“No Glenn [Lord], no Howard Studies as we know it today…” — Don Herron, June 2011

“Robert E. Howard could not have had a more faithful steward.” — Roy Thomas, June 2021

Glenn Lord died ten years ago tonight. Glenn has been called ‘The Father of REH LitCrit’ and the ‘Original Robert E. Howard Uber-fan’. Fair enough. All I know is, I wouldn’t be here, typing this now, with two Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards hanging on my wall, if Glenn Lord had never existed. Every Robert E. Howard fan owes him a debt and I’ll try to repay a small portion of mine with this post.

Glenn Lord was born in Pelican, Louisiana in 1931. He did military service in the Korean War. Around the same time. Glenn discovered Robert E. Howard in the pages of Skull-Face and Others from Arkham House.* He would never be the same again. Reading the prose and poetry of REH lit a fire in Glenn Lord that would not be quenched for the next sixty years.

By 1957, Lord had compiled a collection of Howard's classic poetry, Always Comes Evening. This was published by August Derleth, albeit with some financial help from Glenn. Derleth was running Arkham House from his home and the extra bucks were needed to pull off the project. Less than seven hundred copies were printed. Nowadays, consider yourself lucky if you can pick up a first edition for less than seven hundred dollars.

Glenn Lord became literary executor for the Howard Estate in 1965. It was right around this period that he acquired 'The Trunk' from pulpster, E. Hoffmann Price. It is possible that no 'treasure chest' in all of history has yielded more riches. The Trunk contained tens of thousands of pages of unpublished REH yarns. Before all was said and done, Mr. Lord would unleash them, in their entirety, upon the world. Every last one...and I will thank him for it to my dying day.

It should also be noted that Glenn was also quite busy tracking down REH’s letters and other such vital documents. Many of those finds made their way into Mr. Lord’s The Howard Collector. Publication of that ground-breaking magazine slowly ground to a halt once Glenn became a full-time agent of the Howard Estate.

1968 saw Mr. Lord teaming up with Donald M. Grant to publish Red Shadows, a hardcover collection of Solomon Kane yarns. Lord and Grant would continue to work together for two more decades. This is one example of how, while L. Sprague de Camp maintained a stranglehold on Conan book publishing, Glenn had free rein to get non-Conan Howard characters published.

More importantly, in the overall Howardian scheme of things, Roy Thomas contacted Glenn in 1970. De Camp had the say-so on Conan publishing in books—though even that was tied up by the collapse of Lancer—but Glenn held the right to license such things as comic book adaptations. Mr. Lord agreed to license Marvel Comics to publish a 'Conan' comic for two hundred dollars an issue. The rest is history.

Thomas and Lord exchanged letters back and forth. Originally, Marvel—i.e., Roy—wasn’t allowed to adapt actual REH stories, but an agreement was worked out. That agreement eventually led to me reading Conan the Barbarian #38, which contained a Conanized adaptation of “The House of Arabu”. That led to me checking out the Gnome Press edition of Conan the Conqueror from a nearby library and then directly to my buying The Book of Robert E. Howard…edited by Glenn Lord.

The Book of Robert E. Howard and its follow-up volume, The Second Book of Robert E. Howard, could be called ‘Howard samplers’, but they were more than that. As Glenn himself put it:

“The Book of Robert E. Howard is a sampling of Howard’s writings within certain limitations. I have not included material from any hardback or paperback collection that is currently available, or soon to be available. Nor have I included anything from the books tied up due to the collapse of Lancer Books. Thus stories about Howard’s best known characters Conan, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane, Breckinridge Elkins and King Kull are not present, although "‘The Curse of the Golden Skull’ is peripherally part of the Kull series. On the plus side, however, many of the stories herein are previously uncollected in any form, several being available heretofore only in rare old pulps.”

Having only read a few issues of Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Conqueror, I was fine with this situation. I was already a Howardist, not a Conanist. If The Book of Robert E. Howard contained REH stuff that couldn’t be found anywhere else, that was totally cool with me. It’s not like I was getting ‘screwed’; far from it. Check out the table of contents here. In one package, I got “Pigeons from Hell” and classic examples of REH boxing, lost race, Crusader, Western and Weird Menace fiction. Plus, some of Howard’s very best poetry, which is no surprise, since Glenn was the man who edited Always Comes Evening. This was Robert E. Howard in wide-screen mode. One book gave me a solid foundation in virtually all of the genres and styles in which REH wrote. Just try to tell me that some reader of Conan the Adventurer came away with the same.

All of the above doesn’t even take into account Mr. Lord’s excellent “Introduction”, which I quoted briefly above. In it, he gave a concise overview of Bob Howard’s life that—in so many words—has rarely been equaled, let alone surpassed. In less than three pages he encapsulated REH’s life accurately, with zero ‘spin’. Some Howard scholar really should place all of the Lord and de Camp REH bios like this side-by-side in chronological order and compare them.

Glenn also wrote mini-intros to all of the stories within The Book of Robert E. Howard. He would detail their history, often quoting from Howard’s letters. He would also give info on any previous pulp publications they appeared in. Just as important, I first read the names ‘H.P. Lovecraft’ and ‘A. Merritt’ in those little intros. Up to that point, I only had a very vague conception of the pulps. Glenn Lord helped turn me into a pulp fan.

*Just one example of August Derleth advancing the literary reputation and cultural profile of Robert E. Howard