Robert E. Howard: "The Good Knight," "Knife-River Prodigal," and "The House of Suspicion"

I recently went to Antiques Crossroads in Hagerstown, MD, where I saw a bunch of cool things and even purchased a few.  One of my purchases was a copy of the 1976 Zebra paperback edited by Glenn Lord, The Second Book of Robert E. Howard, a wide-ranging collection of stories and poems by Howard supplemented by introductions by Glenn Lord and illustrations by MPorcius fave Jeff Jones.  Let's check out three stories from the book that star Howard characters not nearly as famous as Conan, Kull or Solomon Kane.

"The Good Knight" AKA "Kid Galahad" (1931)

Nowadays the detective and various speculative fiction pulp magazines are well-remembered, but also popular during the pulp era were magazines of sports stories, and Howard sold quite a volume of material to them.  (Robert E. Howard Foundation has printed four volumes of Howard's boxing fiction and each volume is over 300 pages.)  "The Good Knight" is just such a story, making its debut in Sport Story Magazine under the title "Kid Galahad" and starring light-heavyweight boxer Kid Alison.  This is a somewhat slight but entertaining story, like a fun episode of a TV sitcom.  It feels odd comparing Robert E. Howard to P. G. Wodehouse or Jack Vance, but the slangy first-person narration and dialogue, delivered by a likable but somewhat confused and ignorant protagonist, and "The Good Knight"'s obvious but fun joke premise (a premise at least as old as Don Quixote) and all the little jokes along the way make reading the story a pleasant experience not unlike reading some of the works of those more critically acclaimed creators of Bertie Wooster and Cugel the Clever.

Our narrator is Kid Alison himself; he is on the West Coast while his manager is on the East Coast trying to set up a lucrative bout for Kid.  In hopes of keeping Kid out of trouble, a member of his entourage accompanies him to the library and suggests he read a book about Sir Galahad.  Kid becomes fired with the idea of emulating that noble knight, of helping damsels in distress and vanquishing malefactors.  So when he runs into a young woman who has been hit by her boyfriend after she caught him with another girl, Kid vows to teach her assailant a lesson.  Said assailant is a fellow boxer, a famously dirty fighter, and the woman contrives a situation that puts Kid and this knave in the ring together.  In the end, Kid knocks out the dirty boxer in front of a crowd and a sports journalist, buoying his career.  But the fickle woman regrets putting her boyfriend in such a tough situation and Kid finds himself, painfully, on the receiving end of her anger.  (This story illustrates the reality that abused women often defend their abusers in a sort of jocular way that people today may find in bad taste.)

A trifling thing that is fun, though the climactic bout may be a little too long.  In 1975 "The Good Knight" was printed in the fanzine Fantasy Crossroads, and in Britain in 1977 it appeared in The Robert E. Howard Omnibus.

"Knife-River Prodigal" (1937)

From sports to Westerns--there were also a bunch of Western pulps back in the day, and Howard wrote for those as well.  "Knife-River Prodigal" appeared first in Cowboy Stories; in 1975 it was brought back into print in the fanzine REH: Lone Star Fictioneer and since then has appeared in several Howard collections. 

As with "The Good Knight," in "Knife-River Prodigal" we have a first-person narrator who is something of an ignoramus who is good at finding trouble, starring in a somewhat silly humor story, much of the humor of which rests on unusual syntax and slang.  ("Git goin' before I scatters yore remnants all over the floor."  "Air we men or air we jassacks?")  The comedy business in this story is inferior to that in "The Good Knight," but the action is better.

Bruckner J. Grimes is a young Texan, a real hellraiser from a family of hellraisers who is always getting into feuds and fights.  (The central joke of "Knife-River Prodigal" is that Texas is a violent place.)  He causes so much trouble his family actually tells him to leave Knife River and to go to "Californy" to prospect for gold.  So he steals his brother's horse and heads west; upon arriving in New Mexico, thinking he is in California, he starts chipping away at some rocks, hoping to discover gold thereby.  Grimes gets mixed up with a band of desperadoes who decide to keep him around for laughs, and, when they terrorize the innocent folk of a small town, our hero belatedly realizes what's what and with his six-guns, bowie knife, and fists sets things to rights.

A pleasant diversion.   

   

"The House of Suspicion" (1976)

Here we have one of Howard's stories starring police detective Steve Harrison; we read another Harrison story, "Lord of the Dead," back in 2019.  "House of Suspicion" was first printed here in The Second Book of Robert E. Howard and would go on to appear in various collections of Steve Harrison stories printed here in the land of the free and the home of the brave and over in Europe, the land of croissants and home of pizza.

Harrison is looking for a man who has gone missing, the star witness in a murder case.  He has received an anonymous note, inviting him to the dilapidated mansion of a once wealthy, now decaying, Southern family--Harrison is warned to conceal his true identity from those at the mansion--the writer will reveal himself and guide Harrison to the missing witness.  At the mansion Harrison meets four people.  We've got the last member of the family.  We've got his uncle, rendered deaf, blind and dumb by disease.  We've got the hugely muscular black servant.  And last but not least we've got the biracial ("mulatto") maid.  Someone keeps trying to kill Harrison--throwing a knife at him from the shadows, tossing a water moccasin into his room, dumping poison in his coffee, etc.  Who wrote the letter?  Was the letter sincere or a trap?  Who is trying to kill Harrison and why?  Is that guy really deaf, dumb and blind or is he shamming?  And where is that witness?

There is some mystery business with clues and people concealing their identities and so forth, but mostly this story is about violence and death, with people beating up, blowing up, shooting up and stabbing (up?) other people on purpose or by mistake.  Much blood is spilt!  I enjoyed "The House of Suspicion," though it lacks the personality and atmosphere of "The Good Knight" and "Knife-River Prodigal"--the narration is third-person omniscient, and Harrison and the other characters are quite nondescript, cogs in the grinding gears of the plot.

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Our first two stories brought a smile to my face, and the violence in the third is pretty effective; we have here three undemanding and easy-to-read entertainments.  If you are a Howard fan, The Second Book of Robert E. Howard is definitely worth your time.  I paid ten bucks for mine, which seems like a good price, based on what copies are going for on ebay (mine is also in good shape--it was in one of those plastic bags at the store and I think I'm the first to read it.)  There is a 1980 Berkley printing with a Ken Kelly cover, which I assume is the same text, but Jeff Jones fans will definitely want a Zebra edition, with the great wraparound cover and the eight interior illustrations featuring skulls and bare male flesh.  I have to warn you, though, that "The Hand of the Black Goddess," though promised on the back cover, is not actually in this volume.  If isfdb is to be believed, "The Hand of the Black Goddess" seems to be a hard story to find; hopefully somebody will reprint it soon.

I'll probably read more Howard soon, but first some science fiction stories by a Grand Master.