Author Archives: Keith West

“There’s Nothing I Enjoy More Than Discussing These Old Scoundrels.” Robert E. Howard on Ben Thompson and John King Fisher, Two Texas Gunfighters

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Today’s guest post is by John Bullard. Take it away, John.

Robert E. Howard loved the history of the American Southwest, and greatly enjoyed talking about it with and teaching it to his famous Eastern writer friends. For a while there in his correspondences with Lovecraft and Derleth, Howard could barely let a letter go by without talking about Billy the Kid or John Wesley Hardin’s exploits. However, two famous Texan gunmen that Howard talked about have been all but forgotten today, and with the anniversary of their violent deaths having just passed, I thought it would be interesting to talk about them again, just as Howard did. Continue reading →

Remembering Novalyne Price Ellis

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Today, March 9, marks the birthday of Novalyne Price Ellis (1908-1999). She is remembered today for her memoir One Who Walked Alone. It was based on the diaries she kept while she dated Robert E. Howard during the final two years of his life.

One Who Walked Alone provides the best account of what Howard was like. She wrote the book, which was published by Donald M. Grant in 1986, in order to counter some of the things said in L. Sprague de Camp’s biography of Howard, Dark Valley Destiny.

If you are interested in Robert E. Howard, and really, who around this blog isn’t, then you should really read One Who Walked Alone.

Revisiting William F. Nolan

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Today, March 6, is the birthday of William F. Nolan (b. 1928), best known as the coauthor of Logan’s Run and two sequels.

Nolan is primarily a short story writer, and when I picked up the volume shown on the right last week at the Friends of the Library sale, I thought it would be time to revisit some of his works. It’s been a few years since I ready much by him. That’s a photo of the actual book I bought. It was the library’s copy that was taken out of circulation. You can see the edge of the sticker that says “Fiction” on it down on the lower left.

But I digress.

This isn’t going to be a review. I’ve not had much chance to read the book. I’m probably going dip into it from time to time rather than try to read it straight through. But I did want to acknowledge Nolan’s birthday. He’ s 93, and that in itself is an accomplishment.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss

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Theodore Geisel, AKA Dr. Seuss, was born on this day, March 2 in 1904. He passed away in 1991. He wrote and illustrated many of my favorite and my son’s favorite books from early childhood.

Yes, I know he’s being canceled. Or at least some of his books are. Some people have decided that they have racist content.

Really? Dr. Seuss?

Whatever.

I don’t really care they claim about his books. I’m getting really tired of people saying I shouldn’t have access to reading material (or movies, or…) because they don’t approve of it or it isn’t woke enough. And don’t get me started on the recent attempt to get Baen Books deplatformed.

I don’t need someone to tell me what I can’t read. Or what I should read. I’ll read whatever I please, and it’s no one’s business what I read. If someone objects to it, that’s only going to make me read more of it. *Looks at shelves containing Kipling, Haggard, Howard, Lovecraft, and Uncle Remus.* That includes Dr. Seuss. What I’m going to read even less of than I already do is what’s coming out of the major publishers or anything promoted because it’s woke.

If that last paragraph offends you, go screw yourself.

A Visit to the “Shottle Bop” with Theodore Sturgeon

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Today is February 26, which means it’s the birthday of Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985). I read a great deal of Sturgeon in my teens and early twenties, and over the last few years, I’ve been revisiting some old favorites. “Shottle Bop” is one of those. It’s probably among the top two or three of my favorite stories by him, if not my favorite.

“Shottle Bop” was first published in the February 1942 issue of Unknown. I read it for the first time in Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories Volume 3, 1941. It’s one of Sturgeon’s most reprinted stories and is currently available electronically in Microcosmic God: Volume II of the Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon. Continue reading →

Margaret St. Clair and Her Causes

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“The Causes”
Margaret St. Clair
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1952
Currently available in The Hole in the Moon and Other Tales

Margaret St. Clair (1911-1995) was born on this date, February 17. Although she wrote eight novels, she is best remembered for her short stories, both under her own name and the pseudonym Idris Seabright. “The Causes” was one of the Seabright stories, most of which were published in F&SF.

Bar stories and the closely related club stories, which are often some type of tall tale, have a long history in the science fiction and fantasy fields. “The Causes” falls into this subgenre. It’s a fun and clever little story. Continue reading →

“Red Nails”: Did Howard Create the City of Xuchotl From a Real-Life Inspiration?

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We’ve got another guest post by John Bullard for you today:

Robert E. Howard’s final Conan story, “Red Nails”, relates how Conan and his fellow adventurer Valeria come upon a giant, totally enclosed city, Xuchotl, where the inhabitants have divided up into two factions and are in a deadly war to wipe each other out. As is well known, Howard used a lot of real life historical incidents and places as inspiration to write many of his stories. Howard’s two trips to New Mexico in 1934 and 1935 with his good friend Truett Vinson provided ideas for his stories. Patrice Louinet, in his essay1 on Howard’s writing of the Conan tales argued that the feud of the inhabitants of Xuchotl was inspired by Howard’s June 1935 trip to New Mexico, when he and Truett Vinson stopped at the town of Lincoln, home of the famous Lincoln County War, to see the sites of the notorious conflict. Howard had a great interest in the Lincoln County War and its most famous fighter, Billy the Kid, and wrote of the events in many letters to H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth. Howard also wrote a travelogue of the 1935 New Mexico trip in two letters to Lovecraft and Derleth. His letter to H.P. Lovecraft in July 1935 contains a long, extensive narrative of the trip, and that letter’s sections dealing with Howard’s experiences and impressions of Lincoln definitely show its influence on his conception of the deadly feud in Xuchotl as well as the atmosphere of the city itself.

But, did Howard draw upon a place or places in the real world which inspired his creation of the physical description of Xuchotl itself? It is my belief that Howard did indeed draw upon real life places for creating Xuchotl, and that it was on this 1935 trip that he found that inspiration. These two letters reveal the clues as to what those places in New Mexico were, with two in particular probably being the real-life inspirations for the layout of the incredible city of Xuchotl.

The Letters

Howard traveled with Vinson to New Mexico in June, 1935, as Vinson wanted to visit people in Santa Fe. Along the way, the pair stopped to visit Lincoln to see the buildings where much of the action in the Lincoln County War took place. They then continued on to Santa Fe. Howard hoped to continue traveling on into Colorado and Arizona, but Vinson wanted to end the trip and return home to Texas quickly after they had reached Santa Fe. It was while they were in Santa Fe, that Howard writes in the two letters the clues of what led to his creating the physical layout of the doomed city of Xuchotl: Continue reading →

Blogging Northwest Smith: “The Tree of Life”

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C. L. Moore (1911-1987) was born on this date, January 24. Shen  was one of the greatest writers of the fantastic in the 20th Century.

For today’s post, I’m going to continue the series I’ve been doing on her character Northwest Smith. Smith is frequently regarded as a Han Solo prototype.

In “The Tree of Life” he’s on his own, without his Venusain partner Yarol.

The opening of the story could have been written by Leigh Brackett, and I had to remind myself that this story is set on a different Mars than the one Brackett wrote about. Continue reading →