It looks like everyone’s favorite Ilyassai warrior has found his way onto Facebook.  Charles Saunders’ epic hero now has his own fan club page where you can keep up with his latest adventures and those of his creator.

Here is a recent update from Charles from the Facebook page on all the great fantasy fiction he is currently working on:

Next up in my publishing pipeline is Dossouye II, the sequel to the Dossouye volume that came out in 2008. That book was a compilation of previously published stories about the Black Amazon. Dossouye II is a brand new novel.

After Dossouye II comes Imaro V. This volume can be considered a book-length epilogue to Imaro IV

Next in line is The Warrior’s Way, a collection of the Imaro short stories that were not incorporated into the novels. Seven of the ten stories in this book were previously published in the 1970s and 1980s; three are brand-new, written during the time period of 2007-2008.

Also, I recently completed another Imaro story for the Sword and Soul anthology I’m putting together with Milton Davis.

Farther down the pipeline is Nyumbani Tales, a collection of short stories that do not have either Imaro or Dossouye as lead characters. However, one story features Imaro’s mother, Katisa, and two are about Imaro’s sidekick, Pomphis.

So be assured there will be more Saunders fiction coming out over the next couple of years.

For those of you who have some spare time this June while attending Howard Days, you might want to do a bit of wandering around the area surrounding Cross Plains and visit the sites of some historical and notorious events smack dab in the middle of Howard’s old stomping grounds. 

After reading about some of the real life episodes, one can see Howard lived in a part of Texas that saw more than its share of violence and sorrow back in days of the wild frontier when sudden death was cloaked in the guise of the Red Indian.  The blood that flowed through Howard’s veins was much the same as the hale and hearty settlers, soldiers and lawmen that preceded him.  While he did not have to deal with the same day to day death struggles the frontiersmen did, he was certainly made of the same mettle.

No doubt, late at night while working at his typewriter, he could hear the faint sounds of horse hooves pounding across  the plains, the cry of the Indian braves and the thunderous reports of pistols and rifles as the white man pushed the frontier further west. Howard did not have to venture far to find material to write about – the stories were all around him.

The success of the recent Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey, Jr. got me thinking about Arthur Conan Doyle.  Downey appears to give Sherlock Holmes a London accent whereas Doyle had referred to Holmes’ northern origin. Holmes is a name that originated in Lancashire in England.  There are some Scottish Holmes but they are no doubt descendants of reprobates, miscreants, and recidivists who fled across the border evading justice.  The name has its origin from before the Norman Conquest in its Old English version of Holegn which means the holly plant or bush. So Sherlock Holmes should be speaking like a Mancunian.

Both Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft were fans of both Arthur Conan Doyle and the Sherlock Holmes stories. Lovecraft was such a fan he formed The Providence Detective Agency with friends for play when he was thirteen.  Robert E. Howard mentioned Doyle as one of his favorite writers in a letter to Lovecraft.  Howard seems to have been bit with the Sherlock Holmes bug in 1923 telling Tevis Clyde Smith to watch for any cheap Doyle books he can get. Howard’s library included The Sign of Four, The Valley of Fear, The Hound of the Baskervilles, His Last Bow, and The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Howard also had The Maracot Deep, The Lost World, and The White Company. Howard also had two volumes of Conan Doyle’s Best Books which included A Study in Scarlet and various non-series stories.

H. P. Lovecraft’s library included The Lost World, The Mystery of Sasassa Valley, Tales of Long Ago, and Tales of Twlight and the Unseen. Interesting that both HPL and REH had The Lost World in their possession. It is a classic fantastic adventure novel. Doyle wrote enough fantastic stories to fill out collections of both science fiction and supernatural fiction.

If you want to work on your Robert E. Howard bookshelf, a good place to start is getting The Lost World.

Doyle’s influence extends further. August Derleth wrote direct pastiches of Sherlock Holmes with his character Solar Pons. Donald Wandrei had his own detective series featuring I. V. Frost in Clues Detective Stories. Frost has some similarities to Holmes but uses more gadgets and is much more violent when need be. I wouldn’t be surprised if Frank Belknap Long ever wrote any Doyle influenced detective fiction.

Bill “Indiana” Cavalier came through with a scan for the Corgi paperback edition of Jack London’s The Star Rover. Here it is:

Nothing to write home about. I would have liked to see a Frank Frazetta or Jeff Jones cover.

Some of those who are Robert E. Howard fans are interested in what he read and what influenced him.  I mentally subdivide the category into two groups. One includes the Howard’s Weird Tales and the H. P. Lovecraft circle. The other group are those that Howard sought out and enjoyed generally in his younger days. Many are classic adventures writers from what is now becoming called the “Era of the Storytellers.” Generally these are classic adventure writers who straddle the 19th-20th Century line. I have covered a few such as Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy in the past month.

If one wants to read what influenced Howard, the first writer on the list should be Jack London. Remembered today as a boy’s writer of dog stories, London was so much more. He wrote in that time where the division between “slick” and “pulp” magazine was not so set in stone. London was at the forefront of changing the language of writing. His style was not flowery or ornamented. He used simple words but used them well. The prose flowed much faster and that influence is still felt today. Robert E. Howard had two collections of London short stories, six novels, and a collection of essays.  Fantasy Magazine in 1935 mentioned that “Jack London is this Texan’s favorite writer.”

If there is one Jack London book a Robert E. Howard fan should seek out, it is The Star Rover. I first heard of this book in Fritz Leiber’s excellent introduction to the Berkley paperback edition of Marchers of Valhalla. It was six years later that I finally found a hardback copy at John T. Zubal Books in Cleveland, Ohio. A tale of a convict tortured by using the straight jacket on him, he remembers past lives. The prose is familiar:

“And on that great drift, southward and eastward under the burning sun that perished all descendents of the houses of Asgard and Vanaheim that took part in it, I have been a king in Ceylon, a builder of Aryan monuments under Aryan kings in old Java and old Sumatra. And I have died a thousand deaths on the great South Sea Drift ere ever the rebirth of men to plant monuments, that only Aryans plant, on volcano tropic islands that I, Darrell Standing, cannot name, being too well versed in that far sea geography.”

The Star Rover is available today in a few different editions. For some reason, there was never a mass market paperback edition during the sword and sorcery booms. There was a Corgi paperback in the U.K. I am still trying to find a scan of the cover for that one. There were two different mass market paperback editions for Before Adam. That was London’s first racial memory novel predating The Star Rover. We don’t know if Howard read that but I would bet that he did.

I have not seen the Bantam edition of Before Adam in a long time though it used to be common in bookstores. The Ace edition has a way better cover.

Another novel in Howard’s Library is The Iron Heel which is set slightly in the future for that time (1908) and is about a shooting class war in the United States. There are some trade paperback editions of that novel.

As to the short stories, the fantastics are generally going to interest the Howard fan. The Citadel Twilight The Science Fiction Stories of Jack London is technically out of print but copies are cheap and plentiful at Amazon.

An oddity that you may run across in a used bookstore is Thirteen Tales of Terror. This is a Popular Library paperback from 1978. I have only ever seen this once (and I snatched it up) but again does not appear to be rare with online sellers. It is a cool little collection.

Leonaur Books in the U.K. has reissued Before Adam, The Star Rover, and The Iron Heel in both hardback and trade paperback editions. Plus–each book includes several shorter fantastic stories by London. So, if you get all three books, you will have just about all of London’s fantastic output. You can order these at Amazon or directly from Leonaurpress.com.