Presenting the complete collection of Robert E. Howard's private eye stories starring Steve Harrison! Everything in this volume-stories, drafts, synopses-was pulled directly from Howard's own typescripts, including an early draft of "Graveyard Rats," the most horrifying of Harrison's adventures.
In these pages, you will enter a nightmarish world that blends weird mystery and heart-stopping horror, with Steve Harrison as your guide, a powerful man who is more likely to tear into a fight with a mace or a battle-axe than a gun. Harrison has more in common with Howard's sword-swinging Conan than Hammett's Continental Op, but he helps to establish the roots of a noir style that would later find success with Micky Spillane's Mike Hammer. Harrison might walk the mean streets and back alleys of the 1930s, but he has the soul of a barbaric savage, possessed by the crimson instinct for slaughter.
Changes from the first edition:
There are few changes from the first published version of this book. The first edition used the first published version of "Names in the Black Book". Since then the REH Foundation has located the final typescript and re-edited back to match that for the Ultimate Edition. In fact, the changes are few, mostly punctuation, etc.
Robert E. Howard (1906- 1936) grew up in the boomtowns of early twentieth-century Texas, eventually settling in Cross Plains where he lived for the remainder of his short life. Deciding early on a literary career, he spent the bulk of his time crafting stories and poems for the burgeoning pulp fiction markets: Weird Tales, Action Stories, Fight Stories, Argosy, etc. Howard's literary reputation was assured with the publication of "The Shadow Kingdom" in 1928, which featured a unique blend of fantasy and adventure which has since been termed Heroic Fantasy. The creation of Conan the Cimmerian, Kull the Conqueror, Solomon Kane and many more has earned him lasting recognition.
DON HERRON published his now classic defense of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, "Conan vs. Conantics," in 1976-and the very next year he began leading The Dashiell Hammett Tour in San Francisco, which continues hiking up and down those mean streets to this day. Among other titles he has edited two critical anthologies on Howard, The Dark Barbarian (1984) and The Barbaric Triumph (2004)-plus Willeford (1997), a book about the books written by the cult crime writer Charles Willeford. The first of his "Mr. Hunt" stories, written in homage to Hammett and the Black Mask school of hard-boiled detective fiction, is included in San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics from Akashic Press.
ROB ROEHM has traveled to every location in the United States that Howard mentions visiting-from New Orleans to Santa Fe, and dozens of Texas towns in between-verifying and expanding our knowledge of Howard's biography. His research has also uncovered lost Howard stories, letters, and poems, which are included in the volumes he edits (more than 20 at last count). He writes about these places and discoveries, in-frequently, at howardhistory.com.
