A lone wolf and a beautiful spy in REH's Great War story

 I'd love to know whether "Doonesbury" cartoonist Garry Trudeau read Robert E. Howard's El Borak stories to prepare for his "Sorkh Razil" aka "Red Rascal" storyline. Red Rascal is the alter ego of one of Doonesbury's youthful slacker characters, Jeff Redfern. El Borak, aka ex-gunfighter Francis Xavier Gordon, no slacker in the least, is the protagonist of Howard's Son of the White Wolf, among other Middle Eastern adventure stories.

And perhaps even more so than Conan, the alter-ego of Howard himself.

After all, Howard made Gordon a Texan, like himself. And as Rusty Burke notes in the introduction to The Best of Robert E. Howard, Howard had lived the El Borak stories longer than any of the others, creating the character when he was only ten.

In Doonesbury, young Redfern has been channeling his alter-ego's adventures for years, while his parents wait for him to get a real job --  dare we say, as Howard's parents might have? In the comic strip, Redfern has attained seven-figure book advances for a book about the Rascal -- Howard could only have dreamed of this! But, as with so many of Sorkh Razil's exploits I keep wondering if the book is "real" in the storyline or will turn out to have been only a dream.

image: wikimedia commons

(If you've read this blog very long, you know I can't resist searching for the influences behind many fictional characters: King George VI as Roman Emperor Claudius, the aged, grieving Queen Victoria as the very aged, grieving "She." How about "Mad" Bavarian King Ludwig as the king of Bohemia?)

It's a particularly irresistible game in the case of Son of the White Wolf, in which El Borak combines traits of T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) and explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton. (Frederic Leighton's painting of Sir Richard -- the Victorian explorer, not the actor -- illustrates this post. I find the resemblence to El Borkak's dark hair and eyes striking.)

And could the story's "Olga" -- a  pseudonym, of course, have existed without the inspiration of intrepid British traveler Gertrude Bell?

In his appendix to The Best of Robert E. Howard, Steven Tompkins called the likes of Lawrence and Bell one of the few "glamourous" sideshows of the Great War. And despite a relatively realistic setting, there's more than a trace of glamour in Olga -- young, beautiful, brave -- and a spy.

Son of the White Wolf finds El Borak in the middle of Ottoman Turkish territory in the waning days of World War I, where a Turkish outpost deserts in favor of a rebel leader whose banner carries the image of  a white wolf. In their retreat, the deserters destroy an Arab village which has given shelter to Olga and her guide. One of Gordon's followers, also wounded in the attack, survives long enough to warn his leader, who promises revenge.

As Howard wrote, "(Gordon) not only understood the cry for vengeance, but he sympathized with it. And he always kept his promise." 

How? Well, telling you that might spoil your own fun in reading the story in Grim Lands: The Best of Robert E. Howard, volume 2, or quite possibly your local library.

***

That's all for now, on this final session of REH Days 2026 (70th anniversary of Howard's death). But I'll post pictures and tips from the editors of the inaugural class of REH Emerging Writers! 

Adventure classics -- Zombies and a woman wronged

Pigeons from Hell

by Robert E. Howard

#

I promised not to ignore Robert E. Howard this year, despite making room for other Texan and southwestern writers during June, the month when fans gather to observe the anniversary of his death in the tiny West Texas town of Cross Plains. Far from ignoring him, placing his stories within their representative genres only shows the extent of Howard’s range, as in his gruesome zombie tale, Pigeons from Hell.

Since its first posthumous 1938 appearance in Weird Tales magazine, the story has been remade over the last several decades as a television episode, a graphic novel and a serial by fellow Texan Joe R. Lansdale for Dark Horse Comics. Stephen King has praised it as one of the best horror stories of the twentieth century.

With all this, and zombie mania in full bloom as well, why isn’t it as well-known as Conan?

It suffers on two fronts, neither of which has to do with its power as a story. One is its title, which Howard scholar and editor Rusty Burke grants in an introduction to The Best of Robert E. Howard, “may not be the most chilling title in the world of horror fiction.” Its other fault is the more telling sin of racism.

REH and friends

“I’m not going to defend the position that Howard isn’t a racist,” Howard biographer Mark Finn writes in a blog post earlier this year. “In the context of his time and place, Howard was, in fact, a racist. Institutional racism was in full swing, especially in Texas. . . (but) not until I got to ‘Pigeons from Hell’ as a teenager, when I first encountered the word ‘nigger' in the story, did I stop and think about what was going on. . . I had to suddenly walk through the time and place of the story and ask myself, ‘Would a sheriff use that word in casual conversation? In 1936?’ And of course, the answer was yes.”

The issue of racial epithets is one that’s dogged some of our best fiction, especially from Southern writers honest enough to admit it exists, from Mark Twain to Harper Lee. Whatever Howard’s personal opinions, he knew what his characters would do and say, and he knew what his readers would expect. And he was willing, perhaps gleefully, to turn those expectations upside down.

The story takes place in a decaying Southern plantation house, like many Howard must have seen during his family’s sojourns in Louisiana, “rearing black and start and gaunt against the low lurid rampart of sunset, barred by the black pines.”

Benighted travelers Griswell and Branner camp in the deserted house. Griswell wakes during the night to find his friend descending the house’s stair from a mysterious journey to the upper story. “A groping hand, moving along the balustrade, came into the bar of moonlight. . . Then he saw Branner’s face, and a shriek burst from Griswell’s lips. Branner’s face was bloodless, corpse-like; gouts of blood dripped darkly down it; his eyes were glassy and set, and blood oozed from the great gash which cleft the crown of his head!”

Griswell escapes, hoping at first for help from the local sheriff but finding himself accused of his friend’s murder. Attempting to clear himself and solve the mystery of his friend‘s death, he plunges into a maelstrom of ancient injustice, voodoo, and zombies--or in this case, the female version of zombies, zuvembies.

But when Griswell and the sheriff track down the undead to their lair, they find something more--and other-- than they expected. All too willing to close a case whose perpetrators are beyond reach of mortal authority, the sheriff settles for a half-truth. “This clears you, Griswell,” he says at last. “A crazy woman with a hatchet--that’s all the authorities need to know.”

Score another point for the wronged and vengeful women in Adventure classics'  October of Halloween horror. And if you dare, read or listen to the original free, at
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0600721h.html/.
For Mark Finn’s full discussion of Howard and racism, see the Mary 10, 2013, post at
http://marktheaginghipster.blogspot.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics concludes a month of horror with Toni Morrison’s Beloved.)

Adventure classics -- Mirrors into other worlds

“The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune”

by Robert E. Howard

#

What would the sword and sorcery genre have become if Robert E. Howard’s first “pre-cataclysmic” age character Kull of Atlantis had proved more profitable than Conan the Cimmerian?

Kull’s first public appearance in the magazine Weird Tales opened with a tremendous barbarian bang. But by the next month, when the second Kull story, today’s “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune,” saw print, the character had deepened into a philosopher-king, seeking enlightenment from the ancient wizard of the story’s title.

“Tell me, wizard who are wiser than most men, tell me, are there worlds beyond our worlds?” Kull asks.

Although I had intended to finish this month’s discussion of Robert E. Howard stories with a more straightforward barbarian tale, after reading a few pages of “Mirrors,” I changed my mind. Howard fittingly chose to head his story with lines from the Edgar Allan Poe poem, “Dream-Land,” and the psychology is worth of the comparison, although written when Howard was only in his early twenties.

The story begins with Kull, an adventurer from Atlantis, firmly established on the throne of the highly-civilized kingdom of Valusia. But, Howard writes, “there was a longing in him for things beyond himself and beyond the Valusian court.” In this mood, he accepts a suggestion to visit the famous House of a Thousand Mirrors of the wizard Tuzun Thune.

At first, Kull hopes only to see diverting spectacles. “Then came a day when Kull seemed to catch glimpses of strange lands; there flitted across his consciousness dim thoughts and recognitions.” As he becomes increasingly convinced of the reality of the other worlds the mirrors reflect, Kull longs to explore them, losing touch with his own world.

Will he disappear completely into the wizard’s worlds of illusion? And are they illusions, or reality? “This is the deepest story I ever tried to write and I got out of my depth,” Howard told his friend Tevis Clyde Smith in February 1929, months before the publication of “Mirrors”.

Howard scholar Steven Tompkins disagrees in his appendix to The Best of Robert E. Howard, insisting, “A good many classic American writers got to be classics by venturing out of their depth and diving instead of drowning, and in this story Howard discovered just how deep his depth truly was.”

Howard’s friend H.P. Lovecraft, urged him in 1934 to write more Kull stories. But the Atlantan had already fallen out of favor with his writer, subsumed by the birth of a new and less introspective barbarian, Conan the Cimmerian.

See the Robert E. Howard foundation’s website, www.rehfoundation.org/, for more perspective on Kull and his influences. And although “Mirrors” is one of Howard’s shorter stories, for an even briefer, charmingly illustrated version, visit the online magazine Dreamquest at www.gwthomas.org/themirrorsoftuzunethune.htm/.

(Next week -- In honor of the space rover Curiosity, currently speeding toward Mars, July’s science fiction adventures will be all Martian, opening with H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.)

Wordcraft -- Writing advice from a barbarian

In her memoir of Robert E. Howard, Novalyne Price Ellis details an amazing amount of writing advice from the creator of Conan. In honor of June’s annual Robert E. Howard Days in Cross Plains, Texas, the closest place to a home town for him, I’ve combed the memoir and selections of his letters and stories for continuing advice from the master. Answers to the interview questions are taken verbatim from Howard’s writings or conversations, as reported by Ms. Ellis, but not always in the context that was intended.

I understand you’re a writer, Mr. Howard.
Yeah, that’s right. I write for the pulps.

How did you get started?
At the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.

Given your unfamiliarity of the business, how did you choose writing as a profession?
I tried a lot of other jobs and I didn’t like ‘em. I worked on a farm and that was no good at all, but clerking in a store is about the worst job you can have. So I decided the only way I could get out of working for a living was to start writing.

Isn’t writing work?
Well, not by the sweat of your brow at any rate. You can stay at home. All you have to contend with is a typewriter and it just puts down what you want it to.

Was there something in your environment that encouraged you to be a writer?
It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments. I became a writer in spite of my environments. Understand, I am not criticizing those environments. They were good, solid and worthy. The fact that they were not conducive to literature and art is nothing in their disfavor. Never the less, it is no light thing to enter into a profession absolutely foreign and alien to the people among whom one’s lot is cast.

I understand your first story appeared in a school publication. Did you enjoy school?
I hated school.

Why was that? You seem like someone who would have been a good student.
It wasn’t the work I minded. . . .What I hated was the confinement -- the clock- like regularity of everything; the regulation of my speech and actions; most of all the idea that someone considered himself or herself in authority over me, with the right to questions my actions and interfere with my thoughts.

What advice do you have for other writers?
I don’t usually give advice.

Perhaps you could at least tell us something about the way you write. For instance, when you start to write a story, do you start with a character or an idea for a plot?
(Appearing to relent) Mostly with a character, I suppose. I’ve got a character going now. . . That Conan’s the damnedest bastard I ever saw. He gets himself into all kinds of scrapes.

So, do you carry on a conversation with him, getting to know him?
I sure don’t try to give advice when he tells me all that junk. I just sit back and listen.

Speaking of listening, I’ve heard that some of your neighbors aren’t always happy about the noise when you read your stories aloud as you write. Has anyone ever complained to you?
I was out working on my car (and) while I was working, like a fool, I was talking, trying to figure out something about a yarn I was stuck on. I wasn’t talking too loud, but I got to a place where ol’ Conan was fighting, and I said, “Fool. Dog of hell. Die!” About that time, a timid little voice said, “Robert, is your mother home?”

What do you say when people ask how you come up with characters such as Conan?
(I) always say, “He’s a combination of a lot of people I have known.”. . . (But) to tell the truth, I don’t know how a man gets a character for a story, anymore than I know how he falls in love. . . I doubt any writer knows for sure where his characters come from.

At this point Howard looked pointedly at his watch and rose, impatient to return to his typewriter. But I hope to secure a promise of another interview for next Wednesday.

#

(Quotations from One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis and Howard’s letters quoted in The Best of Robert E. Howard, vol. 1, published by DelRey Books.