After completing
the bookkeeping course, Howard set about in earnest to become
a professional writer. By early 1928, it was clear that he would
be able to succeed, and indeed he never again worked at any other
job. In 1928, Weird Tales published four stories (including the
first Solomon Kane tale, ‘Red Shadows’) and five poems.
From then until his death in June 1936, Howard stories or verse
appeared in nearly three of every four issues of the magazine.
Writers working for the pulp magazines had two paths to success.
One was the creation of a character who would keep readers coming
back for more and thus keep editors happy. The second was versatility;
a writer who could handle a variety of story types could sell
to more magazines in an age of specialization. Howard agreed with
one correspondent that “the pulp magazines are specializing
to an alarming rate... Wild West Weekly, Battle Stories, Gangster
Stories, Two-Gun Stories (!) and Wall-Street Stories being a few
of the titles of magazines now seen on the newsstands”.
Fortunately, Robert E. Howard was both versatile and had the knack
of creating popular characters. However, unlike many of his contemporaries,
who could continue cranking out stories about their characters
long after inspiration had abandoned them, Howard found he could
not keep a series going indefinitely. Writing to Clark Ashton
Smith in 1933 about Conan, he conceded “the time will probably
come when I will suddenly find myself unable to write convincingly
of him at all. This has happened in the past with nearly all my
numerous characters; suddenly I would find myself out of contact
with the conception, as if the man himself had been standing at
my shoulder directing my efforts, and had suddenly turned and
gone away, leaving me to search for another character.”
After Howard’s death, H.P. Lovecraft said that the secret
to the vividness of Howard’s stories was “that he
himself is in every one of them.” Less perceptive critics
have suggested that Howard’s heroes were all essentially
cut from the same cloth, but if this were true, Howard should
have had no problem continuing to write stories about Kull, Solomon
Kane, Bran Mak Morn and the like. Howard scholar Patrice Louinet
has proposed what seems the best explanation for this: that the
characters represent new stages of the writer’s own emotional
growth. As a person matures, his basic nature or personality does
not change dramatically (thus the similarities among the characters),
but many of his ideas and his emotional responses to the world
do change (and thus the contemplative and sometimes tentative
Kull comes to be replaced by the more carefree and decisive Conan,
to use one example). Howard sometimes lost touch with his characters,
then, because he had psychologically outgrown them, and could
therefore no longer write convincingly from their point of view.
A very interesting character, from this psychological standpoint,
is Francis Xavier Gordon, a.k.a. ‘El Borak’. According
to Howard, Gordon was first created when he was only ten, though
it was some time before his exploits were committed to paper.
In the earliest surviving stories, written by a teenage Howard,
Gordon is a world traveler and adventurer, a man known to and
respected by the British Secret Service. He may have been inspired
by such real-life men of action as Richard Francis Burton, John
Nicholson and ‘Chinese’ Gordon. As they exist today,
none of these early stories is complete. It was not until years
later, in December 1934, that this former Texas gunslinger turned
Middle Eastern adventurer appeared in ‘The Daughter of Erlik
Khan’ in Top-Notch. Gordon clearly reflected the youthful
Howard’s infatuation with the Orient, echoing the exploits
of Lawrence of Arabia and the fiction of Talbot Mundy. Just why
this character should have languished for at least ten years,
even after Howard began writing for Oriental Stories in 1930,
remains something of a mystery, but it is interesting to compare
the sophisticated world traveler of the earliest stories with
the hardened frontier fighter of the later tales.