Robert E. Howard surely needs no introduction to fans of fantasy and science fiction, as the pulp author who brought us 'Conan the Barbarian' and arguably pioneered the sword and sorcery genre, but he was a prodigious author who turned out short stories for the pulps like they were going out of style. He died at the young age of thirty, taking his own life when confronted with the loss of his beloved mother, who had fallen into a coma and was not expected to wake up again, yet his output is easily comparable to an array of other pulp authors who survived the era and wrote for it for decades.

We tend to remember him for his stories for 'Weird Tales' magazine, whether about Conan or his other recurring genre characters such as Kull the Conquerer, Bran Mak Morn and Solomon Kane, not to forget supporting characters who would gain a more prominent life after his death like Red Sonja. However, he wrote in many genres, especially westerns and boxing stories, the latter of which is the focus here in an excellent collection I was surprised to find while browsing the Bookmans shelves. His primary boxer was an Irish American sailor called Steve Costigan who was enough of a success in 'Fight Stories' and 'Action Stories' for him to keep writing more.

The catch was that he was writing these stories faster than they could be published, so he chose to come up with a pseudonym, Patrick Ervin, the latter being the E. in Robert E. Howard, and sell Steve Costigan stories to a different magazine, 'Magic Carpet Magazine' with the characters simply renamed. Costigan became Dennis Dorgan; his ever-present bulldog companion Mike became Spike; and his most frequent ship, the Sea Girl, became the Python. Otherwise, they were indistinguishable from each other. In fact, the earliest Dennis Dorgan stories were Steve Costigan stories.

The main reason I leapt at this volume at Bookman's, a 1974 hardcover from Fax Collector's Editions, is because I hadn't read any of these Dennis Dorgan stories before. That's primarily because only one was actually published since 'Magic Carpet Magazine' only managed one issue. That's the opening story, 'The Alleys of Singapore', in which Dorgan finds himself the victim of a fixed fight, losing to Kid Leary in the Sweet Dreams Fight Club in Singapore who had clearly come off the worst. Given that his shipmates had bet heavily on him, including the captain who had put up his ship, there's plenty of investigation to be done to reach a satisfactory conclusion and it's all done with just as much energy as we might expect from Robert E. Howard.

Nobody put us in the middle of the action like Howard, regardless of genre, because at heart he wrote adventure, simply finding it wherever he went in his fiction, whether that was a bygone barbarian age, a more defined historical era or the present day. Things happened for his regular characters to stumble into and they shaped the outcome with their fists and their swords, if not always their wits. Dorgan is a powerhouse of a man, a real dynamo in the Howard tradition, quick to anger and quick to let fly with his fists, but just as quick to fall for someone else's shenanigans, especially when that someone happens to be a beautiful young lady.

That happens in the next story, 'The Jade Monkey', which had been scheduled for 'Magic Carpet' but did not appear after the magazine folded after its first issue. This time he's in Hong Kong, dealing with Jim Rogers, a shipmate who needs fifty bucks to buy the titular statue, which a lady is eager to sell cheap to raise funds for her passage out of Hong Kong, even though it's worth thousands. Of course, Dorgan falls for Miss Betty Chisom and raises the money to help her out by fighting Swordfish Connolly for a purse of fifty dollars, only to discover that the historically important Yih Hee Yih monkey she's selling was made in Bridgeport, Connecticut and retailed for 15 cents.

That ought to be enough to give you the picture of the formula Howard worked to for these stories and set you up for the other eight collected in this volume. Most were unpublished manuscripts found after Howard's death by his literary agent, Glenn Lord, but a few had seen much belated publication in issues of 'The Howard Collector' in the sixties and seventies. One of them, 'The Turkish Menace', was accepted by 'Magic Carpet' but never published and also never found in a complete state. About half of its pages are lost, so Darrell C. Richardson filled in the rest, in addition to writing the introduction to the book.

The other detail I should add is that this isn't just pulp fiction written in the thirties, thus containing a lot of dated language when it comes to race, with characters described as "slant-eyed yeller giants", for instance, but a substantial amount of period slang too. As you'll have gathered, Dorgan is a good man and a great amateur fighter, but he's no brain and these stories are told entirely from his perspective, just like he was sitting on his Texas porch in his old age recounting his exploits to us from memory, with embellishments and exaggerations for the moment, as all tellers of tall tales employ. This doesn't only mean loose language like "I seen" rather than "I saw" or "offa" for "of of" but archaic throwbacks like "hadst" for "had" and a string of abbreviations that seem odd to us, like "riz" for "arose" or "clum" for "climbed". It's a fascinating glimpse into a past era but it's just as vibrant today as it was then. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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