A chance discovery in a tiny Ernakulam shop sparked a lifelong obsession with Robert E. Howard’s evocative worlds of sword and sorcery.
There is a small lane at the end of Marine Drive in Ernakulam, Kerala that connects to the end of the parallel road called Broadway, next to where booksellers Pai and Co have an outlet. At around the midway point of this lane was a small shop that sold stationery items and, occasionally, old books. I used to frequent this shop regularly in the early eighties and sometimes came away with a couple of vintage paperbacks or comics clutched in sweaty palms. Nothing very earth shaking but then on a balmy evening sometime in 1984 I hit the jackpot. I got a couple of paperbacks that thrilled me.
One was a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs called ‘The Lad and the Lion’ and the other was a paperback by someone called Robert E. Howard. I was basically chuffed about the Burroughs as I was already a huge fan having read all of the Tarzan, Venus and Mars series and several other books by him. The book by Robert E. Howard was called ‘Conan’ and featured a terrific Frank Frazetta cover of a muscular barbarian locked in combat with a gorilla.
At that point in time, I did not know Frank Frazetta from Adam. ‘Conan’ and Robert E. Howard were vaguely familiar as Stephen King had mentioned Howard in his book ‘Danse Macabre’ which is almost a Bible for me insofar as it has hugely influenced my reading preferences. Moreover, a movie on ‘Conan the Barbarian’ starring Arnold Schwarzenegger had been released a couple of years back. Unfortunately, I had not been able to catch the movie as it hadn’t made it to our town.
Howard’s spellbinding worlds
On reaching home I devoured the Burroughs novel in a couple of hours. The next day I started on the book by Robert Howard. To say that it was a turning point in my lifelong love of books is an understatement. I was totally captivated, entranced, enchanted. The only word that would describe his prose was ‘atmospheric’. I was transported to a distant land where a barbarian swordsman, a thief, a mercenary, a pirate waged battle against titanic monsters, armies of enemies and sorcerous beings. Conan is described as ‘black haired, sullen eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth’. He is a man who has a very questionable moral code but also a rough chivalry all his own.
The book was a collection of short stories, some by Howard and a couple by L.Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter. The stories by De Camp and Carter were fragments of stories by Howard that had been completed by De Camp and Carter after Howard’s sad demise as explained in the foreword. The stories penned by Howard were the best in the book including the classics ‘The Tower of the Elephant’ and ‘The God In The Bowl’. The stories were set in the mythical ‘Hyborian Age’ after the destruction of Atlantis and before the rise of any known ancient civilization.
The Conan books chronicle the adventures of Conan through his youthful days as a thief through his young manhood as a mercenary and a pirate and finally his ascension to the throne of Aquilonia. I surfaced after reading ‘Conan’ as if from a spell, determined to read every book by this magician that I could beg, borrow or steal. I did manage to get a couple more of the Conan books, but they were scarcer than hens teeth and difficult to come by in the wild.
It was when I got a job in Delhi and discovered the Daryaganj book market that I hit the jackpot. Within a couple of years, I got my hands on all of Howard’s Conan books and a large number of other books written by him including those featuring his other heroes like the Atlantean swordsman King Kull, the puritan adventurer Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn the Pict, Cormac Mac Art and Dennis Dorgan. He even wrote some terrific westerns.
The first western by Howard that I added to my collection was, coincidentally, from the same small shop where I had got my first Conan novel. The book was ‘The Vultures of Whapeton ‘and was written in the same muscular, frisson inducing style that characterized his Conan books. That particular shop does not carry books nowadays, more’s the pity. By now Howard had vaulted straight into my top five favourite writers, rubbing shoulders with the likes of P.G.Wodehouse, Stephen King, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Charles Hamilton ( Frank Richards ).
Beyond Conan
After the glory days of the pulps the character found renewed popularity when it was adapted in comic book form by Marvel Comics in the 1970s. The first issue was published in October 1970 and the series was a success with the first run continuing for 275 issues from 1970 – 1993. Marvel again obtained the rights to the character in 2018 and have started a new series. The main writer on the series was Roy Thomas and he did a pretty good job in maintaining the feel of the original stories while not quite reaching the dizzy levels of Howard at his best. The series featured fabulous art by the likes of Barry Windsor Smith, John Buscema and Ernie Chan. Marvel also published Savage Sword of Conan Magazine, a black and white comic series, from 1974 to 1995, a total of 235 issues.
Since it was registered as a magazine it did not have to conform to the ‘Comics Code Authority’ the material was much more graphic including bloody violence and nudity, much closer to Howard’s Conan than the sanitized version appearing in the regular comic series. The main writer was again Roy Thomas and a host of wonderful artists featured including Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, John Buscema, Alfredo Alcala, Jim Starlin, Walter Simonson and Ernie Chan among others, a veritable lineup of modern comic book greats. The magnificent painted covers by the likes of Boris Vallejo, Neal Adams, Earl Norem, Nestor Redondo, Bob Larkin and others were another feature. The series became a cult classic.
Conan also appeared as a comic strip from 1978 to 1981. Dark Horse comics also published a series of Conan comics in 2003 which continued upto 2018. These featured writers Kurt Busiek and Tim Truman and artists including Cary Nord, Thomas Giorello , Richard Corben and Jose Villarubia.
The success of the comics sparked a huge wave of interest in ‘sword and sorcery’ in the 1970s and beyond. Two films based on the character as well as subsequent movies based on other Howard characters like ‘Red Sonja’, ‘Kull the Conqueror’ and ‘Solomon Kane’ were commercial successes. This led to fresh interest in Howard’s works with the books being reprinted and other writers also stepping in to write books featuring the character. These included the bestselling author Robert Jordan as well as the likes of Leonard Carpenter, Steve Perry, Sean A. Moore, Harry Turtledove and others. Today’s generation mostly knows the character through the comic books and the movies and TV shows. However, in my opinion, the atmospheric, visceral quality of Howard’s writing has not been matched and, while hugely enjoyable, the comics and the movies cannot match up to the images conjured up in the reader’s brain while reading Howard’s prose.
The eternal flame
Robert Ervin Howard was born in 1906 and spent most of his life in the town of Cross Plains, Texas. He wrote in a variety of genres and a lot of his work including the Conan stories were published in that seminal magazines ‘Weird Tales’. Most of his output consisted of short stories or novellas and he wrote only one novel featuring Conan called ‘The Hour of the Dragon’ (alternate title Conan the Conqueror). I remember reading the book in one sitting during a train journey from my hometown to Delhi. A 48-hour journey including two nights on the train, I started the book at about 7 pm on the first evening and finished it in one sitting by around 11 pm, breaking only for dinner.
Even dinner was almost swallowed whole, so eager was I to get back to the book. Howard’s career was brilliant but short. He flared like a comet and zoomed across the literary firmament to fade too soon. To quote Stephen King ‘Howard overcame the limitations of his material by the force and fury of his writing and by his imagination which was powerful beyond his hero Conan’s wildest dreams of power. In his best works Howard’s writing seems so highly charged with energy that it gives off sparks. ‘Robert E. Howard committed suicide in 1936 at the age of 30, depressed by his mother’s terminal illness. One can only wonder at the wonders that would have sprung from his pen if not for his untimely death. He has left behind a legacy of magical storytelling that continues to entrance readers almost a century after his stories first appeared.
