I have to admit, I didn't really know very much about Robert E. Howard's fiction until just a few months ago, when I decided, out of sheer curiosity, to pick up one of Del Rey's classy collections of his Conan stories (The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian, the first of a three-volume collection featuring absolutely every Conan story he ever wrote, in the order that he wrote them, and even including first drafts and fragments that were never finished). I was immediately enthralled: Howard's writing is accessible (his prose is clean and sometimes beautifully poetic), his stories are well-crafted, and his characterization of Conan is, of course, eternally compelling (you're really missing something if you've only seen the movies). Good fiction of the type that Howard regularly wrote is extremely hard to find nowadays; most mainstream publishers, even of fantasy, prefer vaguely literary junk to pure, unabashed adventure stories in the pulp tradition.

What's more, Howard, writing in the 1930's, didn't have to worry about accusations of political incorrectness (the word "sexist", according to my Webster's, wasn't invented until 1968): if he wanted a strong-jawed, confident hero swinging through some exotic locale with a swooning half-naked woman on his arm, then he just went ahead and put one in there. Unless you want your work to be derided as trashy escapism for adolescent boys (even in the 30's this criticism occasionally popped up), I wouldn't recommend attempting that sort of thing nowadays. To the modern reader, though, this unself-conscious approach can seem almost refreshing.

Not that any of that is really an issue where The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane is concerned: Del Rey's complete collection of Howard's Solomon Kane stories features a few half-naked women here and there, but as Solomon Kane is a Puritan swordsman and not a carouser like Conan, their appearances are pretty seldom and incidental (of more relevance is Howard's borderline racist portrayal of African blacks, which can be somewhat off-putting at times).

I'm not going to attempt to tackle any of the individual stories collected here; suffice to say, they're all pretty good, even the fragments, which if nothing else help to flesh out the character of Solomon Kane: a grim English Puritan and expert swordsman, who wanders the world throughout the seventeenth century selflessly avenging wrongs. As he puts it, "it has fallen upon me, now and again in my sojourns through the world, to ease various evil men of their lives." Kane fights pirates, criminals, random thugs, and murderers, and has a habit of finding himself in the heart of blackest Africa, surrounded by beasts, practioners of jungle magic, and various inhuman monsters, all of which he deals with accordingly.

It should be noted that despite their shared penchant for traveling the world and having action-packed adventures, Solomon Kane and Conan possess two very different personalities; Howard was not simply recycling characters here. Whereas Conan is thoroughly amoral, and frequently expounds upon the joys of slaying for slaying's sake, Kane, in several of Howard's stories, spends months and sometimes years hunting individual murderers, whose victims are often so inconsequential as to go unnoticed by practically everyone else in society.

Del Rey has put together a very attractive edition here, nicely illustrated by Gary Gianni, that includes everything Howard wrote about Solomon Kane -- even a few poems. The book's design is similar to the three Conan volumes, and all look nice together on a shelf. If you're at all interested in Howard's work, or want to get a feel for what good adventure stories were like during the heyday of the pulps, I'd highly recommend checking this collection out.

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