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Post by deuce on Feb 17, 2016 0:06:02 GMT -5
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Post by elegos7 on Feb 17, 2016 1:00:25 GMT -5
Keith Taylor and I looked hard at all of this while writing biographies for both C&K. Hi Deuce, Where can we read your biographies for C&K? Or is it in a forthcoming book? |
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Post by deuce on Feb 17, 2016 9:57:08 GMT -5
It's forthcoming. We hit some snags, but we're getting back on track.
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Post by deuce on Dec 29, 2016 10:54:39 GMT -5
In the newest REHupa, Patrice Louinet said that more pages of Dig Me No Grave have turned up and says they raise as many questions as provide answers. He was pretty cagey beyond that. Here is an old essay where Patrice looks at the complicated history of DMNG: www.robert-e-howard.org/Dwelling2.htmlIt will be interesting to see what these new typescripts reveal. |
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Post by elegos7 on Dec 29, 2016 23:58:10 GMT -5
In the newest REHupa, Patrice Louinet said that more pages of Dig Me No Grave have turned up and says they raise as many questions as provide answers. He was pretty cagey beyond that. Here is an old essay where Patrice looks at the complicated history of DMNG: www.robert-e-howard.org/Dwelling2.htmlIt will be interesting to see what these new typescripts reveal. I agree. It would be interesting to learn more about the composition history of the Conrad and Kirowan tales. Hopefully Patrice will publish his findings in a forthcoming essay. |
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Post by deuce on Jan 11, 2017 15:37:09 GMT -5
Pretty close to how I envision John James Conrad, Esq.:  |
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Post by deuce on Jan 13, 2017 15:11:32 GMT -5
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Post by deuce on Apr 8, 2017 20:58:55 GMT -5
Dwellers Under the Tomb is a Conrad and John O'Donnell tale.
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Post by keith on Nov 5, 2017 4:42:19 GMT -5
In the newest REHupa, Patrice Louinet said that more pages of Dig Me No Grave have turned up and says they raise as many questions as provide answers. He was pretty cagey beyond that. Here is an old essay where Patrice looks at the complicated history of DMNG: www.robert-e-howard.org/Dwelling2.htmlIt will be interesting to see what these new typescripts reveal. |
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Post by keith on Nov 5, 2017 4:47:59 GMT -5
That will probably mean some -- or a lot -- of revision of our Conrad/Kirowan biographies has to be done! Sometimes I think Patrice Louinet, good as he is, just knows too much and is too thorough!
Conrad and Kirowan really should be referred to as Conrad, Kirowan and O'Donnel. The brash young Texan appears as their buddy and third team member in "The Haunter of the Ring", "The Dwellers Under the Tomb," and a couple of others. He shows what appears to be an unstable streak in "The Children of the Night", not to mention raving paranoid racial hatred, but I suppose that could be the result of having just regressed to a primitive former life under the influence of a crack on the head. He seems to be OK and trustworthy again by the time he accompanies Conrad on an adventure in "The Dwellers Under the Tomb."
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Post by keith on Nov 5, 2017 5:19:10 GMT -5
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Post by keith on Nov 5, 2017 5:29:59 GMT -5
Yes, the implications of "The House" are really interesting. "The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard" (Ballantine Books, Del Rey) contains it. There are a number of interesting Kirowans, or Kirwans, in other stories and fragments of REH's. There is Michael Kirowan, haunted by grief for his dead twin sister, in "Dermod's Bane", not to mention his medieval direct ancestor, Sir Michael Kirowan. And there is Captain Turlogh Kirowan, who battled Cromwell's forces with resolute fury in the 17th century, most likely as a henchman of Viscount Muskerry. Turlogh Kirowan is the protagonist of "The Ghost in the Doorway." Occult investigator John Kirowan himself, naturally. And someone who appears to be an English relative of his, the "Professor Kirowan" in the group gathered in Conrad's "bizarrely furnished study" in "The Children of the Night." And a few Kirowans are well known to actual history, as we'd expect from such an extensive clan, one of the so-called "Tribes of Galway".
But that's another story, as the barman keeps saying in "Irma la Douce".
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Post by finarvyn on Nov 18, 2017 20:57:42 GMT -5
Interesting. I hadn't realized that Howard re-used the Kirowan name so frequently. I knew about dual use names like Steve Harrison who was a sailor and a detective if I recall correctly, but didn't realize he had done it in other places. (Maybe it was Steve Costigan. Been too long since I've read some of this stuff and my memory isn't great any more for details like that.)  |
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Post by bobbyderie on Nov 23, 2017 20:01:37 GMT -5
In Occult Detective Quarterly #3 (out now), I have a little article "Robert E. Howard's Weird Detectives" - fairly familiar stuff, for a lot of folks here, but hits most of the high points. I was mostly focusing on how Howard characterized his detective characters, and developed his detective fiction; the Kirowan, Conrad, & O'Donnell stories of course are gone over.
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Post by keith on Nov 11, 2019 8:37:41 GMT -5
The connection of this latest project of mine with REH's Conrad and Kirowan is oblique at best, but it was partly inspired by Conrad and Kirowan. Kirowan comes from Galway and belongs to one of its fourteen great families, the so-called "tribes." REH's short story, "Dermod's Bane" is actually set in Galway, with a Kirowan as its narrator, and the atmosphere of Galway caught my interest.
I'm still hoping my last novel, DAMNED FROM BIRTH, will find a publisher, but in the meantime I'm trying a whodunnit, a mystery, set in Galway in the 1790s, that I hope will be purchased by someone and maybe form the initial book of a series. The detective is a flamboyant Connaught lawyer native to Galway, and a member of the fourteen great families, but he's a Bodkin, not a Kirowan. Galway Bay, Galway town, the Claddagh fishing community, smugglers, the lawyer-detective's own rambunctious family, arson, a revenue cutter's none-too-honest officer.
(Yes, I've finished the 30,000 word yarn that featured two mercenaries at the 1527 sack of Rome, one of them Solomon Kane's grandfather, but that's an inconvenient length for publication and I've still got to write the third part of what I hope will be a triptych and see print, but I'm feeling a bit frustrated and I'm focussing on what, I hope, will flaming well SELL.
If it does, I'm already convinced that Counsellor Bodkin will meet at least one Kirowan, or Kirwan -- Richard Kirwan, also called to the Irish bar but preferring science, jailed for his wife's debts (which came as quite a shock to him since he hadn't known about them before they married) chemist, geologist, winner of the Royal Society's Copley Medal, and one of the last champions of the phlogiston theory of combustion. And there were plenty of other strong-willed, opinionated eccentrics in Ireland at the time.
Here we go again.
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Putting together the pieces is grueling mental work.
Putting together the pieces is grueling mental work.
