Keith Taylor is the author/co-author of 11 novels and dozens of short stories, for fans of the sword-and-sorcery subgenre most notably the Bard series, featuring the wandering Felimid mac Fal and his picaresque adventures in early Dark Ages Britain. Taylor began writing professionally in the mid-1970s with appearances in the likes of Ted White’s Fantastic and the Andrew Offutt edited Swords Against Darkness anthologies. After a lengthy battle and recent reoccurrence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma he has resumed writing again. DMR Books recently republished two of Taylor’s stories featuring Felimid’s father, Fal the Reiver, which originally appeared in a revival of Weird Tales in 1988. And he has a new story, “Written in Lightning,” in the new sword-and-planet anthology The Lost Empire of Sol. Here he generously provided this author a rambling (but highly informative and entertaining) look at his literary inspirations, his writing career including two novels featuring the Robert E. Howard hero Cormac Mac Art, both co-written with Andrew Offutt, his health, and his current works in progress, provided here as a two-part Q&A series. Enjoy!

Who were your literary inspirations?

Like most of the weirdos called writers, I read voraciously as a kid. If you want the classier influences among those early ones, there was the King James Bible (stately archaic language, and I was a regular at Sunday School), Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (more stately archaic language) and an Illustrated book of Greek myths. And Shakespeare. Well, I didn’t really get into Shakespeare until I had to study his stuff in high school, though my mother (a fun lady, and literate) had a leather-bound copy of the complete works and I looked at it sometimes.

But the junk, the precious, priceless, gaudy, mind-blowing trash that all kids read with delight, had at least as much influence as the quality stuff! Much more! Comic strips like The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, Flash Gordon (there was an Australian imitation of Flash, too, Silver Starr, adventuring on a strange planet with his girlfriend Pristine), Prince Valiant in the days of King Arthur (quite an influence, that one) and comic books like The Black Knight (the old Atlas Comics version, also set in the days of King Arthur, and who cared if it wasn’t history?), western comics like Kid Colt, Outlaw (tougher and more gritty in my young days than he later became), and of course science fiction. Most of the money from my newspaper delivery round when I was twelve got spent at that same news agency that employed me – on The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, Fantastic Stories, and novels like Vardis Fisher’s Testament of Man series – the latter a guided tour through prehistory and history, novel by novel, with a jaundiced view of the development of religion.

It and old Bertrand Russell did a lot to liberate me from the influence of Baptist Sunday School. So did pulp science fiction and fantasy, both pretty cynical towards gods and their priesthoods as a rule. For instance, Philip Jose Farmer and, L. Sprague de Camp (the first Farmer story I read was The Lovers, and de Camp, The Tower of Zanid and The Incomplete Enchanter).

That’s getting ahead, though. It was when I was fourteen that I discovered … fanfare!!! … Robert E. Howard and Leigh Brackett at the same time. That’s a story you may have heard before; I’ve told it and told it until people must be getting bored. But… I used to haunt the Hobart library, and the second hand bookshop just across the street from the library. That library had a number of Ace Double Novels on its shelves, and the staff used to cut them in half, bind each half of the paperback in stiff cardboard, and put them on the shelves under the author’s name. One of them was the great double Sword of Rhiannon by Brackett, and Conan the Conqueror by REH.

Apparently someone had swiped the Brackett book from the library, glued down the page with the library stamp on it to conceal it, and sold it to the second hand bookshop, which was where I found, and bought, The Sword of Rhiannon. The main character, Carse, by the way, is a renegade scholar, archaeologist, and tomb looter who prefigured Indiana Jones by a long way – in 1949! And opposite the title page Ace habitually printed the title and author of the other half of the double, in this case Conan the Conqueror by Howard.

Like Sherlock Holmes aware that the game was afoot, or a hunter in a Jack London fantasy on the trail of a mammoth, I hot-footed to the library and looked for Howard, Robert E. Yes! The re-bound Conan the Conqueror was still there, with a cover showing the laughing Conan in Roman style armour scooping up Countess Albiona to save her from the headsman’s axe. I borrowed it right away and took it home. After I read it I was a Howard fan for life, and that library had the old Gnome Press hardbacks, The Sword of Conan and The Coming of Conan, too. I made the acquaintance of Kull in those collections. I was completely hooked on REH now, if I hadn’t been before!

Put REH and Leigh Brackett down as two of my major inspirations.

This was before the 60s and 70s sword and sorcery revival still—it was 1960. But occasional treats for a newbie sword and sorcery freak kept appearing on the Tasmanian bookstore shelves to tease my appetite. I still remember, vividly, that first of de Camp’s Pyramid Books heroic fantasy anthologies, Swords and Sorcery, which I found on a rack in the bookstore in Cat and Fiddle Arcade in 1963. A fellow with a sword was menacing an (I assume) sorceress in a medieval headdress and gown, against a background of flames and pointy-eared ugly demons. This promised to be a fix of the real stuff, and indeed it was. It contained REH’s “Shadows in the Moonlight”, with its duels to the death, cruel eastern warlords, pirates, giant apes, ancient ruins, cursed iron statues, and one beautiful civilized girl for Conan to rescue. (I noticed early that despite his frequent disparaging comments about civilization, Conan’s girlfriends were always civilized.) It also introduced me to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser and Jirel of Joiry.

Especially, and one of the things that contributed to my inchoate ideas for a bardic hero, was Poul Anderson’s “The Valor of Cappen Varra,” about a southern troubadour (with a harp) who has travelled north to Viking realms hoping for rich rewards and instead finds nothing but difficulty with a grim king and his crew and then a hideous cannibal she-troll. His final conclusion is, “These lands ain’t for me.”

Yes. Felimid the bard definitely owes something to Andrson’s Cappen Varra. And to the real rogue poet Francois Villon, especially as depicted in Doris Leslie’s novel I Return, told in first person and filled with eloquent, irreverent language. And to REH’s mad minstrel Rinaldo in “The Phoenix on the Sword”, and to Kipling’s Thomas the Rhymer in “The Last Rhyme of True Thomas.”

As for Felimid’s background, the misty, half-known history of the British Isles and Scandinavia in post-Roman times, the fifth and sixth centuries, well, Le Morte d’Arthur and Prince Valiant and The Black Knight had already helped plant the seeds in my mind, and then I read Rosemary Sutcliffe’s great Sword at Sunset. A lot of people have worked with the idea of the Arthur of “real” history fighting for the last remnant of Roman law and culture as the barbarian darkness comes down, but by me Sutcliffe still did it best. Although I found Edison Marshall’s The Pagan King a hell of good read too.

On the subject of barbarian darkness coming down, I read de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall in the 1963 Pyramid paperback at about the same time. I’d just left high school. Inadvertent time traveler Martin Padway finds himself back in Italy in the 530s in trouble with Romans, Goths, various religious fanatics, and eventually a Byzantine army, while trying to stave off the dark ages. That rang big bells with me and contributed to my fascination with the sixth century too.

Cripes, that is just the first question. I’d better be more concise with the rest.

Do you have any schooling in history? How did you develop an interest in and deep knowledge of early medieval northern European history and the British isles, the setting for Bard?

No formal education after high school. I was always a voracious reader, and as my ideas for a heroic fantasy character having adventures against a background of actual history – with myth, legend and magic mixed in, especially Irish legend – started to develop, I looked for Dark Age sources. In my teens I bought a copy of the Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, which started with the late Roman Empire and went through to 1478 (I still have it.) I checked out sources close to the period, like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Gildas and Bishop Gregory of Tours (History of the Franks). As I say, Prince Valiant and Lest Darkness Fall and Sword at Sunset did a lot to kick off my interest in the period. I haunted libraries looking for info on the pagan Saxons and their entry into Britain under Hengist, Attila and the Huns, etc. I was writing stories all this time as well as doing research, and each year I’d make a big heap of that wasted paper and burn it in the back yard. Like every writer’s early efforts, the less said about them the better. Well, almost every writer. Believe me, I was not one of the exceptions. Practice is the only way we get better and all of us start out penning absolute crap.

When did you start writing, and when and to what outlets did you first begin submitting stories? Did you face much rejection initially?

I started writing when I was nine. My earliest efforts were historical stories. Blatant copies of stuff like Blackbird Patrol by Andrew Wood (British navy men putting down the African slave trade) or Ronald Welch’s juveniles (Knight Crusader, Captain of Dragoons) or Dumas and Sabatini or Stephenson or Haggard, or westerns. Or plots swiped from Saturday matinee movies. I never stopped. And I made an annual bonfire of the junk I had written, which had priceless value as practice but otherwise was just waste paper.

I started submitting work to professional magazines when I was fifteen. My first attempt went to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and it was about spacemen in a Lunar base having trouble with a Lunar life form that resembled an armadillo with a globular head, featureless except for eyes.

You will be amazed to hear it was rejected. (That story sounds a hell of a lot better than the garbage they publish these days—DMR)

Crushed, wondering how they could fail to recognize my genius, I didn’t try again for two years. Then I did, not just with F&SF, but Analog. I think I even sent one to Amazing Stories, but I don’t even remember what it was and it never made it past the slush pile. Nor did the others.

Then, in February 1965, I joined the Australian army and served six years, including one term in Vietnam (Medical Corps). I didn’t submit any more stories professionally while a soldier, but I kept writing and doing research, including a lot about sixth-century Ireland and other sixth-century regions, from Scandinavia to Persia. I still have the exercise books I filled with notes and maps back then. A lot of it was background for my Felimid stories, though I was still developing the character.

Were you aware of sword-and-sorcery as a subgenre when you started writing stories of Felimid Mac Fal, as something apart from Tolkienian fantasy?

I was indeed. Matter of fact I didn’t become aware of Tolkien until the early 1970s, and as I said, I’d encountered REH and Leigh Brackett when I was fourteen. Then there was de Camp’s anthology, Swords and Sorcery, (containing C.L. Moore’s “Hellsgarde”), its successor The Spell of Seven, and the Lancer Books paperback editions of the Conan stories which appeared in the ‘60s. I read Heinlein’s Glory Road when it appeared as a serial in F&SF in 1963. Heinlein was partly experimenting with sword-and-sorcery and partly sending it up, I think, but I enjoyed it. And that landmark story of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, “The Lords of Quarmall” ran as a two-part serial in Fantastic Stories in – I think I was 1964. Yes. So I was definitely aware of sword and sorcery before I knew about Tolkien, though I’d read his buddy Lewis’s “Narnia” books as a kid and his interplanetary trilogy in my teens.

Why did you assume the pseudonym Dennis More?

Oh, that. Partly because I was bashful about using my own name. I didn’t feel my stuff was good enough to make the grade and I wanted a secret identity. Also, the stories I was doing had an Irish hero and I decided on an Irish name. But I only used it on a few stories.

Part Two of this interview appears here.

Brian Murphy is the author of Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery (Pulp Hero Press, 2020). Learn more about his life and work on his website, The Silver Key.