Last Christmas a package of books was under the tree for me,
three old classics found at the largest remainder bookstore in the state, and
I’ve had the pleasure of consuming them at my leisure, intermingled with others
from the same source, reviewed previously.
Howard is most famous as the creator of Conan, but among his
prolific writings are found many other heroes – F. X. Gordon, Kirby O’Donnell,
King Kull, Sailor Costigan, Bran Mak Morn, Cormac Mac Art, and the central
figure of this collection, Solomon Kane. The Solomon Kane stories are set in
the 16th – 17th centuries and follow the wanderings of an
English Puritan, a solider of fortune whose iron will and combative prowess
take him to the far corners of the world, and through grim adventures with
dark, supernatural twists. The introduction to this classic 1966 paperback collection,
copyrighted by the late Glenn Lord, the agent to the Howard estate, describes
him as sombre, black-clad, powerful without being of overwhelming stature, and
the sort of tortured character who is eternally driven, searching for something
he may never find.
Three stories appear here, a quarter of Howard’s output on
the character, and the titular piece, about half the volume, was first
published in August, 1928 (in Weird
Tales, of course.) This adventure is set in “darkest Africa,” inland from
the slaver coasts, and sees Kane venturing alone into that “heart of darkness”
to the rescue of an English woman abducted long ago and passed from hand to
hand as a captive until fetching up in the lost kingdom of Negari. Here the
psychopathic queen Nakari rules amongst the crumbling, cyclopean ruins of an
earlier glory, where brutal rites and human sacrifice mark her ambitions to expand
kingdom to empire, and Kane brings down these dreams in fire and fury in the
course of the rescue. Wandering through the black depths of the ancient
fortress, he encounters a dying captive, the last descendent of the original
priesthood, who tells him of the origins of this lost fortress-city – that they
were survivors from doomed Atlantis, whose glories have faded, usurped into
barbarism down the thousands of years as those they took as slaves overcame the
few Atlanteans and built their own power.
When reading texts from ninety years ago one is keenly aware
of the change in times. Howard wrote this story in an age of broad-brimmed hats
and waistcoats, of running-boards on cars, of candlestick-telephones, when Al
Capone was the most feared name in Chicago, and Adolph Hitler was a political
radical not long out of prison for organising the “Beer-Hall Putsch” of 1926.
Racism is endemic to the era and one must make allowances for the nature of
description – for descriptive language reflects prevailing expectations. Howard
describes his African warriors as mighty giants, valorous in the extreme, yet
of limited nature: a schism between the white man and his African cousins
cannot help being in focus. His attribution of savagery, unthinking destruction
and brutal slaughter, to a racial basis, makes one cringe today, and to read
the piece is to be keenly aware of how far we have come in our social thought. That
said, he was probably fairer in his imagery than many another writer of the
times.
The second story, Skulls
in the Stars, much shorter, follows supernatural slayings upon the moors
and marshes of some unspecified place in rural England – justice at the point
of a sword for an old miser whose murder of his brother gave birth to a horror
that slays by night, and only in his own passing at the hands of the monster
will his soul be cleansed. Howard weaves the fanatical Christianity of the era
into his tales skilfully, including apt Bible quotations as his hero finds
divine logic in the doings of fate and his own survival against all odds.
The third piece, The
Footfalls Within, takes Kane back to Africa, where he encounters the misery
of an Arab slaver column, and though taken captive, with guile sets one against
another until tricking them to a night-begotten temple with tales of riches,
where they will be undone by the horror that waits upon trespassers – thus
freeing the captives. In this Howard demonstrates the loathing for coarse
slavery widely felt in his time as well as in our own, and casts Kane as the hand
of justice. He couches it in a convincing Biblical speech of the era, and
glories in setting a lone hero against overwhelming odds – yet is not above ju-ju magic saving the day for his
Puritan.
Howard was just 22 when he created this character and in
many ways his writing is far beyond such a tender age today. He writes with the
verve and pace of youthful energy, but with a depth of understanding of the way
the world works we today associate with greater maturity. He was a king of the
pulps, one of the best remembered authors of his era, is credited with
invention of the sword & sorcery genre, and his legacy lives on in
enthusiastic tributes as the current century continues; thus it is of great
interest to look back on his work, understand it in the context of the time
when it was written, and to enjoy the adventure for its own sake.
Cheers, Mike Adamson
