If you take a look at your old Lancer or Ace edition of Conan the Adventurer, you will recognize the face of Conan. Decades before Arnold Schwarzenegger mumbled his way through Conan the Barbarian in 1982, another actor had the barbarian role down pat. That actor was Vladimir Pahlaniuk, better known as Jack Palance. Born to Ukrainian immigrant parents in the coal mining territory of Pennsylvania, Palance had been a pro-boxer in the late 1930s. A WWII veteran, he moved into acting. After some noir and war pictures, Palance took the role of Simon Magus in the celluloid adaptation of Thomas B. Costain’s The Silver Chalice. Richard L. Tierney loved Palance’s role so much, he turned Simon of Gitta into a sword and sorcery hero. Palance’s first barbarian part was as  Attila the Hun in Sign of the Pagan in 1954. At 6’4″ and muscular, Palance cast a great barbarian.

His next barbarian was as the Celt, Revak in The Barbarians, loosely based on F. van Wyck Mason’s Argosy serial from the 1930s, “The Barbarian.”

He quickly followed up playing Ogatai ravaging medieval Poland in The Mongol in 1961.

He stole the scene from Anthony Quinn in Barabbas as Torvald the gladiator.

His last barbarian role from this period was playing Alboin, king of the Lombards, conqueror of Italy in the 6th Century A.D. in Sword of the Conqueror.

Palance scared the hell out of me in fifth grade when he played Dracula.  Hey, he even had a part in 1979 in the disco era Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. He beat Arnold by two years to sword and sorcery playing the villain, Voltan, in Hawk the Slayer (1980).

I mentioned Palance as a what if alternate history Conan to Leo Grin. Upon reflection, Leo mentioned that Palance had the “aura of good humored menace” about him that would have made a good Conan.

Jim Keegan had a chance to meet Ray Harryhausen and happened to mention Robert E. Howard. Harryhausen told Jim that he wanted to make a Conan film in the 1950s but no one was interested. Imagine a 1950s or early 60s version of Conan with Palance snarling “I’ll send the devil a henchman!” Go back to your copy of Conan the Adventurer, Frank Frazetta had the same thing on his mind in 1966.

If you go to a library booksale, you are almost guaranteed to see at least one book by Thomas B. Costain available. As much as I can tell he was one of the biggest of the 1950s historical writers from that period that included Samuel Shellabarger, Frank Slaughter, F. van Wyck Mason, Edison Marshall, Frank Yerby, and Lawrence Schoonover. L. Sprague de Camp was a second stringer by virtue of being a decade late before jumping into historical novels. Then you had the paperback guys like Gardner F. Fox, Donald Barr Chidsey, Poul Anderson, John Vail, and Homer Hatten who generally brought a distinctly pulp attitude to the table.

I had read Costain’s Landmark (remember those?) book on William the Conqueror way back in school for a book report. He tried to make William Bastard appealing as much as could be done.  Costain got his start as an editor and moved onto writing. A piece of trivia is he was a buddy of Frederick Faust (aka Max Brand).  I decided to give Costain’s fiction a whirl and see how he stacked up.

You can see why Costain was popular. His style is smooth and you can burn though one of his books in rapid order. He is dialogue driven with some descriptions interspersed.  This novel is his Attila the Hun story though the main characters are from a nameless tribe first under Roman control and then Hunnish. Costain’s descriptions are more suited for high Middle Ages than terminal stage western Roman Empire. His descriptions of riding jackets, hats with peacock feathers etc just don’t fit with the lurch into barbarism taking place at the time. Costain just didn’t have the feel for barbarian Europe that our man from Cross Plains had. The Battle of the Catalaunian Fields is not up close and personal but off stage for the most part. Attila’s mass destruction of cities in northern Italy is glossed over. A growing romance is a major plot in the story. Flavius Aetius (“The Last Roman”) is not a developed character. He also made some historical mistakes such as having the Bulgars present as enemies of the Huns. The Bulgars were descendents of the Huns who had mixed with Ugric tribes around the Ural Mountains after Attila’s empire broke up. He refers to the plains of Lombardy in northern Italy a full century before the Lombards (and their Saxon allies) stormed into Italy. He should have used the term Cisalpine Gaul instead. I catch these things.  So, you have a historical novel meant for broad, mass appeal and not aimed at blood & thunder former pulp readers. They had to search out the Gardner Fox Gold Medal paperbacks.  My guess is Costain is strongest in his high and late Middle Ages novels such as The Black Rose, Below the Salt, and The Moneymaker. Edison Marshall and F. van Wyck Mason both came out of the pulps. Marshall’s writing style can be stilted and slow. The movie The Vikings is an improvement on his novel, The Viking. F. van Wyck Mason slightly rewrote and expanded some of his 1930s Argosy serials as 1950s paperbacks with even more violence thrown in. L. Sprague de Camp was of the opinion that Howard would have been in the midst of the 1950s costume drama wave. I don’t know if Howardian mayhem would have translated well into big print run hardbacks. F. van Wyck Mason comes closest to REH with paperbacks such as The Barbarians, The Silver Leopard, The Return of the Eagles, and Lysander. I will recommend Costain’s four volume history of the Platagenet Dynasty tracing the travails and triumphs from Henry II to the end of the War of the Roses. He goes into things such as the evolution of castle warfare for example. It is common in used bookstores and enjoyable reading in its own right.

For the past few years, I kept hearing how great a novel Eagle in the Snow by Wallace Breem was. This past winter, I finally got around to procuring a copy and reading it. I have to agree, Eagle in the Snow is a great, unforgettable story. I am an enthusiast of the history of the Fall of the Roman Empire. I read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall many years ago and ate it up. The story of the wanderings of tribes such as the Goths, Heruls, and Vandals were exciting to me. I even ended up getting Procopius’ History of the Vandal Wars and also read History of the Gothic Wars which are eye witness accounts of Belisarius’ campaigns in the Sixth Century A.D.

     Wallace Breem’s novel starts in Britain and the rise of Paulinus Gaius Maximus, a Roman soldier who serves at Hadrian’s Wall. There is a fascinating character, Julian, Maximus’ cousin who turns traitor and joins the barbarians. Maximus is instructed to recreate  the Twentieth Legion for duty on the continent to help protect Rome. Stilicho, a Vandal born Roman General of the West sends Maximus and his legion to the Rhine River to help contain a dangerous concentration of barbarians threatening the empire.

     Maximus not only has to deal being outnumbered ten to one but with incompetence and treason from within. Breem has done the best job I have ever read of describing a society that is deteriorating and there is no coming back.  There are some great quotes such as: “He had no initiative, no imagination, no understanding. It was hard to blame him. He was, after all, only a civil servant.” Or “It was full of polite evasions, veiled threats, meaningless assurances, and hollow sincerities, the whole so wrapped in the stilted language of the civil administration as to rob the contents of any value whatsoever.”

     The novel builds in suspense until the last 100 pages are non-stop action. Breem has some excellent battle sequences. He does take some small liberties with a few names of barbarian leaders from a few years later but the average reader is not going to notice this. The historical background is extremely accurate. I don’t know if Eagle in the Snow is a brilliant novel but I do know that it is a great novel. It is a book I will be returning to someday.

Robert E. Howard Days 2009 was hot in more ways than the obvious one. In addition to both the 12th and 13th being over 100 degrees hot, we had hot guests and hot happenings.

After surviving a MONSTER thunderstorm while white-knuckling I-30 through Dallas, Cheryl and I arrived in Cross Plains to another nasty storm. It was like I was that guy with the rain cloud above his head from the Little Abner comic strip for the entire eight day trip! After the storms, it just got hot for the rest of the non-stormy weekend.

HD 09 featured not one but two incredibly hot Guests, Larry Thomas and Donald Sidney-Fryer. Mr. Thomas came in as New School Howard, DSF is Old School Howard, and they combined to give us all incredible insights on Howard the Man and Howard the Poet. The panel appearances of these two fine gentlemen, along with Barbara Barrett, gave us all some hot views of the Poetry of Robert E. Howard. Unfortunately, panelist Frank Coffman had to cool his heels in Chicago, a victim of storm-cancelled air flights. You were missed, Skipper!

While this won’t be a complete report, even though I’m starting to heat up here, suffice to say that all the regularly scheduled events turned out great, the Robert E. Howard House shined in the Texas sun, and a number of attendees wound up with shiny hot foreheads! We’ll change around the Poetry Throwdown for next year, the REH Foundation Awards will get started up, and we’re already planning for some more hot times. But that’s next year – this year was HOT!

Without question, the hottest event of the weekend, and one of the best show’n'tells ever from any Howard Days, happened on Saturday afternoon. Jack and Barbara Baum gave us a look into a heretofore unknown high school textbook that belonged to a 15 year old Robert E. Howard. How do we know it was Howard’s book? Well, he wrote his name and the date inside the front cover, along with drawing several cartoons. AND, to top it off, Howard made written comments after each section of the book. Wow! Talk about the icing on the cake of a fabulous weekend!

But, like all Howard Days, there’s never really enough time to do everything you want to do, so that’s why you keep coming back: to get to everything. Eventually I will, but in the meantime, I’ll bask in the heat from another well-spent weekend under a hot Texas sky.

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).

The May 4, 2009 issue of National Review magazine had an article on Louis Lamour by John J. Miller. Miller is a Robert E. Howard fan, you can link to his “Between the Covers” at Nationalreview.com from Thecimmerian.com site. I have been a reader of National Review for seventeen years. Here and there have been discussions on H. Rider Haggard and reviews of George McDonald Fraser. The magazine is a friend to adventure fiction.

     Miller’s piece was informative to me. I knew of course about President Reagan being a big fan of Lamour but didn’t know that Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter were also readers. Miller gives a mini-biography even mentioning Lamour’s first sale to True Gang Life. Miller touches on Lamour’s moral certitude in his fiction. He also discusses Lamour’s uneveness. Louis Lamour was the first western writer I ever read after Robert E. Howard. I started out with his 12th Century historical, The Walking Drum, a book that had its moments but hampered by Lamour’s kitchen sink approach to the story. If I were to recommend a Lamour book, it would be The Daybreakers which is the classic Sackett novel. I saw the CBS miniseries on T.V. about 29 years ago which starred Tom Selleck and Sam Elliott. It is a classic western novel and one that hits all the right notes. Other novels are hit and miss. Lamour cranked out three novels per year in the 1960s. He became the western writer for Bantam Books because “Luke Short” could not produce the numbers that Bantam wanted.

     James Reasoner, no slouch at western writing, mentioned liking Lamour’s pulp novelettes and novellas better than the paperback expansion of the stories. I have to admit to not reading Lamour’s westerns anymore. I am slowly reading the westerns of Robert E. Howard’s high school classmate, Clarence S. Boyles, Jr. who wrote as “Will C. Brown” and in the process becoming quite a fan of his.  I know people who read nothing but Lamour. I have tried to interest Lamourphiles in giving a try to Gordon D. Shirreffs or T. V. Olsen, generally with no luck. I can remember in 1982 I had just read the Bantam edition of Robert E. Howard’s Wolfshead. I lent it to a fraternity brother of mine (Delta Sigma Phi, Omega Chapter) who was a big Lamour fan. He returned the book a few days later saying, “This was interesting but this Howard guy really needed to take a cue from Louis Lamour. He is too fast.” Had I known at the time that Lamour also started out in the pulp magazines I could have riposted in kind.

     Lamour is interesting in that he wrote not only in the western field, but for Thrilling Adventures, boxing and football yarns, and various detective pulps including one story in the legendary Black Mask. I have not read The Haunted Mesa but the late, great Chuck Eschweiler told me that he detected elements of Lovecraft in it.

     This is my alltime favorite Lamour quote from an introduction to a story in The Hills of Homicide: “The idea that poverty is a cause of crime is a lot of nonsense. It is one of those cliches that is accepted because it seems logical. Crimes are committed by people who have some money and want more. More often they are committed by somebody who wants to have money to flash around, to buy fancy clothes, or spend on women, drugs, or whiskey.”  

     Miller’s article has a funny in retrospect condemnation by George Will on Ron Reagan’s fondness for Lamour: “By all means, read westerns, Mr. President, but why Louis Lamour? He is a pale writer.”

     This article should show up in National Review’s archives in time. I checked a few days ago and it wasn’t up yet but check it out when it does.

Robert E. Howard Days, the yearly celebration of the Life and Works of Ol’ Two-Gun Bob Howard, is nigh upon us! Only a week away! This year’s event will officially take place next Friday and Saturday, June 12th & 13th, in the otherwise quiet town of Cross Plains, Texas, where REH lived and wrote all of his stories and poems. I say “officially” because some of us show up early and stay later, because we have so much fun!!

Project Pride, a local civic organization formed 20 years ago, took it upon themselves to first purchase and then restore the house where Robert E. Howard lived and worked, recognizing the importance of preserving the home that made their town famous all over the whole wide world. The House has been turned into a museum, and walking through it is like stepping back in time to the 1930′s. The work on the House has been done so lovingly and graciously that the Robert E. Howard House is listed in the National Historic Registry, and it has become enough of a tourist attraction to be listed in several of the Texas travel guides.

This year we’re trying something a little different by putting a theme to Howard Days: The Poetry of Robert E. Howard. There’ll be readings and panels devoted to this subject, with some great poetry experts on hand. Of course, the main subject is always Bob Howard, and the conversation and fellowship in his name is always the highlight of Howard Days.

Pretty much everything you need to know about Howard Days is available by clicking on the REH DAYS 2009 bar at the top of this page. The information has been continually updated. If you’re a fan of REH and you’ve never been to Howard Days, there’s always room for you to come on down (there’s just not room at the only local motel…). It’s a great way to sample the wonderful small town Texas hospitality and friendliness while enjoying the camraderie of folks who have come together in the name of our pal Bob Howard. Hope to see you there! Y’all come!