Richard L. Tierney has died. One of the Sword-and-Sorcery legends. A Great Old One of our beloved sub-genre. Australian author, Leigh Blackmore, a long-time supporter of all things S&S, had this to say:

David C. Smith has just posted to say he has confirmed that poet and author, devoted fan of Lovecraft, Howard, Tolkien and others, and master writer of Sword and Sorcery in a Gnostic vein, Richard L. Tierney has passed away today at the Good Shepherd Nursing Home in his home town of Mason City, Iowa. Danny Lovecraft had let me know yesterday that 'Eldritchard' had broken his ankle two weeks ago and it seemed he was fast going downhill.
I'm really heartbroken. I had talked to Dick on the phone periodically from Australia over the last year-18 months. He was in good spirits until quite recently. Danny Lovecraft was in touch with him more recently than I, and is in the process of preparing the new/expanded edition of his poetry collection SAVAGE MENACE AND OTHER POEMS, to which I contributed an appreciation of RLT. I was just about to review his last collection, the expanded SORCERY AGAINST CAESAR (his Simon of Gitta tales). I wish he could have lived to see the new poetry collection and the review. I had the honour of collaborating with him on the poem "Twilight of the Mage" (Midnight Echo 5, 2011). The sound of his wonderful rich voice, and his laugh, lingers in my ears. He was a Great Old One and his like will not soon be seen again.

I personally first encountered Richard Tierney by way of Zebra's Tigers of the Sea, itself a reprint of the Donald M. Grant edition. That book contained all of Robert E. Howard's Cormac Mac Art yarns, including an intro by RLT and two REH stories that he 'completed'. Richard was one of the few authors, then or now, who could write in the REH style and who truly grasped what Howard was trying to say. When it comes to such 'completions', Tierney's are about as good as we are going to get. Far better than what we got from de Camp and Carter--regarding REH in general--and better (speaking as a David Drake fan) than Drake's 'completion' of 'Tigers' two decades later.

My second encounter with Richard's fiction was in my hometown library. I checked out Swords Against Darkness II and discovered Simon of Gitta in "The Scroll of Thoth". Here was the 'Dark Trinity Universe'--the synergistic writings of REH, Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft--in action. It also featured Caligula, whom I had previously encountered in ERB's I Am a Barbarian. Powerful stuff.

I would pick up more Simon of Gitta tales here n' there over the next decade, but it was Chaosium's The Scroll of Thoth--edited by Robert M. Price--that let me read Simon's saga all together and in sequence.

Fast forward about a decade. Leo Grin, the editor of the legendary REH journal, The Cimmerian, wanted to do something special for the centennial of Robert E. Howard's birth. Not only did he decide to put out an issue every month--something unheard of in fanzine circles--but he also brought on RLT to do a Howardian poem for every issue. That series of poems is now called the 'Hyborian Cycle' by some. Richard would return to contribute three poems in 2008, the last year of The Cimmerian's publication.

Leo's selection of RLT wasn't something out of the blue. Tierney had always been a poet in the tradition of his idols: REH, CAS and HPL. Between 1975 and 2010, Richard had five collections of his work published. Three of those five were poetry collections. For a taste of his work, check out this:

"Mountains of Madness"
Grim ranks of frozen spires rear high to face
The world like walls that guard far lands of dream—
White, ivory fangs whose jagged summits seem
To lance the skies and pierce the fringe of space.
No life survives in that Antarctic clime,
And yet the demon wind that pipes and shrieks
Among those spires is like a voice that speaks
Of evil things in accents old as time.
No man has seen beyond that range of snow
The vast black city sprawling grim and cold,
Yet dreamers speak of monstrous things of old
That ooze through vaulted corridors below,
While some have warned of what may rise again
From the black gulfs to face the world of men.

Tierney was a poet of the old school, carrying on the traditions of his great forebears in these decadent times.

As weird fiction scholar and Clark Ashton Smith biographer, Scott Connors, said recently:

I first met Dick Tierney at the 1975 MinnCon. We began corresponding shortly thereafter, and I purchased a large number of his outstanding statuettes on Lovecraftian themes, my favorite of which was a particularly hellish Brown Jenkin. Dick was as multi-talented a creative artist as Clark Ashton Smith: he was probably the finest poet working in the field at the time; his fiction is quite respected; and in many ways his sculptures were even better than those of Klarkash-Ton.

High praise from a man who has spent much of his life admiring and researching Clark Ashton Smith.

For those who--sadly--have never heard of Richard L. Tierney, here is the blurb from his publisher, Pickman's Press, slightly edited to reflect Richard's passing:

Richard L. Tierney (1936 -2022) was a poet, author, and editor of adventure fiction, mainly in the realm of dark fantasy. From his mid-teens, he was both a fan and scholar of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and other great names from the pulp fiction era. In 2010, he was nominated for the Science Fiction Poetry Association's Grandmaster Award. In 1961, Tierney earned a degree in Entomology (Iowa State College) and served for many years with the U.S. Forest Service in several of the western states and Alaska. A haunter of archaeological ruins by instinct, he traveled widely, especially in Mexico, Central, and South America. Many of the ideas and images that he employed in his stories were inspired by his extensive travels.

One thing that bio leaves out is RLT's sojourn in St. Paul, Minnesota, which is where Scott Connors met him. Tierney spent his time in St. Paul hanging out with elder Cthulhu Mythos/Arkham House luminaries like Donald Wandrei. During that sojourn, he was something of a mentor to a young Don Herron.

Tierney was also a mentor to Robert M. Price, who recalled his relationship with RLT in his 2021 post for the DMR Blog, "Memories of Richard L. Tierney and Simon of Gitta".

(Almost) all of Richard Tierney's Simon of Gitta tales--Sorcery Against Caesar and The Drums of Chaos--are available through DMR Books. There was a mention in Sorcery Against Caesar of an upcoming collection/novel starring Simon written by Tierney and Glenn Rahman. Apparently, it is called The Path of the Dragon. Let's hope it sees the light of day sooner than later.

Richard L. Tierney was an author, a poet and a Cthulhu Mythos scholar. As Leigh Blackmore said, his like will not soon be seen again. Raise your mead-horns high in memory of Dick Tierney, sword-brothers! He has rambled on Beyond the Fields We Know, but he made his mark whilst he sojourned among us.