The Right Hand of Doom & Other Tales of Solomon Kane

By Robert E. Howard and M.J. Elliot

The sixteenth-century Puritan Solomon Kane has a thirst for justice which surpasses common reason. Sombre of mood, clad in black and grey, he 'never sought to analyse his motives and he never wavered once his mind was made up. Though he always acted on impulse, he firmly believed that all his actions were governed by cold and logical reasonings...A hunger in his soul drove him on and on, an urge to right all wrongs, protect all weaker things, and avenge all crimes against right and justice'.

Immune to the attractions of the opposite sex, he seems drawn by some psychological distress beacon to places where he knows only that he will be called upon to defend the helpless or (more often) exact retribution on their behalf.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworth Editions
• Release date: Oct 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781848705074

Book preview

The Right Hand of Doom

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane

Robert E. Howard

with an Introduction by

M. J. Elliott

WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

The Right Hand of Doom first published by

Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2007

Introduction © M. J. Elliott 2007

Published as an ePublication 2014

ISBN 978 1 84870 507 4

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Contents

Introduction

The Right Hand of Doom

Solomon Kane

Skulls in the Stars

The Right Hand of Doom

Rattle of Bones

The Moon of Skulls

The Hills of the Dead

The Footfalls Within

Wings in the Night

Blades of the Brotherhood

Death’s Black Riders

Appendix

Untitled

The One Black Stain

Solomon Kane’s Homecoming

For Megan

Introduction

On the morning of the 11th of June 1936, Robert Ervin Howard said farewell to his ailing mother for the last time. Hester Howard was suffering from terminal tuberculosis, and had sunk into a coma. One of the two the nurses attending her advised Robert that Hester was unlikely to regain consciousness. A methodical and decisive young Texan, Robert had already decided that he too would live no longer, and had purchased a cemetery lot three days earlier. He had also questioned his father Isaac’s friend, Dr J. W. Dill, about the likeli­hood of anyone surviving a bullet to the brain. At eight that morning, he left the Howard residence, got into the front seat of his 1935 Chevrolet Sedan, and shot himself with the .38 Colt automatic he had borrowed from a friend. He died eight hours later. It is said that before his death, he typed out a couplet from the poem The House of Caesar by Viola Garvin, although accounts differ as to whether the paper was discovered in his room or in the billfold he kept in his pocket:

All fled, all done

So lift me on the pyre

The feast is over

And the lamps expire.

Robert and Hester were buried at Greenleaf Cemetery in Brown­wood, Texas, on the 14th of June. Robert was just 30 at the time of his death, but already he had amassed a considerable body of work, as well as a reputation as one of the foremost writers of the sword and sorcery genre, thanks to the frequent appearances of his fiction in celebrated pulp magazine Weird Tales. His first story for the famous title, Spear and Fang, appeared in the July issue for 1925. When he died, Weird Tales still owed Howard $1350 for published work. His recurring characters included the Pictish King Bran Mak Morn, Kull of Atlantis, and, of course, his most famous creation, Conan of Cimmeria.

But without doubt his most fascinating and undeservedly neglected hero is very different from these muscle-bound warriors of a world forgotten by time. The sixteenth-century Puritan Solomon Kane is a man as troubled and complex as his creator. He is sombre of mood and clad in black and grey, in sharp contrast to the world he inhabits, where the most common hues are the red of spilled blood and the blue flame of vengeance. His thirst for justice surpasses common reason; in his first appearance in print, Solomon Kane (also known as Red Shadows, and published in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales Magazine), he pursues the bandit Le Loup from France to Africa, via Italy and Spain, but his motives for doing so are not personal. He believes that it is his destiny to be the cause of Le Loup’s demise and that is that. He is seemingly immune to the appeal of the opposite sex (or, it should be added, his own) and seems drawn by some sort of psychic distress beacon to lands where he knows only that he will be called upon to defend the helpless and extract bloody retribution on their behalf. ‘It hath been my duty in times past to ease various evil men of their lives,’ he explains in Blades of the Brotherhood. Howard devised the character of Kane while still in high school, making the Puritan perhaps his earliest creation.

The Moon of Skulls (first published in Weird Tales over the June and July of 1930) provides the reader with a fair assessment of Kane’s character: ‘He never sought to analyse his motives and he never wavered, once his mind was made up. Though he always acted on impulse, he firmly believed that all his actions were governed by cold and logical reasonings. He was a man born out of his time – a strange blending of Puritan and Cavalier, with a touch of the ancient philosopher, and more than a touch of the pagan, though the last assertion would have shocked him unspeakably. An atavist of the days of blind chivalry he was, a knight errant in the sombre clothes of a fanatic. A hunger in his soul drove him on and on, an urge to right all wrongs, protect all weaker things, and avenge all crimes against right and justice. Wayward and restless as the wind, he was con­sistent in only one respect – he was true to his ideals of justice and right. Such was Solomon Kane.’

In the course of ten completed adventures, Howard reveals very little about Kane’s background. Several stories give Devon as his place of origin, and Solomon Kane lets slip that his middle initial is L. Blades of the Brotherhood, also known as The Blue Flame of Vengeance, gives us as close to an account of his origins and motivations as we are likely to get. Kane, it seems, is compelled to conduct this endless quest to see the wicked punished as a form of penance for the atrocities perpetrated by troops under his command when he served, for reasons unknown, as a captain in the French army. Blades is also notable as the only Solomon Kane story not to feature a supernatural or ‘weird’ element. Howard is keen to make it clear that the creatures of Wings in the Night (Weird Tales, July 1932) are not demoniacal in nature, but neither are bat-winged savages a common hazard for even the most hardened traveller. We know from the verse Solomon Kane’s Homecoming (Issue 1 of Fanciful Tales Magazine, 1931) that his departure from England caused grief to a loved one named Bess, and he later feels regret for his actions. Whatever the nature of his relationship with this Bess, she is certainly not Queen Bess, for whom he shows no fondness in The Hawk of Basti: ‘Her sister harried my people like beasts of prey,’ he insists. ‘She herself has lied to and betrayed the folk of my faith.’

Unlike Conan and Kull, Kane has yet to make the leap from the printed page to the silver screen (although his adventures have been recounted in the pages of Marvel Comics), but take a moment when reading The Moon of Skulls to compare Solomon’s jungle experiences with the misadventures of Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom. Kane’s African wanderings, which form the greater part of the series, seem inspired by the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard; the notion of nefarious goings-in in previously undis­covered lands is a theme common to both authors, although Howard acknowledged only the creator of Allan Quartermain as a favourite.

As with the chronicles of Conan, there are many significant gaps in Howard’s accounts of the Puritan’s life. Had he lived, might Howard have filled in these gaps? When and how, for instance, did he come by the Oriental sash he wears in Blades of the Brotherhood, and which is mentioned nowhere else? It seems likely that it is the same one worn by his captor Hassim ben Said in The Footfalls Within (published in the September 1931 issue of Weird Tales), and that Kane simply took it from Hassim’s corpse when reclaiming his weapons, but there is no specific mention of this in the text of that story. What becomes of the ju-ju staff given to Kane by the wise man N’Longa at the opening of The Hills of the Dead (Weird Tales, August 1930), and which Kane keeps about his person for the majority of his later adventures, his fierce Puritanism notwithstanding? The Footfalls Within gives some indication of the history of the staff and hints at the possibility that its destiny and Kane’s might prove to be intimately connected, but any definite conclusion will have to be imagined by the reader. It appears in Footfalls and Wings in the Night that Solomon is beginning to embrace a greater, if somewhat gloomy, philosophy regarding man’s place on this earth: ‘The planet men call the earth spun on through the untold ages, Kane realized, and as it spun it spawned Life, and living things which wriggled about it as maggots are spawned in rot and corruption. Man was the dominant maggot now – why should he in his pride suppose that he and his adjuncts were the first maggots – or the last to rule a planet quick with unguessed life?’ Again, would Howard have expanded upon Kane’s notions and thus developed the character, had he lived?

Three Kane stories, The Right Hand of Doom, Blades of the Brother­hood and Death’s Black Riders, did not see print during Howard’s lifetime. The same is true of two verses, The One Black Stain and the piece commonly referred to as The Return of Sir Richard Grenville (although that title was chosen later by Glenn Lord). At the time of Howard’s death, many of his stories were either incomplete or existed only in synopsis form. There are three unfinished Solomon Kane tales: The Castle of the Devil, The Hawk of Basti and the Children of Asshur.

In Castle, Kane is on the road to Genoa when he meets fellow Englishman John Silent (no relation to Algernon Blackwood’s super­natural investigator John Silence). Kane has just saved a starving peasant from the gallows, and Silent informs him that the execution was the will of Baron Von Staler, ‘the most powerful lord in the Black Forest’. Kane decides to confront Von Staler, and it seems that Silent will accompany him. What dangers are in store for the pair remain unknown, alas.

Kane meets another Englishman far from home in The Hawk of Basti; Jeremy Hawk recognises the Puritan at once, from the days when they ‘harried the Dons from the Azores to Darien and back again’. After a series of misadventures, Hawk explains, he came to Africa, and eventually became the leader of the small island of Basti, before being overthrown by Agara, High Priest of the cult of Khabasti. Hawk persuades Kane to join him in an attempt to regain the throne, although there are indications that his intentions are not wholly honourable. In The Footfalls Within, it is learned that Kane’s ju-ju staff once belonged to the priests of Bast. Whether Howard intended a connection between Bast and Basti we shall never know.

Once more in Africa, Kane is captured at the beginning of The Children of Asshur, and taken to the city of Ninn, where he becomes the pawn of another villainous high priest, this one apparently attempting to control King Asshur-ras-arab. Kane escapes during an attack by a tribe of Sulas, but loses his chance to flee from Ninn when he stops to rescue a maiden from a marauding lion. Here the narrative ends, with Kane seemingly having won the friendship of an officer in the Ninn army, whose sweetheart the Puritan saved.

As with Howard’s Conan stories, attempts have been made to complete these partial adventures. British author Ramsay Campbell wrote his versions in 1976, while Italian Gianluigi Zuddas published his own treatments (along with two new pastiches, The Island of the Feathered Serpent and The Crown of Asa) just three years later.

But we must not allow the tantalising possibilities presented by unfinished tales and exploits unwritten to prevent us from appreci­ating the wealth of material contained within these pages. In the course of ten adventures, our sombre hero in the slouch hat does battle with pirates, spectres, vampires, sorcerers, cannibals, winged beasts and terrors out of time. The Solomon Kane stories exist as a testament to the fierce imagination of one of the greatest authors of fantastic fiction, Robert E. Howard.

M. J. Elliott

The Right Hand of Doom

Solomon Kane

1

The Coming of Solomon

The moonlight shimmered hazily, making silvery mists of illusion among the shadowy trees. A faint breeze whispered down the valley, bearing a shadow that was not of the moon-mist. A faint scent of smoke was apparent.

The man whose long, swinging strides, unhurried yet unswerving, had carried him for many a mile since sunrise, stopped suddenly. A movement in the trees had caught his attention, and he moved silently toward the shadows, a hand resting lightly on the hilt of his long, slim rapier.

Warily he advanced, his eyes striving to pierce the darkness that brooded under the trees. This was a wild and menacing country; death might be lurking under those trees. Then his hand fell away from the hilt and he leaned forward. Death indeed was there, but not in such shape as might cause him fear.

‘The fires of Hades!’ he murmured. ‘A girl! What has harmed you, child? Be not afraid of me.’

The girl looked up at him, her face like a dim white rose in the dark.

‘You – who are – you?’ her words came in gasps.

‘Naught but a wanderer, a landless man, but a friend to all in need.’ The gentle voice sounded somehow incongruous, coming from the man.

The girl sought to prop herself up on her elbow, and instantly he knelt and raised her to a sitting position, her head resting against his shoulder. His hand touched her breast and came away red and wet.

‘Tell me.’ His voice was soft, soothing, as one speaks to a babe.

‘Le Loup,’ she gasped, her voice swiftly growing weaker. ‘He and his men – descended upon our village – a mile up the valley. They robbed – slew – burned – ’

‘That, then, was the smoke I scented,’ muttered the man. ‘Go on, child.’

‘I ran. He, the Wolf, pursued me – and – caught me– ’ The words died away in a shuddering silence.

‘I understand, child. Then – ?’

‘Then – he – he – stabbed me – with his dagger – oh, blessed saints! – mercy – ’

Suddenly the slim form went limp. The man eased her to the earth, and touched her brow lightly.

‘Dead!’ he muttered.

Slowly he rose, mechanically wiping his hands upon his cloak. A dark scowl had settled on his sombre brow. Yet he made no wild, reckless vow, swore no oath by saints or devils.

‘Men shall die for this,’ he said coldly.

2

The Lair of the Wolf

‘You are a fool!’ The words came in a cold snarl that curdled the hearer’s blood.

He who had just been named a fool lowered his eyes sullenly without answer.

‘You and all the others I lead!’ The speaker leaned forward, his fist pounding emphasis on the rude table between them. He was a tall, rangy-built man, supple as a leopard and with a lean, cruel, predatory face. His eyes danced and glittered with a kind of reckless mockery.

The fellow spoken to replied sullenly, ‘This Solomon Kane is a demon from hell, I tell you.’

‘Faugh! Dolt! He is a man – who will die from a pistol ball or a sword thrust.’

‘So thought Jean, Juan and La Costa,’ answered the other grimly. ‘Where are they? Ask the mountain wolves that tore the flesh from their dead bones. Where does this Kane hide? We have searched the mountains and the valleys for leagues, and we have found no trace. I tell you, Le Loup, he comes up from hell. I knew no good would come from hanging that friar a moon ago.’

The Wolf strummed impatiently upon the table. His keen face, despite lines of wild living and dissipation, was the face of a thinker. The superstitions of his followers affected him not at all.

‘Faugh! I say again. The fellow has found some cavern or secret vale of which we do not know where he hides in the day.’

‘And at night he sallies forth and slays us,’ gloomily commented the other. ‘He hunts us down as a wolf hunts deer – by God, Le Loup, you name yourself Wolf but I think you have met at last a fiercer and more crafty wolf than yourself! The first we know of this man is when we find Jean, the most desperate bandit unhung, nailed to a tree with his own dagger through his breast, and the letters S.L.K. carved upon his dead cheeks. Then the Spaniard Juan is struck down, and after we find him he lives long enough to tell us that the slayer is an Englishman, Solomon Kane, who has sworn to destroy our entire band! What then? La Costa, a swordsman second only to yourself, goes forth swearing to meet this Kane. By the demons of perdition, it seems he met him! For we found his sword-pierced corpse upon a cliff. What now? Are we all to fall before this English fiend?’

‘True, our best men have been done to death by him,’ mused the bandit chief. ‘Soon the rest return from that little trip to the hermit’s; then we shall see. Kane cannot hide forever. Then – ha, what was that?’

The two turned swiftly as a shadow fell across the table. Into the entrance of the cave that formed the bandit lair, a man staggered. His eyes were wide and staring; he reeled on buckling legs, and a dark red stain dyed his tunic. He came a few tottering steps forward, then pitched across the table, sliding off onto the floor.

‘Hell’s devils!’ cursed the Wolf, hauling him upright and propping him in a chair. ‘Where are the rest, curse you?’

‘Dead! All dead!’

‘How? Satan’s curses on you, speak!’ The Wolf shook the man savagely, the other bandit gazing on in wide-eyed horror.

‘We reached the hermit’s hut just as the moon rose,’ the man muttered. ‘I stayed outside – to watch – the others went in – to torture the hermit – to make him reveal – the hiding-place – of his gold.’

‘Yes, yes! Then what?’ The Wolf was raging with impatience.

‘Then the world turned red – the hut went up in a roar and a red rain flooded the valley – through it I saw – the hermit and a tall man clad all in black – coming from the trees– ’

‘Solomon Kane!’ gasped the bandit. ‘I knew it! I – ’

‘Silence, fool!’ snarled the chief. ‘Go on!’

‘I fled – Kane pursued – wounded me – but I outran – him – got – here – first– ’

The man slumped forward on the table.

‘Saints and devils!’ raged the Wolf. ‘What does he look like, this Kane?’

‘Like – Satan – ’

The voice trailed off in silence. The dead man slid from the table to lie in a red heap upon the floor.

‘Like Satan!’ babbled the other bandit. ‘I told you! ’Tis the Horned One himself! I tell you – ’

He ceased as a frightened face peered in at the cave entrance.

‘Kane?’

‘Aye.’ The Wolf was too much at sea to lie. ‘Keep close watch, La Mon; in a moment the Rat and I will join you.’

The face withdrew and Le Loup turned to the other.

‘This ends the band,’ said he. ‘You, I, and that thief La Mon are all that are left. What would you suggest?’

The Rat’s pallid lips barely formed the word: ‘Flight!’

‘You are right. Let us take the gems and gold from the chests and flee, using the secret passageway.’

‘And La Mon?’

‘He can watch until we are ready to flee. Then – why divide the treasure three ways?’

A faint smile touched the Rat’s malevolent features. Then a sudden thought smote him.

‘He,’ indicating the corpse on the floor, ‘said I got here first. Does that mean Kane was pursuing him here?’ And as the Wolf nodded impatiently the other turned to the chests with chattering haste.

The flickering candle on the rough table lighted up a strange and wild scene. The light, uncertain and dancing, gleamed redly in the slowly widening lake of blood in which the dead man lay; it danced upon the heaps of gems and coins emptied hastily upon the floor from the brass-bound chests that ranged the walls; and it glittered in the eyes of the Wolf with the same gleam which sparkled from his sheathed dagger.

The chests were empty, their treasure lying in a shimmering mass upon the blood-stained floor. The Wolf stopped and listened. Out­side was silence. There was no moon, and Le Loup’s keen imagination pictured the dark slayer, Solomon Kane, gliding through the black­ness, a shadow among shadows. He grinned crookedly; this time the Englishman would be foiled.

‘There is a chest yet unopened,’ said he, pointing.

The Rat, with a muttered exclamation of surprise, bent over the chest indicated. With a single, catlike motion, the Wolf sprang upon him, sheathing his dagger to the hilt in the Rat’s back, between the shoulders. The Rat sagged to the floor without a sound.

‘Why divide the treasure two ways?’ murmured Le Loup, wiping his blade upon the dead man’s doublet. ‘Now for La Mon.’

He stepped toward the door; then stopped and shrank back.

At first he thought that it was the shadow of a man who stood in the entrance; then he saw that it was a man himself, though so dark and still he stood that a fantastic semblance of shadow was lent him by the guttering candle.

A tall man, as tall as Le Loup he was, clad in black from head to foot, in plain, close-fitting garments that somehow suited the sombre face. Long arms and broad shoulders betokened the swords­man, as plainly as the long rapier in his hand. The features of the man were saturnine and gloomy. A kind of dark pallor lent him a ghostly appearance in the uncertain light, an effect heightened by the satanic darkness of his lowering brows. Eyes, large, deep-set and unblinking, fixed their gaze upon the bandit, and looking into them, Le Loup was unable to decide what colour they were. Strangely, the Mephistophelean trend of the lower features was offset by a high, broad forehead, though this was partly hidden by a featherless

Reviews for The Right Hand of Doom & Other Tales of Solomon Kane

[philsyphe · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

“The Right Hand of Doom” is an interesting collection of Howard shorts that revolve around Solomon Cane.Cane is a great character, though some of the stories are somewhat lacklustre. The author is sublime at writing action & adventure, but as someone who truly admires Robert E. Howard, I must state that these types of tales, and horror in general, are my least favourite of his works.Personally, I think his greatest stories are his comedies, and humour is an ingredient that’s absent from these dark tales. So not Howard at his best, but definitely worth reading, as is anything by this great author.

[devenish_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Robert E. Howard is probably best known as the writer of the 'Conan' stories. This volume concerns a very different character altogether. Solomon Kane is the hero of 10 stories and 3 poems contained in this book. He is a 16th century Puritan-like character who travels his own country of England and far-off Africa,protecting the weak from both evil men and women and supernatural creatures. Armed with his trusty blade and his pair of pistols he is a match for just about anyone or anything. In the course of these stories he fights (among others) La Loup the bandit chief,Nakari Queen of the Neari,and perhaps the most awful creatures of all,the harpies who are flying vampires.In many ways the style of writing is akin to that of H.P.Lovecraft,in that there is much mewing and gibbering along the way. Also many mentions of clinging foulness and talons that rip and tear. Great fun if you like your stories full of blood and the macabre.