In an effort to flog a dead horse, I thought I would post the other covers by Tom Barber done for the Zebra edition of Tros of Samothrace. Barber produced many covers for Zebra Books including the Weird Tales anthologies edited by Lin Carter. I like his style as it is different from other fantasy illustration of the time.

The Zebra editions are notorious for typoes and bad printing.  The covers have it all over the Avon editions though.

Zebra also numbered The Purple Pirate as book four when Queen Cleopatra is actually the next book.  Supposedly Talbot Mundy rewrote the original Tros sequence for book publication. I have generally found that more is lost than gained from rewrites, especially when a writer returns to the work years later. I now have to dig out my copies of Adventure and see if the original Tros stories are more blood and thunder and generally vigorous than the later book version.

Here is also the cover for the Gnome Press hardback for Tros of Samothrace in the 1950s. A pretty lame cover.

I had no sooner put up the post on Talbot Mundy’s Tros of Samothrace stories and someone posted a link from the Conan.com forum. I found out there Leonaur Press reissued Tros of Samothrace in trade paperback form recently. Looks like Leonaur used the old Avon method of collecting two novellas per book for volumes 1,2,3 and “The Messenger of Destiny” for the fourth volume.  The new titles are Wolves of the Tiber, Dragons of the North, Serpent of the Waves, City of the Eagles. I have to say that the new titles are pretty snappy. For some reason the first volume is $17.99 at Amazon while the rest are $28.99 to $32.99. Queen Cleopatra has been renamed Cleopatra while The Purple Pirate remains under the 1935 title. I am debating on updating my Tros collection and picking these up. If you are a Robert E. Howard fan looking for a Bran Mak Morn vibe, and have never read these–by all means invest in them.

One of the great series from the pulp magazines in general and Adventure in particular is that of Tros of Samothrace.  Fritz Leiber does a good job of describing Tros: “A Greek mystic and man of action, who comes from the Aegean isle with his father to warn the Britons to resist Caesar at all costs. Tros’ father belongs to a branch of the mystic brotherhoods that believes in nonviolent resistance to evil, Tros to a rather more practical branch which approves violence in a good cause after every effort has been made to avoid it and to mislead the enemy with honest but deceptive words. Tros is an Odyssean character, by temperament an explorer seeking to widen horizons. He is a dauntless fighter, a swordsman without peer, and a resourceful leader of men.”

This was a departure for Talbot Mundy. He had been known for writing tales of India and Africa in the pages of Adventure the past fourteen years. He shifted gears and moved into historical territory previously owned by Harold Lamb, Arthur D. Howden-Smith, Farnham Bishop, and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur. Mundy caused a ruckus by portraying Julius Caesar as a charismatic villain.  The stories in Adventure were:

Tros of Samothrace     Feb. 10, 1925       

The Enemy of Rome   April 10, 1925          

Prisoners of War           June 10, 1925   

 Hostages to Luck                  August 20, 1925  

Admiral of Caesar’s Fleet         October 10, 1925

The Dancing Girl of Gades     December 10, 1925

The Messenger of Destiny         Feb. 10-Feb. 28, 1926 (3 part serial)

The first six stories were novellas, the last a novel. All were collected in 1934 as Tros of Samothrace which came in at 949 pages. Gnome Press later reprinted it in 1958. An Avon edition in the late 1960s collected the stories into four paperbacks. The first three paperbacks each collected two novellas while the fourth was “The Messenger of Destiny.” Zebra Books reprinted the series with nice Barber covers in three volumes. Zebra just chopped a novella in half midway.

Mundy wrote four more novelettes in the mid-1930s:                                         

Battle Stations            May 1,1935

Cleopatra’s Promise      June 15, 1935

The Purple Pirate           August 15, 1935

Fleets of Fire        October 1, 1935                                                                 

 These four novelettes were collected as The Purple Pirate in 1935 right after the last story appeared in magazine form. Avon and Zebra both had paperback editions later.

The Tros stories have a reputation. L. Sprague de Camp once said of someone who described the stories as Conan raised by Quakers. The stories will go on and on with talk. All of a sudden there is a great battle scene whether with Romans, Northmen, in the arena etc., and then the story will go back to talk. I am partial to The Purple Pirate as the action took up a bigger percentage of the overall story. There are some great battles contained within these books. The books are also very anti-Roman. You can imagine a 19 year old Robert E. Howard enjoying these stories immensely in the winter and spring of 1925 while taking notes. Howard would have also read Mundy’s long letters to “The Campfire” in Adventure including the one regarding warfare between Ancient Britons and Vikings in the June 10 issue. Those Northmen in “Kings of the Night” are right out of Mundy. It would be interesting to see someone put together an edited blood & thunder Tros of Samothrace, what Rusty Burke calls a “good parts” edition.  There are two related books by Mundy. The first is Queen Cleopatra (1929, no magazine publication) where Tros is mentioned. You can find Ace, two Avon editions, and a Zebra paperback edition.  Caesar Dies originally appeared as “The Falling Star” in the October 24, 1926 issue of Adventure. This is a novel about Commodus for you fans of the movie Gladiator. Centaur Books reprinted the novel in paperback in 1973.

Tros of Samothrace is an important series. It is obvious when you read it that Robert E. Howard had. Fritz Leiber credits the book with opening up a new world for him. H. Warner Munn is another who was a fan and when you read Munn’s The Lost Legion, it becomes apparent. If you go to the used bookstores, the Tros books are generally shelved in the science fiction and fantasy sections. The Zebra editions have rather small print but the Avon editions I have noticed are often falling apart 40+ years later. Time for a new set of paperbacks to come out. This time without “Heroic Fantasy in the Tradition of Robert E. Howard” with Howard’s name bigger than Mundy’s.

To say that Howard Scholarship has come a long way in the last 12 years borders on hyperbole, but in the interest of REH getting his just due, check out these Calls for Papers from Justin Everett. (Note that there are two separate calls for proposals):

CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR A PROPOSED SESSION ON HEROISM AND VILLAINY IN WEIRD FICTION, 1925-1945

SW/TX PCA/ACA CONFERENCE, FEBRUARY 10-13, 2010

Science Fiction/Fantasy Area 

Between 1925 and 1945, “pulp” magazines were the primary means of distribution for “weird fiction” which would quickly evolve into the semi-separate categories of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.  Though film and radio had begun to make an impact, the mass market paperback industry was in its infancy, and television was still years away.  In the particularly tumultuous years between the stock market crash of 1929 and the end of the Second World War, the pulps provided much more than a means of escape—they were a conduit for coming to grips with the rapid acceleration of technology, the theory of evolution, particle physics and other scientific revolutions.  Beyond this, they allowed the formative writers of the new literatures places (topoi) to debate the virtues and vices of the newly modern world.

The proposed session will consist of four presentations that discuss the roles of heroism and villainy, broadly conceived, as manifest in the pages of Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, and other pulps.  Proposed papers may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• The impact of editors on the evolution of weird fiction (such as Farnsworth Wright’s influence on Weird Tales)
• Feminism in the early pulps (C. L. Moore’s Jiril of Jiory and others)
• Robert E. Howard’s concept of the barbarian hero (Kull, Conan, Bran Mak Morn, and variations of the barbarian—Francis X. Gordon, Solomon Kane)
• H. P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos
• The impact of the Lovecraft Circle:  Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derlath and others
• The violence of Nature in Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Moore, Howard, and others
• Clark Ashton Smith and the theme of necromancy
• The ‘new’ Lovecraft Circle:  The Cthulhu Mythos in recent fiction
• Lovecraft and Howard on film
• Pulps in MMORPGs such as Age of Conan:  Hyborian Adventures

Please submit 250 word abstracts of proposed papers to:  j.everet@usp.edu.

Submission Deadline:  October 15, 2009

CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR A PROPOSED SESSION ON ROBERT E. HOWARD

AT THE PCA/ACA CONFERENCE, MARCH 31-APRIL 3, 2010

Science Fiction/Fantasy Area

Robert E. Howard is arguably one of the most influential writers to contribute to the early evolution of American fantasy, but he continues to be one of the least-studied contributors to early pulp magazines.  His contemporaries H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber and others have received more critical attention though Howard almost single-handedly created the sword-and-sorcery genre that was imitated by C. L. Moore and Fritz Leiber, and continues to influence contemporary writers.  Though a number of biographies have chronicled the pulpster’s brief and tragic life, very little analysis of his work has appeared.  The recent publication of The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard by the Robert E. Howard Foundation in three volumes, and the upcoming A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E . Howard, have set the stage for invigorating Howard scholarship.

The proposed session will consist of four presentations that discuss Howard’s contributions to the development of the genre of sword-and-sorcery, and may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• The evolution of the genre through specific “series,” including Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Kull, the Gaelic heroes, and Conan.
• The development of themes in particular series:  moral justice in Solomon Kane; racial degradation in Bran Mak Morn; the immorality of civilization in Kull’s Valusia; the barbarism/civilization debate as manifest in the Conan tales.
• The evolution of Howard’s idealized barbarian hero across different series or within a particular character (Kull’s evolution from Am-ra to Kull; Brule and the Picts; Bran Mak Morn and the degenerate Picts; Conan’s manifestations as youth, pirate, and eventually king).
• Elements of sword-and-sorcery in Howard’s historical tales and horror tales.
• Howard’s theory of race and its contribution to the development of the barbarian hero.
• Howardian influences in other writers such as Leiber’s Lankhmar series and Moore’s Jiril of Jiory.
• Evolutionary themes in Howard’s work.
• Howard’s epistolary relationships with other writers.
• Howard’s influence on later writers such as Robert Jordan.

Please submit 100-250 word abstracts of proposed papers to:  j.everet@usp.edu.

Submission Deadline:  October 15, 2009

 I’m sure Mr. Everett can answer any questions.

Justin Everett, Ph.D., Interim Director of Writing Programs, Mayes College of Healthcare Business and Policy, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, 600 S. 43rd St., Philadelphia, PA  19104, 215-596-8736.

In part of my revisiting old favorites, I reread Manly Wade Wellman’s Cahena while on vacation a couple weeks back. The book had an impact on me at the time when I read it in Spring 1987. I wanted to see if it still held up–it did. A month or two ago, I had wondered if Karl Edward Wagner or David Drake had a hand in the novel. Cahena is a historical “fantasy” of sorts set around 700 A.D. Set in North Africa at the time of the Arab Moslem conquest with some basis in actual history. Wulf the Saxon late of the Byzantine Army escapes from the city of Carthage when it falls to the Arabs. In the hinterland, he meets and falls in with the Berber tribes. They are led by The Cahena (Prophetess). There are some great battles, a betrayal, and a memorable ending.  There is even a vampire scene very effectively done. I won’t spoil the end of the book but the opening framing scene is the eve of the Battle of Tours where Charles Martel slugged it out with the invading Moslems and forced them to retreat. This novel is like  nothing else that I have read by Manly Wade Wellman. His Kardios of Atlantis stories have a certain light hearted nature to them. Most of Wellman’s fictional output were juveniles and southern weirds. The novel’s  mood is grimmer and darker than his other fiction. The novel also came out posthumously after Wellman died. I had a hard time believing an 80 year old man could write something this vigorous. I contacted David Drake and he told me that Wellman had begun the novel back in the 1940s and had worked on it on and off over the decades. He even made a research trip for the novel to London in 1977  and had finished it before he had the fall that would eventually kill him. Karl Edward Wagner was already in his non-producing period in the 1980s and Drake denies any involvement. So we have a unique piece of work by Wellman that is unlike anything else he did. He never wrote any blood and thunder historicals about Vikings, Mongols, Crusaders, Romans etc that I know of in the pulp magazines. He did write a series of cave man stories about Hok. There are two stories listed in the fictionmags listing by Wellman–”Strategic Bridgehead” in Short Stories, Dec. 10, 1941 and “Cannon in Front of Them” in Short Stories, Oct. 25, 1944. These might be historicals similar in tone. If anyone has read them, I would be interested in hearing about them. Cahena came out in early 1987 from Doubleday in hardback. There was never a paperback edition. The novel is only 182 pages which probably makes it around 65,000 to maybe 70,000 words and I may be overestimating it. A shame there has never been a paperback edition as it is a fine novel. A paperback edition would be on the slender side and probably have to be filled out with something else by Wellman. Maybe one or both of those items from Short Stories would work? Karl Edward Wagner filled out Twice in Time with “The Timeless Tomorrow,” which was a nice fit. Twice in Time was about Leonardo de Vinci while “The Timeless Tomorrow” was about Nostrodomus.

I have lately been rereading some favorite past novels. One that I have been meaning to return to for years was H. Warner Munn’s King of the World’s Edge. Munn was one of those solid second stringers for Weird Tales magazine. He had a total of eleven stories in WT including one 3 part serial and one 4 part serial.  He was not prolific but generally more than competent. King of the World’s Edge was Munn’s last contribution to Weird Tales running September to December 1939 catching the very end of the Farnsworth Wright era. A quasi-sword and sorcery novel concerning survivors of the Battle of Camlann and King Arthur’s death. Merlin leads survivors on a ship across the Atlantic to build a sanctuary from the Saxons. Adventure upon adventure ensues as the Roman-Britons lead a revolt against a Mayan colony who are the mound builders of the American Mid-West.

The novel was later reprinted by Ace Books in the 1960s. Munn returned with a sequel entitled The Ship from Atlantis (1967). Merlin sends the son of Ventidius Varro in a ship to find out what has happened in Britain. Gwalchmai finds a survivor from Atlantis in suspended animation. When she awakens, she tells her tale and Valusia and Cimmeria pop up.  Robert E. Howard name checking goes back to H. P. Lovecraft’s mention of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain in “The Shadow Out of Time.” Leigh Brackett did it with her Conan in “Lorelei of the Red Mists” and her mention of Cimmeria in “Lord of the Earthquake” and Crom the space vampire fighting barbarian in “The Cube From Space.” Gardner Fox did the same thing using Lovecraft names in his pulp stories in the 1940s. Eventually, four Weird Tales alumni– H. Warner Munn, Frank Belknap Long, Manly Wade Wellman, and Joseph Payne Brennan all contributed to the round robin novel, Ghor Kin-Slayer along with fellow contemporary pulpster, A. E. van Vogt.

You never know where Robert E. Howard, his legacy, or one of his creations is going to turn up.

Patrice Louinet chimes in from across the pond:

Perhaps this will warrant a mention on the rehupa blog… I am the guest
of this Saturday’s “Mauvais Genres”, a one-hour long weekly radio show
on the nationally broadcast France Culture, which, as its name implies,
is a radio dealing with everything cultural. This is for a Robert E.
Howard special (not the movies, not the comics, not even Conan, but
Robert E. Friggin’ Howard!) Should be anywhere between 100 to 150,000
listeners. For those who can understand French , there’ll be a podcast,
but the real thing here is the sheer importance of having REH discussed
in such a formal and reverred radio (and show).

I say “radio” because my little transistor can’t pick up radio waves from so far away. Besides, unless it’s been upgraded, it can’t translate French. However, those of you with the wherewithal to find this on your computer machine, and you understand French, you’ll get to hear one of the world’s leading authorities on Robert E. Howard pontificate his brains out!

http://sites.radiofrance.fr/chaines/france-culture/endirect/

Me? I’m going to be holed up in a cabin in Ohio, drinking whisky and getting all Conan on some monster ass. As one of my buds put it: we’ll be playing Drinking and Dragons! Won’t be the first time!

Y’all have a safe Labor Day Weekend. Hole yourself up in a cabin if John Barleycorn is coming to your party, stay off the damn roads, and don’t kill anyone. But it’s ok to croak some orcs.

Indy out.