Part One of this interview appears here.

What was the market like in the mid-late 70s for this type of fiction? Specifically how did you go from Fantastic Stories, to Swords Against Darkness, to getting a contract at Ace? What details can you share about that?

I was in Australia and the only real markets were in the U.S. Mark you, I was always at the old Space Age Bookshop in Swanston Street, looking for the latest SF and fantasy, and checking out the comics range.  Space Age was where you went in Melbourne then.  No other place, really. Although I was still living in Tasmania (after my army discharge in late 1970) when I saw an issue of Marvel’s Conan the Barbarian for the first time. It was only issue #7. I wrote to the Marvel crew asking for help finding the back issues. Roy Thomas printed my letter and explained that they didn’t usually do that, but they were so happy to hear any copies of Conan even reached Tasmania that they’d make an exception. The letter appeared in the legendary Issue #23, “The Song of Red Sonja,” and it brought results. It was also, looking at it in a certain way, the first thing of mine ever published in a professional magazine.

It didn’t count, of course, the way a story for which you get PAID counts, and I had my sights on just that. I worked hard at turning Felimid into a fully rounded character and doing a few closely connected stories about him.  While I was doing that, Tigers of the Sea was published by Donald M. Grant in 1973. I grabbed it (at Space Age Bookshop, where else, I was living in Melbourne by then) and devoured it. The period was almost exactly Felimid’s, a few decades earlier, that was all, and I played for a while with the idea that Felimid’s father had been one of Cormac mac Art’s crew when Cormac led Gaelic reivers, before joining Wulfhere’s Danes.

Then, and I could not believe it, came a letter from Ted White accepting “Fugitives in Winter” for Fantastic Stories. 1974, that was. The magazine was strapped for cash and could only pay on publication, not on acceptance, which Ted explained was not how he liked to do things but the way he had to do them since Fantastic’s national print order had just been drastically cut.

I wasn’t about to object or withdraw the story!  My first sale!

Can you share any details about your process of working/collaborating with Andrew Offutt on the Cormac Mac Art novels? i.e., who wrote what, or did someone do a first draft and then the other the second, as well as how that co-writing relationship was formed?

It was actually astonishing the way that came together. As stated above, I had an acceptance letter from Ted White for “Fugitives in Winter” in 1974. But the yarn wasn’t printed until October 1975.  As I remember, I got over-enthusiastic and jumped the gun by sending Ted two more Felimid stories right away – “The Forest of Andred” and “The Atheling’s Wife.”  He let me know, nicely, that I shouldn’t send any more at once. 

Something else of significance was happening that year. The 33rd world science fiction convention (Aussiecon) was being held right there in Melbourne, in August. I was so tight for money then I couldn’t spring for full membership or get a room at the Southern Cross Hotel, just get day memberships and show up daily and in the evenings. The guest of honour was Ursula le Guin, fan guest of honour Susan Wood. 

At a room party someone – and I forget who! – told me that having a story accepted, even though not published yet, by Fantastic, made me eligible to join the Science Fiction Writers of America, with due professional perks such as access to professional advice and news. So, I wrote applying, and who should respond but the man who was SFWA’s treasurer at the time, Andrew J. Offutt!

And what project should Andy have in hand but a series of books about Cormac mac Art, set in the late 5th century, as part of the big Robert E. Howard boom?

His first Cormac novel, Sword of the Gael, would be published in late 1976. I happened to mention that my Felimid series was set in the same period, just a generation later, and he wrote back. It turned out that I’d done more research on the period than Andy, so he asked if I’d be interested in a collaboration. Would I ever?

The eventual result was the Ace paperback The Tower of Death. The idea of harking back a few years, to 486 A.D. and Galicia in north-west Spain, was mine (REH’s original Cormac stories and Andy’s Sword of the Gael were set in 490.) The Roman lighthouse known as the Tower of Hercules, near Coruna, is real and still stands. You can google it now, but in the 1970s I had to hit the books for info about Roman and Visigothic Spain. Then I borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft for a nest of malevolent Deep Ones in the waters off that lighthouse, and a human cult that colluded with them. Cormac and his big Danish pal Wulfhere show up, storm-battered, having fled from Gaul pursued by warships, and …

Andy and I did a sequel, When Death Birds Fly (my idea for the title was The Black Owl, but Andy thought it wasn’t dramatic enough.) Cormac and Wulfhere return to the region of Brittany and Nantes, to settle a few scores, at the time when the fierce, treacherous Franks under Clovis are attacking the “kingdom” of Soissons, the last remnant of Roman power in Gaul, under the Consul Syagrius. He’s defeated and has to flee for refuge; in my story, at the end of the novel, Cormac and Wulfhere give him passage out of Gaul in their longship. Unlike REH, I tied the pair’s exploits in with a few historical facts. I was sort of hoping to continue the series after Andy stopped writing it, but neither Ace Books nor the Howard estate warmed to the idea, so that never happened.

As for how an Aussie and a native of Kentucky who had never met collaborated on two novels, “with all the back-and-forth correspondence,” Andy gave his answer to that in an introduction to my story – the first Nasach story - “Hungry Grass”, which he published in one of the Swords Against Darkness anthos he edited.  “Expensively!”      

I probably had more reason to flinch at the postal expense than Andy did, being a lot poorer than he at the time, but then I was a raw newbie still and Andy was a real professional who knew the full truth of that sour tag line among writers, “Barabbas was a publisher.”  I was so excited to be getting published at all, and to be working with a Howard character, and to be partners with a genuine pro, that I didn’t care about anything else. Besides, I had no responsibilities, while Andy had a wife, kids, and a house. Makes a difference, as I later found out.

As I remember, with both those Cormac novels, I came up with the basic plot and historical background and did the background research – on post-Roman Gaul and the Suevic Kingdom of north-west Spain, for instance. Then Andy would do a full, chapter-by-chapter plot outline and send it to me.  Then one of us would do a rough draft of two or three chapters and send it to the other, and we’d polish it up. Then Andy did the final draft and sent it to Ace.

That was how I first got a foot in the door with Ace Books. It led in the end to Ace publishing four of my Felimid novels, the first being a collection of the stories I’d had published in Fantastic, plus one long new one in the middle. They were so closely connected they made a coherent novel, with some characters, like the British girl Regan and the werewolf Tosti, recurring throughout.

Another thing resulted from my failing to get contracts to continue Cormac’s adventures. Nasach. I dropped the tentative idea I’d had that Felimid’s father once sailed with Cormac. Not only because of that, but also because reflection convinced me it was too clumsy an idea. There were big discrepancies between my Dark Age Britain and Howard’s – the Picts, and the presence of Vikings, and REH’s ideas of King Arthur. I still liked the idea of Felimid’s father having been a pirate and the circumstances of the bard’s birth having been irregular, but since his line had been poets and harpers for many generations, even back to the legendary Tuatha De Danann, that meant the pirate must have broken with tradition and rebelled. Also, he must have learned the business from someone, and Howard’s Cormac mac Art was eliminated.

Enter Nasach the Firbolg, a sort of substitute for Cormac.

He resembles Cormac mac Art in some ways.  He’s tall, lean, dark, and tough as a wolf.  He is, or becomes, a chief of Gaelic reivers. Cormac, though, appears to be of aristocratic stock. His weapon is the sword and he’s apparently literate, having at least some acquaintance with Roman culture. He knows who Petronius was, and he knows about Hades and Pluto. Nasach is a fisherman’s son from the Kerry region. His weapon is the spear, as a rule. He learned to fight as a slave in Caledonia, abducted by pirates at the age of fourteen, and escaped after seven years. He fought his way home tooth and nail. When my last Nasach story closed he was still doing it.

The first one, “Hungry Grass”, saw print in Andy Offutt’s anthology, Swords Against Darkness V. He’d already accepted a Felimid short story, “On Skellig Michael”, and included it in Sword Against Darkness II. The direct sequel to “Hungry Grass,” “Where Silence Rules” was written for the Aussie anthology Distant Worlds, edited by Paul Collins and published in 1981.  “The Lost Ship” followed in Frontier Worlds, published in 1983. I don’t suppose many people in the U.S. have read those, but the next Nasach story, “Men From the Plain of Lir” was in Weird Tales #292, Fall 1988. The next was “The Drowned Dead Shape,” which appeared in Skelos Journal #1, the summer of 2016. I wrote another, “The Crimson Spectre”, which was accepted by the people at Skelos, but because of their health and financial troubles I don’t think they’ve brought that issue out.

So, after Ted White in Fantastic, Andy Offutt gave me my second big break, and in a way my third and fourth too.

What was the story behind Bard V, and the ending of the series?

Almost wish you hadn’t asked!  That’s a sad sad story! Briefly, Ace Books published the Bard novels I-IV, and I moved on to other stuff like the Danans books (three of them) which Ace also published, and the series of short stories about Kamose the Magician set in ancient Egypt, which came out in Weird Tales and made the complete change of pace I wanted.

Headline Books in the U.K. then reprinted Bard I to Bard IV, starting in 1989. Unlike Ace, they also contracted for a fifth Bard novel, which was Felimid’s Homecoming. I wanted to bring him back to Erin finally, and I did. I might have written another Felimid book then, but Bard V didn’t sell well – didn’t even make back the advance money – and Headline didn’t want any more.

By that time I’d met and married Anna – about whom I am still crazy after all these years, in fact more crazy than ever – and we had Francis. Very few people can support a family on a writer’s unreliable income. Full time remunerative work and regular pay was essential. I wanted to click with another series of novels, but that didn’t happen.

I had several stories published in Mike Ashley’s British anthologies, like Chronicles of the Round Table and Shakespearean Whodunnits, and Fantastic Books published a collection of my Kamose the Magician stories, eleven of them, under the title Servant of the Jackal God. That was in 2012. But I was running into a string of dead ends with my novels.

I kept trying different genres, including romance. I did a full length novel about Kamose, The Jackal God’s Hunter, but it didn’t find a publisher. I tried a medieval murder mystery, set against the background of a lavish 14th century tournament, but it didn’t find a publisher. I tried a weird horror novel set in 1911, inspired by REH’s short story “The Thing on the Roof,” giving the unnamed narrator of TTOTR a name, a background (Boston upper crust) a family and a fiancée, and problems with a horrid cult. It hasn’t found a publisher. Which really irked me as I still think it’s good, maybe the best thing I’ve done in years.

I also started losing confidence, saying to myself that maybe I’m like those ageing gunfighters in the movies, slowing down, unable to match the fast new hotshot kids in town.  (Although if Matthew Reilly, who consistently makes the best seller lists, is one of those new hotshot kids, there are not printable words that can express my disgust.)  I tell ya, Brian, they just do not write ‘em the way me and Chaucer used to.

Except my son Francis, who is not just a chip off the old block; he’s a lot better. 

However, the whole Bard series is now being brought out again, in E–book and audiobook format, and the company wants Bard VI, also, which I am now writing.

What can you share about your health and your battles with non-Hodgkins lymphoma?

Oh, well. This time around it’s not such a big deal.  Fourteen years ago, when it first struck me, it was kind of alarming. I started to get tired a lot, and lose weight. The real initial warning sign that something was wrong was when I went outside to mow the lawn, and before I’d done a quarter of the smallest patch I had to leave the mower and go inside, exhausted, to lie down. That was not like me.

The weight loss accelerated. The GP I first went to see, taken by Anna right after the lawnmower event, because the tiredness was extreme by then, is best described as an asshole. He didn’t even send me for any tests, just listened to the symptoms and did the usual superficial blood pressure/pulse rate things, and as good as told me I had liver cancer and should write my will. Anna suggested it might be a blood disorder (she’s sharp on medical matters) and the jerk snorted, “Pigs might fly.”

A blood disorder was just what it turned out to be. Anna took me to a different GP for a second opinion, and that doctor turned out to be a thousand per cent better than the jerk. She referred me at once for a whole battery of tests, blood, cardio, liver, and then to a specialist in haematology and medical oncology. Unlike the jerk, she was right on the ball and so was he. I was dropping weight faster and faster, down to eight stone by the time I went into hospital for a course of chemo, but I responded to it well and pulled through fine. I lost every hair I still had, but it grew back afterwards and my appetite came back too, in spades. I ate ravenously until I reached my normal weight again.

It turned out that non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma occurs disproportionately in Vietnam vets. Not only the ones who were exposed to Agent Orange (I wasn’t, that I know of or that tests revealed) but exposed to other herbicides and insecticides too. The latter got sprayed everywhere. I can’t do better here than quote from Bryce Courtenay’s novel Smoky Joe’s Café, told by a (fictional) Australian veteran. Courtenay did his homework for the book, as he always does, and interviewed a lot of real veterans and medical personnel.

“At the time nobody really asked if it was dangerous, we all reckoned if they were spraying this stuff where we were fighting and even living it couldn’t be harmful to us. Nobody in their right mind would put their own troops in danger, would they?

“The Hygiene Unit at Nui Dat sprayed insecticides like DDT, Malathion and Dieldrin round the camp on anything that moved. They sprayed it in our tents, in our weapon pits, in our kitchens and mess halls and in our latrines. It would be on the plates we ate off and the cups we drank from. It’s so toxic, Dieldrin is now banned in every country in the world because it’s a carcinogenic and deadly to humans.

“That’s just one of dozens of chemicals used. Of course, we were told the stuff they sprayed everywhere was deadly to insects, leaves, rice paddies, rivers, mozzies, spiders, in fact to everything that grew or breathed – except humans.

“I guess when you’re twenty-one years old you’ll believe just about anything the army tells you.”

The passage rings a big bell with me because I was one of the dumb twenty-year-olds who actually sprayed that stuff, from a big tank strapped to my back, in the latrines, on every bush, all around the camp. No protective gear. The place was Vung Tau, not Nui Dat, but same difference.

To be sure, the army and various governments were telling soldiers bullshit long before Vietnam. The bloody British crown tested a baker’s dozen of A-bombs in the Australian desert back in the 1950s. Our soldiers watched it unprotected and walked into the radioactive ground zero afterwards, under orders. Our navy boys recovered highly contaminated debris, under orders. Air force pilots actually flew their planes into the mushroom clouds, under orders.

As for the aborigines who lived in the desert where the tests were carried out, their presence wasn’t officially recognised. “There are no natives here.  That’s what they told us.”  And when military people found their own eyes telling them otherwise, a “colonel in full uniform” roared at them on parade, “You did not see any aborigines in the camp today. They were never here. It did not happen. Is that clear?”

Nothing had changed by the Vietnam years.  Or not nearly enough.

I was among the lucky ones. I came through fine and the lymphoma didn’t recur for thirteen years. I had regular blood tests to track my condition. Then, a year ago, it did recur, but it took the blood test to reveal it, I wasn’t passing out or losing weight.  X-rays and scans also ensued.  Just for gravy, they revealed that I had massive gallstones and a badly infected gall bladder that might rupture any time.  They asked me in the hospital if I was in pain, and I said, truthfully, “Not a twinge.  Haven’t noticed anything.”  They were amazed.  They assured me that neutron star level masses of pain would have been appropriate and I needed my gall bladder removed yesterday. They couldn’t quite do it yesterday but they rushed the op through the next day, as a reasonable option.

The specialist professor – the one I’d seen originally for my lymphoma, I’m now off the gall bladder subject - said he’d send me to a different haematologist, one whose knowledge was more up-to-date than his. She’s a young woman who really knows her stuff.  She also orders a thorough battery of regular tests in case they’re missing something.  Well, I had radiotherapy, but it didn’t quite do the trick and they gave me some chemo as well, at the Peter McCallum Clinic here in Melbourne, which is world class.  I seem to be okay again now, no symptoms except breathlessness and feeling tired after exertion, and a persistent cough.  This is probably as much to do with my age as the lymphoma. The blood tests so far are cleary. I get cardio and lung tests regularly too. Those seem all right.

That’s the way things stand now.

What has precipitated your return to writing, and to Bard VI, after all these years? Can you share any details about the publisher (if it’s being traditionally published), anticipated manuscript or publishing dates, any high level details on the story?

It has been the hell of a long time.

Mind you, I never did stop writing entirely. I was constantly writing articles for the weblog REH: Two Gun Raconteur, and for the Shieldwall of glorious memory (aka The Cimmerian) until it closed down. But that was essentially fan writing. I was getting some stories published, like the ones in Mike Ashley’s various anthologies with various themes. I even did a Nelson’s era sea adventure for one of them – The Mammoth Book of Hearts of Oak, published 2001. My intrepid captain wasn’t in the English navy, though. He was Roger Lowell North, the son of an American privateer who fought in the War for Independence, and a privateer himself – sailing under French letters of marque at the time Napoleon was just starting out, and had a campaign in Italy to fight, in 1796. The story was “Fountains of Resolve” (a quote from John Paul Jones) and I really like it. I remember saying to myself, many times, “I have to write more stories about this joker, even a novel or two.”

I said exactly the same thing to myself about Valentine, the protagonist of my story “The Banished Men,” which saw daylight in another Mike Ashley antho, Shakespearean Whodunnits. Valentine is the main character in old Will’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, and I borrowed him, as other writers in that collection borrowed Shylock, Viola, and Othello.  Of course Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona, too, and I had Valentine being acquainted with characters from that play, before he left Verona to see the world – Romeo himself, and Mercutio and Tybalt, and Benvolio, whom he meets in “The Banished Men.”  I hypothesised that on leaving Verona, Valentine first travelled north into the Holy Roman Empire, then east towards Vienna, and was there in the desperate struggle that was the siege of 1529.  REH described it in “The Shadow of the Vulture.”  I never intended to make any blatant tie-ins with the REH story, but I did plan to have Valentine encounter, in passing, a red-headed fighting woman from Ruthenia who is nicknamed, by Italians, “La Fiamma” – The Flame, for her red-gold hair and her fury in combat. Spaniards call her “La Baliza”, The Blaze or The Beacon, and Germans “Das Feuer”, their language being less musical and they less imaginative. If you identify La Fiamma with Howard’s Red Sonya you will not be wrong.  She wouldn’t play a big part in the story of Valentine at Vienna, but a fan like me could hardly put Valentine there without having him at least notice her on the ramparts!

Then I said the same thing to myself about Johan de Mandeville, who (whom?) I made a character in my story “Benefit of Clergy” which appeared in yet another Mike Ashley antho, The Mammoth Book of More Historical Whodunnits. Yes, that’s the Sir John de Mandeville who wrote the 14th century best-seller, Mandeville’s Travels and Voyages, a splendid old lying scoundrel. I assumed that in “real” life he was a professional herald who knew the Black Prince. I not only told myself I had to write a novel about him, and his pursuivant – or apprentice herald – Winged Spur, I actually did. But it hasn’t found a publisher. If it’s ever to do so I’ll have to rewrite it considerably. As first written … it just tried to be too many things at once. If I keep it a murder mystery it may have a chance.

I did keep getting short stories accepted, and published, here and there.  “Witch with Bronze Teeth” appeared in the Rogue Blades Entertainment antho Discovery! edited by Jason Waltz, in 2017.  “Herald of Chaos” led off Darrell Schweitzer’s Lovecraftian antho That is Not Deadin 2015. A story set in the Second Crusade, “Stain of Blood” came out in another antho edited by Jason Waltz, Crossbones and Crosses, in 2019. The protagonist was none other than Geoffrey the Bastard, father of REH’s less-than-idealistic Irish crusade warrior, Cormac FitzGeoffrey. (Howard never wrote any stories about Geoffrey himself, just mentioned him as part of Cormac’s background, so I didn’t feel I’d be taking undue liberties there.) And a story of mine, “Written in Lightning”, is to be found in The Lost Empire of Sol, which for a while I feared would founder and never be published. I created two new characters for that one. Adan Seperuvo is a smuggler, hijacker and all-around rogue of the spaceways, while Dathyl pab Marddu is a savage warrior girl from the swamps and jungles of Venus - as it was in this rather different primeval Solar System. My character Palamides from the Bard series made a return to print for the DMR Books antho Death Dealers & Diabolists, in 2019, in “The Man with the Evil Eye,” set in fifth-century Constantinople.  My two short stories featuring Felimid the bard’s father as a wild young boy, “The Unlawful Hunter” and “The Haunting of Mara” just came out again as well, in Dave Ritzlin’s anthology Renegade Swords II.

But.

It’s the novels I wanted to see printed, and that kept on not happening!  I was discouraged for years. A couple of things snapped me out of it in the end. A great guy named Ralph Grasso founded a Taylor fan club online, and to my astonishment I realized I still HAD fans, apparently a number, and pros like Darrell Schweitzer and Scott Oden still liked my stuff. I also realized, courtesy of non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma, that I am not going to be around forever, though I intend to be around with the love of my life for some time yet. For that I’ll even follow doctors’ orders.

Therefore, back to writing novels, and all the short stories I can get in print, to keep my name in front of people until I finally click with another novel. This year I’m working hard on two. There’s Bard VI: Sunspear, and a murder mystery set in Galway, Ireland, in 1790, with a newly-fledged law counsellor just back from London as the detective.  Again, this owes something to REH!  The fourteen great merchant families known as the “Tribes of Galway” include the Kirowans, which was the name of several of REH’s characters. There were the occult investigators Conrad and Kirowan, who appear in a few of his stories, and Michael Kirowan, the bereaved narrator of “Dermod’s Bane” and the Professor Kirowan whose waspish presence graces Conrad’s “bizarrely furnished study” in “The Children of the Night.”  My fresh-skinned lawyer isn’t a Kirowan, though.  His name is Malachi Bodkin, the Bodkins being another of the fourteen tribes, and he’s mighty proud of his tribe’s history, too.

Maybe this time …

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.