Graveyard rats and other.., p.1
Graveyard Rats and Others, page 1
20-12-2023
Reworking of an earlier version
covers and introduction etc restored
GRAVEYARD RATS
AND OTHERS
ALSO BY ROBERT E. HOWARD
Waterfront Fists and Others
GRAVEYARD RATS
AND OTHERS
ROBERT E. HOWARD
Introduction by Don Herron
Edited by Paul Herman
GRAVEYARD RATS AND OTHERS
Compilation and editing copyright © 2003 by Paul Herman.
Introduction copyright © 2003 by Don Herron.
“Black Talons” first appeared in Strange Detective Stories, December 1933.
“Fangs Of Gold” first appeared in Strange Detective Stories, February 1934.
“The Tomb’s Secret” first appeared in Strange Detective Stories, February 1934.
“Names in The Black Book” first appeared in Super-Detective Stories, May 1934.
“Graveyard Rats” first appeared in Thrilling Mystery, February 1936.
“Black Wind Blowing” first appeared in Thrilling Mystery, June 1936.
Published by
Wildside Press
P.O. Box 301
Holicong, PA 18928-0301 USA
All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
A BLACK WIND OFF RIVER STREET-Don Herron
BLACK TALONS
FANGS OF GOLD
CHAPTER II Murder Tracks
CHAPTER IIIVoodoo Lair
THE TOMB’S SECRET
NAMES IN THE BLACK BOOK
GRAVEYARD RATS CHAPTER I The Head from the Grave
CHAPTER II Madman’s Hate
CHAPTER III The Feathered Shadow
CHAPTER IV Rats in Hell
CHAPTER V The Rats Eat
BLACK WIND BLOWING CHAPTER I “I Take This Woman!”
CHAPTER II “Tell Them — In Pity’s Name”
CHAPTER III Dead Madness
CHAPTER IV Crackling Blue Flame
A BLACK WIND OFF RIVER STREET
Don Herron
An abiding mystery of Robert E. Howard’s volcanic career as a writer for the wood pulp fiction magazines remains: Why he didn’t smoke the keys on his Underwood with one hard-boiled detective story after another?
Howard had the speed, the influences, the personal interest in guns and boxing and other hallmarks of the tough guy crime tale. He hit his professional stride in exactly the right era. Among the vast hosts of his fellow fictioneers, Howard was one of the few to create an enduring icon of the hard-boiled attitude of his age with his most popular creation, Conan: a character and a mood, tougher than tough.
Nailed to the cross in “A Witch Shall be Born,” the Cimmerian emerges triumphant from the ordeal, a quintessential image torn from the heart of the Great Depression. If the American readership of Weird Tales, from young teens on up, needed reassurance that adversity could be met, Howard gave it to them in mythic terms told in emotionally immediate prose. You want a tough guy who can survive anything thrown at him, here’s your tough guy.
Of course, most Weird Tales readers probably weren’t looking at the story with quite those ideas in mind. It usually takes a little time for this kind of evaluation to shake out. When the Dime Novels of the 1800s were trying on various character types, looking for The Hero whose exploits would sell copy after copy, it wasn’t evident immediately that The Cowboy was the archetype which would survive and dominate much of American pop culture in the Twentieth Century.
You cannot say with certainty that Howard himself had a single clue that he had created The Barbarian, not merely a few characters in a fairly large group of stories, but yet another archetype that would ease out into world culture over the next half-century. Yet Robert E. Howard and no one else created The Barbarian in the same era in which another new archetype came along to give The Cowboy a serious challenge as America’s dominant pop culture hero. Both The Barbarian and The Private Eye were born in the wood pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s.
Howard came so close to the tone, setting and concerns of the hard-boiled Private Eye story, it is astonishing that he managed to keep to his own path and carve out a new genre of fiction with his tales of Sword-and-Sorcery. The scenes with Shevatas the thief in the Conan yarn “Black Colossus” or with Conan himself as a young thief in “The Tower of the Elephant” play with the materials of the pulp crime story. Without any need for qualification, “Rogues in the House” is one of the best hard-boiled stories of the era, featuring terrific moments such as the jailer who “had become careless in his dealings with the underworld” or Conan tossing “his punk” who had betrayed him into a cesspool. Especially hard-boiled is the casual thought, when the barbarian “decided it was time for him to kill Nabonidus.”
So close, yet only a month before his death by suicide in June 1936, Howard would tell H. P. Lovecraft in a letter that he could “scarcely endure to read” a detective story, “much less write one.”
In 1935 the Texan briefed Clark Ashton Smith, another of his peers in the pages of Weird Tales, on the creation of Conan: “It may sound fantastic to link the term ‘realism’ with Conan; but as a matter of fact — his supernatural adventures aside — he is the most realistic character I ever evolved. He is simply a combination of a number of men I have known…. Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prizefighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian.” Gunmen and gamblers, bootleggers and prizefighters — the solid stuff of hard-boiled fiction.
Howard’s taste in movies underlines his innate attraction to the form: “Give me a rough, tough brutal story, quick action and a gang of hard-boiled hairy chested eggs: George Bancroft; Mathew Betz; Lionel Barrymore; Vic Maclaglen, who once fought Jack Johnson….” If any writer was participating in the cultural moment, that writer was Robert E. Howard.
The first World War brought literature and film to the boil, although other forces had set out simmering fires earlier. The rise of literary naturalism in the late Nineteenth Century paved the way for a brand of tough-minded realism, and one of Howard’s favorite authors, Jack London, dead at age forty in 1916, was a significant factor in popularizing what would become known as “tough guy” writing. But it took a world actually going to war to set in motion the social and economic forces that would bring the detective story up to speed. Edgar Allan Poe had inaugurated the detective and mystery genre with “Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841, with Arthur Conan Doyle’s private investigator Sherlock Holmes the most enduringly popular figure to emerge from the hundreds of fictional detectives to trail in Poe’s wake. Still, before the war, crime fiction lacked a convincing sense of what was realistic.
The realistic hard-boiled form exploded out of the postwar pulps, specifically The Black Mask, which began publication in 1920, though it wasn’t until October 1922 that the significant creative fires were lit. In that issue you find “The Road Home,” the first detective story by Dashiell Hammett, the unquestioned modern master, as well as “The False Burton Combs” by Carroll John Daly, a lesser figure but nonetheless a major influence on later writers such as Mickey Spillane. Daly rapidly produced more stories featuring tough-talking private eyes, but we can look back now and see that it was in 1923 when the hard-boiled detective arrived to stay. That year Hammett began his long series of short stories, novelettes and novels about the exploits of an unnamed operative for the Continental Detective Agency with a tale called “Arson Plus.” By 1928, when Hammett began writing his novel The Maltese Falcon, few had any doubts that something new, something great, had come to literature.
Robert E. Howard’s major market for fiction, Weird Tales, also was born in 1923, and the teenaged Howard managed to place three stories with that magazine by 1924. He came into the fiction magazine scene virtually on Hammett’s heels. It’s interesting to note that the next major hard-boiled crime writer after Hammett, Raymond Chandler, first appeared in the pages of Black Mask in the December 1933 issue with “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot.” By that time Howard himself was a full-fledged professional writer; he had created Conan in 1932.
In that specific period in the pulps, from no earlier than 1922, with no need to go any later than 1936, the year of Howard’s death, a number of writers following Hammett’s lead hard-boiled the detective story. While they did that, Howard single-handed performed the same job for the fantastic tale, imbuing his stories with the tough realism of the day, adding a new dimension to otherworldly fantasy.
If some hardcore Howard enthusiasts may be experiencing a strong sense of deja vu by this point, perhaps it’s because I have made this argument at length before, some twenty years ago. In 1984 for The Dark Barbarian, a critical anthology about Howard’s writing I edited, I wrote an essay on this theme entitled “Robert E. Howard: Hard-Boiled Heroic Fantasist.” Since I also wrote the essay “The Dark Barbarian” for that book, I decided to disguise the hard-boiled section a bit by using the nom-de-plume “George Knight.” In part I did that for fun, and the fact was that in 1984 you didn’t have Robert E. Howard critics falling out of the trees — not like today. If I wanted that essay, and I did, then I had to write it myself.
So, you can see that I’ve been intrigued by the problem of Howard largely missing out on the most fecund and significant era of the hard-boiled detective story for quite a long time. As a big fan of both Hammett and Howard, this situation gnaws at me. What if? Why didn’t it happen? Wonderful questions.
This collection demonstrates, however, that Howard did not miss his chance completely. A working professional, willing to try any marketplace to make a living, he swallowed his aversion to the detective formula and wrote these tales during the years he chronicled the adventures of Conan. At the same time, he was writing his boxing stories and becoming increasingly interested in Westerns, both serious sage-brushers and his popular burlesques featuring such Tall Tale heroes as Breckinridge Elkins. If he had lived — another always arresting What If — surely Howard would have done more detective stories. And if these stories aren’t on a par with the best of Hammett and Chandler, they’re not much worse than many other yarns published in that heyday of the hard-boiled — I’ve actually met people who like Carroll John Daly’s stories, for some reason.
Howard clearly sensed how to shape his backdrop, although he didn’t do quite enough with detective tales to start filling it all in. You have a private eye named Steve Harrison — or more than one private eye named Steve Harrison — and you have a mysterious locale called River Street: “It was absurd to suppose that the dead Mongol fiend was behind these murderous attacks, yet — Harrison’s flesh crawled along his spine at the memory of things that had taken place in River Street — things he had never reported, because he did not wish to be thought either a liar or a madman. The dead do not return — but what seems absurd on Thirty-ninth Boulevard takes on a different aspect among the haunted labyrinths of the Oriental quarter.” Yeah, that River Street setting, where “three unsolved murders in a week are not so unusual,” could have been a real hotbed for some hard-boiled detective action.
The least stories here perhaps are “Black Talons” and “Fangs of Gold,” replete with virulent racism and xenophobia, but then racism and xenophobia were common in that era and pulp marketplace. If ethically deplorable, an equally strong objection may be made that Howard doesn’t make these stories stand up and rock — which he does with much the same material in his horror story “Black Canaan.”
“Names in the Black Book” impresses me as being equal to several of the escapades Howard wrote about El Borak, adventuring in the wild, rocky hills of Afghanistan. Paul Herman, the editor for this collection, feels that Howard was starting to hit his stride with “Graveyard Rats.” I must agree — he reaches a fever pitch of fear that places this one on a par with the story of the same title by Henry Kuttner, while playing fair with the conventions of the crime story.
And may I point out that a quick glance at the content’s page will remind you of the fact that Howard often used the word “black” (and “dark,” as well) in his titles — as I was saying twenty years ago in “The Dark Barbarian,” that’s because these words represent Howard’s content and themes, not for any lack of inventiveness on his part.
If Howard did not do much with the detective story, he left us with at least this much — and in the larger hard-boiled arena of his day, he was a giant figure. I’d place his Conan saga against Hammett’s Continental Op series any day — both have a few weaker entries, yet both have one story after another that still burn with that same white-hot fire that shrouded the pages as they rolled off the typewriter. Against such poetic masterpieces as Chandler’s “Red Wind” you might pit Howard’s “Worms of the Earth.” Hammett, Howard, Chandler — they are among the finest writers to emerge from the pulps.
And if it’s too damn bad that Howard never managed to get going with hard-boiled detective tales, I have another thought: wouldn’t it have been fascinating if Dashiell Hammett had tried his hand at the Sword-and-Sorcery tale? Great, bad, indifferent, but enough to fill a book of this size?
BLACK TALONS
Joel Brill slapped shut the book he had been scanning, and gave vent to his dissatisfaction in language more appropriate for the deck of a whaling ship than for the library of the exclusive Corinthian Club. Buckley, seated in an alcove nearby, grinned quietly. Buckley looked more like a college professor than a detective, and perhaps it was less because of a studious nature than a desire to play the part he looked, that caused him to loaf around the library of the Corinthian.
“It must be something unusual to drag you out of your lair at this time of the day,” he remarked. “This is the first time I ever saw you in the evening. I thought you spent your evenings secluded in your rooms, pouring over musty tomes in the interests of that museum you’re connected with.”
“I do, ordinarily.” Brill looked as little like a scientist as Buckley looked like a dick. He was squarely built, with thick shoulders and the jaw and fists of a prizefighter; low browed, with a mane of tousled black hair contrasting with his cold blue eyes.
“You’ve been shoving your nose into books here since six o’clock,” asserted Buckley.
“I’ve been trying to get some information for the directors of the museum,” answered Brill. “Look!” He pointed an accusing finger at the rows of lavishly bound volumes. “Books till it would sicken a dog — and not a blasted one can tell me the reason for a certain ceremonial dance practiced by a certain tribe on the West African Coast.”
“A lot of the members have knocked around a bit,” suggested Buckley. “Why not ask them?”
“I’m going to.” Brill took down a phone from its hook.
“There’s John Galt — ” began Buckley.
“Too hard to locate. He flits about like a mosquito with the St. Vitus. I’ll try Jim Reynolds.” He twirled the dial.
“Thought you’d done some exploring in the tropics yourself,” remarked Buckley.
“Not worthy of the name. I hung around that God-forsaken Hell hole of the West African Coast for a few months until I came down with malaria — Hello!”
A suave voice, too perfectly accented, came along the wire.
“Oh, is that you, Yut Wuen? I want to speak to Mr. Reynolds.”
Polite surprise tinged the meticulous tone.
“Why, Mr. Reynolds went out in response to your call an hour ago, Mr. Brill.”
“What’s that?” demanded Brill. “Went where?”
“Why, surely you remember, Mr. Brill.” A faint uneasiness seemed to edge the Chinaman’s voice. “At about nine o’clock you called, and I answered the phone. You said you wished to speak to Mr. Reynolds. Mr. Reynolds talked to you, then told me to have his car brought around to the side entrance. He said that you had requested him to meet you at the cottage on White Lake shore.”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Brill. “This is the first time I’ve phoned Reynolds for weeks! You’ve mistaken somebody else for me.”
There was no reply, but a polite stubbornness seemed to flow over the wire. Brill replaced the phone and turned to Buckley, who was leaning forward with aroused interest.
“Something fishy here,” scowled Brill. “Yut Wuen, Jim’s Chinese servant, said I called, an hour ago, and Jim went out to meet me. Buckley, you’ve been here all evening. Did I call up anybody? I’m so infernally absent-minded — “
“No, you didn’t,” emphatically answered the detective. “I’ve been sitting right here close to the phone ever since six o’clock. Nobody’s used it. And you haven’t left the library during that time. I’m so accustomed to spying on people, I do it unconsciously.”
“Well, say,” said Brill, uneasily, “suppose you and I drive over to White Lake. If this is a joke, Jim may be over there waiting for me to show up.”
As the city lights fell behind them, and houses gave way to clumps of trees and bushes, velvet black in the starlight, Buckley said: “Do you think Yut Wuen made a mistake?”
“What else could it be?” answered Brill, irritably.
