Charles R. Saunders Remembered
A photo of Saunders taken during his final years.
Charles R. Saunders would have turned seventy-five this past Monday. The churn and roil and toil of real life prevented me from posting then. I'm giving props now.
As many DMR Books readers probably know, word that Charles R. Saunders had died in May of 2020 hit social media last fall, courtesy of Charles' friend and protegee, Milton Davis. Soon, a flurry of tributes to CRS were posted on the Interwebz.
Initially, I felt I had little to add. The tributes were well-written and did a good job covering CRS' career. An especially good one was written by Charles' long-time friend and publisher, Ron Fortier, who knew Saunders from the 1970s-on.
Then I read this post by Derrick Ferguson—a good author who died this year, I should note. Like me, Ferguson had never met Charles in person. Like me, he was a fan and had corresponded with CRS by way of emails. That got me thinking that maybe I had something to add.
My first encounter with the fiction of Charles R. Saunders occurred when I was in junior high. I found a copy of The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 3 in a used bookstore. That anthology was a revelation to me at the time and deserves its own blog entry...but I digress. Among the excellent stories within it was Saunders' "The Pool of the Moon", a tale of Imaro.* That story was sword-and-sorcery in the classic Howardian mold, with a strong warrior fighting a Lovecraftian foe. Lin Carter, having read other tales of Imaro in the small press, had solicited an original adventure from CRS, getting Saunders and Imaro out into mass market circulation for the first time. "The Pool of the Moon" stood out to me even in that quality anthology. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for further tales of Imaro.
Not long after, I found Imaro--also published by DAW Books--in another used bookstore. This was quality S&S. For me, the standout story was "Slaves of the Giant Kings." More on that later. I soon found Amazons!--once again, from DAW Books--which featured the first appearance of Dossouye, Saunders' S&S heroine. A few years later, I tracked down Imaro: The Quest for Cush. It took me another decade to find Imaro: The Trail of Bohu.
As is my wont when I find something cool, I urged friends of mine to read the Imaro tales. One of them--Chris Hale--said, "Waitaminnit! I've got an Imaro story in one of my old Dragon issues". Sure enough, it was "Mzee", a tale of Imaro's youth.
Fast forward about fifteen years. I was a moderator on the late, lamented Official Robert E. Howard Forum. Rumors began to spread of Night Shade Books publishing the Imaro novels. They turned out to be true. While I welcomed the fact that CRS was getting published again--I'd heard nothing about his activities for years--and I promoted the novels to others, I already possessed all three Imaro novels. Despite that, I planned on buying the volumes just to support Charles’ return to S&S.
Then I found out that Saunders was heavily revising the stories from the DAW versions. A big revision was his removal of "Slaves of the Giant Kings" and the insertion of a new chapter, "The Afua", which would replace it in Imaro's chronology. That got my attention.
I ended up buying the Night Shade edition of Imaro. "The Afua" was a good story, as was "Betrayal in Blood". They helped flesh out the "haramia period" in the Imaro saga. However, I didn't feel that either of them had the power of "Slaves of the Giant Kings". In my opinion, there was room for all three chapters, with the "old Tanisha" character being killed in SotGK and a "new Tanisha" being introduced in the new chapters.
I said just that in 2008 on the REH Forum. Then, in January, 2009, Steve Tompkins--managing editor of The Cimmerian blog--contacted me about writing for the website. I began doing so. Around the first of March, the Supreme Editor of The Cimmerian, Leo Grin, contacted me. Charles R. Saunders, who'd just fired up his blog, Drums of Nyumbani, had read my forum comment about “Slave of the Giant Kings” and responded to it with a blog post. Leo, also a long-time fan and major supporter of CRS, put me in touch with Mr. Saunders.
That initiated a correspondence that would last half a decade. Charles and I agreed to cordially disagree on that particular topic, but we kept in touch.
Leo Grin worked up ‘pop-up’ pics of various iconic fantasy/S&S authors for The Cimmerian which would appear randomly on the main page and in the sidebar of various blog posts. Such pics included REH, Fritz Leiber and others. This pic of CRS was included in those ranks.
As I mentioned above, Leo Grin was a long-time CRS fan, as was Steve Tompkins. Both of them covered Saunders' work at the Cimmerian blog. After Steve's death, Leo continued to post about CRS-related topics and other TC bloggers, including myself, followed his lead.
By my rough count, the Cimmerian blog published fifteen blog entries directly related to or referencing Mr. Saunders and his work between April 23, 2008 and May 8, 2009. Well over one post a month. The Cimmerian's coverage of CRS during that period was easily comparable to its posts on Fritz Leiber or Michael Moorcock. The only author who got more coverage was Robert E. Howard, which is quite understandable.
As soon as Charles fired up his new blog, Drums of Nyumbani, Leo Grin reported on it.
http://leogrin.com/CimmerianBlog/there-is-always-something-new-out-of-africa/
Steve Tompkins quickly followed that up with "Abomean Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves — And So Is Charles R. Saunders". Tompkins was soon, again, singing the praises of CRS with "After Aquilonia and Having Left Lankhmar: Sword-and-Sorcery Since the 1980s", his landmark essay on the history of S&S from 1990 to 2008, wherein Saunders gets a big shout-out. In March, 2009, Tompkins unleashed an in-depth look at the entire Imaro series titled " 'I’ll Kill the Mama-Mfuka': The Trail of Bohu in 2009". It would be one of the last posts he ever wrote.
Steve died on March 23, 2009. Leo kept posting updates regarding just about every new entry at Charles' blog. Meanwhile, other TC bloggers followed suit. I posted about Charles' "Mwindo" series which he was sharing on MySpace at the time. In "Charles Saunders Compares Conan and Jack Reacher", I questioned CRS' take on Jack Reacher. We ended up agreeing that there was more than a dash of Solomon Kane in Jack's literary DNA. In my post, "Of Buffalos and Women-Warriors: CRS’ brand new blog", I gave a signal boost to Saunders' own blog post while ruminating on Dossouye's mount, Gbo.
By late December, 2009, The Cimmerian was indisputably--reckoning by monthly views--the biggest S&S blog on the Interwebz. We reported on the imminent publication of Imaro: The Naama War within about a day of it being announced at Saunders' own blog. The last post of the year at TC was Al Harron's "Charles R. Saunders’ Quest for (Historical) Kush".
Al would follow that up with January 17, 2010's blog entry, "The Long Road to Imaro IV". Several other blog entries by Al and yours truly would be posted in the following months. The last CRS-related post at The Cimmerian blog would be "Charles R. Saunders Gives Props to Frazetta" on May 19, 2010, just three weeks before the blog shut down.
From May, 13, 2009 to May 19, 2010, The Cimmerian blog posted CRS-related blog entries a total of twenty-one times. Over the course of twenty-five months, The Cimmerian promoted Saunders thirty-six times. I challenge anyone to compare that to any other blog up at the time--beside Saunders' own website. We did our part.
After the Cimmerian blog shut down, I took a break from SFF fandom for about a year. That included my correspondence. I didn't get back in touch with Charles Saunders until late 2011. We were Facebook friends and also exchanged replies on the REH Forum. Around 2017, he seemed to kind of drift away.
There was plenty going on in my life at that time, including the start of my writing for this blog. I simply assumed that Charles would reappear at some point. After all, he had dropped below the radar in the late '80s and then came roaring back in the 2000s. I heard nothing from Milton Davis or others that there was anything to worry about. Meanwhile, there were Saunders-authored/edited books like Griots, Abengoni and Nyumbani Tales being published.
So, it came as something of a shock when word of Mr. Saunders' death filtered down from Canada. It is still kind of shocking now. Saunders was one of the titans of '70s-'80s sword-and-sorcery, along with Wagner, Taylor and others. He combined a deft hand at crafting fast-moving plots with an ability to depict intense combat that is rarely found in twenty-first century fantasy. His signature character, Imaro--while often compared to Conan in days gone by--is more similar to REH's brooding, vengeance-driven, almost superhuman Cormac Fitzgeoffrey. That said, Imaro is a unique, iconic character in the S&S pantheon. In all my interactions with Charles—even when we strongly disagreed—he was nothing but gracious and calm. As with Karl Edward Wagner, I doubt his like will be seen again.
*The title of the Imaro tale, "The Pool of the Moon", made me wonder these last couple of years if CRS had read some A. Merritt. Considering that he'd read Howard, Lovecraft and Burroughs back in the '60s, it certainly isn't out of the question. Sadly, I'll never have a chance to ask Charles now.