 |
| Del Rey trade paperback and Subterranean Press hardcover editions of Crimson Shadows |
A note at isfdb suggests that Strange Detective Stories purchased this story and was going to print it in 1934 but the magazine went out of business before "Lord of the Dead" was scheduled to appear, with the result that the tale was not available to the public until 1978 when it was included in the paperback collection Skull-Face. Lin Carter liked it enough to include it in the fifth of DAW's The Year's Best Fantasy Stories. The text in Crimson Shadows that I read is based on Howard's original typescript.
"Lord of the Dead" stars a recurring character of Howard's, Steve Harrison, a police detective. But this story isn't full of scenes of a guy interrogating suspects and poring over files and typing reports and rapping with government lawyers. It is full of scenes of a guy fighting hand to hand with foreigners!
Harrison is incredibly strong, with wide shoulders and a huge chest and all that. His beat is the "Oriental quarter" of a large city on an important river. As the story begins Harrison is in a dark alley and he is attacked by a Druze who thinks Harrison is the reincarnated killer of the guy the Druze was in his last life. After escaping this loonie, Harrison talks to a white man who is an expert on the culture of the East and then a crooked Chinese merchant, trying to figure out what is up with this Druze. Harrison then stumbles on the subterranean lair of a Mongol who is trying to unite all the criminal Asians in America for some diabolical purpose. Harrison is captured, Harrison escapes, Harrison rescues (from Mongol torturers whose tongues have been cut out) the girl (half-white, half-Asian) who sicced that Druze on him in the first place and started this whole crazy mess. Harrison kills plenty of people, but the plot is resolved when the Mongol betrays the Druze and the offended Druze starts a melee that ignites a conflagration that kills all the criminals (except the girl.)
This is a fun story of violence that, like the Howard stories about scary black people we read recently, suggests that there is a whole secret world of non-whites, in this case Asians, with strange alien knowledge that white people cannot fathom. Oddly for a story about an American detective, but as we might expect from a story by Howard, "Lord of the Dead" (like "Black Beast of Death") associates science with the Far East and suggests that science is dangerous and that to survive we should rely on boldness and brute strength rather than our brains. If you're like me and lack brains, boldness and brute strength, maybe survive by just staying home?
"Valley of the Worm" was printed in Weird Tales alongside a cynical and sad horror story by Edmond Hamilton that I quite liked, "The Man Who Returned." The text here in Crimson Shadows is the same as that in Weird Tales. "Valley of the Worm" has appeared in many anthologies celebrating the pulps, and in many Howard collections.
Just like the guy in Edgar Rice Burroughs's Moon books from the 1920s (we read them in March of this year), the narrator of "Valley of the Worm," James Allison, can remember his past and future lives. Howard wrote six or seven Allison stories, and I guess in each one Allison describes one of his past lives as a fighting man of the North. In this story he tells us of his life as the guy who inspired the tales of St. George, Beowulf and Siegfried!
Niord was a member of a tribe of blonde and blue-eyed nomads, the Aesir, fierce warriors of tremendous strength. They came upon a jungle where lived the black-haired Picts, fierce warriors of strength not quite as tremendous. The Aesir outfought the Picts and then made friends with the survivors. No hard feelings!
Grom, greatest hunter among the Picts, becomes buddies with Niord, greatest of the hunters of the Aesir. Grom shows a ruined city to Niord--this city is home to the invincible monster god of a vanished inhuman race, and is thus forbidden. The Aesir don't believe in the monster god, so a bunch of them decide to start a colony in the city. When Niord goes to visit the colony he finds it has been exterminated by the monster, so he seeks revenge.
First, in the nearby jungle, Niord kills a poisonous snake that is like 80 feet long to get poison for his arrows. The monster god, according to Grom, comes to the surface from a bottomless pit in a ruined temple, "a great well-like shaft in the stone floor, with strange obscene carvings all about the rim." So Niord throws boulders down the hole until the monster, a colossal white worm-thing with forty eyes and various tentacles and feelers and proboscides, emerges, preceded by a prancing Sasquatch-like herald who plays a flute! Niord kills the hairy attendant and the sickening bete blanche with his poisoned arrows, but is fatally injured in the battle. As he dies he tells Grom to spread the story of his destruction of the worm far and wide.
The first half or two-thirds of "Valley of the Worm" has the feel of a fable rather than the immediacy of an action story, and felt a little flat, though I suppose the mythological history of the human race it describes, what with the delineation of the relationships between and among the beautiful Aryans of the north and the ugly barbaric Picts and even more barbaric blacks of the jungle is sort of compelling (and/or offensive.) But the end of the story is great, Howard providing evocative descriptions of the three very cool monsters, Niord's cunning plans for defeating them and the cataclysmic course of his fights with them. In its climax, this story achieves both cosmic horror and a sort of mythic power--thumbs up!
As Rusty Burke tells us in the introduction to Crimson Shadows, Howard published twenty-one stories about Steve Costigan, a sailor who is also an amateur boxer. I guess during the golden age of the pulps there was a demand not only for stories about private dicks, flesh-eating ghouls, ray-gun-toting space men, and sword-swinging barbarians, but also boxers--The Robert E. Howard Foundation has printed four volumes of Howard's boxing stories and poems, and only two of them are about Costigan! Though I am not exactly interested in boxing, I decided I should read at least one of these stories, you know, to have some kind of familiarity with this facet of Howard's career, and why not one that Rusty Burke thinks is one of the best?
"The Fightin'est Pair" appeared in Action Stories under the title "Breed of Battle."
Steve Costigan is a sort of working-class brute with bad grammar and poor spelling (I guess these Costigan stories are supposed to be funny.) He is in Singapore (or maybe some other Far Eastern port full of Chinese and British people?) with his beloved white bulldog Mike. There is a famous fighting dog, Terror, in town, and some people urge Costigan to pit Mike against Terror. A "gentleman adventurer," D'Arcy, asks to buy Mike because he thinks owning a white dog brings good luck. But Costigan doesn't want to make Mike fight or to sell him.
Costigan gets mugged and Mike is stolen. Costigan assumes D'Arcy is to blame and goes to a fancy club and beats the man up, but has to flee the club before he can collect any clues about Mike's whereabouts. Costigan offers a reward for Mike's return, and participates in a boxing match in order to raise the money for the reward. The story's big central joke is that Costigan is distracted during the bout by the never-ending queue of Asians who didn't quite understand Costigan's poorly written sign who come running into the arena trying to sell Costigan dogs that in no way match Mike's description. Costigan suddenly realizes the man he is fighting in the ring was one of the muggers--he beats the info on Mike's whereabouts out of this joker and dashes off to rescue Mike from the pit in which he is tearing Terror to bits.
D'Arcy, with a revolver, appears in the end of the story seeking revenge, but when he sees how much Costigan loves Mike he realizes Costigan is an OK guy and puts away his gun and these two globe-trotting fighting men start a friendship that crosses class barriers.
"The Fightin'est Pair" is faintly amusing and innocuous; I don't feel like I got anything out of it, but it was not irritatingly bad, just lightweight.
**********
"Valley of the Worm" is a legitimately good weird story with its awesome monsters and conceits of reincarnation and revelation of the history of the world before the fall of Atlantis when human and inhuman people worshiped monsters as gods. "Lord of the Dead" and "The Fightin'est Pair" are competent entertainments that take as their raw material class and ethnic distinctions and the thrill of physical violence.
I'll be seeking out more of Howard's fantasy and horror work in the future, but first at MPorcius Fiction Log we'll be reading some paperback science fiction novels.
No comments:
Post a Comment