Category Archives: Mark Finn

Interview with Mark Finn, Revisited

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Back in late February, I interviewed several people at ConDFW and posted those interviews over the next few months.  Links to those interviews can be found in the sidebar.  The longest interview was with Mark Finn, and it was so long that I broke it into two parts, which I posted a week apart.  The second part was shorter than the first because I chose to make the break at a point where the topic of our conversation shifted rather than at the halfway point.

Both parts of the interview were well received and quickly found a place in the top ten most popular posts, which was fine with me.  For some reason, the second half of the interview had about 10% more page views than the first, maybe because more people linked to the second half.  I wasn’t really concerned, since both parts of the interview got a lot of traffic, Mark was happy with the interview, and Adventures Fantastic was linked to on other blogs and websites.

Then about six or eight weeks ago, something unusual happened.

The first part of the interview began to pick up more traffic.  At first I didn’t think much of it, because both halves of the interview have gotten a small but steady flow of traffic since the initial interest died down, as have several other posts I’ve done since I started this blog.  Blogger shows the ten most popular posts, and there’s always some relative movement in the middle of that list.

But I noticed something.  While the first part of the interview saw an upswing in the number of page views, the second half didn’t.  There would be the occasional bump in traffic, but nothing like what the first half of the interview was getting. In fact, the first half of the interview has surged to be the number one spot by a noticeable margin.  As I write this, it was the second most viewed post in the last day, and the third most viewed post in both the last week and the last month.  In other words, it’s gotten more traffic than most of the posts I’ve done in the last month.

First, let me say “Thank you” to everyone who has looked at that interview.  It’s extremely gratifying to me to know that an interview I conducted months ago is still of interest to people and still speaks to them on some level.  It encourages me to do more interviews, and I will.

But I’m also curious.  Why has the first part of the interview seen such an increase in interest but not the second?  It’s the scientist in me.  I’m trained to notice trends in data and question what causes them.  Please understand, I’m not unhappy that this one post is still generating traffic and interest.  Just the opposite.  I’m thrilled.  I’m just puzzled that the other half isn’t seeing the same response. The only thing I can figure out is that “Tom Sharkey” is part of what the attraction is.  That’s one of the most common search terms, and Mark discussed Tom Sharkey in the first part of the interview.  The numbers aren’t a good match, meaning that the number of page views is much higher than the number of times “Tom Sharkey” shows up in the search terms, so I’m not convinced that’s all there is to it.

If anyone has any idea what’s caused this sudden interest in the first part of the Mark Finn interview, I’d be interested in hearing it.  My curiosity is driving me up the wall.

A Review of Dreams in the Fire

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Dreams in the Fire:  Stories and Poetry Inspired by Robert E. Howard
Mark Finn and Chris Gruber, ed.
cover art by Jim and Ruth Keegan
Monkeyhaus Publishing
available from Lulu (use above link), $20, 278 p.

Ever since I interviewed Mark Finn back in February (posted here and here) and he told me about this book, I’ve had high expectations for it.  It did not meet my expectations.

This book exceeded my expectations, and in spades.

All the contributors are either current or former member of the Robert E. Howard United Press Association.   The anthology is a fund raiser, and I’ll talk more about that at the end of the review.

The book contains stories and fiction, along with an introduction by Rusty Burke.  Several professional writers are included, but not all of the names will be familiar.  My understanding is that some of the contents are the first published fiction of some of the contributors.  I can only ask:  What took you people so long?  There’s not a dog in the book, and the quality of many of the stories surpasses a lot of what’s in professional short fiction markets these days. Howard wrote in a variety of genres, so not all of the entries are fantasy, although most are.

I’ll not discuss the poetry, since some of the pieces are only a few lines.  I don’t want my commentary to be longer than what I’m commenting on.  I restrict myself to saying the following people have one or more poems in the book:  Barbara Barrett (3), Frank Coffman (2), Danny Street, Amy Kerr, and Don Herron.

The backbone of the anthology is the fiction, and that’s what I want to discuss here.

Charles Gromlich opens the book with a deadly tale of family and gender politics in “A Gathering of Ravens”; this one annoyed me because I wanted to know more about the relationship between Trajan Vittus and Jedess than Gromlich chose to show.  That’s a sign of good writing.  Veteran professional James Reasoner examines the relationship between the pen and the sword in “The Rhymester of Ulm”, while “The Word”, by Rob Roehm, is the only western tale.  Robert Weinberg lightens the mood with “CSI:  Kimmeria”.  Christopher Fulbright gives us a pirate yarn set on the “Bloody Isle of  the Kiyah-rahi”, and Jimmy Cheung’s “Avatar” is a twisty tale of betrayal.

The second longest story and one of my favorites, “Now With Serpents He Wars” by Patrick R. Burger, ventures into territory not much explored by Howard, the Arthurian legends.  I found this one to be fresh and original, with compelling writing and believable characters.  I’m hoping this one will be on one or more award ballots next year.  Oh, and if you don’t like snakes, this one will probably get under your skin.

Angeline Hawkes’ series character, the Barbarian Kabar of El-Hazzar, puts in an appearance in “Two Dragons Blazing”.  Co-editor Mark Finn gives us a something of a boxing tale with “Sailor Tom Sharkey and the Phantom of the Gentleman Farmer’s Commune.”  David A. Hardy descends into madness with his “I am a Martian Galley Slave”; or does he?  Co-editor Chris Gruber, with the longest of the selections and another personal favorite, tells the story of an Indian massacre and its aftermath on the Illinois frontier during the War of 1812, with a dash of horror thrown in for good measure in “Dead River Revenge”.  Gary Romeo tells of a swordsman who has “No Other Gods”, and Morgan Holmes rounds out the volume with “A Meeting in the Bush”, a vignette in which several familiar characters meet up for a brief encounter.

Some of the contributors are shown in the picture below at the signing for the book held at Howard Days last month.  I’ve tried to identify everyone I can in the picture.  If I’ve left anyone out, I apologize.

Signing at Howard Days 2011 – (l. to r.) Amy Kerr, Mark Finn, Angeline Hawkes, Chris Fulbright, Gary Romeo (purple shirt), and Rob Roehm (black shirt, far right)

I expected to the stories to be well written.  Amateur press associations tend to attract intelligent, articulate people.  What I didn’t expect was the level of professionalism and craftsmanship in the writing.  Like I said earlier, some of these stories are better than most of what you find in professional anthologies and periodicals, and none of them fall below that standard.  Not quite what I would have expected for a group of writers who, to a large extent, are not pros and/or write mostly nonfiction.  This was the second original anthology without a bunch of A-list names I’ve read in the last month that has surprised me with the high quality of the stories.  (Here’s my review of the other one.) If other small press anthologies of this type are this good, I’m going to need to read a lot more of them (and so should you).

If I have any complaint at all, and that’s stretching the definition of the world “complaint” almost to the breaking point, it would be that only one story is a nonfantasy.  That being Rob Roehm’s, which is a grim western.  (Chris Gruber’s comes close to being a straight historical, but does contain a fantastic climax.  Mark Finn’s is a definite fantasy, even though it’s about a boxer.)  Now I discovered Howard through his fantasy work, primarily Conan, so I’m not really trying to cast stones here.  My point is Howard wrote a great deal more than just fantasy.  There were the westerns, both humorous and serious, the boxing stories, and the historical adventures.  I was expecting more entries in those veins, seeing how the focus was about Howard’s inspiration of these writers.  Maybe in the next volume guys?

Finally, one last thing.  This book costs $20.  You might be thinking that’s high for a trade paperback, and under other circumstances I would be inclined to agree.  But this is a fund raiser for Project Pride, the community organization that maintains the Howard House, puts on Howard Days, and has done work above and beyond the call of duty to maintain Robert E. Howard’s legacy.  If you’ve been to Howard Days, you understand what that means first hand.  If you haven’t, Project Pride maintains the House and grounds.  Provides meals for Howard Days attendees for free (although registration and a donation are requested to defray the cost of the evening meals and to get an accurate count, I don’t think anyone has ever been turned away).  Maintains copies of a number of original manuscripts.  And makes Howard fans not only feel welcome but like part of the family.  When you buy this book (and you should), your money will be going to a good cause.

The Adventures Fantastic Interview: Mark Finn, Part 2

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Last week, in part 1 of this interview, Mark Finn discussed his own writing, both biography and fiction.  In this installment, he continues sharing his thoughts on other Howard related topics.

AF:  Do you think there been any faithful adaptations of Howard to film?
MF:  Howard films…I have to tell you a quick story, an anecdote.  We managed to get ahold of a copy of Solomon Kane from a friend who taped a bootleg.  My wife Cathy was real excited to sit down and watch it.  We were five minutes in, and she said, “Was this Robert E. Howard right here?”
And I said, “No.”
Then she said, “Okay.”  And we watch a little bit more.  He goes through the things he goes through and he’s killing people left and right, and she says, “This has got to be Howard.”
And I said, “No, this isn’t in any of the Solomon Kane stories.”  
“Huh.”
I said, “I’ll tell you what.  I’ll let you know when the Howard stuff shows up ’cause I’ll probably get real excited about it.”
She goes, “Great.”
Thirty minutes go by.  She says, “He’s met the family now.  Is this Howard?”
“No, this isn’t Howard.”
We get to about ten minutes before the end, and she says, “Honey, is there any Robert E. Howard in this?”
I said, “Well, the guy’s name is Solomon Kane.” 
She said, “Honey, that doesn’t count.”

You know, it’s a little sad that the best one of the bunch is still the old “Pigeons From Hell” Thriller episode.  Boris Karloff’s adaptation of “Pigeons From Hell” still stands out as following the storyline.  Which is such a novel approach.  Why didn’t I think of that?  Why not just take something from the books?  How simple and how basic.  “No, no, no, you don’t understand, Mark, we’ve got to rewrite Conan so that he’s on a quest for vengeance.”  Oh, cause that hasn’t been done to death.  Yeah, yeah, that makes prefect sense.  Yeah, why not, why not?  In fact, I got an idea.  Why don’t you have a Vikings kill his family.  We’ve never seen that before in a film. 
It just makes me crazy that these guys in LA have…I don’t think it’s ignorance.  I think it’s a willful self confidence there that feeds an ego that has to be the size of C’thulhu.  It’s the only thing that makes sense.  If I come to them with a proposal set in a savage land in a distant time about a guy who walks into town out of the wilderness and through strength, cunning, guile, his own wits, he pulls himself up by his bootstraps to become the most famous rogue in town.  But because he’s still new in town he hasn’t counted on the forces of civilization rallying around him, and so the story ends when he’s betrayed and has to leave town.  And they say, “What’s the name of this piece?”  and I say, “Krogan the Mercenary”.  They’d be like [snaps fingers], “Awesome, we’ll run with it.  It’ll be just like Walter Hill did in Last Man Standing.  Yeah.  We won’t give him an origin.  No, it makes him mysterious.  Perfect!  I love it!” 
That should be the Conan movie.  That should be the Conan movie.  But no, noooo, let’s give him a family.  Even though Robert E. Howard’s stuff so seldom uses family for anything, much less a motif for vengeance.  Usually it’s an excuse to move away. 

The Conan movie’s coming out.  I’ll show it at the theater.  But it’s not gonna be Conan. I mean there may be more stuff in it.  We haven’t seen it, so obviously we don’t know what elements got taken out.  But I can tell you right now, if the plot involves him going on a quest for vengeance to get the guy that got his parents, that’s not Robert E. Howard.  It’s just not.  It may be an entertaining movie.  There may be some pieces and parts where you go, “Wow, that’s a pretty Conan-esque type of thing that’s going on right there.”  Until they figure out that this stuff works because it’s been around this long and people respond to it on a visceral level, until they figure that out, we’re gonna have this problem.  I wish it was different.  Moreover, I wish they would fly me out to Hollywood for a week.  I’ll take a meeting with them.  I can fix this.  I just know it.  Get the executives out the room and let me talk to the scriptwriter, okay?  I’ll even put it in the language of film.  There’s a hundred film examples of exactly the kind of thing that can be used for this.  Most of the executives are thirty-five and don’t watch movies, so what are you going to do with that?  What’s the next question?

AF:  What one question would you have for Howard if you could ask him anything?
MF:  If I had just one question?
AF:  Or a series of questions if you prefer.
MF:  I thought about this the other day.  I was watching a Ben Franklin documentary and realized the five people that you would have breakfast with, you know, would be…one of them would be Robert E. Howard, of course.  I think I would ask him, if I had just one question to ask him, it would be, “Do you…”  Actually, this is what I would ask him.  “How do you see yourself?”  I would want to know how he saw himself because I think that would answer a lot.  And I know he writes about it in the letters, but I think in the letters he also puts on a lot of different faces depending on who he’s talking to.  If I got the chance to look him in the eyes and see what he says, I want to know how he sees himself because we’ll know.  And if I could tell him one thing, it would be “It’s gonna get better.”  I’d like to pull him aside at the beginning of 1936 and say, “You will get through this.”  Would it help?  Who knows, I mean when people have made up their minds that they’re gonna do that, especially when people are clinically depressed, decide they’re taking a path… [sighs]

AF: I think that’s the desire of every Robert E. Howard fan, to talk him off the ledge so to speak.

MF:  And the thing is, you know the question is, if you talk him off the ledge in 1936, what’s to say he doesn’t get back on that ledge in ’37?  The things that he’s dealing with, presuming he would get through the funeral and make it a few months down the road, where does he go?  Does he go with his dad?  What does he do?  There’s this continual grieving process.  For a guy who spent most of his life as a caregiver to his mother, as a guy, who, whether he wanted to or not, identified himself as a caregiver to his mother, that piece of his identity is gone.  They’ve done studies about this now, and noted that when children take care of parents in a caregiving role for a number of years, you get all sorts of depressed behavior, and suicide becomes a major thing because the one reason why they’re doing what they’re doing has been taken away.  So there’s no guarantees that we would have gotten a whole lot of stories from Robert E. Howard.  There’s no guarantees he would have made it to World War II.  When you’re dealing with someone who’s been that depressed for that long, who’s to say?  But I would ask him what he thought of himself.  Or optionally, I would ask him why he never talked about his humor because that was the stuff that put food on his table for most of his writing career.  And very little is said about it.  He’s always more interested in talking about the horror stories or whatever, but the stuff that he came to rely on for a steady paycheck was the funny boxing and the funny westerns.
AF:  What do you see as the state of Howard scholarship and where do you think it’s going over the next few years?

MF:  I think Howard scholarship is alive and well.  I think we’re in a lull right now because a lot of people’s projects are coming to an end.  And the may be the end of the second Howard boom’s scholarship push.  The internet has helped since we can react to things that are on there now, that’s been useful in keeping things alive, but until all of Robert E. Howard’s fiction is in print in some form or fashion, we won’t have Rusty and Patrice for the big stuff.  That’s what they’re doing.  That’s the job they’ve set themselves.  As a task, as fans, we should be grateful for that.  They’ve had eleven Del Rey books come out.  And even though it won’t be the funny stuff.  The funny stuff is what’s left, and once that’s done, and they take a mental break, I’m sure both of them are gonna dive into the biography.  It’s not that they haven’t wanted to work on it, it’s that they haven’t had time.  So I think we have one more big push yet to have happen, and I’m not sure yet if it’s going to be during this big push, this third age of Howard scholarship that he won’t join the American literary canon in the way that Lovecraft has and Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, and all those guys.  I think that’s an inevitability, and we’re already moving in that direction anyway.  The next five years is when you’re gonna start seeing Rusty and Patrice come out of the cave and start talking about stuff and the biographical debate comes up again.  I think it’s around that time, either just before, during, or just after, is when he goes in the Library of the Americas.  At that point you’re gonna see a lot of people back off and go “Ahhh.  Now I can go read this and enjoy it again.”  It tends to be a singular focus when you’re working on this stuff.  There’s just one problem you’ve gotta just tackle and tackle until it’s dead and you look up and find another thing.  I think of it like that, and I don’t begrudge what anybody is doing.  Like I’ve said before, it’s important to have those authoritative texts out.  The Foundation has made all the poetry available for the first time ever.  Now we’ve got the wonder three volume set of the letters.  Essential.  So they’re setting up for the next wave.  I think that’s what all this is right here.  And if the academics continue to come to this, as we’ve seen starting with last year, with a couple of very strong academics, Justin and Diedre, I think they’re going to be instrumental in leading some more academics to Howard.  I think that’s when the real interesting stuff will begin. 

AF:  Last question.  What question would you ask that I haven’t if you were conducting this interview?

MF:  I would have asked me if I had any regrets about what I’d done in Howard studies.  But, I don’t have any regrets, so that’s kind of a boring question.  [laughs].  I wish the REH Manifesto had been a little bit shorter because I wrote it ostensibly to just tell the people:  If you going to shoot your mouth off and you’re going to come out with some alleged knowledge, don’t tell me “I’ve read a few Conan stories, and here’s what I found out about Robert E. Howard.”  You’re reading the one character that he commercially engineered over any of his other material to be something that he could sell to Weird Tales.  That’s not to say that Howard didn’t enjoy it and that’s not to say he didn’t invest in it, but the elements in the stories that a lot of people had a problem with, if you view Conan as the thing he constructed to try and get Farnsworth Wright’s attention and knew that certain things like women wearing certain things like gossamer silk robes and being whipped by other women, if he knew that stuff like that made it into Weird Tales and got cover space, which usually was a little bit more money, and became things that Farnsworth Wright featured.  And he put that in there, then the Conan stories become the anomaly, not the rule.  “Sword Woman”, which was unpublished in Howard’s lifetime, is much more Howardian in tone.  It’s not until those early Conan stories, where he’s trying to find his way, which tend to be some of the best ones, and then the later Conan stories, when he’s trying to break away, tend to be some of the best ones.  In the middle you’ve got some fairly formula Conan stories, and these were the ones that Wright was featuring; these are the ones that Wright was lapping up.  So, was Conan the way he always did things, or was it the exception to the rule.  I think Conan was the exception, but then again , I’ve been steeped in this for a decade now.  I’ve read the Conans over and over, and I’ve all the other stuff, and I”ve looked at all of this.  I don’t expect BobaFett1972 at aol.com to know that.  I wrote the manifesto as basically, if say I don’t like him, he’s too bloody for my taste, I’m not a big fan of the subject matter, and I tend to like my fantasy a little more epic and a little less down in the dirt, I can’t say anything bad about that.  But if you tell me that Howard clearly had a problem with women, and after reading three Solomon Kane stories it’s clear that he was a virulent racist, I have to put the brakes on that.  I wrote the Manifesto to basically tell people think before you type.  What they took from that was “God, he doesn’t like it if anybody says anything negative about Robert E. Howard.”  Which is not the case.  I would love to read a negative critique of Robert E. Howard based on what’s in there.  Not what you think is in there, not your mind tells you your mind tells you is in there, not what you remember from your D&D days as being in there.  So far I haven’t seen that critique yet, but maybe one day we’ll get it.
AF:  Thank you very much.
MF:  You’re welcome.

The Adventures Fantastic Interview: Mark Finn, Part 1

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Mark Finn should be no stranger to hard-core Robert E. Howard fans.  He is the author of the Howard biography Blood and Thunder as well as numerous articles and essays about the man from Cross Plains.  In addition to his writings about Robert E. Howard, Mark is also a fiction author with a number of short stories to his credit.  He took time out of his schedule recently to sit down with Adventures Fantastic to answer a few questions.  Here, in the first of two parts to this interview, Mark discusses why he writes, why he felt the need to write a biography of Robert E. Howard, his admiration of jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden, and what other projects he has in the works.
AF:  Why do you write?
MF:  Why do I write?  That’s a good question.  When I was a lot younger, I wanted to be an entertainer of some sort.  I went through a period where I remember in the 70s television would always have these variety shows, so I got to see ventriloquists and magicians, and guys who could do impressions, Rich Little.  I used to watch the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts with Foster Brooks.  I didn’t understand why it was so funny, but my parents just thought it was the best thing ever.
AF:  I remember those.
MF:  Oh, they were so funny.  And Foster was great.  I mean really underappreciated kind of guy.  So I went through phases where I studied ventriloquism, and I studied magic.  I still play with magic on a strictly amateur basis right now.  But as I got older I wanted to do special effects makeup for the movies and found kind of accidentally that I was good at writing.  And I kept wanting to do other things.  I wanted to draw.  I’ve always wanted to tell stories.  I’ve always wanted to entertain people and tell stories.  However that needed to happen.  I found that of all the things I wanted to do, the thing that came easiest to me was writing.  If I spent a lot of time and went to school and learned art and got a degree in commercial art or graphic art and sat down and made an effort at getting into comics, I probably would be pretty good.  But I was always naturally better at writing than I was anything else, so by the time I was fifteen, I met somebody, incidentally, who was gifted in art the way I was in writing, so that’s what made me go, “Oh, I get it.  All right.”  And he and I have been friends, and he, John Lucas, has pursued the art career, and I’ve pursued the writing career.  For me it boils down to entertaining people, storytelling. I think that’s our primary means of communicating with one another, whether it’s a joke or “Honey, you won’t believe the day I’ve had.”  It’s all stories.  I like that form.
AF:  What got you interested in Robert E. Howard?

MF:  I was a nerd.  (laughs)  Yeah, in the 70s I liked all the monster movies, the Saturday afternoon stuff, Jason and the Argonauts.  It was the time of Star Wars and later fantasy movies and Dungeons and Dragons and all that stuff.  Dungeons and Dragons, when it came out, the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, had a list in the back of recommended reading.  That was interesting to me because I had been reading science fiction up until then.  I was just transitioning over into Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I got into D&D about the same time the Conan movie came out.  I was too young to go see it in the theater, but with a little finagling, when it came to HBO, I was able to watch it.  And so when I recognized that the Conan created by Robert E. Howard, according to the movie, was the same guy they were recommending the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons book, I said, “Well, I’ve clearly got to read this guy.”  And so it was through other influences that led me to check out Howard.  That’s been where my heart has been ever since.  Well, it just spoke to me in a way that very few other authors have before or since.  So, the short handed answer is through the movie, and the long handed answer is through Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and the movie.
AF:  This could be a two part question, depending on how you want to interpret it.  What led you to write a biography about Robert E. Howard, and why did you see a need for a revised edition?

MF:  My initial intention with writing Blood and Thunder was two-fold.  One, I knew that Rusty and Patrice [Rusty Burke and Patrice Louinet] were busy doing the Del Rey texts and preparing those and would have no time to finish these biographical projects and what they were doing in time for the Centennial [the centennial of Robert E. Howard’s birth] in 2006.  That just sort of happenstance coincided with Chris Roberson from Monkey Brain saying, “Isn’t the Howard Centennial coming up?”  And I said, “Yeah.”  And he said, “Do you want to do a book for us?”  And I said, “Sure, I’ll edit an anthology, and I’ll put everybody together, and we’ll do essays, and it’ll be great.”  And he said, “No, no, no, I’m thinking just you.”  That was when the idea first came to me.  I knew right away that I couldn’t do a kitchen sink, warts and all kind of book.  Those types of things take a while.  You’ve got to go three years in and really do a bunch of stuff.  I had a small window.  I had one year.  So I chose to write the biography I would have wanted to read, that I’ve always wanted to read as a fan, and couldn’t.  I wanted a biography that was easy to read.  Not simple, but an engaging story.  I wanted something that dealt with the literature that he wrote, and I wanted something to put it all into context.  There were things I emphatically did not get in reading Dark Valley Destiny.  In fact I decided to make that the critical yardstick, if you will, for Blood and Thunder.  I looked at everything I didn’t like about Dark Valley Destiny, and I either didn’t do what he [L. Sprague de Camp] did, or I wrote an answer for what he posited.  And so as a biography, it’s not a complete book in so much as it is a reaction to de Camp’s various theses.  And so when it came out, I had to turn it in at the end of 2005, beginning of 2006. 

Then in 2006, a bunch of things happened.  Most notably, The Cimmerian magazine that Leo Grin was doing went monthly, and with the monthly schedule came all these finds, all this new stuff.  That’s always the case, it’s never gonna be finished because if I wanted to stop right now and add new stuff, I could.  But I had to have a cut off point because of the process they were using to do the book.  There was a lot of stuff found in 2006, interesting speculations and some cool finds, subsequently, in 2007 and 2008, that weren’t in the first edition.  I made a deal with Monkey Brain for the mass market in trade.  So everybody was asking if there was going to be a hardcover.  I shopped it around to a few people, including Del Rey.  They liked the book, but it wasn’t in their cards to do it.  They were just really wanting to concern themselves with the fiction.  So I went to the Foundation [The Robert E. Howard Foundation] because, again, Rusty and Patrice are still working on their own stuff.  Patrice is still preparing texts.  They’ve got the boxing and the funny western stuff left to do.  So that’s somewhere between six and eight more books if they do it right.  Rusty, too, same thing.  So I knew that those biographies they’re gonna have are eventually going to come out.  But the Foundation could use a biography right now that they could market and sell, so I thought, I’ll just ask them.  But I wanted to put in the new information, I wanted to rewrite the last chapter, which is very problematic in the first edition.  I wanted to add a bunch of things people asked me about.  One of the few negative comments I got on the book was “I really liked learning about all the other stuff, but I kinda wish there were more Conan stuff in there.  He doesn’t spend a lot of time on Conan, aannndd I understand why, but it still would have been pretty nice.”  With that kind of luxury, with another year to go back through the manuscript, I can clean up a bunch of stuff.  Now it’s got 30,000 extra words in it.  And all those things have been addressed.  All the technical errors and lapses in concentration on my part have been fixed.  I’m very happy with it.  It’s a little weightier of a book.  The last chapter got completely reorganized and feels a whole lot more focused and less chaotic.  I would say probably four of the chapters at least have gotten a substantial revision or were completely revised.  Another four of the chapters had extra bits and pieces and things inserted into them, so if you’ve read the first edition once or twice, you’ll quickly start hitting stuff where you go, “I don’t remember that from the first time I read the book.”   Then you’ll go and get to the sections and go, “Wow, I don’t remember any of this.”  That’s the new stuff.

Illustration by Mark Schultz

AF:  Any possibility that you can foresee a third edition somewhere down the road, or is this your final word on Robert E. Howard’s life as far as a formal biography?
MF:  I would say, for everything that I wanted the book to accomplish, it largely did.  Now we have a talking point opposite de Camp’s book.  The thesis I wanted to work into the first edition regarding Breckenridge Elkins is now in there.  Unless some big evidence shows up that changes something fundamental, I don’t know that a third edition would need to come out.  I wouldn’t want to do it unless I could put another thirty thousand words into it, and if I put another thirty thousand words into it, now we start getting into an awful lot of lit crit.  Which is great if you’ve read it.  If I’m talking about Solomon Kane, if you’ve read all those stories, then a little literary criticism discussion, breaking stuff down isn’t going to hurt anybody.  You might agree or disagree,  You would at least be able to go, “Oh, yeah, ‘Wings of the Night,’ I’ve read that.”  If I put it in there, and you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re going to be more likely to skip chapters, which is exactly what I do when I read a literary biography and come across something I haven’t read yet because I don’t want to be pre-informed when I read the story.  So I don’t think a third edition is in the works anytime soon.  I would be more inclined to just do more articles and essays and fill in gaps that way.
AF:  Any other biographies you plan to write?

MF:  Weirdly enough, yes.  (laughs)  I want to do a biography of Jack Teagarden, who was a jazz trombonist during the Big Band era.  He’s from the town I currently live in, Vernon, Texas.  He’s the Jimi Hendrix of the jazz trombone.  That kind of sounds like a trite way to say it, but he played the trombone in a way that it was not played before or since.  His style was so singular and signature that jazz trombone died when he did.  And so he’s largely forgotten by modern jazz aficionados.  In the Big Band era, he was kinda on the second tier.  People have heard of him, go “Oh,yeah, I know that, trombone, right?” He’s got a pretty big international following still.  I recommend him.  If anybody is reading this, do a google search for him on Utube and check out how he plays.  The guy was a virtuoso.  The kind of which, you won’t believe what you’re hearing is a trombone.  He’s that good.  I want to do a biography of him.  I think he’s a fascinating guy.  He’s another one of those Texas creators who took two disparate things and combined them to make a unique sound.  I use him in the introduction to Blood and Thunder alongside of Howard Hughes and Bob Wills as inventive Texans who were able to take the best of two separate elements and combine them to make something new.  He’s one of those kind of guys, and I’m fascinated by those type of guys.  Historically, I’m attracted to subjects who displayed that kind of brilliance, maybe even to the cost of their own lives.  Orson Wells.  Benjamin Franklin.  Howard Hughes.  Harry Houdini. 

Robert E. Howard.  These guys, Jack Teagarden, all had this sort of intensity about them, this sort of effortless means of creation that was responsible for why they were the way the were but also made them so flawed and so tragic.  I don’t have a timeline on the biography.  I’m waiting for a bunch of stuff to come together.  I’m probably through writing biographies for a few years.  I really want some time to study Teagarden more before I get into it.  But, yeah, I definitely want to tackle him.  Now I have to be mindful of something.  I do not remember who said this, but there’s a very famous quote from a critic.  I should now who said this.  The quote is writing about music is a lot like dancing about architecture.  I’ve got to find a way to write about his stuff, maybe not in a way that you understand it, but in a way that makes you want to listen to it.  That’s really the goal.  If you’re a jazz fan and you pick up the book, I’ve got to be able to write about what he’s doing in a way that the jazz fan will say “Yeah, he totally nailed it.”  And you, who have never heard him at all, will go, “I don’t what he’s talking about but, man, I got to check that out.”  And that’s a balancing act.  Who knows how long that’s going to take?

AF:  I enjoyed your novel excerpt that you read earlier this morning.  What fiction do you have in the pipeline, and where can someone go to get copies of what you’ve already head published?
MF:  I’ve got two…I’ve got a bunch of stuff in the pipeline, actually.  I’ve got a lot of neat stuff coming out this year.  I just wrapped up a script for Dark Horse for their Howard theme anthology entitled Robert E. Howard’s Savage Sword.  It’s an original story about El Borak, Francis Xavier Gordon.  I’m really excited about it because it’s the first comic book appearance of El Borak.  As such it’s also a kind of an introduction to the character for people who don’t know who he is.  This will get picked up by a lot of people who’ve maybe read Conan, Solomon Kane, even Kull. and might be curious to try this.  I’ve only got eight pages in it, so I basically have got to provide you with a sort of …I think of it as a fictional essay, really, on what makes him so cool.  Eight pages isn’t enough adapt an original story.  It isn’t enough to get into a richly detailed plot, so I came up with an incident.  So we basically decided as long as we have eight pages of El Borak doing the things that we know he can do best, it’ll be pretty cool.  That comes out in May.  The novels I’m working on, I’ve got two in progress. 
The Domino Chronicles has been shopped to a couple of people.  I’m not sure if I’m gonna get any bites any time soon. 

The other thing I’ve been working on, I’ve been researching this guy for years, and I’ve finally got the means to put it into a novel form.  It’s about Sailor Tom Sharkey, who was an actual golden age boxer from the turn of the century.  The story involves him and his adventures.  He was a very larger than life character, and the model for Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan, at least in terms of physicality and fighting ability.  So for me, what I like about that story is I’ve loved the funny boxing stories for forever.  That’s no secret to anybody who’s met me for more than five minutes.  And as much as I want to go play in that sandbox, I really have a problem with pastiche authors, particularly the ones who don’t get it.  Or “I want to do my thing with Conan.”  Well, if you do your thing with Conan, why don’t you go do something else?  So I decided that what I wanted to do was something in the funny boxer genre, but not necessarily a Robert E. Howard turn.  Because Howard’s sense of humor is not my sense of humor.  My sense of humor is different.  And it would be bad for me to try and imitate Howard’s sense of humor.  This gave me an opportunity to do something really funny in stories with this unreliable narrator, kind of a la Steve Costigan, but not a direct rip off.  We’re dealing with somebody who’s at the end of his life or he’s in the twilight of his career and he’s looking back and regretting some decisions he’s made.  He decides to go on this vaudeville circuit, which actually happened. What he doesn’t realize is that the vaudeville circuit train he gets on turns out to be a quest for a golden belt he left back in New York City.  Things get pretty weird after that.  By doing a kind of fantastical historical, that’s something that Howard never did either.  His funny boxing stories are pretty straight up.  Definitely it owes a great debt to that work, but ultimately I’ve moved to where I feel far enough away from it that, again, only people who’ve read the boxing stories will go, “You know, that was a Costigan flourish.”  I think everybody else is gonna read it and go, “Where the hell did you come up with this guy?”  And I’m gonna have to tell them, he’s straight out of history.  That’s a work in progress.  I hope to have that done this year and shopped around. 

If you want a taste of it, we’ve got a short story collection coming out here that will be ready before Howard Days.  It’s called Dreams in the Fire:  Fiction and Poetry Inspired by Robert E. Howard.  It’s actually a REHUPA project.  Current and former REHUPAns have donated stories to this anthology.  And we got a couple of ringers in there.  Bob Weinberg did a story for us; Don Herron has a good poem in there.  The whole thing is a fiction anthology in the vein of Robert E. Howard.  Everybody had different characters and different concepts.  We’ve got some pirate stuff.  We’ve got some American frontier stuff.  We’ve a Sailor Tom Sharkey story.  All kinds of things.  The entire book will be sold online, through the usual outlets, also through the gift shop [at the Robert E. Howard House].  And all the money goes to Project Pride.  So it’s going to be our fundraiser book from REHUPA.  And we’ll keep that active for a year, and all the profits we’re going to give over to the Howard House to let them continue the good work and keep the place up.  So hopefully I’ll have that out by mid-May, if not sooner.  That’s in the final stages.  Really, right now between the novels and some more comic work that’s coming down the pipe, I’ll have quite a few things out this year.  I’m looking forward to having all this out and published. 

Next Week:  In part 2 of this interview, Mark discusses adaptations of Howard to film, the state of Robert E. Howard scholarship today, and what one question he would ask Howard if he could.

Odds and Ends

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Between allergies, taxes, and trying to finish my upcoming column for Home of Heroics, I’m a little behind in getting some things up that I’ve been working on.  It might be next week before anything substantial is posted since I’ll be traveling over the weekend starting tomorrow.  In the meantime, check out the new material at Home of Heroics if you aren’t already doing so.  Yesterday’s guest column was by John O’Neill, publisher of Black Gate, in which he talked about how Scholastic Books got him hooked on science fiction and fantasy.  It brought back memories for me, because I used to read those books as well.  My son is now starting to read them, and I’m looking forward to what he’s going to be bringing home.

I want to take a moment to thank everyone who’s visited Adventures Fantastic, especially in the last couple of weeks.  Traffic seems to be picking up, and I appreciate your interest, support, and comments.  I’ve got some cool things planned for the next couple of months, including a two-part interview with Robert E. Howard scholar Mark Finn, some Long Looks at Short Fiction, a review of Jasper Kent’s Thirteen Years Later, a look at Henry Kuttner’s Prince Raynor stories, and some more Kull.  So stick around.  It’s only gonna get better.