Swords From the West (2 page)

In the 195os Lamb wrote a series of stories for the Saturday Evening Post where famous historical events were re-dressed-usually to include some romance a la the Collier's pieces-and given a contemporary framing story. To my eyes these framing stories are forced, and the stories themselves pale in comparison to Lamb's earlier work. One, though, Lamb's last published historical story, has the old fire. Thematically it doesn't belong in this volume, but it fits even less well in the other books in this book series-the protagonists, at least, come from the West. Step around the awkward frame opening to "Secret of Victory," and you'll be swept into an adventure about the fabled sword of Attila and a last desperate battle to keep the Hun from Roman lands.

The intent of this new series of collections is to reprint all of Harold Lamb's magazine historicals not already collected in Bison Books editions. Lamb's crusader stories don't end with this volume: crusaders make an appearance in Swords from the Desert, and the appendix in the same volume has dozens of pages of historical information Lamb wrote on the subject. There are yet more crusader stories, for crusaders seem to have been Lamb's favorite historical subject after Cossacks. I was forced to exclude three short crusader novels from these collections, due both to space limitations and because another publisher is already caring for them in fine editions. For some years the first two books of the Durandal trilogy, Durandal and The Sea of Ravens, have been available in marvelous illustrated volumes from the publisher Donald M. Grant, and the third book, Rusudan, should follow soon. I urge you to seek them out if you have not already done so.

Should these tales fire your interest in researching the historical period, look no further than Harold Lamb's own two-volume set on the Crusades. Later collected in one large book, both volumes, Iron Men and Saints and The Flame of Islam, can still be found on many library shelves. Lamb earned a medal from the Persian government for these books in recognition of the accuracy of his research, and the acclaim helped launch the rest of Lamb's career. The crusade books were well received in America and led to movie mogul Cecil B. DeMille hiring Lamb to cowrite his motion picture The Crusades, the first of many projects they worked on together. One interesting anecdote of Lamb's work on the film survives, reprinted here from Charles Higham's book Cecil B. DeMille ~Scribner's, 1973:

Harold Lamb was constantly present during the shooting of the siege [of Acre], dodging arrows and narrowly avoiding being crushed by the siege tower. "Is that realistic enough, Mr. Lamb? " the director asked him at the end of the first exhausting rehearsal of the conflict.

"Not nearly," Lamb replied, wiping his spectacles. "Those soldiers seemed almost fond of each other. Medieval warriors were infinitely more sanguinary, let me assure you. What you need is a thousand battle axes red with blood."

"That would make it a shambles, " DeMille said.

"Exactly. And also history," Lamb primlyreplied. (242)

Lamb thereafter cowrote a multitude of screenplays for DeMille and spent the rest of his working life either drafting for the cinema or producing biographies and histories for Doubleday-putting aside his service for the oss during World War II, when he was posted to Persia. I discuss that period of his life in more detail in Swords From the Desert.

Now it is time to settle back and read of crafty Sir John and his brave and loyal Arab friend Khalil. Herein learn what befell the daughter of Rusudan, from Lamb's Durandal trilogy. Read of the winged knights of Poland, the deadly horde of Tamerlane, and Richard the Lionheart's last stand. Ease back and let a master storyteller speak of fabled lands and faroff places and heroes who rode to doom or glory against all odds.

Enjoy!

Dedicated to the memory of heroic-fiction scholar Steven Tompkins (1960-2009).

I would like to thank Bill Prather of Thacher School for his continued support. This volume would not have been possible without the aid of Bruce Nordstrom, who long ago provided Lamb's Collier's texts as well as his Saturday Evening Post and other research notes; Mike Ashley, who provided the text of "Doom Rides In"; and Alfred Lybeck, Kevin Cook, David Scroggs, and James Pfundstein, who provided "Camp-Fire" letters. I also would like to express my appreciation for the aid of Victor Dreger and Jan van Heinegen, gentlemen and scholars. Lastly I wish again to thank my father, the late Victor Jones, who helped me locate various Adventure magazines, and Dr. John Drury Clark, whose lovingly preserved collection of Lamb stories is the chief source of seventy-five percent of my Adventure manuscripts.

The Long journey of the Morning Star

ROBERT WEINBERG

Updating an old ethnic joke, what do you get when you put ten pulp collectors in a locked room and ask them to name the best pulp ever published? The answer, of course, is eleven different answers. Everyone who collects has their favorite, and with over a thousand different pulp titles published, it's hard to settle on just one, or ten, or even twenty favorite magazines. Still, if most of the collectors were forced to agree upon one title for otherwise face the infamous Copper Bowl as so horrifically described by Major George Fielding Elliot in the pages of Weird Tales, there's a very good chance that the magazine they'd pick would be Adventure.

As a pulp (it turned into a rather mundane slick magazine late in its life), Adventure ran for an amazing 753 issues from 1910 to 1953. Many of those years it appeared twice a month (the first and the fifteenth) on the newsstand, and there were periods it appeared three times a month (the tenth, twentieth, and thirtieth, except for February, when it was published on the twenty-eighth). Issues from the early 192os, a favorite period of many collectors, were 192 pages of eye-straining print and usually included a complete novel, two or three complete novelettes (in reality short novels), and a goodly chunk of a serial. There would also be five or six short stories and a bunch of departments like "Old Songs That Men Have Sung," "Ask Adventure," and "Lost Trails." The letter column, known as "The Camp-Fire," was perhaps the best letter column published in any magazine, ever. Usually, authors of stories in the issues wrote long essays where they detailed the historical background of their work. Letters from readers argued over facts in previous stories. In an America just emerg ing from the Wild West and the First World War, the readers of Adventure weren't just armchair adventurers spouting theories. A typical letter began, "I enjoyed Hugh Pendexter's story about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but he got some of the details wrong. I was there and remember quite distinctly-" and continue on for three pages about the famous gun battle. There's a spectacular oral history of the American West in the letter columns of Adventure, and hopefully someday it will see print.

Still, it was the stories that made the pulp memorable, and Adventure featured the greatest lineup of adventure writers ever assembled. There was Talbot Mundy, Arthur D. Howden Smith, Arthur 0. Friel, Georges Surdez, Hugh Pendexter, J. Allen Dunn, and many hundreds of others, penning some of the finest, most accurate historical and modern adventure stories ever written. These were the top men in their field, men who knew how to tell a good story with plenty of action and a dash of romance, and who understood that their audience wouldn't accept inaccuracies in their fiction, so they kept their history straight. Adventure was considered the most prestigious pulp magazine in America. It was the very best the pulps had to offer. And the very best author in Adventure was Harold Lamb.

Lamb wrote seventy-five stories for Adventure from 1917 through 1933, many of them long novelettes and short novels. He was most famous for his series of stories about Khlit, an old and wily Cossack warrior. However, Lamb's finest fiction wasn't about Khlit but consisted of a thematic series of novellas featuring unjustly accused crusaders who joined the Mongol hordes of the great khans. The most popular of these adventures were three short novels featuring Sir Hugh of Taranto, which were later published in hardcover in 1931 as Durandal, A Crusader with the Horde. In the rambling adventure, Hugh fights treacherous Greeks and Moslems; finds Roland's lost blade, Durandal; and finally achieves a measure of revenge while riding with the hordes of Genghis Khan. Donald M. Grant Publications reprinted the first two short novels in this series, Durandal and The Sea of the Ravens, but has yet to publish the third and concluding volume, Rusudan. While the Durandal series is Lamb at the top of his form, it is not his best crusader-meets-the-Mongols story. That honor is reserved for the longest story in this volume, "The Making of the Morning Star."

This action-packed short novel was written in 1924, before the Sir Hugh series, and features a similar plot. A crusader, Sir Robert, is betrayed by his comrades and later is taken captive by the Saracens. Unwittingly, he helps one of the leaders of the advancing Mongol horde and wins his freedom, but not before he goes into battle wielding a gigantic iron ball and chain, a weapon known as a morning star. If set on Barsoom or in Aquilo- nia, "The Making of the Morning Star," would have been hailed as a fantasy masterpiece, but because it takes place in historical times without any magical elements, it has remained forgotten in the pulps for eighty years, until this welcome reprinting.

This short novel is just one of a number of superb stories contained in this long-overdue collection of Harold Lamb's crusader fiction. As a Lamb collector and fan for forty years, I envy all those who are reading his work for the first time. This book is a collection to be treasured, a book I guarantee you will read more than once.

As a brief historical footnote, in 1974 Ted Dikty, the co-owner of FAX Collectors Editions, asked me to edit two series of trade paperbound books reprinting the best adventure fiction from the pulps. One series was titled Famous Fantastic Classics and featured only science fiction stories, while the other was titled Famous Pulp Classics and was going to reprint only high adventure fiction. When I assembled the first issue of Famous Pulp Classics, there was no question in my mind what to use as the lead story-"The Making of the Morning Star." Rights to the story did not seem to be a problem, so Ted commissioned up-and-coming artist Michael Kaluta to paint a cover illustration based on the story. It was only when the book was ready to print that we learned that Donald Grant had licensed some of Lamb's work and was strongly opposed to us reprinting "The Morning Star" story. Don felt that our reprint would cut into sales of his planned Lamb reprints, even though they were years away. To keep the peace, we dropped the story, and instead substituted a Malcolm WheelerNicholson adventure in its place. For those who might be interested, the Kaluta painting for "The Making of the Morning Star" still appeared on the cover of Famous Pulp Classics #1, though it didn't illustrate any story in the book. It's still great art for a great story!