It has become fashionable to regard Robert E. Howard’s Steve Harrison as the author’s lone failure. Much is made of what Howard expressed in letters about disliking hardboiled detective stories as both an author and a reader. Emphasis is placed on the fact that very few of the Steve Harrison stories found a market in the author’s lifetime. Critics measure the Steve Harrison tales against Hammett and Chandler and dismiss Howard’s efforts with disdain. All of this ignores how the character first came to prominence in the late 1970s when Berkeley Books collected “Lord of the Dead” and “Names in the Black Book” in Skull-Face.

As a 45-year-old man today, I first discovered Robert E. Howard through the worlds of Conan and Kull from Marvel Comics. My youth in the 1970s had seen me move from Tarzan films to the far more exciting jungle adventures found in DC and Marvel Comics. These comics led me to challenge myself to read the wonderful Ballantine editions of the original Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. As a comics fan, the cover art by Neal Adams and Boris Vallejo was half the attraction. A trio of low budget AIP movies with Doug McClure led me to discover the worlds of Caspak and Pellucidar which were back in print courtesy of Ace Books with gorgeous cover art by Frank Frazetta. I soon found Tarzan in Pellucidar in the Marvel Comics series. There was an excitement that made me believe there were far more fantastic worlds to discover.

I found these worlds in Robert E. Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs was never quite the same. Burroughs was Paradise and Howard was Paradise Lost, but damn if that Forbidden Fruit didn’t taste better than anything else. I was a latecomer to church. Consequently, I resented losing out on Porky Pig cartoons on Sunday mornings. My Mom attempted to entice me with a Children’s Bible. The illustrations were nice, but I was mainly interested in The Old Testament which at least had the Flood and Samson to commend it. Along came Conan and Kull comics and suddenly I found characters that could rival Tarzan but lived in a world closer to The Old Testament but far more interesting to my young mind.

By the time I was thirteen, I had enjoyed a brief obsession with Ian Fleming’s James Bond series before discovering Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books. These opened a world that was to become my favorite retreat from reality and one that continues to resonate with me well into middle age. The Berkeley edition of Skull Face and the Donald M. Grant hardcover edition of Lord of the Dead immediately caught my eye when I first discovered them in my early twenties. Here was Robert E. Howard moving away from the fantastic worlds of his own imaginings and turned loose on the twentieth century. I was in my forties by the time I first encountered El Borak and, along with Steve Harrison, I now knew the Howard characters that held me under a spell greater than his barbarian heroes.

Howard’s Weird Menace stories, despite their Rohmer influence, were also very much in keeping with his more celebrated sword and sorcery fiction. Steve Harrison was a powerful latter-day barbarian as equally at home with an axe as a pistol. Harrison teamed with Khoda Khan (from Howard’s El Borak tales) to battle the sorcerous Erlik Khan is reminiscent of the bond forged between Kull and Brule the Pict. Harrison removed from the seedy fog-enshrouded River Street to run down a voodoo cult in Bayou country could just as easily be set in Stygia. Those expecting traditional hardboiled gumshoe tropes are doomed to be disappointed, but fans of Howard’s fantastic fiction will find much that will prove the writer’s talents were not bound by place or time. Harrison, like Nayland Smith (the protagonist of the Fu Manchu series) has been granted a roving commission to run down the sort of exotic crimes that fall beyond the white man’s comfort zone of the 1930s.

That last bit is likely the key for me. Howard’s characters are men out of time. Whether Kull or Conan or Solomon Kane or Steve Harrison or El Borak, they are men without homes who function best in exotic worlds. They are old souls who do not fear a world that isn’t white and civilized. They are men at home with Eldritch terrors, in exotic jungles, facing Oriental cults or serpent worshippers. They know this world is far older than white civilization with its fragile sense of security and a neat, orderly view of the world and its creation. They are not afraid to step beyond conventions for the non-white world of exotic danger and pagan thrills promise far more than the restrictions of civilization. And so it is for readers these past 80 years who understood that Robert E. Howard’s fiction was finite, but the promises they hold were infinite.

For anyone who accepts the common belief that Howard stumbled and fell when he created Steve Harrison, I urge you to revisit “The People of the Serpent,” “Names in the Black Book,” or “Graveyard Rats” and see them for the masterly Tales of Weird Menace they are and enjoy the same wonderful world of Robert E. Howard as it exists in a modern world. For a world of fantasy and escape is not ossified in the past, it is accessible today as it was yesteryear. You just need to step outside the confines of a conventional world that is safe and dull and realize the world is as it ever was and always worth discovering Gnostic truths and exploring uncharted corners. The key is to read and learn to open your mind for ultimately, that is the lesson of Burroughs and Howard and Rohmer and every other author who raised the lantern and shone its light on shadows.

William Patrick Maynard is the authorized continuation writer for the Estate of Sax Rohmer. His third Fu Manchu thriller, The Triumph of Fu Manchu will be published by Black Coat Press later this year.

noun

1. any of several plants (genus Dasylirion) of the agave family of the southwestern United States and Mexico that resemble a yucca; an alcoholic beverage made from this plant. It grows in northern Mexico, New Mexico, west Texas and the Texas Hill Country.

Commonly known as Desert Spoon, sotol, which grows in northern Mexico, New Mexico, west Texas and the Texas Hill Country, produces a distilled spirit similar to the mescals of central Mexico. The Chihuahua Indians fermented sotol juice into a beer-like alcoholic beverage as early as 800 years ago. Spanish colonists introduced European distillation techniques in the 16th century.

The Desert Spoon takes approximately 15 years to mature and yields only one bottle of sotol per plant. It typically grows on rocky slopes in the Chihuahuan desert grassland between 3,000 and 6,500 feet above sea level. Sotols produce a flower stalk every few years. The outer leaves are removed to reveal the center core, which is taken back to the distillery. The core can then be cooked and/or steamed, shredded, fermented, and distilled.

While distilled sotol is attaining international recognition, at the Fate Bell Shelter, which is on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, sotol is depicted in paintings on the rock walls. Sandals, baskets, ropes, mats, and many other items of sotol fiber show that it was a highly important resource to ancient Pueblo people. These artifacts date to around 7000 BCE.

[origin: 1881; American Spanish, from Nahuatl zotolin palm tree]

HOWARD’S USAGE:

From Sonora to Del Rio is a hundred barren miles
Where the sotol weave and shimmer in the sun—
Like a horde of rearing serpents swaying down the bare defiles
When the scarlet, silver webs of dawn are spun.

There are little ’dobe ranchos brooding far along the sky,
On the sullen dreary bosoms of the hills;
Not a wolf to break the quiet, not a desert bird to fly
Where the silence is so utter that it thrills.

[from “The Grim Land”; to read the complete poem see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 302 and Robert E. Howard Selected Poems, p. 342]

This is Part Three of a series featuring photos taken at the home of Doug Ellis and his wife by TGR blogger Barbara Barrett. As you can see, Doug has amassed a huge collection of original pulp art, pulps and other collectibles. Here is Barbara’s introduction to this series in Part One.

Photos courtesy of Doug Ellis

Part One, Part Two

noun

1. a wreath to be worn on the head

[origin: 14th century; Middle English chapelet, from Anglo-French, diminutive of chapel hat, garland, from Medieval Latin cappellus head covering, from Late Latin cappa]

HOWARD’S USAGE:

Nial of Ulster, welcome home!
What saw you on the road to Rome?—
Legions thronging the fertile plains?
Shouting hordes of the country folk
With the harvest heaped in their groaning wains?
Shepherds piping under the oak?
Laurel chaplet and purple cloak?
Smokes of the feasting coiled on high?
Meadows and fields of the rich, ripe green
Lazing under a cobalt sky?
Brown little villages sleeping between?
What saw you on the road to Rome?
“Crimson tracks in the blackened loam,
“Skeleton trees and a blasted plain,
“A heap of skulls and a child insane,
“Ruin and wreck and the reek of pain
“On the wrack of the road to Rome.”

[from “Shadows on the Road”; to read the complete poem see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 520; Always Comes Evening, p. 30; Robert E. Howard Selected Poems, p. 204]

All fans of Howard’s humorous westerns have been waiting for two volumes of those yarns to be published by the REH Foundation Press — fear not the wait is over with the impending publication of Volume 1.

Complete details and pre-ordering information can be found on the Robert E. Howard Foundation website.

By the way, I recently took the liberty of using your mythical “Arkham” in a single-stanza rhyme which Mr. Wright accepted for Weird Tales, and which fell far short of doing justice to it’s subject. Here it is:

Arkham.

Drowsy and dull with age the houses blink

On aimless streets the rat-gnawed years forget—

But what inhuman figures leer and slink

Down the old alleys when the moon has set?

– Robert E. Howard to H. P. Lovecraft, 9 Dec 1931 (AMtF 1.238, CL2.280)

What did Robert E. Howard know of Arkham, which caused him to compose this quatrain? What might he have known? By December 1931, Lovecraft had published less than a dozen stories that mentioned the fictional town, which comprised what he sometimes called his “Arkham cycle.” (SL2.246) Most of these were published in Weird Tales, and many of them we can be sure by comments in his letters that Howard had read.

The eponymous dwelling of “The Picture in the House” (National Amateur Jul 1919, Weird Tales Jan 1924) was set in “an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the shortest cut to Arkham,” and places the town in New England. Howard had apparently missed this story when it came out, but Lovecraft apparently later sent him a copy. (AMtF 1.85, 97; CL2.93, 118)

“The Festival” (WT Jan 1925), Howard did read (AMtF 1.159; CL2.179), though as a locale it is set mainly in Kingsport until the very end, when the narrator ends up in St. Mary’s Hospital, where the kindly staff were helpful enough to borrow the copy of the Necronomicon from nearby Miskatonic University for his perusal.

“The Unnamable” (WT Jul 1925) also mentions St. Mary’s Hospital, but adds an “old burying ground” with “a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb.” While Lovecraft is not known to have ever sent Howard a copy of his street plan for Arkham, he did have a very definite geography developed in his imagination while writing of the place, one readers get a sense of in lines describing “a lonely field beyond Meadow Hill, a mile from the old burying ground, on a spot where an ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood.”

One of the fuller descriptions of the land around Arkham was given in “The Colour Out of Space” (Amazing Stories Sep 1927), which opens with:

West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods no axe has ever cut. There are narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooks trickle without ever having caught the first glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but they are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.

It is not entirely clear if Howard ever read this story, as there are no mentions of it in his letters, but Lovecraft mentions it in his letters to Howard from time to time. (AMtF 2.533, 582, 656; SL4.170)

The “Colour” described Arkham as “a very old town full of witch legends,” but it was in “The Silver Key” (WT Jan 1929) that Lovecraft grows fulsom about the old town’s history, describing it as “the terrible witch-haunted old town of his forefathers in New England, and had experiences in the dark, amidst the hoary willows and tottering gambrel roofs.” This of course helps to point out Arkham as corresponding closely with Salem and its famous witch-trials, something that Lovecraft himself would confirm in an early note to Howard: “Old Salem with its spectral memories (the prototype of my fictional ‘Arkham’) is only about 60 miles from Providence.” (AMtF 1.31)

The Arkham Advertiser, the town newspaper, first made an appearance in “The Dunwich Horror” (WT Apr 1929); and Howard certainly read that story. (AMtF 1.17; CL2.50) While little of the town is described, much of the action centers around the Library of Miskatonic University. Howard, living in Cross Plains and having attended Howard Payne College in Brownwood, would at least have some impression of a college town in a rural district. Miskatonic University and the Arkham Advertiser would likewise appear in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (WT Aug 1931); Howard “went thirty miles to get the new magazine” (probably to Brownwood) and read it straight away. (AMtF 1.180-1, 205; CL2.220-1, 223)

The last story that would appear in Weird Tales before Howard probably composed “Arkham” was “The Strange High House in the Mist” (WT Oct 1931), where the eponymous house was located on a cliff such that “only the western side, inland and toward Arkham, remained.” Here we also get a brief description of “[…] a lovely vista of Arkham’s white Georgian steeples across leagues of river and meadow. Here he found a shady road to Arkham […]” Howard praised the story claiming:

It’s pure poetry of the highest order, and like all great poetry, stirs dim emotions and slumbering instincts deep in the wells of consciousness. (AMtF 1.217; CL2.256)

So much for the published references to Arkham that Howard might have seen; it is unlikely the man from Cross Plains had ever run across “Howard West—Reanimator,” unless Lovecraft had lent him a copy, and if Lovecraft did there is no mention of it. Of course, by 1931 the Texan was on the “circulation list” for drafts of Lovecraft’s stories, which included the then-unpublished novella At the Mountains of Madness (AMtF 1.231; CL2.273, 274), concerning an antarctic expedition from Miskatonic University, sailing out aboard the Arkham.

There is a possibility that Howard may have read “The Port” (“Ten miles from Arkham I had struck the trail”) one of Lovecraft’s sonnets in the Fungi from Yuggoth cycle. Lovecraft had sent along at least some of the poems; probably the typescript, but possibly a collection of excerpts from those that had been published at this point. Howard does not specifically mention “The Port” among his favorites, but it would remain a potential influence. (AMtF 1.32; CL2.61)

Slight though it is, this was likely all that Howard knew of Arkham—the rest being not published or available to him—and it is not so hard to trace some of the imagery in his poem, and at a time when Howard was already experimenting with a “Lovecraftian” style, such as expressed in “The Black Stone” (WT Nov 1931) Lovecraft himself was enthusiastic in the poem’s reception:

Your “Arkham” stanza is splendid, and I feel honoured that my imaginary city of brooding horror should have evoked such an image. Glad Wright took it, and hope you’ll have more verse for him before long. (AMtF 1.246)

Works Cited

AMtF   A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (2 vols., Hippocampus Press)

CL       The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard (3 vols. + Index and Addenda, Robert E. Howard Foundation)

SL        Selected Letters of H. P. Lovecraft (5 vols., Arkham House)

noun

1. oboe: a double-reed woodwind instrument having a conical tube, a brilliant penetrating tone

[origin: ca. 1575; Middle French hautbois, from haut high + bois wood]

HOWARD’S USAGE:

Grim, grim, grim the elephants were chanting,
Chanting in the jungle in the dim, dark dawn;
Through the waving branches were the late stars slanting,
Beating up the morning ere the night was gone.

Lion in the morning, crouching by the river.
Red birds flitting with a sing-song shrill.
Morning like a topaz, the green fronds a-quiver.
Scent of lush a-wafting in the dawn air still.

Moses was our leader when we came up out of Egypt—
Came up out of Egypt so many years ago—
When I think of magic, I always think of Moses,
Riding down to glory while the hautboys blow.

[from “The Dust Dance (1)”; to read the complete poem see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 133; Echoes From an Iron Harp, p. 25; and Robert E. Howard Selected Poems, p. 13 (version 2)]

Robert E. Howard was an avid reader of Weird Tales, the famous fantasy pulp magazine that was launched in the spring of 1923. He may have seen the first issue of the magazine while studying in Brownwood. The issues of Weird Tales usually appeared a month earlier than their cover date would suggest. Howard’s first known mention of Weird Tales was in a letter to Tevis Clyde Smith (July 7, 1923):

I sent a story to the Weird Tales, ‘The Phantom of Old Egypt,’ which I suppose they will turn down.

While it is well known that living in Cross Plains, Howard could not always buy the current issue — still it is reasonable to assume he read most of the issues. In a letter to Carl Jacobi (March 22, 1932), he mentions the nearest first-class newsstand (in Brownwood) is forty miles away:

It was not my fortune to read either of the other stories you mentioned; in fact, I live so far out of civilization, as it were, that 1 can’t keep track of the magazines very well. It’s forty miles to the nearest first-class news-stand, so my magazine reading is rather desultory.

In this post I single out some Weird Tales stories that probably influenced Howard on what he chose to write in that particular month. Occasionally I also mention stories whose influences were more long-term.

Howard sent a letter to Weird Tales, ca. January 1926, where he praised Seabury Quinn’s stories of the occult detective Jules de Grandin:

These are sheer masterpieces. The little Frenchman is one of those characters who live in fiction. I look forward with pleasurable anticipation to further meetings with him.

Years later Howard also tried his hands in detective fiction, although his most famous detective, Steve Harrison, operates quite differently than de Grandin. Robert M. Price thinks the name “Harrison” could be a tip of the hat to de Grandin’s base of operations in Harrisonville, and River Street (where many Steve Harrison tales take place) could have been suggested by the Harrisonville River.

The appearance of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” (Weird Tales, February 1928) was a critical importance in the development of the young Texan’s career. Deuce Richardson in his essay “The Call of Kathulos: Kull, Skull and ‘Call'” has already pointed out the similarities between Lovecraft’s tale and some of Howard’s stories written just after its appearance, or within a few months.

Howard sent a letter to The Eyrie, which was published in Weird Tales, ca. April 1928:

Mr. Lovecraft’s latest story, “The Call of Cthulhu”, is indeed a masterpiece, which I am sure will live as one of the highest achievements of literature.

A scholar named Kuthulos is a protagonist of “The Cat and the Skull” and “The Screaming Skull of Silence,” both tales written in the spring of 1928, and subsequently rejected by Weird Tales. It is possible the name Kuthulos came from the title of Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu,” which appeared in Weird Tales at the start of the year. The second tale has even more similarities with the Lovecraft story. Like the sailors in HPL’s tale, Kull and his entourage are faced with a castellated tomb with a cosmic monster that is not dead but dreaming for aeons. Just as R’lyeh was found to be of “greenish stone,” Kull and his men find a gong and mallet “apparently of jade.” In both cases, a cosmic menace is dealt a crippling (perhaps mortal) blow.

“Skull-Face” (Weird Tales, Oct/Nov/Dec 1929), written in the fall of 1928 shows also influences from Lovecraft’s story: the use of the first person, the technique of story within the story, the importance of the sea and the secrets hidden in its depths.

Surama, the resurrected Atlantean villain of Lovecraft’s revision story “The Last Test” (Weird Tales, Nov 1928), bears a curious likeness to Kathulos in many ways. Howard probably read this story around the same time as he wrote “Skull-Face.”

Lovecraft’s influence, and especially of his tale “The Dunwich Horror” (Weird Tales, April 1930), can be seen in a lot of stories REH pounded out on his faithful Underwood No. 5 in the second part of 1930, after starting his correspondence with the older writer in the summer. These tales include “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (Weird Tales, December 1936), “Dig Me No Grave” (Weird Tales, February 1937), “The Black Stone” (Weird Tales, November 1931), “The Thing on the Roof” (Weird Tales, Feburary 1932) and “The Hoofed Thing” (rejected by Strange Tales). The many references to HPL’s stories and emerging mythology are well attested to and lie outside the scope of this blog post.

But another story was published in the summer, whose influence may be similarly important, Harry Noyes Pratt’s “The Curse of Ximu-tal” (Weird Tales, August 1930). Here, inspired by a jade image of a giant snake, the narrator discovers a Mayan temple and a giant green snake that could swallow an elephant. Many Conan stories feature giant snakes, cities built of jade-like green-stone with names beginning with a “X” (Xuchotl, Xuthal, Xapur).

It is probably after reading Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness” (Weird Tales, August 1931) that Howard had decided to change his conception of the Black Stone: his new stories written in the fall, “People of the Dark” (Strange Tales, June 1932) and “Worms of the Earth” (Weird Tales, November 1932) feature a small stone instead of a monolith, as in “The Black Stone.”

The March 1932 issue of Weird Tales featured a story that had repercussions three years later, when REH wrote his last Conan tale, “Red Nails” (Weird Tales, Jul/Aug/Sep/Oct 1936). In Kirk Mashburn’s “The Vengeance of Ixmal” (Weird Tales, March 1932) the American leader of an excavation near a vampire-haunted village in Mexico turns out to be the reincarnation of an Aztec Prince, who was sacrificed on an altar by his lover princess Tascala. “Red Nails” has many Aztecian-sounding names and a princess called Tascela. We know REH had read and liked Mashburn’s stories, as noted in his letter to Mashburn, ca. March 1932:

Mr. Price mentions you often in his letters, and I have been much interested in your work in Weird Tales. I particularly remember “Tony”, “Sola”, “Placide’s Wife”, and your recent “Vengeance of Ixmal” — a powerful tale.

The April 1932 issue of Weird Tales (on sale April 1st) contained a story that could have been a springboard of REH’s reincarnation tales featuring James Allison. In Nictzin Dyalhis’s “The Red Witch” (Weird Tales, April 1932) scientist Randall Crone becomes conscious of his ancient life in an Ice Age tribe as the impetuous young warrior, Ron Kron, in love with the red-haired Red Dawn.

Howard’s first completed reincarnation story was “The Children of the Night” (Weird Tales, Apr/May 1931), which he wrote in September 1930. In that tale O’Donnel is struck unconscious by an accidental axe blow and drifts out of the darkness to find himself as a warrior of a primitive Celtic tribe in pre-Roman Britain fighting against the reptilian Children of the Night. In October 1931 Howard writes “People of the Dark” (Strange Tales, June 1932) where an accidental head injury leads John into a past life as Conan the Reaver, a Gaelic pirate. The reincarnation theme is also present in his poem “Cimmeria,” written in February 1932.

REH completed his first James Allison story, “Marchers of Valhalla,” in April of 1932. Allison lies at the end of a short and sickly life in rural Texas, but remembers a previous incarnation as a mighty yellow-haired warrior, Hialmar. Much has been written about how Jack London’s novel, The Star Rover has influenced the creation of James Allison, but the Dyalhis story could have been the final impetus for REH to start the James Allison series, where for the first time his reincarnated hero is living in the Ice Age and is in love with a gold-haired girl.

The story was rejected by Weird Tales in May. But it did not discourage Howard, who in a few weeks’ time completes “The Valley of the Worm” (Weird Tales, Feb 1934), one of his most famous stories, featuring the Æsir warrior Niord.

REH had created Conan the Cimmerian and wrote the first stories featuring the Cimmerian in February and March of 1932. According to Patrice Louinet, REH had written the third Conan story, “The God in the Bowl” (rejected by Weird Tales) in March. The story shows remarkable similarities to Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Gorgon” in the April issue, which theoretically appeared only at the start of April. In both stories a beautiful, but deadly, mythical entity kills an art collector. It could be just a strange coincidence, or perhaps REH somehow read Smith’s story previously.  REH and Smith have not started correspondence yet, and while it is possible Lovecraft had sent Howard this tale, it is not mentioned in REH’s correspondence.

The publication of Smith’s “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” (Weird Tales, May 1932) coincides with REH’s writing of “The Scarlet Citadel” (Weird Tales, January 1933). Smith story taking place in a subterranean catacomb with deadly monsters (in his case brain-sucking leeches) could have influenced REH when created the catacombs beneath the Citadel.

In the spring of 1934 Howard was immersed in writing his only Conan novel, The Hour of the Dragon (Weird Tales, December 1935, Jan/Feb/Mar/Apr 1936). A source for the scenes in the Stygian pyramid may have been Clark Ashton Smith’s “The Charnel God” (Weird Tales, March 1934), with a temple for the dead, ghouls (the Khitan sorcerers are described as ghoulish by REH) and reanimation of corpses. We know REH admired the story as stated in a letter to CAS in May of 1934:

Yes, I certainly did like “The Charnel God” and its fine illustration, and the Malygris story came up to expectations splendidly. In some ways I liked the illustration even better than that of “The Charnel God”, though both were fine.

As an aside, both “The Charnel God,” (Weird Tales, March 1934), and “The Death of Malygris,” (Weird Tales, April 1934) were illustrated by CAS.

These are just a handful of instances where Howard “borrowed” ideas and concepts from his fellow Weird Tales writers in the pages of The Unique Magazine.

Sources:

Patrice Louinet: “Hyborian Genesis: Notes on the Creation of the Conan Stories” (The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, May 2002)

Patrice Louinet: “Hyborian Genesis Part II: Notes on the Creation of the Conan Stories” (The Bloody Crown of Conan, May 2003)

Patrice Louinet: “Hyborian Genesis Part III” (The Conquering Sword of Conan, December 2005)

Robert M. Price: “The Many Incarnations of Anton Zarnak,” in Lin Carter’s Anton Zarnak Supernatural Sleuth (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, June 2002)

Deuce Richardson: “The Call of Kathulos: Kull, Skull and ‘Call'”(The Cimmerian website, February 11, 2009).

The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard (Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, 2007-2008).

• To Tevis Clyde Smith, July 7, 1923
• To Weird Tales, ca. January 1926
• To Weird Tales, ca. April 1928
• To Kirk Mashburn, ca. March 1932
• To Carl Jacobi, pm, March 22, 1932
• To Clark Ashton Smith, pm, May 21 1934

noun

1. An extremely unpleasant or painful condition or place; Hell.

[origin: Middle English; from Late Latin Topheth, from Hebrew tōpheth]

HOWARD’S USAGE:

God is God and Mahommed his prophet;
Idols stared with their carven eyes
As I went down to a marble Tophet
Where misers glow and the worm never dies.

The first of the stairs were frozen marble,
The second, silver, brittle and white;
And I heard a dark bird drearily warble:
“Nero’s night is another night.”

[from “Altars and Jesters”; to read the complete poem see The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, p. 140 and Night Images, p. 28]

This is Part Two of a series featuring photos taken at the home of Doug Ellis and his wife by TGR blogger Barbara Barrett. As you can see, Doug has amassed a huge collection of original pulp art, pulps and other collectibles. Here is Barbara’s introduction to this series in Part One.

And here are some pulps, a Shadow pinball machine and action figures thrown in for good measure.

Photos courtesy of Doug Ellis

Part One