De Camp looking down his nose at SF convention fans.

Lyon Sprague de Camp died on this date in 2000 AD. He left an interesting legacy, to say the least.

Young Sprague was born in New York in 1907. A tall, thin boy, he was often bullied at school. One reason might be his "intellectual arrogance", something his parents recognized early on and he himself admitted to late in life. De Camp was certainly a sharp young lad. He eventually graduated from Caltech with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 1930.

De Camp got his Master's at Stevens Institute of Technology in 1933 and went to work for The International Correspondence Schools corporation. He quit in 1937 and published his first book, the pulse-pounding Inventions and Their Management. That same year, he also sold "The Isolinguals" to the pulp SF magazine, Astounding. Not long after, John W. Campbell became editor of Astounding. He and Spraguey got along famously, sharing a very simpatico attitude toward the SF and fantasy genres.

In 1939, LSdC married Catherine Crook*, a woman who would later inflame the desires of the likes of Bob Heinlein, Isaac "The Thing With a Thousand Hands" Asimov and countless convention-attending fanboys during the '40s and '50s. Spraguey first met Heinlein and Asimov while all three served at the Philadelphia Naval Yard during World War Two.

De Camp wasn't spending all of his time researching aeronautics on the taxpayers' dime in the early '40s. Before the Big One even started, LSdC collaborated with Fletcher Pratt on the first Harold Shea story, "The Roaring Trumpet". More would follow in the pages of Campbell's fantasy pulp, Unknown.

I've never been a huge fan of the Shea stuff. Shea is a thinly-veiled de Camp who visits various mythological/legendary locales--the Norse Ragnarok, for instance--and then goes around smirking at the silly yokels and spouting snarky one-liners. Also, trolls and frost-giants speak in 1930s Gangsterese. Shea is such a clever boy. Sound familiar? Later claims by Sprague and Cat de Camp that the Shea tales were, somehow, "early sword and sorcery" are just ludicrous.

In 1949, Spraguey launched one of his more enduring series, the “Viagens Interplanetarias” tales. While some stories have elements of space opera, most are pretty squarely in the Planetary Adventure category, with a few--most set on the planet of Krishna--even shading over into Sword and Planet. All are told in LSdC's standard authorial voice, which can most charitably be described as "wry and detached". That said, I enjoy many of the earlier ones as light SF entertainment.

Around the same time, de Camp discovered Howard's Conan yarns. Thinking he could do REH one better, LSdC wrote The Tritonian Ring. It is an S&S novel starring Vakar of Lorsk and set in de Camp's "Pusadian" milieu. While nowhere near as good as the best REH Conan tales, the worldbuilding is top-notch and de Camp would return to Pusad numerous times. Once again, I enjoy reading some of them as light entertainment.

The Donning edition, which sports a great Stephen Fabian cover.

The 1950s were a golden age for historical adventure paperbacks. Blood n' thunder bodice-rippers flew off the spinner racks across the USA during that decade. De Camp decided to horn in on that market. His first foray was An Elephant for Aristotle, a book-title that explodes with portents of adventure. That said, I consider it one of the best in his "Hellenistic" series of historical novels. The only one that beats it is The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate, a rollicking adventure which sees a bad-ass Persian nobleman travel through the Persian Empire into darkest Africa hunting the titular dragon. To one extent or another, I enjoyed reading all five of the novels in the series. None of them approach the Howardesque heights of Gardner Fox’s historical novels, but they’re entertaining.

Meanwhile, as the '60s were a-borning, Spraguey was shopping around Conan the Barbarian to various paperback publishers. Since his former partner at Gnome Press, Martin Greenberg, was himself claiming rights to those stories, publishers were leery of going all in on the Cimmerian, especially since de Camp wanted to also shoehorn his own pastiches and posthumous collaborations into the bargain as well.

Seeking to get the newly-coined "sword and sorcery" brand some more visibility in order to drum up interest in the Conan tales, LSdC pitched an S&S anthology to Pyramid Books, a second-tier paperback publisher. 1963's Swords and Sorcery was the result. In my opinion, this was probably Spraguey's finest moment in the history of S&S.

Swords and Sorcery contained not only a tale of Conan, but also stories of Poul Anderson's Cappen Varra, Kuttner's Prince Raynor, Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Moore's Jirel. Also therein were tales from Dunsany, Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. All three, to my mind, are more heroic fantasy, not S&S, but de Camp had a limited pool of tales at that early date to draw from.

De Camp would publish The Spell of Seven--another S&S antho--through Pyramid in June of 1965. However, Don Wollheim, the man who had published Conan the Conqueror in paperback in 1953, had already launched Lin Carter's Thongor novel, The Wizard of Lemuria, in January. The first salvos of the Sword and Sorcery Renaissance had been fired.

Sprague’s autobiography with a Kelly Freas cover. Don’t blame Freas for the wonky font.

Spraguey finally got Lancer Books to publish the Conan tales--along with his and Lin Carter's pastiches--in 1966. The books were a resounding success and LSdC soon looked to come up with another S&S character of his very own. The Goblin Tower, the first in a series set in de Camp's world of Novaria, starred Jorian. Jorian is likeable enough--certainly better than Harold Shea--and Spraguey's world-building is, once again, top-notch. I enjoy the various Novarian novels as, you guessed it, light entertainment.

The same could be said for the "Neapolitan" tales of Eudoric that LSdC penned in the '70s: A competent S&S protagonist suffering/enjoying adventures in a well-crafted fantasy setting.

As some might've guessed, I keep using the phrase "light entertainment" to describe basically all of Spraguey's fiction because that is exactly how he characterized Robert E. Howard's tales of Conan--he seems to have cared not a whit for REH's myriad other creations, by the way. As the decades have passed, de Camp's estimation has been turned on its head, with volumes like Don Herron's The Dark Barbarian and The Barbaric Triumph resoundingly demonstrating that REH addressed weighty matters and themes in the best of his fiction.

Where are the scholarly volumes looking at the enduring merits and insights of de Camp's works? Short answer: they don't exist and will probably never exist.

To sum things up, de Camp's legacy overall is nothing to be ashamed of, necessarily, but time (and chance) has not been all that kind to his works, either.

*Catherine Crook de Camp's many contributions to sword and sorcery literature have been shamefully ignored for decades. Looking at that issue will form the basis of a future blog post.