Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures

much interested Lamb.

In Lamb, though, he found a kindred spirit. It is not that the themes Howard so often dealt with in his fiction came first from Lamb, it is that Lamb’s themes resonated so strongly with Howard because the outlook of both men was quite similar. They were drawn to write tales of outsiders and veteran warriors. Both were suspicious of civilization’s strengths and often portrayed rulers and merchants as decadent, greedy, and immoral. Many of Lamb’s heroes were barbarians, or one step removed, just as Howard’s were. And both gloried in bloody action and adventure. Lamb never comes right out and says that barbarism is the natural state of mankind, but in many of his stories it is made clear that civilization will destroy a way of life that Lamb thinks more honorable – that of the folk who protect the borders, who are continually pushed back from the civilization over which they themselves stand sentinel. Overall Lamb was a better plotter (though Howard’s finest stories stand at least shoulder to shoulder with Lamb’s) but Howard was the more gifted storyteller. Lamb’s style is spare and strong, and quite effective, but it rarely rises to the poetic and dreamy heights of Howard’s greatest work.

Howard himself tried Adventure magazine as a market, but never managed to get in. By the time he was writing his finest historical fiction, he’d given up on ever appearing in the magazine – more is the pity – but did have a regular market of his own.

ORIENTAL STORIES

Unfortunately for all lovers of swashbucklers, Oriental Stories, later briefly retitled Magic Carpet Magazine, had a short lifespan. In four years, only fourteen issues were produced. Howard seems to have been made aware of the publication by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, who was readying to launch the new historical magazine. Wright wrote to Howard that “I especially want historical tales – tales of the Crusades, of Genghis Khan, of Tamerlane, and the wars between Islam and Hindooism. Each story will be complete in one issue, and we will use no serials. The longer lengths are preferred – that is about 15,000 words.”

To all appearances, Howard seems to have leapt at the chance to write this kind of fiction. He said in a 1930 letter to Lovecraft that:

I think Wright’s “Oriental Stories” bids fair to show more originality than the average magazine dealing with the East, though the initial issue, was, to me, slightly dissappointing – not in the appearance of the magazine but in the contents. However, with such writers as Hoffman-Price, Owens and Kline, I look for better things … For my part the mystic phase of the East has always interested me less than the material side – the red and royal panorama of war, rapine and conquest. What I write for “Oriental Stories” will be purely action, and romance – mainly historical tales. And I greatly fear that my Turks and Mongols are merely Irishmen and Englishmen in turbans and sandals! Howard was worried that he wouldn’t be able to accurately portray people of other cultures and times, but after his initial forays he showed the humanity of his characters, regardless of their point of origin. Far from sounding like Irishmen and Englishmen with turbans, they walk onto the stage as fully realized people, bearing their courage and their flaws regardless of their nationality. The sainted and knightly are few and far between in these stories. Instead Howard drafted fiction of hard men and hard deeds.

The first historical Howard sent Wright’s way shared a byline with Howard’s old friend Tevis Clyde Smith. In a letter to Smith penned in July or August of 1930, Howard directly quoted what Farnsworth Wright had said about the story, relaying Wright was “very well pleased with Red Blades of Black Cathay, and may use this as the cover design story for our third issue of Oriental Stories.”

It’s easy to see why Wright would be pleased with the tale. A greater mystery is why the already accomplished Howard wrote it with his friend. Smith once said that he’d handled the research while Howard did the writing, which still seems odd, for Howard was not only capable of solid research but enjoyed the process. Howard scholars speculate that the story might simply have been a case of Howard trying to help his friend Smith get into print in the pulps.

“Red Blades” is an engaging tale, and a solid enough sounding blow, though it can only hint at what will shortly follow. It is the only Howard historical that can truly be said to read like a Harold Lamb pastiche. It may be that Howard leaned heavily upon a genre master as he was finding his bearings. Howard is too accomplished to mimic plots, but he borrows and remixes concepts he came across in Lamb’s writing, most particularly within “The Three Palladins.” There is the same search for Prester John – though Howard’s character comes from the west rather than the east – and the discovery of the Keraits (Christians) that Prester John rules only a short time before Genghis Khan invades the region. Just as Sir Hugo sides with natives against the invasion of a Mongol tribe in Lamb’s “The Wolf Chaser,” Howard’s Godric advises the Black Cathayans to hold a narrow pass, though instead of facing off a tribe and antagonists unknown to westerns, he fights against the forces and champions of Genghis Khan, and even meets the mighty conqueror himself. Anyone who has read Lamb’s “The Three Palladins” or “The Making of the Morning Star” or the second and third novels of his Durandal trilogy will be familiar with the portrayal of Subotai, Chepe Noyon, and Genghis Khan, who sound and behave in “Red Blades” very much the way they do when scripted by Lamb. So similar are they in tone and behavior that “Red Blades” can almost be seen as a companion piece in the same fictional universe: nothing within Howard’s tale precludes any of the events within Lamb’s stories, and may even follow naturally from some of them. Howard is no slavish imitator, and goes so far as to invent additional characters and moments, but the influence is unmistakable.

Howard flew solo for his next historical outing, the first of two finished tales of Cormac FitzGeoffrey. Titled “Hawks of Outremer,” it would eventually appear in Oriental Stories. Howard named FitzGeoffrey “the most somber character I have yet attempted” and sent him “into the East on a Crusade to escape his enemies.” In an October 1930 letter to Harold Preece, Howard wrote that he was considering writing a series based around the character. Howard did so, but it was short lived, consisting of only two completed tales and one unfinished draft of another, possibly because FitzGeoffrey was better in conception than in execution. Howard developed a complex background for his character, then frontloaded it into the first FitzGeoffrey story through direct narration and a long, forced conversation between FitzGeoffrey and an old friend, Sir Rupert. The depth of information is impressive, but the means of transmission is not; it is a contrived information dump.

The next chapter reveals FitzGeoffrey’s personality and mission through showing him in action, a marked improvement, but the tale lurches forward without ever really convincing the reader we should care about FitzGeoffrey or his adventure. In all it’s a weaker tale than “Red Blades.” A sequel story starts more strongly, but never really rises to great heights. Howard himself seemed to think he sold it merely on his reputation, “if I can be said to have one. The title, ‘The Blood of Bel-Shazzer,’ referring to a jewel, was the only interesting thing about it. The plot was hackneyed and sketchy, the action labored and artificial. Only once in the entire story did I evoke a slight spark of the fire that has smoldered out in me.” Howard frequently undervalued his writing and his intelligence when he discussed them in his letters, but his criticism this time is somewhat accurate. “The Blood of Belshazzar” is a murder mystery featuring a blizzard of characters who are introduced in passing as FitzGeoffrey surveys them in a feasting-hall. They are difficult to remember and harder to care about. FitzGeoffrey passively moves though the action, striving only to survive as he comes first upon the murdered victim and then the rogues responsible. The problems in the story look forward somewhat to one of the central issues of Howard’s “The God in the Bowl” in that the mystery itself just isn’t very compelling.

When FitzGeoffrey is saved at the end by a Mongolian borrowed from a Lamb story (one who calls FitzGeoffrey Bogatyr, a Russian term from Lamb’s Cossack stories unlikely to be used by a tenth- century Mongol) he rides off for further adventures, although after two stumbles it is hard to imagine too many people would be eager for another helping.

It is only with the third tale that we can finally glimpse what Howard must have been striving for with FitzGeoffrey in the first stories. It’s never seemed sporting to me to spend too much time criticizing the characters, prose, and plot elements of fragments and unpolished works – after all, they’re unfinished. They weren’t taken from the workshed for presentation because the writer didn’t think they were ready to share. What fragments can show us is the writer’s process and reveal the means that the writer employed in the act of creation. What we have of “The Slave Princess” would make any other writer shake his head a little in wonder. In first draft form it’s as polished as most finished