Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures

While it’s typical of writers to learn by imitation, Robert E. Howard seldom imitated for long before his own voice was so intercalated into a composition that the inspiration was no longer obvious. Scholars have noted the influence of Jack London and Rudyard Kipling in his work, as well as Howard’s familiarity with myth and legend, likely via Thomas Bulfinch. The shadow cast by adventure and historical adventure writer Harold Lamb over Howard’s work has been noted but never discussed at length. Robert E. Howard seems to have found a kind of kindred spirit in Lamb, and progressed from modeling off his fiction until, student growing to master, Howard matched and even sometimes surpassed his skill.

That is no mean thing, for Harold Lamb was one of the finest of all American adventure writers. Even today, only a few years out from the hundredth anniversary of Lamb’s first great historicals, Lamb’s pacing feels modern. His best fiction is vibrant, cinematic, and exciting, which put him decades ahead of almost all his contemporaries. His plotting rises from the collision of motivations among his characters and is seldom predictable. His depth of knowledge permeates his work without ever derailing the story to trumpet mastery of the material. His characters live and breathe and ride the steppes with an honest multiculturalism. In his work heroism and villainy do not reside in particular cultures, but with individuals – we do not see much evidence of the white man’s burden so prevalent in other stories penned at this time. Some of his contemporary crafters of historical magazine fiction could spin yarns that worked as well – Arthur D. Howden Smith and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur among them – but no one else so consistently delivered high quality stories, and without resorting to formula.

It was chance that set Howard on the road to encounter Lamb’s fiction at the age of fifteen, when he bought a copy of Adventure magazine. We can’t know whether or not there was a Harold Lamb story in that particular issue, as Howard didn’t mention the issue number. He was hooked by the magazine, though, and Lamb was one of Adventure’s stars. Howard could not have read the magazine for very long without stumbling upon Lamb’s work.

Howard describes the moment of discovery himself in a July 1933 letter to H. P. Lovecraft. Although he had always loved reading, books had been hard to come by. “Magazines were even more scarce than books. It was after I moved into ‘town’ (speaking comparatively) that I began to buy magazines. I well remember the first I ever bought. I was fifteen years old; I bought it one summer night when a wild restlessness in me would not let me keep still, and I had exhausted all the reading material on the place. I’ll never forget the thrill it gave me. Somehow it never had occurred to me before that I could buy a magazine. It was an Adventure. I still have the copy. After that I bought Adventure for many years, though at times it cramped my resources to pay the price. It came out three times a month, then.”

Adventure endured in pulp form for nearly forty-three years, birthed in 1910 and falling into a feeble senility after a change of format in 1953 before an ignominious death. With its reputation for historical accuracy and its stable of well-known authors, Adventure was arguably the most prestigious of all pulp magazines when Robert E. Howard first chanced upon it. Those familiar with magazines of today should not assume Adventure was slim, quarterly, or populated with literary fiction. In a time when there were no televisions, America was a nation of readers, and turned to entertainment in these magazines, new issues of which often appeared two or three times a month. Drug store racks and newsstands overflowed with an immense variety of detective and mystery pulps, which were nestled beside magazines devoted to romance, or sports stories, or war stories. A few, like Argosy and Adventure, published a variety of fiction set in different lands and times, the sole unifying theme of their contents being that the material had to entertain. As for what Howard might have seen when he flipped open a particular issue – one that likely featured an oil painting of a historical warrior dashing into battle, given the typical Adventure cover of those years – let’s turn to pulp scholar Robert Weinberg.

Issues from the early 1920s, a favorite period of many collectors, were 192 pages of eye-straining print and usually included a complete novel, two or three complete novelettes (in reality short novels) and a goodly chunk of a serial. There would also be five or six short stories and a bunch of departments like “Old Songs That Men Have Sung,” “Ask Adventure,” and “Lost Trails.” The letter column, known as “The Camp Fire” was perhaps the best letter column published in any magazine, ever. Usually, authors of stories in the issues wrote long essays where they detailed the historical background of their work. Letters from readers argued over facts in previous stories. In an America just emerging from the Wild West and the First World War, the readers of Adventure weren’t just arm-chair adventurers spouting theories. A typical letter began, “I enjoyed Hugh Pendexter’s story about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but he got some of the details wrong. I was there and remember quite distinctly …” and continue on for three pages about the famous gun battle.* Adventure today is most famous for printing the work of an elite cadre of talented adventure writers: Arthur D. Howden Smith, Arthur O. Friel, George Surdez, and many others, although it is these three and its two most famous contributors, Talbot Mundy and Harold Lamb, whose work has been most often reprinted outside the pulps.

It seems clear that Howard enjoyed both Mundy and Lamb. We can see shades of Mundy’s influence, at least topically, in the tales of El Borak and even in the stories of Conan. But for all that Mundy is mentioned more than twice as often as Lamb in Howard’s surviving correspondence, it is Lamb’s writing that seems to have been the greater inspiration.

If Howard had never crossed paths with Adventure until 1921, then he missed the earliest phase of Lamb’s Adventure years, when he wrote the first fourteen stories of his signature character, Khlit the Cossack. Howard does not seem to have encountered the aging warrior until Khlit’s return as a secondary character; this is a shame, for the third through the ninth tales of the wandering Cossack are some of the finest adventure fiction ever written. They take the Cossack across the steppes of Asia, into ancient tombs and the citadels of kings, bringing him face-to-face with emperors living and dead, bold comrades, scheming traitors, and lovely damsels. Tempting as it is to speculate that Robert E. Howard devoured these earliest tales, we have no record that he did so, though it is easy to imagine that he would have enjoyed reading them.

It seems clear, though, that Howard was a follower of the second, shorter cycle of Cossack stories that Lamb penned, featuring characters named Ayub and Demid. Howard wrote a poem titled with the twain’s name, although the poem is unfortunately lost. Demid is lean, hawkish, quiet, thoughtful; a talented swordsman, he is also a natural leader. Ayub is not as bright – he’d rather act first and then think – but he’s a seasoned veteran and loyal friend, a mighty man who wields a massive two-handed sword and who can drink any fellow under the table.

Readers of the Conan tales can find references to Howard’s Kozaks and it is tempting to credit this influence, and the manner in which certain terms are used, to Lamb. But we should not assume too much. While Lamb’s shadow likely lies over these stories, he wasn’t the only pulp writer to pen Cossack tales.

What we do know is that Howard once sat down with a large stack of Lamb stories and transcribed all of the foreign words for equipment and clothing he found within them. Howard scholar Patrice Louinet found a list of these words in among Howard’s papers and, suspecting they might be from Lamb stories, conferred with me. By searching the texts we discovered that the terms were listed in the same order that they had appeared in several Lamb stories: “The Shield,” “The Sea of Ravens,” “Kirdy,” “The Witch of Aleppo,” “White Falcon,” and “The Wolf Chaser.” Clearly Howard must have found inspiration in these stories, or the stack would not have been so deep. For further evidence that Lamb’s tales struck some primal chord, we need look no further than Lamb’s “The Wolf Chaser.” Howard wrote a five-hundred-word recap of the story, then wrote nearly a thousand words of his own take on the events, reusing the place names and some of the characters.

Preserved in Howard’s body of letters are two that he wrote to Adventure. In February of 1924 he wrote the editors to ask more than a dozen questions about Mongolia; Howard wanted to know Mongol names for objects and creatures like swords and tigers, whether or not Mongolians worshipped Erlik, Bon, Buddha, or all three, where exactly the Khirgiz lived, and many other questions besides. He almost certainly had encountered these terms in Lamb’s Adventure tales. In July of 1924, Howard again wrote to Adventure, though this time he asked questions about Europe, wondering what exactly the rights of a Feudal Baron were, how long the Feudal system flourished in central Europe, and other related matters.

Howard had been drawn to history from a very young age, so we should not think that he found all his desire for writing historical adventure from perusing the pages of Adventure magazine. He was keenly interested in Irish history, about which Lamb seems rarely to have concerned himself, and as is well known, wrote widely of a certain Puritan who spent a great deal of time in Africa, another area that never seems to have