Category Archives: Robert E. Howard

“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 Bran Mak Morn: Worms of the Earth

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So for Howard’s birthday (January 22), I thought I’d look at a story I haven’t read in a long time, “Worms of the Earth”.  This is one of the Bran Mak Morn tales. There aren’t a lot of them. Some weren’t published in Howard’s lifetime, but this one was, in the November 1932 issue of Weird Tales.

The opening is one of Howard’s best. A Roman governor, Titus Sulla, is showing a Pictish ambassador Roman justice by executing a Pict by crucifixion. The ambassador watches stoically without saying anything. The ambassador is of course the Pictish king Bran Mak Morn in disguise.The dying man provokes one of the guards into killing him, which angers the Sulla. It was the quickest death the Pict could experience, and the governor wanted him to suffer. The guard is sentenced to jail. Continue reading →

Klar-Kash-Ton

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Today, January 13, is the birthday of one of the greatest writers of fantasy of the Twentieth Century or any other. Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) was one of the big three in what many consider to be the best years of Weird Tales. The other two are Robert E Howard and H. P. Lovecraft.

I last looked at some of Smith’s work last summer when I reviewed Zothique from the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. I had started Hyperborea, which was the next volume Lin Carter published in that line, but summer school started. Trying to figure out how to teach online in a summer session was time consuming, and I never got back to it.  I’m going to try to get back to in sometime in the next few months.

Smith doesn’t seem to be as well-known these days as REH and HPL. Part of that, I think, is because his writing isn’t light and breezy. Neither are Howard’s nor Lovecraft’s, but Smith used a vocabulary that was extensive. As a result reading him can be something of a challenge. You see, kids, back in the day, we had these things called dictionaries, and anytime we didn’t know what a word, meant, well, we just looked ’em up. Now git off my lawn.

I’m not sure what story of Smith’s I’m going to read tonight. Maybe I’ll reread “The City of the Singing Flame”. It was the first story by CAS I ever read. I was in the seventh grade, and the junior high library had a nice collection of Robert Silverberg anthologies. It was in one of those.

Regardless, I’ll raise my glass to Clark Ashton Smith and enjoy some of his fiction this evening.

Hester Howard Slept Here

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Hester Jane Ervin Howard

I would like to thank John Bullard for his assistance in the preparation of this post.

Recently I was traveling through Carlsbad, Texas, something I’ve done many times over the years. There’s not much in Carlsbad, other than the San Angelo State Supported Living Center and some houses and churches, post office, and a few other establishments that owe their existence to the state facility. San Angelo is about fifteen to twenty minutes to the southeast.

I seemed to recall reading something about Robert E. Howard’s mother Hester having been a patient in a facility north of San Angelo, but it had been a while. Memory is a tricky thing, and I wanted to get confirmation. It happened that I was talking to John Bullard on the phone as I was passing through, so I asked him about it. He thought I was right, that Howard had mentioned such a thing in one of his letters. A few hours later he sent me the following excerpt from one of Bob’s letters. Continue reading →

Enjoying Some Non-Conan Howard

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The Dark Man
Robert E. Howard
Lancer Paperbacks
Original Price $0.95

So earlier this month I was in the mood for some Robert E. Howard. I am always in the mood for Howard at this time of year. It has to do with Howard Days.  (This was about a week before the Fort McKavett excursion.)

The local comic shop has part of a wall devoted to used paperbacks, and they usually have about a dozen or more Robert E. Howard titles.  I haven’t bought many there because whatever the book, I usually either have a copy or have all the stories in other books.

But I didn’t have a copy of the The Dark Man. The book was in almost pristine conditions. For three bucks, I couldn’t pass it up. Continue reading →

Ambrose Bierce’s Birthday, with a Guest Appearance by Robert E. Howard

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What follows is a guest post from John Bullard. – KW

Ambrose Bierce

Today, June 24th, is the birthday of writer, reporter, and Civil War veteran, Ambrose Bierce. He became famous for his reporting, his fiction writing and his satires. He disappeared while down in Mexico covering the Mexican Revolution around 1914. His work is readily available. An online site that has most of his fiction, including all of the stories mentioned in this piece, and some of his non-fiction is here:

http://www.ambrosebierce.org/works.html

So, why on Bierce’s birthday am I going to talk as much about Robert E. Howard as the birthday boy? Simple: Ambrose Bierce had a big influence on some of Howard’s weird western stories. Continue reading →

Not Exactly Howard Days

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If things had gone the way the were supposed to, instead of writing this post, I would be at Howard Days enjoying a nice dinner, listening to Roy Thomas giving his Guest of Honor speech, and wondering if I would win all my bids in the silent auction. But as you are probably aware, nothing this year has gone the way it was supposed to. Continue reading →

“Beyond the Black River: Is It Really “Beyond the Brazos River”? Part 3

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This is the third of a three part series of guest posts by John Bullard. Before I turn the blog over to John, I would like to take a moment and thank him for all the work he has done not only researching and writing this series, but his editing of the Howard letters for the next edition of the collected letters.  It’s this type of behind the scenes efforts that often go unacknowledged.  So John, on behalf of Howard fans and scholars everywhere, thank you.

Click the links to read Part 1 and Part 2.  Be advised there are spoilers.

Now here’s John.

In Part 2, we saw some of the historical Texans and their stories that Howard used to base incidents in his story “Beyond the Black River” on, hereinafter referred to as BBR. We also saw that Howard’s life-long love of talking to and learning these stories from old people he would meet saturated his thoughts and dreams, leading him to create other incidents and characters in the story. In this final part, we will see the one story that influenced Howard the most in writing BBR, and then his use of historical people that his ancestors interacted with from family histories which he used to flesh out his story. Finally, we’ll see his use of a famous incident in Texas history to bring BBR to an end, clearly showing that BBR was indeed a story about the settlement of Texas, and not a story taken from the American Colonial wars with the Eastern First Nations. Continue reading →

“Beyond the Black River”: Is It Really “Beyond the Brazos River”? Part 2

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What follows is a guest post by John Bullard.  Take it away, John.  And by the way, there are spoilers.  You have been warned.

In Part One, we began to examine the historical incidents and people from Texas history that Howard used in creating his story, “Beyond the Black River”, hereinafter abbreviated as BBR, grounding the tale as a story about the settling of Texas and not about the American Colonists fighting with the Eastern First Nations. We saw that Howard was particularly interested in the history of the settlement of Comanche lands in Central and North Central Texas by Anglo settlers, and started using the long years of conflict as the foundation for his creating his Conan story of “Beyond the Black River”. He used the general geography of the Texas lands bounded by the Trinity and Brazos rivers and transposed it into the woodland setting of the story bounded by the Thunder and Black rivers. Finally, it was shown that Howard used the actual incident of the destruction of Fort Parker by the Comanche and Kiowa in 1836 as the destruction of the fictional Fort Tuscelan in “Beyond the Black River”. Now, we will look at some of the peoples and stories of Texans fighting for survival against the Comanches who were waging their own war to keep their lands. Continue reading →

“Beyond the Black River”: Is it Really “Beyond the Brazos River”? Part 1

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What follows is a guest post by John Bullard.  It is the first of three parts and contains spoilers for Robert E. Howard’s “Beyond the Black River”.

Weird Tales, May 1935, first installment of “Beyond the Black River”

Robert E. Howard’s Conan story, “Beyond the Black River” is considered to be one of his best stories by his fans. It tells of an attack by Howard’s favorite historical peoples, the Picts, against the encroaching colonization of the Aquilonians on the Picts’ deeply forested land between the Thunder River to the East, and the Black River to the west in his fictional Hyborian world setting. It is well-known that Robert E. Howard used historical events, people, places, and the stories of people he knew to help inspire his writing, giving his stories a grounding in realism that stories just made up from whole cloth may sometimes lack. In “Beyond the Black River”, Howard used his knowledge of Texas’s history and people, as well as his family’s history, to make the story as realistic as possible in a fantasy setting. Continue reading →