Dark Valley Destiny (49 page)

Gordon, of Scottish and Irish descent, is a reincarnation of Bran Mak Morn and Turlogh O'Brien, the heroes of earlier series. Like his literary forbears, he is dark, of medium size, with preternatural strength, speed, and agility. Most of the stories are laid in Afghanistan, where the natives dub him El Borak, "the Swift." With the typical pulp writer's carelessness, Howard assumed that the general language of Afghanistan was Arabic and gave his Afghans Arabic surnames, whereas in truth the people speak Farsi and would never have given the American among them the corruption of an Arabic name.

Still, the stories are fun to read. In all, hooves thunder, rifles crack, pistols bark, scimitars swish through the air, and blood spurts with gusto. Many of the stories end with Gordon and a villain dueling with scimitars. If the invention of the repeating rifle and the revolver had made swords obsolete even in distant places, Howard would not admit the fact.

As examples of these stories, "Hawk of the Hills" involves Gordon in intrigues among the British, Russians, and Afghan brigand-chiefs. "Son of the White Wolf' has Gordon in Arabia during the First World War, emulating T. E. Lawrence. "The Lost Valley of Iskander" brings Gordon to a valley occupied by descendants of the army of Alexander the Great. "The Daughter of Erlik Khan," one of the best tales of the series, finds Gordon penetrating the forbidden city of Yolgan in pursuit of a treacherous Englishman. In Yolgan, Gordon comes upon the beautiful Yasmeena (named after Mundy's heroine), whom Gordon finds hiding from her villainous princely husband and whom Gordon undertakes to spirit out of danger. Like Mundy's heroes, and those of most storytellers of the first quarter of this century, Gordon maintains a chaste relationship with the lady. Whatever the truth about the amorous encounters of real adventurers, this convention of the selfless rescuer remained largely in place until the end of the Second World War.

Howard began a parallel series with a hero named Kirby O'Donnell, physically a doublet of Francis X. Gordon. O'Donnell wanders around Afghanistan disguised as a Kurdish soldier of fortune, shooting and sabering people who get in his way. Of the tales in this group, Howard wrote three and sold two, "The Treasures of Tartary" and "Swords of Shahrazar."

Two historical novelettes by Robert Howard appeared in
Oriental Stories
during 1932, and two more were published in 1933-34 after the magazine changed its name to
Magic Carpet.
The inspiration for both was clearly Harold Lamb's tales in
Adventure Magazine,
for Howard greatly admired this leading pulp writer and self-made Orientalist.

It was during the early months of 1934 that Robert Howard at last discovered the form of the Western story that afforded him the scope for his distinctive talents. He applied to the Western scene the techniques that had worked well with his humorous boxing stories. The result was a long series of excellent burlesques, a source of many hearty belly laughs.

Howard had previously sold three straight Westerns: "The Vultures of Whapeton," "Vultures' Sanctuary," and "Boot-Hill PayofT," this last in collaboration. But although others, unsold in Howard's lifetime, have now been published, the straight Westerns have met with only moderate success.

The humorous Westerns, on the other hand, are memorable works. The primary series is told in the first person by Breckenridge Elkins, a hillbilly from the Humboldt Mountains of Nevada. Breckenridge, who bears the name of a village forty-five miles north of Cross Plains, is built along the lines of Conan. He is also equipped with a broad, frontier sense of humor. In one story, he tells us: "A bullet smashed into the rock a few inches from my face and a sliver of stone taken a notch out of my ear. I don't know of nothing that makes me madder'n getting shot in the ear." Later in the same yarn he reports: "Meanwhile the other'n swung at me with his rifle, but missed my head and broke the stock off against my shoulder. Irritated at his persistency in trying to brain me with the barrel, I laid hands on him and throwed him head-on agen the bluff____"28

In one of these carnivals of cheerful mayhem and murder, Breck gets a letter from his aunt:

Dear Breckenridge:

I believe time is softenin' yore Cousin Bearfield Buckner's feeling toward you. He was over here to supper the other night jest after he shot the three Evans boys, and he was in the best humor I seen him in since he got back from Colorado. So I jest kind of casually mentioned you and he didn't turn near as purple as he used to every time he heered yore name mentioned. He jest kind of got a little green around the years, and that might have been on account of him chokin' on the b'ar meat he was eatin'. And all he said was he was going to beat yore brains out with a post oak maul if he ever ketched up with you, which is the mildest remark he's made about you since he got back from Texas.
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In another story Breckenridge comes upon a young woman who has been treed by a puma. Breck politely doffs his Stetson and explains to the girl the habits of the puma, cougar, panther, or mountain lion. At this point the cat reaches up to claw at the girl's foot. Breck says:

I seen this had went far enough, so I told him sternly to come down, but all he done was to look down at me and spit in a very insulting manner. So I reached up and got him by the tail and yanked him down, and whapped him agen the ground three or four times, and when I let go of him he run off a few yards, and looked back at me in a most pecooliar manner. Then he shaken his head like he couldn't believe it hisself, and lit a shuck as hard as he could peel it in the general direction of the North Pole.

"Whyn't you shoot him?" demanded the gal, leaning as far out as she could to watch him.

"Aw, he won't come back," I assured her.
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Here again we see Howard the nature lover. Breckenridge's actions contrast with the usual Western attitude toward wildlife, which may be summarized as: "If it moves, shoot it."

It is interesting to note that the Breckenridge Elkins stories are placed a long way from Robert Howard's home territory—1,200 miles, in fact—in an area of which Howard had no more firsthand knowledge than he had of Afghanistan. Neither do these tales touch upon the farming and oil-boom life of Central Texas, with which Howard was familiar. So it is incorrect to say that Howard had at last begun to use his own background in his fiction.

In the broad sense of the word fantasy, meaning a nonrealistic story in contradistinction to a tale of the supernatural, the Elkins yarns are fantasies. Like P. G. Wodehouse's tales of upper-class British life, they are humorous burlesques, exaggerations of real life; and that is part of their charm.

Real life, despite its occasional humorous episodes, is never so consistently funny. This is not to say that narrowly realistic fiction is "better" than the more fanciful tale. Some readers prefer one, some the other type of story, and either can be done well or badly. Most fortunate is the reader who can detect quality and, with this limitation only, can enjoy a wide range of genres and types of fiction.

Early in 1933 Howard determined to try selling through an agent. His correspondents referred him to Otis Adelbert Kline, a Chicago-based literary agent who had himself written a series of successful sword-and-planet novels in the Edgar Rice Burroughs manner. Kline urged his new client to try writing detective stories, a field in which Howard was uncomfortable. Still, in time Howard completed several detective stories bordering on science fiction or fantasy.

Two of the successful detective stories appeared in the February 1934 issue of
Strange Detective Stories.
One, published under Howard's own name, was retitled by the editor "Fangs of Gold." This tale introduced the hero Steve Harrison, a burly city detective who solves his problems by shooting the villain or flooring him with a medieval mace in a no-nonsense sort of way. The other story, renamed "The Tomb's Secret," bore the pseudonym of Patrick Ervin; but while the magazine advertised another tale for its next issue, the monthly folded before Howard's "Lord of the Dead" could see print.

Howard did sell two more Steve Harrison stories. "Names in the Black Book" was, like "The Tomb's Secret," about a sinister Oriental cult, reminiscent of Sax Rohmer or Robert W. Chambers. The other, "The Graveyard Rats," appeared in
Thrilling Mystery
for February 1936. Four more Steve Harrison stories failed to sell. Robert Howard found no enjoyment in laboriously piecing together clues like a puzzle. He much preferred the rattle of swords and the shouts of adversaries in action stories. So, in 1935, he abandoned the detective field entirely.
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Many and varied were the tales Robert Howard wrote in these years of furious literary effort. There were so many that his biographers could not possibly list them all without ranging far from the story of the author's life. Some involved Crusaders; some, strange goings-on in darkest Africa or Asia; some—unsuccessfully—tried to deal with modern times. But Howard would have none of the genre called science fiction. He wrote: "There is so little of the scientific about my nature that I feel no confidence in my ability to write convincingly on the subject."
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One series, however, deserves mention because the stories were based on the premise of Jack London's
The Star Rover,
in which a man dreams of his previous incarnations. In Howard's series a crippled man, James Allison, awaits death from some unnamed disease. Of the six yarns Howard started, only one was sold. This was "The Valley of the Worm," which appeared in
Weird Tales
for February 1934. Here Allison tells of being Niord, a giant blond primitive in prehistoric times who vanquishes a saber-toothed tiger, a venomous serpent eighty feet long, and a gigantic tentacled white worm.

It is not too surprising that this series never quite took hold. When the hero has slain one prehistoric monster, he has slain them all, and calling up more monsters for him to dompt turns into a mere walk through the zoo. Besides, barbarian life, narrated in detail, becomes monotonous. It is worth noting that although Conan and Kull are portrayed as barbarians, of the approximately thirty stories Howard wrote about them, almost all are laid in, or on the margins of, some civilized land. The reason is plain: a civilized—if violent—society provides many more colorful threads to be woven into the tapestry of the story than does the repetitious, limited, drab existence of a true, unspoiled primitive.

During the two years since Tevis Clyde Smith had brought Robert Howard around to meet her, Novalyne Price had thought about the young writer of whom Clyde spoke often and admiringly. She had graduated from Daniel Baker College in May of 1933 and, pending a regular teaching appointment, had started a private speech class. When, during the spring term of 1934, an English teacher had resigned from the Brownwood School, Novalyne filled in for her on a temporary basis.

Novalyne's friendship with Clyde Smith came to an abrupt end when he suddenly married Rubye Barkley, leaving the young teacher with no one with whom to share her interest in literary matters. So Novalyne's thoughts, not unnaturally, turned to Cross Plains. If she could revive her acquaintance with Robert Howard, perhaps he could give her advice that would help her to realize her half-formed literary ambitions.

Cross Plains had more than one attraction for Novalyne Price. She had kin in the town—her cousins the Gwathmey sisters, who were both teachers. Enid Gwathmey, the elder, headed the English department at the Cross Plains High School; while Jimmie Lou taught in the primary grades. Learning of an opening for an elocution teacher in the Cross Plains School, Novalyne applied for the job and was hired.

Just before school opened on September 10th, 1934, Novalyne moved to Cross Plains, rented a room, and prepared for her first classes. A day or two after her arrival, she was in Smith's Drug Store with Jimmie Lou when a white-haired man came out of the doctor's office at the rear of the store and made his way to the street. The man, Novalyne learned from the druggist's wife, was Dr. Isaac Howard.

"Isn't he Bob Howard's father?" asked Novalyne.

"Yes," said Mrs. Smith. Jimmie Lou added: "You stay away from Bob Howard; he's just a freak. In fact, I'm afraid of him, he's such a freak."

Novalyne demurred. "Oh, I met Bob in Brownwood, and he seemed like a nice person."
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Despite her cousin's fears, Novalyne made up her mind that she would meet Bob again, come hell or high water; for in Cross Plains she felt even more starved for intellectual conversation than in Brownwood.

Not being the kind of girl to wait in the hope that Howard would notice her, she telephoned the Howard house, not once but several times. Each time Hester Howard answered the telephone and informed her that Robert was not in, or that he was out of town, or that he could not come to the phone. After a dozen such abortive calls, Novalyne determined to solve the mystery. On the evening of Thursday, September 20th, she persuaded Jimmie Lou to drive her to Bob's house and wait in the car while she rang the bell. When Dr. Howard opened the door, Novalyne asked if she might speak with Bob.

The doctor gave his caller a peculiar look and, turning, called out; "Hey, Mama, there's a young
lady
here asking for Robert! Shall I let her in?"

Novalyne missed the reply, because just then Bob strode down the short hall and loomed up behind his father's shoulder. "Why, hello, Novalyne!" he exclaimed. "How nice of you to come!"
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Robert escorted his visitor to the parlor, saying that he would have to speak to his mother, who was in her bedroom. Several minutes later he reappeared and offered to drive Novalyne home. When they were halfway down the walk, Mrs. Howard called, and Robert stopped as if he had run into an invisible wall. Wordlessly he turned and went back to the house, while Novalyne continued to her cousin's car to inform her of the change of plans. Robert soon returned and ushered Novalyne into his Chevrolet as if there had been no interruption at all.

Neither of the young people knew that, as they drove off, Isaac Howard was saying to his wife: "Mama, does this mean we're going to lose our boy?"