The annual Robert E. Howard Days celebration will take place June 13th and 14th in beautiful Cross Plains, Texas. There is a reasonably complete information page now online, and if you click on the little tab labeled REH Days 2008 at the top of this page, you find out Everything You Need to Know About Robert E. Howard Days. Well, almost…

We’ll be adding and revising information there as we need to. This year’s Howard Days is a little more relaxed, and a little more “fannish” in its programming, but I can guarantee it’ll be as fun as ever. It is THE place to be if you are any kind of a Howard Fan — if you weren’t, you probably wouldn’t be reading this anyway!

So check it all out, and make your plans to join in for some fine Robert E. Howard fellowship. Let me know if you’ve got any questions, and I hope to see you in Texas!

Last week, Rusty Burke sent me an email alerting me to an advertisement at Paizo.com regarding their upcoming edition of Robert E. Howard’s Almuric as part of their Planet Stories line. In the description, it is stated “For those historians who believe the latter theory, the chief suspect is responsible for wrapping up Almuric is none other than Otis Adelbert Kline, Howard’s literary agent and himself a prominenent Weird Tales author. In addition to to veiled references to shady arrangements, theorists who believe Howard never lived to see a complete Almuric draft point to the novel’s ending as uncharacteristic of Howard’s style, whereas others accuse such conspiracy theorists to jumping at shadows. The debate rages to this day.”

I am not sure this is a raging debate with the lone exception of one person who has steadfastly refused to accept Almuric is anything but 100% Robert E. Howard despite repeated presented evidence to the contrary. “Veiled references to shady arrangements” has me perplexed. I have studied the history of Almuric for years and have some theories. Glenn Lord told me there was a first version for the novel that was more synopsis than draft. There was a second incomplete draft. He got this information from a fanzine article from around 1940. So, there is a second hand present that finished the novel.

Now to Otis Adelbert Kline. Cerasini and Hoffman did speculate that Kline finished the novel in their Starmont Reader’s Guide to Robert E. Howard. This theory is quickly demolished in that Otis Adelbert Kline would have taken a 50% cut of the sales if he had finished it. The receipts for the novel indicate a 10% agent fee. Also an examination of the climactic battle is most un-Klinish. Kline loved sword fights and used fencing terms such as moulinet for descriptions. Almuric’s last chapter is very clumsy with the action sequences. Some sentences are downright embarrassing. I compared potential posthumous collaborators including E. Hoffmann Price, Ralph Milne Farley, Otis Adelbert Kline, and Otto Binder. My criteria is they had to have been writing for Weird Tales at the time. I came to the conclusion that Otto Binder finished Almuric after comparing the texts of the two chapters to a number of stories of his from that period. I wrote this up as an essay entitled “The First Posthumous Collaborator” for REHupa back in 2002. Binder’s biographer, Bill Schelley agreed with me when I presented my ideas to him. I have no proof as we have no letters or receipts of payment. It is all circumstantial evidence based on textual comparison. I can say Otis Adelbert Kline can be ruled out easily. It is time to lay this one to rest.

A couple of weeks back, I received Lorelei of the Red Mist: Planetary Romances by Leigh Brackett. This is the second volume from Haffner Press collecting all of Brackett’s shorter fiction into uniform volumes. Haffner Press books are real favorites of mine (along with Fedogan & Bremer and Midnight House/Darkside Press). The books are big, solid, and well made for a fair price. The font makes for easy reading, layout is good, the choice of art tasteful and not overwrought. The same reason I like the old Arkham House books (Donald Wandrei and August Derleth were real serious “book people.”)

Leigh Brackett was big fan of Robert E. Howard. The first Haffner Press collection, Martian Quest, included some early Brackett fiction wherein the Howard influence was easy to spot. The black haired barbarian named Crom who battles the space vampires in “The Cube From Space” is one of the most obvious examples. This volume finds Brackett at her peak of writing skills. This volume could just as easily be marketed as a “Best of” collection. Brackett’s writing skills are honed and the influences are less obvious. The writing is both exotic and hard-boiled at the same time. You get to read classics such as “The Moon That Vanished” and the title story co-written with Ray Bradbury. Brackett wrote “Lorelei of the Red Mist” as an homage to Robert E. Howard. The Venusian barbarian Conan is very similar physically to the original Cimmerian. Leigh Brackett had to leave this story unfinished when Hollywood came knocking, so her youthful pal, Ray Bradbury, finished it. Interestingly, the Bradbury portion of the story is rather blood and thunder. A characteristic not associated with his fiction. Go out and buy this book. You won’t regret it. This is among the finest writing in the pulp magazines of the 1940s.

You can order at www.haffnerpress.com

Today, I attended a memorial service for a friend of mine who fell off this mortal coil. Charles Eschweiler who was known as Chuck died too young at 57. I first met him when he worked at the local Barnes & Noble store in the mid-1990s. I was wearing my gray 1993 model Robert E. Howard shirt (produced by Bill Cavalier) while at the store seeing what was at the remainder section. He looked at the shirt and said, “I never saw a Robert E. Howard shirt before.” Then followed a conversation that lasted about an hour. Some years later, Chuck got a job as a custodian at a local senior center cum geriatric medical practice. As I worked there Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, I would often have half hour long talks with him after eating a fast lunch. Chuck was a big strapping goof of a guy with a slight curve to the mouth like he was in on some joke nobody else knew. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of many things. We would discuss H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Weird Tales and then switch to movies and then to music or history. He educated me on Italian cinema and directors such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento. I would lend him books, he would lend me movies. It was refreshing to find someone who like me thought the Eric Clapton period of the Yardbirds was overrated. And again like me, he thought the album Little Games (again the Yardbirds) was far better than some critics had written. A couple of years back when I met Chris Dreja and Jim McCarty of the Yardbirds, I had to call him up and tell him about it (a new incarnation of the Yardbirds played locally and they were killer). Someone mentioned today that Chuck had more vinyl than God. He used to write reviews for the local newspaper and once was a guest dj for a jazz show on our local PBS radio station.

Chuck came to Robert E. Howard in the most unique way. He first read Conan and other Howard stories in the pages of his grandmother’s copies of Weird Tales! He told me his grandmother was a unique person. Indeed. A couple of years back he had the 2nd genre anthology edited by Michael Chabon and said “The cover is taken from Famous Fantastic Mysteries for A. Merritt’s ‘Seven Footprints to Satan’.” He loved the parody issue of Crypt of Cthulhu that I lent to him. He especially liked the piece where Lovecraft became editor of Weird Tales and HPL rewrote the first Jules de Grandin story to meet editorial requirements. Jules de Grandin of course is dispatched by an extra-dimensional creature. He would repeat lines from that piece to me for months. Likewise, he immediately caught the satire in Karl Edward Wagner’s story “Neither Brute nor Human” when I lent him the collection Why Not You and I? He had a lot of ideas about Lovecraft, Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. I would encourage him to write them down and work them up into essays for the various Howard journals out there. Unfortunately, he never got around to doing it. I would sometimes mention his ideas over at the innercircle group referring to him as Chuck the Janitor. I have now lost the only person I knew locally (north western Pennsylvania) to talk about this stuff. The world is now more dull with his passing. I hope he is now engaged in long conversation with Howard and Lovecraft while Keith Relf sings “Silver Tightrope” in the background. I know there are people around here who are going to miss him.

Addendum: Yesterdy, Feb. 14, I talked with a couple of Chuck’s friends and they suggested a link to the goerie page:

http://www.legacy.com/ErieTimesNews/DeathNotices.asp?Page=Notice&PersonID=102765154