Tompkins at 60

October 6, 2020 Brian Murphy

Today Steve Tompkins would have turned 60, had he not passed into the West back on March 23, 2009. Steve was only 48 years old when he died and the world of Howard studies is far poorer for it.

60 is an age where most are working full-time jobs and still doing productive work, and writers are no exception. Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) arguably did his best work on the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series in his early 50s and early 60s—witness “The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar” (Fantastic, 1968) and “Ill Met in Lankhmar,” first published in 1970 in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The latter won both a Nebula and a Hugo. Poul Anderson wrote the outstanding War of the Gods (1997) when he was 70. And so one can only wonder what critical wonders Tompkins would have produced from his one of a kind pen in the last 10+ years.

Today I thought I would commemorate the occasion by taking a look at one of Steve’s essays for the old Cimmerian website for which I used to blog. This one is his first essay published on that site, which first supplemented and later replaced the lamented The Cimmerian print journal.

Published on June 19, 2006, “Maybe not a Boom, but a Drumbeat” summarizes the state of Robert E. Howard publishing in the early days of the 21st century and rebuts the claims of critics. Steve could throw some barbs when justified, and in particular when he believed the critics failed to reckon with Howard’s standing as a titan of fantasy literature. Noted Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi was a frequent target of Steve’s pun-laden ripostes, as was The Cimmerian contributor Gary Romeo. Joshi could never give Howard even 25% of the credit of his literary idol Lovecraft, who himself thought Howard was a first-class writer of the Weird, while Romeo was and remains famous for lavishing attention on the contributions of L. Sprague De Camp as being chiefly responsible for the Howard revival of the 60s, at the expense of the author himself.

In “Maybe Not a Boom, But a Drumbeat” Tompkins turned his acerbic keyboard on Leon Nielsen, who in The Cimmerian (print) vol. 3 no. 5 issue asserted that Howard was receding into the past, would never again achieve the same heights of popularity he enjoyed during the Lancer/Ace heyday of the 1960s to the early 80s, and that the perceived second Howardian coming was “just wishful thinking by the old guard.”

Steve, who by then had written the forward to the Bison books The Black Stranger and Other American Tales and would soon earn a publishing credit for the incredible foreword to Kull: Exile of Atlantis (Del Rey) strongly objected to the charges of insularity as only Steve could, with his trademark creativity and aplomb:

Here is some more Tompkins goodness from the piece:

He worries that Howard might “decline, vanish, and eventually be lost from memory once again, as has happened to many other pulp magazine writers.” But Howard is much more than just a dearly beloved pulp writer. Despite the cooties many Howardists flinch from catching by way of any association of their man with modern fantasy, Howard is a major, major genre figure. He can’t be written out of 20th century heroic fantasy, and his influence has been “written in” to the best 21st century heroic fantasy. His entry in the 1997 Encyclopedia of Fantasy is a Texas-sized hunk of real estate, even if vast expanses are given over to a forced march through innumerable pastiche-titles, and his legacy is going to be honored at the Texas-staged 2006 World Fantasy Convention. Moreover, he’s poised to benefit from the achievements of Peter Jackson and J.K. Rowling. Rowling has created tens of millions of new readers, and although the way of the world will see to it that many of them will shuffle or sleepwalk away from not only fantasy but pleasure reading itself, tens of thousands will delve into the genre’s deeper and darker Morias, where the Del Rey Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, and an at long last decontaminated Conan, soon to be joined by Kull, will be waiting alongside David Gemmell, George R.R. Martin, China Mieville, and others. Howard’s destiny is to engross readers and engender writers, so I think Leon Nielsen is calling for activity while ignoring the hyperactivity that is already underway. We can’t turn the clock back to 1966 or 1976 (the Romeo household is a special case) but we can do our not inconsiderable damnedest to ensure that 2006 mops the floor with 1996, and that momentum and momentousness carry over into 2007 and beyond. Maybe there’s no Boom, but there’s a drumbeat as expressive and galvanizing as the one that Solomon Kane can’t help hearing throughout the African sequences of “Red Shadows.”

I love this… “deeper and darker Morias”… “decontaminated Conan” and of course a wonderful allusion to a Solomon Kane story, all to prove his point that Howard appreciation and studies were much stronger than one critic believed. Barbed poetry.

In the years since Steve’s piece has been published time has proven his predictions prescient. Howard continues to ascend in popularity and grow ever more firmly rooted in the popular culture. Who knows if that much-discussed Netflix deal will eventually bear fruit and give us a decent television series, but it’s obvious that Conan is not going anywhere, any time soon. No way bud. Since 2006 we’ve got reprints of The Savage Sword of Conan, new videogames and role playing games, the revival of the peer-reviewed scholarly The Dark Man journal, an (admittedly lousy) new film, new podcasts like The Cromcast, Rogues in the House, and The Appendix N Book Club that regularly revive and analyze his works, conference panels, Robert E. Howard Days, and much more.

In short, Steve was right, and the critics have been proven wrong.

So, what are you waiting for? Read some Tompkins, and be grateful for his all to brief contributions to sword-and-sorcery, heroic fantasy, and all things Weird. Lead blogger Deuce Richardson has compiled an exhaustive repository of his writings in a set of handy links available here on the DMR Blog: https://dmrbooks.com/test-blog/2019/3/23/steve-tompkins-ten-years-gone?rq=tompkins

Thank you Steve, and I hope you are celebrating your 60th by mulling over the state of sword-and-sorcery and laughing along with Crom at the objections of the critics, their shrill cries passing like the harmless four winds over an indifferent Cimmeria.

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