THE QUEEN’S CONJURER

By Benjamin Wooley

An account of the life and times of Elizabethan England’s foremost philosophical occultist. John Dee was a scholar so cutting edge that he went a bit over the edge. A brilliant man who boldly followed his curiosity wherever it led, Dee explored mapmaking, calendar reform, and astronomy. He also investigated alchemy and astrology, two subjects that Dee’s contemporaries believed to be as scientific, if not more so, than odd notions like Copernicus’s belief that the Earth orbited the Sun. It was spiritual communications and glass gazing that proved to be Dee’s downfall.

Dee came under the influence of one Edward Kelley. This young man was a skryer, one who gazed into a crystal ball and revealed hidden secrets, in this case messages from angels and spirits on how to translate the language of Adam and to find hidden treasure. Wooley meticulously documents just how much of a fraud Kelley was, for Kelley was definitely a fraud who took Dee for just about everything he had including his good name. The tale is s sordid one involving greedy kings, religious zealots, spies and con-men of every sort. The Queen’s Conjurer is a fascinating look at the occult underworld in Elizabethan times.

-Dave Hardy

BLOOD AND THUNDER
By Mark Finn

Once upon a time there was one major biography of Robert E. Howard. It was Dark Valley Destiny by L. Sprague De Camp. While readers might find the many recollections from people who knew REH personally to be fascinating, the whole was overlaid with a massive amount of pop-psychologizing. While LSdC spoke highly of the Conan stories, he adopted a patronizing, if not downright dismissive attitude toward much of the rest of his work. So REH fans were stuck with something that had splendid detail, but was locked into positions that were unconvincing to flat-out offensive.

Not any more. Mark Finn has finally written the answer to DVD. Blood and Thunder uses the wonderful detail de Camp amassed in his interviews, but eschews the spurious psychoanalysis and smug condescension of the former. Finn’s basic premise is that Howard was a man addicted to telling a lively story. That may not be much of a stretch when we consider his chosen career and the way many of the tales from his letters turn out to be very tall. The memoirs of Novalyne Price (later made into a film as The Whole Wide World) do a lot to round out this study of one of Sword & Sorcery’s most influential writers.

Finn examines the impact of Howard’s family life on his career as a writer and his attitude toward life. He takes a cautious view that friction between his parents and the social disruption of the Oil Boom years in Cross Plains contributed to a level of stress that he was ill-suited to cope with. Howard’s suicide in 1936 was not a random impulse, but part of a personal crisis that had been building for a long time. To his credit, Finn does not boast of having “solved” the riddle of REH. He freely admits that the best you can do with a man so contradictory, so enamored of his own myth making, is make tentative conclusions.

On a more definite note Finn looks at all aspects of REH’s writing, from tall-tale Westerns to boxing stories to Oriental Adventures to Conan and Sword & Sorcery. Finn relates Howard’s work to his personal tastes, opinions, interests, and life in a way that shows how his work is a reflection of Howard’s delight and disgust with the world he lived in. While it’s perhaps too much to expect a full scale depiction of Howard’s life AND times, Finn does not neglect to explain what life was like in Cross Plains from 1906 to 1936. He delves into diverse aspects from farming to the chaos of the Oil Booms to impromptu boxing matches in the icehouse to spinning yarns on the back porch.

Blood and Thunder is the new standard by which biographies of this talented, lively, and enigmatic writer will be judged.

-Dave Hardy

TARZAN FOREVER
By John Taliaferro

If there was one guy who could claim to have single-handedly invented pulp fiction it is Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose fictional creations have dominated the daydreams of generations of boys since 1913. John Taliaferro sets out to tell the story of the man behind Tarzan, John Carter, Carson Napier, Davis Innes, and a host of daring heroes in all the remotest places of the Earth and beyond.

Taliaferro balances his view of ERB the man with ERB the writer. But both are weighed against ERB the businessman. Talliaferro notes that ERB’s first book, A Princess of Mars, was written mostly as a release from the boredom of life as an unsuccessful businessman. But ERB was always cognizant that writing was a paying proposition. While ERB was a pretty good businessman for a writer, he was perhaps not a very good businessman overall.

Taliaferro depicts a man that is something of a prisoner of his own success. Having adopted a lifestyle that required a high cash flow ERB was forced to write quickly and stick to characters that would sell. ERB had little time to spend on polishing his work and developing new skills as a writer. When new characters and attempts at new genres didn’t pan out, ERB returned to writing Tarzan to make sales. The result was a body of work that started out as ground-breaking, but ended up by becoming repetitious.

ERB pioneered marketing a character with promotional tie-ins. In way that has become the norm now, the name of Tarzan appeared on toys, clothing, ice-cream, and even gasoline.

Some may find Taliaferro’s literary criticism heavy-handed. If ERB’s series tended to become repetitious, he worked earnestly to create new characters and to broaden his fictional horizons. ERB even dabbled in metafictional conceits such as having Tarzan confront his own movie popularity. Admittedly, Taliaferro chalks this up to an urge to get even with movie-makers that ERB felt hadn’t done justice to his creation. Still, the very notion of a fictional character observing himself translated into film is practically a post-modern novelist’s dream (are your listening Umberto Eco?).

Even more controversial will be Taliaferro on the racist themes and pro-eugenics propaganda that he finds in ERB’s work. While it would be foolish to deny that ERB would have benefited from a more relaxed perspective, readers may wish to make up their own minds on the subject.

Tarzan Forever is probably not the definitive biography of ERB, but its good enough to make its subject come alive and get the pulse pounding at the thought of reading some of those grand old adventure yarns that have held the imagination for decades.

-Dave Hardy