Almuric: Howard's Sword & Planet Novel
Mar 29, 2016 10:04:19 GMT -5
Post by deuce on Mar 29, 2016 10:04:19 GMT -5
Almuric is easily one of the most reprinted of all REH's tales. It should have it's own thread. I thought I'd start with an essay from Larry Richter. While Richter has some great insights, I have to totally disagree with his theory that Wright finished the last part of the novel. We know that Wright basically never did any real editing on other authors' tales, nor was anything about Almuric remotely like what we have that Wright wrote himself.
On the other hand, as Morgan Holmes has pointed out, Otto Binder worked for Otis Adelbert Kline at the time Kline sold Almuric to Wright (Kline was still the literary agent for REH after his Bob's death). Binder went on to write scifi novels and he used terms like "carbine" which can be found only in the last chapters of Almuric and nowhere else in a work attributed to REH. It appears Binder worked from a detailed synopsis left by Howard and added his chapters to REH's actual text.
"The manuscript, or typescript, actually, of Almuric wasn't found among Kline's stuff, but was instead found with Howard's other typescripts in Texas, after his death. It was found by Howard's father, and was one of the things that Doc Howard made an attempt to market immediately, in order to bring in quick money.
The various chunks of story that made the cut for Almuric, if you want to use sportin' terms in describing the genesis of the story, seem to date back to as early as 1932, although only Patrice Louinet seems to know the specifics of it. Apparentlly Howard had worked on the concept of Almuric for quite a while.
If you look at the difference between Almuric as published and a typical Burroughs' sword and planet piece, you will get an idea as to why it took a long time to change the elements of the usual sword and planet story into the elements that make up Howard's Almuric. Aside from the basic here-we-are-struggling-for-survival-on-a savage-distant-planet part, always the mainline sword and planet setting, the Howard version and the standard version really are quite different.
Howard's protagonist is a conflicted criminal, not one of nature's noblemen, unfairly overlooked here on Earth but suddenly revealed as the gem he truly is on Arcturus. Howard's protagonist doesn't have some unexpectedly masterful ability in a combat art such as handling the sword or aerial flight. He beats his problems into submission with his fists, or hr runs from them. His new world is not the gently declining remnant of a formerly glorious civilization, but is a mysteriously unchanging primitive world, unrelentingly dangerous and not conquered by its inhabitants, whose past is obscure.
Burrough's heroes get accepted into whatever political structures exist on the imagined worlds they visit, and with even half a chance they inevitably join the titled Aristos and defend the king or the realm or status quo. When Howard's Ironhand makes it into a position of membership with his adopted planet's society, he brawls some, has some beef, orders more beer, and passes out slack-jawed and bulging with muscles on the tavern floor along with the other dangerous armed drunkards.
Howard's main idea in Almuric, when it is stripped down far enough, is a recognizable Burroughs theme, but not the one that Burroughs used in his own sword and planet work. Howard is concerned with the development of just one man, in stages that mimic civilization's phases, from the state of being nothing to being something to finally being everything.
If you look at Almuric again, you'll also realize that Howard was only about half or two thirds done with this concept when he abandoned Almuric (when he abandoned it for the last time, that is. I imagine it was start and stop all the way as long as Howard was alive to regain interest and start again). In the story as it was published, IronHand, Esau Cairn, is left in Almuric at some stage of development between becoming "something" and becoming "everything." Almuric, even as it is, is a terrific, exciting work of the imagination. I think we really missed something when Almuric didn't get worked on long enough to break through the barriers that it faced to its full development.
I do not imagine that the writing of Almuric was easy work. What first appears to be a simple version of the standard S&P tale always turns out, in a closer look, to be a blend of the surprisingly original with other elements that are standard to Howard. By standard Howard elements, I mean things like the race of winged men, or man-like demons, that appear at different levels of development again and again in Howard's work. I would expect that Howard first picked these beauties up as the Harpies, from Greek mythology, and began the process of their long development from the bare bones of flight and destructive revenge to many sided symbol.
Other items in Almuric are things begun by Burroughs but used by Howard, like the idea of a race that has beastlike men and beautiful, women (actually a Burroughs item from Tarzan: La and her apelike beaus). The extreme sexual differences between the men and the women of the flying race is also related to this ape-guy, beauteous-babe concept, for that matter. But, by the time Howard is through with the idea in Almuric, Burrough's conception of the tough as nails and emotionally clueless La is left behind, and has been replaced by Howard's own idea about the difference between male and female, represented in the usual dual natured Howard fashion by the truly intelligent, inquisitive, dreamily insightful and gentle Altha , Ironhand's real love, and the truly depraved, truly competent, and totally self-aware Black Queen.
It looks to me like Howard kept running into story problems that required the main character to develop in ways other than just becoming a bigger and bigger Good Guy, in order to meet the challenge. In a way this is a plain old Howard sort of problem, since Howard characters generally have at least two opposing natures, both real and usually out of agreement with each other. This is unlike the standard sword and planet main character, who is almost always single natured and single minded in pursuit of some goal, and who is almost always conventionally moral. This type of development, toward becoming a bigger and better Good Guy, is what the normal sword and planet story demands, and is also the way the existing Almuric ending handles the job of closing the story.
The overall difficulties Howard faced is typified by the failings of the scene where Howard's Almuric falters and goes aground. Earlier in the story, Howard has dodged the need to get more complex emotionally in his handling the relationship between Altha and Ironhand, and has most especially failed in his handling the sexual attraction between Altha and Ironhand. Howard has found ways to divert the reader from the difficulty he is having in depicting this attraction, but they don't do the story much good.
The classic model for such a romance would usually be Burroughs' depiction of the courtship between John Carter, the soon-to-be Warlord of Mars, and Dejah Thorts, the Already Princess of Helium. There is conflict and complexity in that depiction, but the two characters are only complex in terms of the strategies they employ in their courtship, and in their misunderstandings of each other's intent. Despite these cultural mismatches that come from - gasp! - their origins on different planets, both Carter and the Princess are fully conventional and in complete agreement on the real meaning of their romance and of their gender roles. It is a matter of successfully concluding the deal between two wholly suitable partners. No Howard couple was ever so lucky. Howard's characters are fully lost, diverted, frustrated, and conflcted concerning their attraction to each other, and the attraction's compelling and genuine nature just seems to confuse them. The attraction's sexual nature is fully beyond them. They flee from it when they recognize it at all, and tongue-tied is a mild description of their level of misunderstanding of each other. That misunderstanding is cosmic and basic, not cultural.
The implications of this relationship just seem to get too big for the rules of the genre or Howard to handle, especially in the scene where The Black Queen brings Ironhand into her bedroom in chains and sets out to seduce him, which is where the story breaks down. Of course the feeling that Howard wasn't able to handle this, his own scene, is ridiculous, since he built the story stick by stick to lead to the scene, which he also built piece by piece. But it may not be ridiculous to say that Howard was unwilling to deal with it, or was puzzled at how to deal with it, at this point.
There are really only three ways I know of to set the story straight, to set it on the right track, when leading it outward from this confrontation between Ironhand and the Queen. One of them involves Ironhand killing the Queen. This runs the risk of immediately ending the story, since Howard has also shown the queen to be the main possessor of advanced knowledge about the planet Almuric. Two of them involve Ironhand bedding the Queen, either treacherously, or willingly, which itself means at least treachery to Altha.
So one way or another the concept of a higher morality than simply doing what is conventionally right is demanded of the character Ironhand and of the writer Howard by the implications of the story at this point. Not to mention just plain sex, and sexual betrayal, that is a few years ahead of it's common acceptance in pulp entertainment literature.
More fully put, Ironhand and Bob are here required (by Bob, no less) to deal with either 1) Treachery to the Queen, who is a monster but has been given Ironhand's promise of good (meaning non-murderous) behavior, or 2) apparent Treachery to his real love Altha, if he beds the Queen in the scene to advance the cause of Altha's survival, or 3) real Treachery to Altha, and to any notion of nobility that he has about himself, if he just porks the winged bitch for no particular reason or for his own reasons. Bob was maybe on the right track back when Ironhand was fighting all comers and passing out in taverns way back early in Almuric, but by the seduction scene Ironhand has drifted back pretty close to Burroughs style nobility, and is really stuck.
In the story as it was actually published, the implications of Ironhand's position and it's successful resolution are things that are just avoided, not dealt with. The concept of Treachery and betrayal are still present in the scene, but they are partly obscured by misdirection, and by the set of details used in wording and writing the scene. Instead of facing his moment of decision, a decision that is apparently tawdry but in fact is the key to Ironhand's way up in self development, either Howard or the unknown completer of the story makes Ironhand become uncharacteristically cunning. Ironhand pretends. He deceives. He sneaks and spies.
He does not escape the necessity for treachery through this use of deception, because he breaks his promise of good behavior by killing Gotrah, the queen's minister. He does not escape the concept of betrayal or abandonment of his real love, Altha, because he uses Gotrah's death to physically escape the Black City. Altha is left behind, physically, not merely emotionally, abandoned in the city of Horror. She is left at the mercy of an airborne female monster, who might even have her served up as supper. At Ironhand's escape. Altha has only the hope of Ironhand's eventual return to rescue her to rely on. Altha even has to assume that this hope exists. Ironhand is not able to communicate with her. His only link to Altha, and Altha's only link to him, Ironhand, is the Queen. At this failure to deal with the the challenge of the story, a challenge that Howard actually built, the story dies. It is dead from this point on. It could have been a temporary death. If he had lived, Howard probably would have put the battery cables to Almuric, shocked it awake with a lightning bolt, and plugged away at it all until the problem was fixed better, even if Almuric, the work where Howard was confronting the problem, wasn't necessarily finished. This need to deal with the implied thing probably happened again and again with Almuric. It migght have been standing in Howard's way in general.
You could maybe also call this collision of needs something like "Howard's need to write something new and real versus Howard's need to write a story that could be sold and only knowing one way to do that." I expect the original Pulp audience Weird Tales served was growing up at roughly the same pace that Howard was growing up and that Wright was growihg old, but it could be that Howard and Wright didn't fully notice this.
Anyway, the story Almuric is always on the verge of turning into an adult piece, rather than an adolescent fantasy. Generally it dodges the bullet, but the missed opportunities are still strong enough to show through, and fascinate the reader. Even with this continuing problem, Almuric is only truly hokey at 1) the beginning, 2) in love scenes that Howard couldn't find a way to make the story face up to in grown-up terms, and 3) at the existing Apocalypse-and-Well-Earned-Rest ending, which, as Alex says, isn't really Howard.
It's not Kline either, getting back to the more practical question: Kline charged for doing that kind of work, and there are no charges listed anywhere in his billing for a completion or an updating edit of Almuric.
The real proof that Kline didn't do it or finish it, though, is that if Kline had been able to produce a work as stunningly imaginative as the first 3/4's of Almuric, he wouldn't have had to go to work as an agent., and if he had been capable of writing an ending so ordinary, he wouldn't have been able to work in the field even as an agent. Remember, Howard kept adding luscious, imaginative possibilities to Almuric all down the line, but just hadn't made the whole jump to facing the new style and the better ending that it promised when his life was cut short.
To wander a bit, I think it might be legitimate to wonder if the Gor series, which started out brilliantly but went way off way quick wasn't inspired by Howard's reaction to Burrough's style of sword and planet, rather than to the Burroughs version itself.
Anyway, whatever there was of Almuric got into WT when Farnsworth Wright went looking for major unpublished works by his former star performers, such as Howard and Lovecraft, when WT had troubles even worse than the usual ones, in the late thirties. The early correspondence between Doc and Wright and Doc and Kline with the negotiations leading to the sale still exist, but from what I hear final money letters don't. Doc wanted to get money form Almuric: he didn't want to spend money on it. So WT would probably have been the one responsible for putting the story into publishable shape, and at minimum expense to themselves, and no expense to Doc. But the arrangement, if once recorded, has either not survived or has not been found.
I think the finish of Almuric sounds like Wright himself, who was a writer but not an especially good one. Morgan thinks it sounds like the work of one of Wright's later finds and proteges, whose name escapes me at the moment. Wright of course knew how it was managed, and surely a few others did, but at the time Wright and his help had no reason to make it better known that the story they hoped would restore Weird Tales' circulation figures was not fully the work of Robert E. Howard.
In a few years, two or so, WT would be sold down the river (sold down the St. Lawrence River, instead of being sold down the traditional Mississippi River, to a shoe manufacturer in New York). Wright himself would be first diminished by this sale, then tossed out of Weird Tales by the new owners, and then dead, a victim of the illnesses that had dogged him for a number of years.
Wright never got a chance to write the classic autobiography, or to write the standard "My Years With Weird Tales!" I-was-there book. The mystery results from this lack. There are rumors that a few people on the east coast still know the inside story of how Almuric got published in Weird Tales. If we are quick enough to out-foot the reaper (who now leans over the shoulder of everyone still remaining from Howard's circle and era) to the Atlantic Seaboard, maybe we still have a chance to find out who diddit. -- Larry Richter"
On the other hand, as Morgan Holmes has pointed out, Otto Binder worked for Otis Adelbert Kline at the time Kline sold Almuric to Wright (Kline was still the literary agent for REH after his Bob's death). Binder went on to write scifi novels and he used terms like "carbine" which can be found only in the last chapters of Almuric and nowhere else in a work attributed to REH. It appears Binder worked from a detailed synopsis left by Howard and added his chapters to REH's actual text.
"The manuscript, or typescript, actually, of Almuric wasn't found among Kline's stuff, but was instead found with Howard's other typescripts in Texas, after his death. It was found by Howard's father, and was one of the things that Doc Howard made an attempt to market immediately, in order to bring in quick money.
The various chunks of story that made the cut for Almuric, if you want to use sportin' terms in describing the genesis of the story, seem to date back to as early as 1932, although only Patrice Louinet seems to know the specifics of it. Apparentlly Howard had worked on the concept of Almuric for quite a while.
If you look at the difference between Almuric as published and a typical Burroughs' sword and planet piece, you will get an idea as to why it took a long time to change the elements of the usual sword and planet story into the elements that make up Howard's Almuric. Aside from the basic here-we-are-struggling-for-survival-on-a savage-distant-planet part, always the mainline sword and planet setting, the Howard version and the standard version really are quite different.
Howard's protagonist is a conflicted criminal, not one of nature's noblemen, unfairly overlooked here on Earth but suddenly revealed as the gem he truly is on Arcturus. Howard's protagonist doesn't have some unexpectedly masterful ability in a combat art such as handling the sword or aerial flight. He beats his problems into submission with his fists, or hr runs from them. His new world is not the gently declining remnant of a formerly glorious civilization, but is a mysteriously unchanging primitive world, unrelentingly dangerous and not conquered by its inhabitants, whose past is obscure.
Burrough's heroes get accepted into whatever political structures exist on the imagined worlds they visit, and with even half a chance they inevitably join the titled Aristos and defend the king or the realm or status quo. When Howard's Ironhand makes it into a position of membership with his adopted planet's society, he brawls some, has some beef, orders more beer, and passes out slack-jawed and bulging with muscles on the tavern floor along with the other dangerous armed drunkards.
Howard's main idea in Almuric, when it is stripped down far enough, is a recognizable Burroughs theme, but not the one that Burroughs used in his own sword and planet work. Howard is concerned with the development of just one man, in stages that mimic civilization's phases, from the state of being nothing to being something to finally being everything.
If you look at Almuric again, you'll also realize that Howard was only about half or two thirds done with this concept when he abandoned Almuric (when he abandoned it for the last time, that is. I imagine it was start and stop all the way as long as Howard was alive to regain interest and start again). In the story as it was published, IronHand, Esau Cairn, is left in Almuric at some stage of development between becoming "something" and becoming "everything." Almuric, even as it is, is a terrific, exciting work of the imagination. I think we really missed something when Almuric didn't get worked on long enough to break through the barriers that it faced to its full development.
I do not imagine that the writing of Almuric was easy work. What first appears to be a simple version of the standard S&P tale always turns out, in a closer look, to be a blend of the surprisingly original with other elements that are standard to Howard. By standard Howard elements, I mean things like the race of winged men, or man-like demons, that appear at different levels of development again and again in Howard's work. I would expect that Howard first picked these beauties up as the Harpies, from Greek mythology, and began the process of their long development from the bare bones of flight and destructive revenge to many sided symbol.
Other items in Almuric are things begun by Burroughs but used by Howard, like the idea of a race that has beastlike men and beautiful, women (actually a Burroughs item from Tarzan: La and her apelike beaus). The extreme sexual differences between the men and the women of the flying race is also related to this ape-guy, beauteous-babe concept, for that matter. But, by the time Howard is through with the idea in Almuric, Burrough's conception of the tough as nails and emotionally clueless La is left behind, and has been replaced by Howard's own idea about the difference between male and female, represented in the usual dual natured Howard fashion by the truly intelligent, inquisitive, dreamily insightful and gentle Altha , Ironhand's real love, and the truly depraved, truly competent, and totally self-aware Black Queen.
It looks to me like Howard kept running into story problems that required the main character to develop in ways other than just becoming a bigger and bigger Good Guy, in order to meet the challenge. In a way this is a plain old Howard sort of problem, since Howard characters generally have at least two opposing natures, both real and usually out of agreement with each other. This is unlike the standard sword and planet main character, who is almost always single natured and single minded in pursuit of some goal, and who is almost always conventionally moral. This type of development, toward becoming a bigger and better Good Guy, is what the normal sword and planet story demands, and is also the way the existing Almuric ending handles the job of closing the story.
The overall difficulties Howard faced is typified by the failings of the scene where Howard's Almuric falters and goes aground. Earlier in the story, Howard has dodged the need to get more complex emotionally in his handling the relationship between Altha and Ironhand, and has most especially failed in his handling the sexual attraction between Altha and Ironhand. Howard has found ways to divert the reader from the difficulty he is having in depicting this attraction, but they don't do the story much good.
The classic model for such a romance would usually be Burroughs' depiction of the courtship between John Carter, the soon-to-be Warlord of Mars, and Dejah Thorts, the Already Princess of Helium. There is conflict and complexity in that depiction, but the two characters are only complex in terms of the strategies they employ in their courtship, and in their misunderstandings of each other's intent. Despite these cultural mismatches that come from - gasp! - their origins on different planets, both Carter and the Princess are fully conventional and in complete agreement on the real meaning of their romance and of their gender roles. It is a matter of successfully concluding the deal between two wholly suitable partners. No Howard couple was ever so lucky. Howard's characters are fully lost, diverted, frustrated, and conflcted concerning their attraction to each other, and the attraction's compelling and genuine nature just seems to confuse them. The attraction's sexual nature is fully beyond them. They flee from it when they recognize it at all, and tongue-tied is a mild description of their level of misunderstanding of each other. That misunderstanding is cosmic and basic, not cultural.
The implications of this relationship just seem to get too big for the rules of the genre or Howard to handle, especially in the scene where The Black Queen brings Ironhand into her bedroom in chains and sets out to seduce him, which is where the story breaks down. Of course the feeling that Howard wasn't able to handle this, his own scene, is ridiculous, since he built the story stick by stick to lead to the scene, which he also built piece by piece. But it may not be ridiculous to say that Howard was unwilling to deal with it, or was puzzled at how to deal with it, at this point.
There are really only three ways I know of to set the story straight, to set it on the right track, when leading it outward from this confrontation between Ironhand and the Queen. One of them involves Ironhand killing the Queen. This runs the risk of immediately ending the story, since Howard has also shown the queen to be the main possessor of advanced knowledge about the planet Almuric. Two of them involve Ironhand bedding the Queen, either treacherously, or willingly, which itself means at least treachery to Altha.
So one way or another the concept of a higher morality than simply doing what is conventionally right is demanded of the character Ironhand and of the writer Howard by the implications of the story at this point. Not to mention just plain sex, and sexual betrayal, that is a few years ahead of it's common acceptance in pulp entertainment literature.
More fully put, Ironhand and Bob are here required (by Bob, no less) to deal with either 1) Treachery to the Queen, who is a monster but has been given Ironhand's promise of good (meaning non-murderous) behavior, or 2) apparent Treachery to his real love Altha, if he beds the Queen in the scene to advance the cause of Altha's survival, or 3) real Treachery to Altha, and to any notion of nobility that he has about himself, if he just porks the winged bitch for no particular reason or for his own reasons. Bob was maybe on the right track back when Ironhand was fighting all comers and passing out in taverns way back early in Almuric, but by the seduction scene Ironhand has drifted back pretty close to Burroughs style nobility, and is really stuck.
In the story as it was actually published, the implications of Ironhand's position and it's successful resolution are things that are just avoided, not dealt with. The concept of Treachery and betrayal are still present in the scene, but they are partly obscured by misdirection, and by the set of details used in wording and writing the scene. Instead of facing his moment of decision, a decision that is apparently tawdry but in fact is the key to Ironhand's way up in self development, either Howard or the unknown completer of the story makes Ironhand become uncharacteristically cunning. Ironhand pretends. He deceives. He sneaks and spies.
He does not escape the necessity for treachery through this use of deception, because he breaks his promise of good behavior by killing Gotrah, the queen's minister. He does not escape the concept of betrayal or abandonment of his real love, Altha, because he uses Gotrah's death to physically escape the Black City. Altha is left behind, physically, not merely emotionally, abandoned in the city of Horror. She is left at the mercy of an airborne female monster, who might even have her served up as supper. At Ironhand's escape. Altha has only the hope of Ironhand's eventual return to rescue her to rely on. Altha even has to assume that this hope exists. Ironhand is not able to communicate with her. His only link to Altha, and Altha's only link to him, Ironhand, is the Queen. At this failure to deal with the the challenge of the story, a challenge that Howard actually built, the story dies. It is dead from this point on. It could have been a temporary death. If he had lived, Howard probably would have put the battery cables to Almuric, shocked it awake with a lightning bolt, and plugged away at it all until the problem was fixed better, even if Almuric, the work where Howard was confronting the problem, wasn't necessarily finished. This need to deal with the implied thing probably happened again and again with Almuric. It migght have been standing in Howard's way in general.
You could maybe also call this collision of needs something like "Howard's need to write something new and real versus Howard's need to write a story that could be sold and only knowing one way to do that." I expect the original Pulp audience Weird Tales served was growing up at roughly the same pace that Howard was growing up and that Wright was growihg old, but it could be that Howard and Wright didn't fully notice this.
Anyway, the story Almuric is always on the verge of turning into an adult piece, rather than an adolescent fantasy. Generally it dodges the bullet, but the missed opportunities are still strong enough to show through, and fascinate the reader. Even with this continuing problem, Almuric is only truly hokey at 1) the beginning, 2) in love scenes that Howard couldn't find a way to make the story face up to in grown-up terms, and 3) at the existing Apocalypse-and-Well-Earned-Rest ending, which, as Alex says, isn't really Howard.
It's not Kline either, getting back to the more practical question: Kline charged for doing that kind of work, and there are no charges listed anywhere in his billing for a completion or an updating edit of Almuric.
The real proof that Kline didn't do it or finish it, though, is that if Kline had been able to produce a work as stunningly imaginative as the first 3/4's of Almuric, he wouldn't have had to go to work as an agent., and if he had been capable of writing an ending so ordinary, he wouldn't have been able to work in the field even as an agent. Remember, Howard kept adding luscious, imaginative possibilities to Almuric all down the line, but just hadn't made the whole jump to facing the new style and the better ending that it promised when his life was cut short.
To wander a bit, I think it might be legitimate to wonder if the Gor series, which started out brilliantly but went way off way quick wasn't inspired by Howard's reaction to Burrough's style of sword and planet, rather than to the Burroughs version itself.
Anyway, whatever there was of Almuric got into WT when Farnsworth Wright went looking for major unpublished works by his former star performers, such as Howard and Lovecraft, when WT had troubles even worse than the usual ones, in the late thirties. The early correspondence between Doc and Wright and Doc and Kline with the negotiations leading to the sale still exist, but from what I hear final money letters don't. Doc wanted to get money form Almuric: he didn't want to spend money on it. So WT would probably have been the one responsible for putting the story into publishable shape, and at minimum expense to themselves, and no expense to Doc. But the arrangement, if once recorded, has either not survived or has not been found.
I think the finish of Almuric sounds like Wright himself, who was a writer but not an especially good one. Morgan thinks it sounds like the work of one of Wright's later finds and proteges, whose name escapes me at the moment. Wright of course knew how it was managed, and surely a few others did, but at the time Wright and his help had no reason to make it better known that the story they hoped would restore Weird Tales' circulation figures was not fully the work of Robert E. Howard.
In a few years, two or so, WT would be sold down the river (sold down the St. Lawrence River, instead of being sold down the traditional Mississippi River, to a shoe manufacturer in New York). Wright himself would be first diminished by this sale, then tossed out of Weird Tales by the new owners, and then dead, a victim of the illnesses that had dogged him for a number of years.
Wright never got a chance to write the classic autobiography, or to write the standard "My Years With Weird Tales!" I-was-there book. The mystery results from this lack. There are rumors that a few people on the east coast still know the inside story of how Almuric got published in Weird Tales. If we are quick enough to out-foot the reaper (who now leans over the shoulder of everyone still remaining from Howard's circle and era) to the Atlantic Seaboard, maybe we still have a chance to find out who diddit. -- Larry Richter"
