Lynn Lockhart

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2:59 AM (10 hours ago)

to me

It's so much like your Nords saga it gave me chills to read it and know you wrote it without ever seeing this. You have a piece of his spirit in you.

Published in 1964, no indication as to when Howard wrote it. This was uploaded to archive in August 2020. Otherwise the assholes at the Robert E. Howard Foundation are the only ones that have it.

There are a few more of these "Howard Collector" issues up on archive and I have downloaded them all.

My Dear Editor, thank you for providing this.

Please record it as audio on Substack so I can listen to it.

Both eyes are now involved in my productivity issues, so I must make some triage decisions here.

The only screen reading I will do is of primary source documents and reader and editor emails—that is it, nothing else. I'm getting my fiction fix through the audio books you sent me.

Second, obviously entering a final stage of writing with wounded eyes [its my fault for reading thousands of books and writing hundreds], I must cut out more writing categories. Literature will be one—I will never review another book, video, podcast, article, etc.

However, I am still ambitious to be involved with Howard's ghost.

I once claimed to be the last Whiteman in Baltimore. My son and Amazon disagreed and I was censored, that book where I made that claim, Autumn in a Dying City, soon banned. However, I was the last white man in Baltimore I knew of—the very last man of my race to traverse that city on foot and by bus, like a man, not a pilot in a safe space insertion vehicle zooming from work to home, knowing that to breakdown on North Avenue is certain doom. I lived by my wits and blade for 38 years in hostile territory, only to be driven forth like all of my kin in the face of the teeming foe.

When I wrote Reverent Chandler I was unaware that Howard had written such a tale.

I would like to try and write in a more Howard style for a few short novels. So, it occurs that in the last year of his life, in 1936, he wrote the darkest stuff, excellent short novels such as Red Nails, Black Canaan, The Black Stranger, and Black Vulmea's Vengeance. His best short novel is widely considered to be the ten-chapter People of the Black Circle.

I would like to write a short novel of ten chapters, his b best though not usual length, in a style that Howard might have developed by 1968, at age 62, had he not self-killed at 30. He was very keen on putting current violence into fiction, with Queen of the Black Coast, a veritable Bony and Clyde romance, written within months of their rampage. This is the assignment I have self-assigned, to write as if I were a 62-year-old Howard, visiting my editor L, Sprague DeCamp, in Philadelphia as the northeastern cities burned, and imagining, let's say a place like Baltimore, and what it would be like for its last unapologetic Arуan denizen in the year 2068. This is the key—there is not a Caucasian man left living in Baltimore who does not apologize near every week of his life for the evil taint of his reviled race. This protagonist does not have to be the last physical Whiteman, but he will be the very last who refuses to kneel before the risen race that are his masters—hell, I could have set this novel in 2018! But, I want to write a story that a young man could read who has not yet been born when I die, a story that is set in his future yet.

For my key inspiration, I will use the above mentioned Howard works and Man Eaters of Zamboula, a tale I have read ten times and reviewed thrice, and which has always struck me as personal, as it reflected so much of my life in Baltimore as if through some weird-lit anachronistic mirror.

So, Lynn, I will finish the last volume of A Well of Heroes, titled, The Iron Harp, as soon as I may, by writing Last Whiteman, inspired by the works of Robert E. Howard and the life of this author, his reader. Together with the dozen or so extant book reviews, that should make for a decent slim concluding volume to the project I will not complete.

My apologies to the readers of A Well of heroes for quitting one of my most heart-felt projects.

-James, 5/24/21

Listen to Lynn's reading on substack: