My best friend would have turned fifty-three today, but he died on April 2, 2021. He wasn’t just my friend, however, Chris Hale was also a student of sword-and-sorcery. He left this world far too soon, but he achieved notable things in the field of Howard Studies/S&S/Heroic Fantasy. I’m going to look at those achievements tonight.

For some background… Chris and I met in college. We both attended a a dorm-room party and subsequently bonded over hard rock and harder liquor. Some nerd wanted to switch over from AC/DC to some Top Forty crap. Both of us loudly expressed our disapproval of that notion and the AC/DC kept playing for awhile longer. Chris saw in yours truly a kindred soul and suggested we do some shots. The party turned lame after awhile, so we adjourned to his dorm room for more drinking. I noticed his REH paperbacks—and, it must be said, several Conan pastiches—which led to a discussion of Robert E. Howard and sword-and-sorcery. From then on, we were buds.

After that first year at college, Chris moved about a hundred miles away, but we kept in touch. He ended up being the first roadie in my first band, driving all the way up for every show. The man loved his hard rock/metal. Chris turned me on to several bands that are still favorites of mine to this day. We also made a great team when attending ‘general admission’ concerts. We always got to first row. Every single time.

I didn’t put ‘warrior’ in the title of this blog entry lightly. Chris was a big guy. All of 6’4” and two hundred-plus pounds. A big, red-headed Irish-American and proud of it. He’d spent a couple of years in high school doing the Golden Gloves thing. That came in handy. We always had each other’s backs when hitting the bars…but there were plenty of times when Chris was out partying solo. More than once, he ended up walking away after beating multiple opponents to a standstill or defeat. The dude was a gladiator. Did I mention that he would have vivid dreams of being an Irish reiver or a Viking marauding unknown shores? After he got married, he amassed a respectable collection of battle-ready swords and other weapons.

Through it all, Chris and I maintained our interest in cool books, especially fantasy literature. We would do epic ‘book runs’ as we called ‘em, making trips to nearby cities just to hit the bookstores. We would regularly spend around one hundred dollars apiece--this was before Amazon, basically. I remember one time we hit a store in Springfield and Chris found a copy of Karl Edward Wagner’s Night Winds before I did. Both of us had been looking for it for years. He roared out, “Ha ha! Mine! All mine!” After we got back to P-burg, he handed it to me and said, “Dude, I know how much you wanted this. Go ahead and have it.” That was the kind of man he was.

About fifteen years ago, Chris got married and moved an hour away from the town we'd both lived in. I was best man at the wedding. By that point, my last real--i.e., one playing paying gigs--band was done. With Chris off doing his thing and a new Hewlett-Packard PC in my house, I really started pursuing my love of Robert E. Howard's fiction in earnest. That led to me attending Howard Days in 2006.

In the spring of 2007, the mighty Leo Grin contacted me, asking me if I wanted to do a panel on the Thurian Age at Howard Days 2007. I said hell to the yeah. I immediately called up Chris. We'd basically been staying in touch for the previous couple years by way of phone calls. I told Chris what was up and asked him if he wanted to roadtrip to Cross Plains. He was all in.

After trials and tribulations, Chris and I made it to Cross Plains in June of 2007. We had a great time. Not long after, David Drage, a Scotsman, contacted me. He'd seen me mention the trip on the old Official Robert E. Howard Forum. He wanted to know if I wanted to do a segment on HD 2007 for his new podcast, Dial 'P' For Pulp. I said, why not?

I called up Chris and we got together in Anthony Leverich's studio, recorded our account of the trip and sent it off to Drage. David put it in the next installment of DPFP.

Here's the link:

https://archive.org/details/dialpforpulp/dialpforpulp-002-Oct07.mp3

Chris' and my segment runs from 13:46 to 30:55.

Not long after the podcast aired, Leo Grin weighed in at the Cimmerian blog. He had this to say:

‘Highlights for Howard fans include…a laconic and humorous Howard Days trip report by Deuce Richardson.

My first impression is that the jury is still out on whether this experiment will become a must-listen for fans. (…) On the plus side, the Richardson trip report does hint strongly at the possibilities of the medium, and how phone interviews and other never-before-heard audio content (on-site reports from Howard Days or Gen Con, perhaps) would be compelling.’

This was 2007. Podcasts had yet to reach their full potential. As usual, Leo was ahead of the curve.

Lo and behold, in 2008, Leo personally put DPFP up for a ‘Black River Award’ for the last of the actual Cimmerian awards ever given out.* For those who don’t know, nominees for the ‘Black River’, as Leo put it, ‘have produced something special that doesn’t fit into any other category: scholarly art, biographical discoveries, etc.’

Leo told me later that it was the Howard Days segment which tipped the scales for nominating DPFP. I might not have made the trip to HD 2007 nor recorded the podcast without Chris Hale. Just sayin’. As it turns out, Chris n’ I lost out to Patrice Louinet for his work on The Last of the Trunk. With that sort of competition, I’m fine with getting second place.

So, jump ahead to the summer of 2008. I’m in the midst of my rediscovery of A. Merritt’s work. At the same time, I learn that Paizo is going to publish an excellent edition of The Ship of Ishtar in 2009; the best in sixty years. I decided to ‘prime the pump’ and give the Paizo edition what boost I could by doing a podcast dedicated to The Ship of Ishtar ahead of publication. I contacted David Drage and he was all about it.

In September of 2008, Chris, myself and Brian Willhite assembled in Anthony Leverich’s studio. Brian was another buddy of mine. I’d taught him to play bass back when we were roommates in 1990. A smart guy and a Merritt fan. At the time—2008—Brian and I were jamming out at his place in the country.

Anyway, all of us had reread The Ship of Ishtar to refresh our takes on it. We sat down in the Leverich studio and did three segments. David Drage featured the first one in October of ‘08 and the second in December. It took until December of 2009 for the third segment to debut. I forget why. In a way, it was fortuitous, since it roughly coincided with the Paizo release of The Ship of Ishtar a few months earlier.

Here are the three segments:

https://archive.org/details/dialpforpulp/dialpforpulp-009-Oct08.mp3

https://archive.org/details/dialpforpulp/dialpforpulp-010-Dec08.mp3

https://archive.org/details/dialpforpulp/dialpforpulp-011-Dec09.mp3

Sequentially, they are...

20:44-36:23

28:58-48:56

8:35-19:51

Listen to those segments. Chris Hale had read The Ship of Ishtar and thought deeply on what he’d read. He brought twenty-plus years of heroic fantasy scholarship to the project. We discussed recording a segment for the centennial of A Princess of Mars, but David Drage had quit doing DPFP by that point.

This is as good a time as any to raise a glass to the shade of Anthony Leverich. He was always a fan of my guitar-playing, as I was of his. Toni died in 2014. Without his studio, none of those pioneering podcast segments would have happened. Did I mention that his dad played bass for Elvis?

I always said—starting thirty years ago—that Chris Hale was the Wulfhere to my Cormac, the Sigurd to my Kenton. He had my back from Day One of our friendship. Friends like Chris Hale only come along once in a lifetime. Rest in peace, brother.

*After 2008, the Cimmerian awards switched over to the REH Foundation awards.

**My Thanks to Tex Albritton for his invaluable help with this post.