A book that will interest those who like to read the Lovecraft circle is Sanctity & Sin, the collected poems and prose poems of Donald Wandrei. I made the case for Wandrei on his centennial back in April. This book from Hippocampus Press is an expanded reissue of the Necronomicon Press chapbook of Wandrei poems that came out back in 1988. It is good to have these poems in a book format and easier to read text. There are a few quibbles such as the centering of the text within the page leaves for a smaller left margin than I would like. S. T. Joshi’s introduction is a paraphrase of the Necronomicon Press chapbook.  I also disagree with his comment that Wandrei had given up writing poetry by 1934. Wandrei wrote some new poems for the Arkham House collection Poems For Midnight when August Derleth approached him about putting together a book for the title that Derleth created. “King of the Shadowland” is very much a poem written by someone later in life. Don Herron saw Wandrei working on a poem when he walked into his house back in the 1970s.

Wandrei’s poetry covers several themes- passion, cosmic, death, torture-horror, nature. I happen to like his poetry better than Clark Ashton Smith’s. If you like Robert E. Howard’s poetry, you should give Wandrei a try. Howard loved Wandrei’s poem “The Little Gods Wait” especially. This collection contains two different versions- one from Weird Tales that Howard read and a previously unseen one from the unpublished Wandrei novel Dead Titans, Waken! Here is an example of Wandrei’s poetry:

No shadow falls athwart my halls

No echo answers when I speak;

No light illumes the frieze antique

That slowly crumbles from these walls

I consider Donald Wandrei as technically the best writer from Weird Tales. His language is more modern than Clark Ashton Smith, more natural than H. P. Lovecraft, more in control of the words in general. I wrote an essay about Donald Wandrei’s poetry three years back that was originally meant for a collection edited by Ben Szumskyj (Power of the Writing Mind, Revelations of the Elder Glyphics etc) which I yanked (along with something on Karl Edward Wagner’s sword & sorcery fiction). Wandrei is a writer like REH that I can get excited about. You can order the book directly from Hippocampuspress.com or from Amazon.

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.

L. Sprague de Camp’s star fell during the middle 1970s with the bankruptcy of Lancer Books. A Robert E. Howard revival took place at this time largely engineered by Glenn Lord’s ceaseless work. There was an explosion of small press magazines that were Howard oriented, small press book publications by Fax and Donald Grant, and mass market paperbacks from Zebra. This in turn helped spark another wave of sword and sorcery fiction (much of it bad) in the late 1970s. Every other paperback had “In the Tradition of Conan” splashed on the cover including the Zebra editions of Talbot Mundy’s Tros of Samothrace (which predated Conan). One thing that was missing was Conan. Then in late summer of 1977, The Hour of the Dragon restored to its Weird Tales text came out from Berkley Medallion. Karl Edward Wagner was to edit the Conan stories in a new package of six volumes. The books had the best covers that Ken Kelly ever did. Wagner produced fact filled forewords and afterwords with no psychoanalysis, character assassination, and back handed comments. Just so there was no confusion, the covers said “The Authorized Edition edited by Karl Edward Wagner.” Then the series was killed. Hollywood was interested in making a Conan movie but wanted to deal with one entity. The end result was the formation of Conan Properties Incorporated. Kirby McCauley is probably the one who talked Glenn Lord into going along with L. Sprague de Camp.  Henry Kissinger once said that NATO’s purpose was to keep the U.S. in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. CPI did the same thing in keeping de Camp in, Robert E. Howard down, and Glenn Lord out. A board that included de Camp, Lord, and a de Camp ally ensured that Congor would be inflicted upons future generations of unsuspecting readers. Glenn Lord would be overruled in voting.

Kirby McCauley had brokered a deal with Bantam Books for Karl Edward Wagner to write three Conan pastiche novels. One de Camp’s first acts was to kill the Karl Wagner book chronicling Conan’s rise to king of Aquilonia. Wagner had already written a Bran Mak Morn pastiche entitled Legion From the Shadows which was turned in late. He was supposed to write a sequel called Queen of the Night which he never wrote. Zebra had to scramble and David C. Smith & Richard L. Tierney were brought in to write a Bran novel (For the Witch of the Mist). I am one who is sceptical that Wagner would have ever written The Day of the Lion. If you read “The Truth Insofar as I Know It” by David Drake from Exorcisms and Ecstacies, it paints a picture of someone who consistently had problems delivering the promised goods. Wagner did write a detailed outline/synopsis for Day of the Lion that appeared in Simba (September 1978).

One version I have heard is Wagner salvaged some parts of Day of the Lion that were incorporated into what would become The Road of Kings. The Wagner Conan pastiche is an interesting book. Rick McCollum describes it as Conan as Che Guevara.  It reads like a Kane story to me. Some people hate the novel, others really like it.  Wagner used the Chinese terra cotta soldiers as the idea for the novel. Wagner turned in two–thirds of the novel in 1978 claiming the remaining portion has been accidently left out of the envelope. He then pulled an all nighter to finish the last chapter. L. Sprague de Camp would later complain that the Wagner novel did not fit in with his Conan chronology. There are stories that de Camp constantly harped on Wagner while he was working on the novel to make it fit in with de Camp’s ideas.

If you go over to David Drake’s website and go to his comments regarding the writing of Killer, there is a repetition of problems. He later never delivered on a medical thriller novel for Bantam. Later on, there were problems with Wagner when he worked on a comic script called “Tell Me Dark.” Either Wagner had incredibly bad luck with who he did business with or there was a problem with him delivering.

A Wagner version of Conan becoming king is intriguing and would have been preferable to what was delivered by de Camp. L. Sprague de Camp eliminated a rival editor and pastiche writer with extreme prejudice. No one was going to stand in his way.

Rusty adds:

Karl tells his side of the Killer and Tell Me, Dark stories in the last interview he did, posted at the Karl Edward Wagner: East of Eden website.  Karl was and Dave is a friend, and I take no position one way or the other here, just note that Karl’s version of what happened is available.

With regard to the tale of Conan’s rise to kingship, after the formation of Conan Properties de Camp killed Karl’s proposal for Day of the Lion because he had already decided that it would be he (along with Lin Carter) who would tell the story.  The result, of course, was the lame Conan the Liberator.

Don’t stop here. Get yourself over to The Cimmerian Blog right this instant and read Leo Grin’s superb essay, “In Defense of Hester Jane Ervin Howard.” Then you can come on back over here and check out my few paltry comments.

No, really, I mean it. Go over there and read that first. Right now.

Okay, presumably you have now read Leo’s clearly heartfelt and genuinely affecting tribute to Robert E Howard’s mother, Hester, which includes some concomitant remarks on his father, Isaac, and their familial relations.

That is an essay that, as I have just told Leo, I very much wish that I had written, though I greatly doubt that I could have brought the same passion to bear, nor written it so well. Hester Howard has indeed taken a savage beating at the hands of Howard’s fans and biographers for altogether too long, for no good reason. Mostly it has been because people felt like they had to find something that would explain Howard’s suicide, and latched onto the fact that it came just as he learned that his dying mother would not regain consciousness. Aha!, they thought, that must be it, he simply couldn’t face life without her, she must have had some strange psychological hold on him. L. Sprague de Camp, Howard’s first actual “biographer,” famously latched onto the Freudian “Oedipal complex.” He then reasoned backward, and interpreted everything about Hester — and I mean everything — in the light of that prejudgment: everything had to be seen in such a way that it would support the conclusion that there was some kind of extreme dependency relationship between Hester and her son. I’ll not bother giving any examples here, Leo did a great job of that. If you take his examples to heart, you can readily see the same thing occurring again and again throughout de Camp’s “biographical” treatments.

I have for some time now been convinced that the reason it has been so easy to misinterpret Hester Howard is that so little is really known about her, particularly about her later years. Isaac Howard was known by nearly everyone within a few hundred square miles of Cross Plains, and liked by most of them. He was a big, hearty, larger-than-life figure, and his wife and son lived very much in his shadow, so far as most people were concerned. In the last few years of her life, due to her illness, she didn’t get out of the house much, so very few people in Cross Plains got to know her all that well. As Leo notes, though, most people who did know her seem to have liked her: you don’t name your children after people you don’t care about. And Bob, of course, didn’t get out a lot either, since he was at home writing stories. As I have been saying for a long time, Bob had friends, very good ones, but he was the sort who preferred a few close friends over a wide circle of acquaintances. Over and over again, people I’ve interviewed through the years could tell story after story after story about Doc Howard, stories that seemed to them as clear as yesterday. But ask about Hester, and I got responses like “I didn’t really know her too well,” “She didn’t get around very much,” and the like. Next to nothing. Ask about Bob, and it was, “I never did know him very well, he was just Dr. Howard’s crazy son.” Well, when two family members are so overwhelmed in memory by a third, they become background figures, almost tabulae rasa onto which pretty much anything can be projected.

Leo has done a splendid job of pulling together what is actually known about Hester and showing that, if we base our view of her on those facts, what emerges is a very different picture than the one we have been sold for far, far too long: a picture of a loving, devoted family woman, one who sacrificed much of her early life, and as it turned out, much of her health, to caring for members of her family; one who doted on her younger half-siblings and kept in touch with them, even when separated by hundreds of miles; one who loved her only child and shared with him her love of poetry; one who did all in her power to ease the lives and the workloads of her husband and her son. It is really a masterful effort, and I heartily applaud Leo for posting it for all to read.

I’m going to head back over and read it again, and then again, until I have memorized it. I hope a few of you will do the same. I sincerely hope that it will prove to be the beginning of the end of the unfair mischaracterizations of a good woman.