Bloodstained Memories - Robert E. Howard

Bloodstained Memories

How my imagination was ensnared by

Robert E. Howard's

Conan of Cimmeria

My discovery of the writings of Robert E. Howard was due, albeit indirectly, to a particularly nasty case of influenza. I was living alone, attending the Spencer School of Business and working part-time at a photography studio in the early months of 1975 when I contracted the flu. It was quite simply the most debilitating viral illness I have ever had (worse than the strep-throat I had in 1968). I was bed-ridden for nearly ten days, delirious and unable to rise for more than a few minutes at a time. My only entertainment, other than sleeping, was the stack of books I kept next to my bed. Several of these books comprised the trilogy known to millions of readers as THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

Truth be told, I’ve always had a love for tales of the fantastic. The first two books I owned were Scholastic copies of the VOYAGES OF SINBAD and TALES OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY. However, most of my teenage years revolved around the literature form known as Science Fiction. Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Leinster were the stars that inhabited the constellations that I knew and loved. But I digress…

Buying THE LORD OF THE RINGS was initiated at the suggestion of a friend of mine who thought it would be of interest. I started the book a couple of times, but it never captured my attention enough to get past the first chapter or two. Getting sick is a great way to read a story that you don’t particularly want to. With nothing else to do, you swiftly become a captive audience. I came to realize that I not only liked the book; I loved it. I loved it a lot. It was like reading a mélange of myth and history and legend all rolled up into a neat and tidy package. In essence, being cooped up with the flu was the catalyst for a paradigm shift in my reading habits.

So, what does this have to do with Robert E. Howard?

One cold, snowy night in March of 1975, several weeks after I had recovered from my illness, I entered the local bookstore in search of some sort of fantasy tale that would give me the same feelings that THE LORD OF THE RINGS engendered. Being a rather small bookstore, my hunt turned up nothing amid the paperbacks of the Sci-fi Fantasy section. I drifted over to the magazine section and, lo and behold, my eye alit upon the cover of a comic magazine, the Savage Sword of Conan #5. Arresting cover! A savage-looking man nailed to an x-shaped cross (by Boris, no less). Even though I hadn’t bought a comic book in nearly half a decade, I decided to spring for this one. The yarn inside was (if you haven’t guessed) “A Witch Shall Be Born”. I ran home through the snow and promptly devoured my magazine.

The next day I was back to see if I could find anything else about this savage hero named Conan. There weren’t any Conan books available, but I did manage to scrounge up an oversized Treasury that contained two stories, “Red Nails” and “Rogues in the House”. “Red Nails” was awesome! I was caught, hook, line, and sinker. Over the next few months I collected all of the Conan comics I could find, and all of the back issues of Savage Sword and Savage Tales.

I was still looking for any books by Robert E. Howard. A series of Conan books had been published by Lancer Books, but they had gone bankrupt and the books were unfortunately out of print. Compounding this was the fact that the town of Spencer had no used book stores and was at least a hundred miles from the nearest big city. So what was I to do?

My solution was rather radical for the time. One of the Savage Sword magazines had printed a fan letter in which its author claimed to have owned all of the Lancer Conan books. I decided to make him an offer he couldn’t refuse. I sent a letter to his address in Las Vegas and offered to buy his entire Conan collection for $10.00 per book. As I expected, he didn’t refuse, and I sent him a money order for $110.00 for the whole set of eleven books (I’ve always entertained the suspicion that he took his money and repurchased the set from a Las Vegas used book store for a buck or two per book). Even though it was a lot to pay for books back in 1975, the purchase was worth it to me.

I finally had Conan in literature form! The first story I read was “Queen of the Black Coast ”. I then reigned in my enthusiasm enough to read the entire series in order. At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to who wrote what in the series, although I remember really hating the novel CONAN THE BUCCANEER. It didn’t take very long for me to realize that the author of the best Conan stories was Robert Howard.

I kept on the lookout for books with Howard’s name on them, and was finally rewarded when Zebra Books began to print books featuring some of his lesser known characters (“Worms in the Earth” and “The Dark Man” were particular favorites of mine). I lucked out to discover Howard just when his writings were experiencing some sort of literary renaissance. The seventies was a good time for Howard, from a publishing standpoint.

About a year after the Las Vegas purchase, I managed to get down to Des Moines and discovered a Sci-Fi Fantasy bookstore that specialized in new and used books. Most importantly for me was the discovery of three Solomon Kane books from Centaur Press, a British import of KING KULL from Sphere Books, and, of course, the complete eleven volume set of Conan, also from Sphere Books (at a couple of bucks apiece, naturally). I bought all of them, anyway.

In fact, I was obsessed enough to buy every Howard related thing that came my way. Over the years I’ve collected most of his stories in paperback form. I have every single Howard-related comic book that has ever been published. I’ve got an album of “Tower of the Elephant”/”Frost –Giant’s Daughter” narrated (I think) by L. Sprague deCamp. My pride and joy is a huge map of the Hyborian World published by Starmont House that was the companion to Lee Falconer’s HYBORIAN GAZETTEER (it resides on the wall above my desk). A statue of Frank Frazetta’s “Barbarian” sits atop my desk in a way that really makes the Starmont map come alive. It continually inspires me…

There is no denying that the works of Robert E. Howard has impacted my life in some very significant ways. I’ve run an AD&D role-playing game based in Howard’s Hyborian world that ran for over seven years of my life. When I decided to create a website, the gaming materials that I had winnowed from all the myriad Conan publications went into the creation of my Hyborian Gazetteer. Finally, the Conan website (as well as my other Heroic Fantasy sites) got me invited to join REHupa by both Steve Tompkins and Joe Marek. So the big wheel of Heroic Fantasy just keeps on turning …

Dale Rippke

08/03/03