As I’ve already stated, I think analysis of fragments for literary worth somewhat problematic – naturally they will have flaws that a finished work will not. In the case of the fragments included in this volume, “The Slave-Princess” is the most compelling, and perhaps the only one that practically begs for completion. “The Track of Bohemund” has stirring moments and fine action scenes and it may be that had it been completed we would have seen another success, but it lies unfinished, and Howard himself might have sensed that something was missing. It does not seem to rise to the heights of the completed historicals from “The Sowers of the Thunder” on.
The other fragments seem to have come from earlier in Howard’s writing career. We have his summary and recap of Lamb’s “The Wolf Chaser,” a tale that clearly captivated him, judging both by these fragments, his brief foray into a tale with the same characters, and the similar conclusion to “Red Blades of Black Cathay.” Howard was probably experimenting with the aspects of the story he most wanted to learn from.
In addition to numerous tantalizing fragments, at the time of his death Howard had a bevy of fine stories and partial series that he never saw in print. Wandering through one of them is Turlogh Dubh O’brien, one of the best realized of Howard’s lesser known heroes and one of my personal favorites; I heartily wish Howard had composed more stories of the Irish rogue. Wherever he turns up, he tends to steal scenes through sheer force of personality, as he does in “Spears of Clontarf.”
When “Spears” failed to sell, Howard upped the quotient of the fantastic, retitled it “The Grey God Passes,” and tried, and failed, again to sell the piece. “Spears” is quite similar to “Grey God,” save that it begins with the slaying of Conn’s master and has a little too much story development through dialogue. When Howard cut this opening and replaced it with a brief glimpse of the All-Father, he improved the story.
Clontarf gives us an early glimpse of Howard’s ability to portray multiple characters in battle scenes. It works very well, even though it does not succeed quite as well as it does in his later historicals. Still, Howard at good is better than most adventure writers at their best, and it is hard to find much fault with the piece except in comparison to Howard’s own later and greater work. It seems strange to us now that the story, be it titled “Spears of Clontarf” or “The Grey God Passes,” did not sell in Howard’s lifetime.
Turlogh turned up as a central character in two more stories – one of which is often mentioned among Howard’s best (“The Dark Man”) and popped up in a few fragments, but Howard lost interest in him, or failed to find more stories to tell of him, and moved on. A different fate was to befall another of his promising heroes, Agnès de la Fère.
We can’t be certain when Howard wrote the Dark Agnès stories, although we can be certain that he set them to paper before January 1935, when he sent “Sword Woman” to C. L. Moore. Catherine Moore is well-known in fantasy circles and especially among fans of Weird Tales for creating a cycle of stories around space opera hero Northwest Smith, and for her tales of Jirel of Joiry. It is likely that the latter, featuring a flame-haired warrior woman of a mythical province of France, inspired Howard’s letter, though we should not leap to the conclusion that Jirel inspired Agnès.
Superficially Agnès and Jirel sound similar. They are both red-haired warrior women and French – but they are poles apart. There are obvious differences: Jirel is a noble and Agnès a peasant; Agnès narrates her story while Jirel’s adventures are told in third person; Jirel’s adventures have fantastic elements from almost the very start, whereas it is only in the Agnès fragment that the supernatural makes an entrance.
A greater difference than these elements, however, is one of tone. Howard and Moore were both of them splendid writers and Howard at least was capable of a variety of different styles. Here, though, he was direct and forceful, even a little spare, especially when compared to the often glorious prose poetry sprinkled through his best historical pieces. The two complete Agnès stories thunder forward at breakneck pace. Moore writes with a dreamy sensuality somewhat reminiscent of William Hope Hodgson’s best work, for mixed in among the surreal imagery are moments of horror and tension. Howard was perfectly capable of this tone as well, as his Kull stories bear witness, but he did not use it when he wrote of Agnès de la Fère.
If Moore influenced Howard in any way it is not really discernable, and it may be that he sent the stories her way because he sensed a kindred spirit, or because he wanted her to see he’d done something a little similar but hadn’t been stealing from her. Perhaps he contacted her for a bit of both reasons; we can only speculate.
What we do know is that Moore replied that she’d enjoyed Agnès, and that Howard never found a market for the series. He might have been considering altering them for Weird Tales – which would surely have required the fantastic element he introduces in the unfinished “Mistress of Death.”
The completed Agnès stories read like the first two chapters of a serial novel, or, perhaps more aptly, like the first two episodes of a radio or television drama. The main characters are introduced in an origin story, and so too is a villain who survives both adventures. It’s a shame we can’t know where Howard was planning to take the series. Presumably he had some idea, but no series outlines survive.
What we can clearly see is evidence to counter one of the critiques sometimes leveled against Howard’s work. No misogynist could have penned a tale with such a valiant heroine. She outwits and outfights any man who stands against her, and is of higher moral fiber besides, sparing Villiers, who would have betrayed her, then risking her life to save him and reigniting his own sense of honor.
Howard should not be faulted if Agnès and her companions are painted in more primary colors than the figures in his more famous historicals. Howard was capable of greater variety than his detractors give him credit for. Agnès comes from a pulpier and more melodramatic tradition, and she can stand shoulder to shoulder with similar heroes. Howard crafted his tales for market requirements. His writing was his living, after all, and it may be that’s why his women often were little more than verbal eye candy. It helped his stories sell. He wrote what sold in the market, and the fact that these fine tales of a heroic female adventurer never saw print are testimony that the wider world, or at least the gatekeeping editors, were not yet ready for the more egalitarian tales Howard was perfectly capable of, and comfortable with, giving us.
TRAIL’S END
Many writers have left their readers wanting more before they rode into the sunset, frequently because they had a popular character or series that readers could not get enough of. One of many fascinating things about Robert E. Howard’s writing is that he managed to pull this trick not once, not twice, but for almost as many series and genres as he worked with. The craving for more Conan stories fired an entire industry of (mostly bad) pastiche based around the character, and now there is an entire role-playing game as well as an online multiverse so that others can walk into the mighty Cimmerian’s world and find their own adventures. But readers don’t just desire more tales of Conan – they want more Solomon Kane, more Kull, more Bran Mak Morn. And there are lesser known characters as well that we would gladly have glimpsed more of – El Borak, Turlogh, Dark Agnès – the list goes on, and if one reflects upon the length of that list and then upon both the relatively short time Howard was creating professional writing and the immense amount of prose he produced over those years, his accomplishment is all the more impressive. He gave us a great deal of fiction, and yet left us still hungry. He was only thirty when he died, a point I like to raise when critics speak to an immaturity they see in his themes or prose. Given that he was already this good when he was thirty, and given he was only getting better, what more could we have seen from him had he lived for ten, twenty, forty years more? When we mourn Howard we should not just regret the passing of a brilliant young man, but the loss of all that he might have lived to give us.