already before he discovered Howard. From there, he went on to check out C. L. Moore and Clark Ashton Smith. De Camp’s discovery of sword and sorcery and subsequent writing in the field puts him in with a later wave of writers. Poul Anderson had written some sword and sorcery type stories for Planet Stories in the early 1950s and his classic The Broken Sword. E. E. “Doc” Smith had two stories about Tedric at this time. Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth dates from this time. De Camp gave up on Pusad within a short time. Mark Olson at NESFA Press has hypothesized that de Camp consistently lost interest in his series. My own theory is L. Sprague de Camp always found writing non-fiction to be easier than writing fiction.

The myth of de Camp as early writer of sword and sorcery had been implanted as early as May, 1956 when Poul Anderson started out the story, “The Barbarian”:

“Since the Howard-de Camp system for deciphering preglacial inscriptions first appeared, much progress has been made in tracing the history, ethnology, and even daily life of the great cultures which flourished till the Pleistocene ice age wiped them out and forced man to start over.“

De Camp probably included himself among the others he mentions in the introduction to Conan as a way getting street cred. He was not a pioneer of sword and sorcery though he was part of the second wave that included Vance and Anderson.The idea of legitimacy of controlling/editing and inserting new pastiches into the Conan cycle is increased by making the case of being at the beginning of the genre.

The late 1970s found L. Sprague de Camp in a favorable position.  Taking an aggressive stand with the formation of Conan Properties, Inc., he was able to throttle the infant pure Howard Conan book series from Berkley in its cradle and figuratively castrate rival editor/pasticheur, Karl Edward Wagner. The road was clear to inflict more pastiches upon the reading public.

In short order the collection, Conan the Swordsman, was on the shelves of your local B. Dalton Bookseller and Waldenbooks in August 1978. The book is a collection of flotsam and jetsam with attempts to fill in gaps of the “saga.” The first story, “The People of the Summit,” goes back nine years to the collection The Mighty Swordsmen. The original appearance was bylined Bjorn Nyberg, this time is was Nyberg & de Camp. The story itself is not that bad for a pastiche. Bjornan is in the Turanian army and his detachment is wiped out by a degenerate remnant of sorcerers. Richard Toogood did a textual comparison of the two versions of the stories and found that de Camp routinely softened the language in the story. Nyberg’s version has Bjornan casually dropping Shanya to the ground while de Camp’s has him gently laying her.  De Camp changes the “women, with white stringy hair” to “crones.” Shanya’s character is consistently haughty in Nyberg’s version while de Camp adds having her blush when she becomes aware she is nude. “Legions of the Dead” is both de Camp and Carter and I detect Catherine de Camp. Carter’s Witch-men of Hyperborea are back along with the oft used Carter device of reanimated corpses. Conan becomes Sir Galahad to rescue Rann Njordsdattir from the Hyperboreans. As the army of corpses closes in on the doomed band of Aesir warriors, Conan places Rann on a stallion and slapes his sword on the beast’s butt! “To Asgard and safety!” De Camp & Carter are the authors of “Shadows in the Dark,” a sequel to “Black Colossus.”  I see little Lin Carter present as Conan rescues the King of Khoraja from Ophir. When asked if he had become the lover of the king’s sister, Conan replies–”If I had, it would be ungentle of me to admit it. But tell me, would you accept me as a brother-in-law?” Bet you never heard Conan talk like that before. Reading this story was tedious. “The Star of Khorala” by Nyberg & de Camp is return of the Conan in King Arthur’s Court that we saw in the opening of Conan the Avenger. The story has the feel of a late 19th Century historical romance replete with knights in armor. Congor returns for one last time in “The Gem in the Tower.” If it’s pirates- it’s Lin Carter! This story is almost completely Carter as there is a Thongor version that appeared two years before in Fantastic (Nov. 1976) called “Black Moonlight.” Farewell Congor and Lin Carter. This was the end of the line for both. Carter was a means to de Camp’s ends and his permanent record suffered greatly for it.  “The Ivory Goddess” is listed as by de Camp & Carter but de Camp friend, Loay Hall, reported about four years ago at the rehinnercircle yahoo group that Catherine de Camp is the real co-writer and not Carter. The story is a direct sequel to “The Jewels of Gwahlur.” First we need a new name for the pastiche Conan character. Congor is gone but we will call him “Spraguenan” from here on out. Spragenan is in archaeology mode with “The modern Puntians could not have built this temple. This marble must have traveled a long way.” Mrs. de Camp’s presence is immediately revealed when the slave girl Muriela is literally turned into a godess and Spraguenan addresses her as “Your divinity.” Makes me think of Roseann Barr when I see that phrase. “Moon of Blood” is another story supposedly written by the de Camps instead of de Camp & Carter. This story is just plain boring.

A few months later “Do You Think I’m Sexy” by Rod Stewart polluted the radio waves and you got to buy the book that killed Karl Edward Wagner’s Day of the Lion–Conan the Liberator by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. This novel reads mostly as by de Camp. De Camp told Robert M. Price that they began writing the novel in early 1972 but Carter bowed out early. Catherine de Camp then wrote it with her husband. So you get a menage a trois here. Liberator is a pretty lifeless novel. A friend of mine who knew Lin Carter said Carter badmouthed the book when it came out. Poul Anderson’s introduction to The Best of L. Sprague de Camp mentions that de Camp’s characters are “limited, fallible, tragi-comic.” That includes Spraguenan. I always imagined Conan’s rise to kingship as one of those lightning fast campaigns with a bloody battle. Sort of like Roman civil wars when a commander of legions would decides to become emperor. Spraguenan’s battle plans are incompetently orchestrated and he is beaten in the first battle. He is saved by the arrival of the Argossean army and another contingent of Aquilonian rebels. De Camp is didactic as ever here. He has Conan wonder after seeing a mounted Bossonian archer. Shazam, “Suddenly, in his mind’s eye, Conan saw a host of mounted archers pursuing the fleeing foe until, coming within range, they dismounted to loose shaft after deadly shaft.” Isn’t Conan supposed to be a seasoned, victorious general in several countries by this point? This makes Spraguenan look very amateurish. De Camp would have been better having Spraguenan order the Bossonians mounted like the Turanian archers and ditch the lecture. There is no climactic battle, Conan sneaks into the palace using the uniforms of turncoats. The sorcerer Thulandra Thuu escapes to do evil elsewhere. The sorcerer is probably a Carter creation and being set up for future confrontations with Congor or Spraguenan. There was a sense of deja vu when I reread this novel. Then it hit me, de Camp pilfered the plot to The Well of the Unicorn by his friend Fletcher Pratt. Pratt’s novel is overrated but it came out at a time when hardly any fantasy came out. So later on during the fantasy revival of the 1960s, it was trotted out in paperback. Pratt has the same win by losing strategy that is found in Conan the Liberator.

Richard Toogood has already deconstructed Conan and the Spider God in detail. I really can’t add anything to it that he hasn’t already said outside of de Camp couldn’t write a Spraguenan story without a co-writer. It was disingenous to list the writer as “L. Sprague de Camp” but I guess he thought the little kiddies wouldn’t buy a Spraguenan novel with a woman listed as co-author.

De Camp had control over the pastiches being written for Bantam at this time. Poul Anderson’s Conan the Rebel was a big disappointment for me. Anderson had written some blood & thunder historicals such as Rogue Sword and The Golden Slave. He also wrote one especially Howardesque story that was in Planet Stories in the early 1950s–”The Virgin of Valkarion.” I don’t know if de Camp forced Anderson to cut the guts out of his novel or if the book is the product of a middle-aged man. “Conan the Chronicled” in Amra #70 by Anderson mentions his wife’s help. Looks like we have another Conan pastiche co-written by the wife. That explains it. Anderson originally has Belit’s enslaved brother a gelding. “An editor” (I think we know who that is) “declared that, since the average reader of a Conan book is a young male and many such have unexpected castration anxieties, this might make them dislike the story without knowing exactly why.” The dangerous aspects inherent in the original Robert E. Howard stories are methodically removed and the concept dumbed down in the pastiches. John Maddox Roberts later complained that the hard edges he wrote were toned down.

The novelization for the 1982 Conan movie is interesting in that L. Sprague de Camp used to complain that Lin Carter got paid but did no work. He claimed his wife was the collaborator. Carter told Robert M. Price that Catherine de Camp wrote the draft and then Carter went in and “break up its long sentences into something more Howardesque.” Lin Carter must have done something in order to get paid.

This was the end of the de Camp pastiches. The work was farmed out from here on out with de Camp making money on Conan licensing. Historical romance writer Robert Jordan was brought in to write a new set of pastiches for Tor Books from 1982-1986. The books were successful enough to repair the brand name and spawn the huge wave of Tor pastiches by other authors from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. De Camp would be involved reading submitted novels and make suggested changes.