It’s interesting to reflect on what factors might have led Robert E. Howard, fairly early in his writing-career, to pastiche the Fu Manchu stories of Sax Rohmer. WEIRD TALES printed the first story in Howard’s series, “Skull-Face” in 1929, but Rohmer had not written a new Fu Manchu story since 1917. Despite the early popularity of the Fu books in the nineteen-teens, Rohmer reputedly wanted to end the series, but later decided to return to his most famous character. Possibly some silent-film adaptations of the Fu stories, appearing in 1923 and 1924, helped revive general interest in the character, and it’s been theorized that the announcement of a pending sound-film adaptation in 1930 may have persuaded the writer to pen DAUGHTER OFFU MANCHU, which appeared in that same year. Robert Ervin Howard may have heard about these revival rumblings in advance of DAUGHTER’s publication, and if so maybe he sought to steal some of the older author’s thunder.
Of course, it’s also possible that Howard had simply enjoyed the earlier Fu-novels, particularly because they addressed contemporary concerns about the relationship of white people toward people of color. Rohmer was not given to theorizing about any proposed hierarchy of various races, but even by 1929, a few years before Howard birthed Conan, such theories were clearly a big part of Howard’s intellectual makeup. In fact, the British Rohmer is more concerned with the theme of Europe vs. Asia than he is with inherited racial nature. Indeed, Fu Manchu stands as a refutation of the notion of racial limitations, since he is a master of all sciences from both the modern and ancient worlds.
The four tales I term “the Skull-Face stories” are something of an anomaly, because Richard A. Lupoff, the editor of the 1978 Berkley paperback collection SKULL-FACE, didn’t just include the two extant stories featuring the titular villain—one of which was an unfinished Howard effort, which Lupoff finished. The editor also included two stories, one unpublished in Howard’s lifetimes, both of which featured a villain named Erlik Khan. This later creation did resemble Skull-Face in terms of modus operandi: that of enslaving his henchmen with opiates so that someday the dark races might rise up to conquer the light-skinned ones. I’m glad that Lupoff bracketed the four stories together, for the sake of Howardian scholarship. Nevertheless, the two villains are not identical, any more than are their respective heroic enemies, even though these heroes both share the first name “Steve.”
The three later stories — “Lord of the Dead,” “Taveral Manor,” and “Names in the Black Book”—are passable timekillers, but I have little to say about them. “Skull-Face,” however, is a more delirious exercise, for all that its villain is not the main character, as is the case with the Fu Manchu stories. The central figure of “Skull-Face” is Steve Costigan, a veteran of World War One. For years he’s suffered from what our age calls PTSD, and he’s ended up finding surcease from sorrow in a Limehouse hashish-den. At the story’s opening, Costigan has run out of money and is on the verge of becoming an utter wastrel.
However, the operator of the hashish-den—initially called the Master, and appearing to be a living skeleton—decides to make Costigan his henchman, asking him, “You who are a swine, would you like to be a man again?” Howard never fully justifies the reason why this villain—whose other enforcers are non-whites, ranging from Chinese to Arab to Black African—chooses to employ this one white man as a pawn, even giving Costigan a serum that gives him temporary super-strength. However, at one point, Costigan saves the Master’s life and Costigan considers them even. The evildoer still seeks to make Costigan his slave. Luckily the hero, being a typical Howardian he-man, breaks free, thanks in part to help from Skull-Face’s only other white servant, a beautiful maiden named Zuleika, and from a redoubtable English cop modeled on Rohmer’s Nayland Smith.
Howard’s story, originally serialized in three parts, rambles quite a bit, just as the early Fu stories did. During the episodic chapters, Skull-Face takes on at least two other names, “Kathulos of Egypt” and “the Scorpion.” (The former name is probably an in-joke on H.P. Lovecraft’s demon-god Cthulhu, while the latter might be a reference to the villain in Rohmer’s 1919 novel THE GOLDEN SCORPION.) Unlike Rohmer, Howard has no interest in “the romance of the Orient.” And whereas Fu Manchu is served by henchmen with no thoughts or personality, all of Skull-Face’s minions are major assholes, so that the reader can look forward to the many scenes in which the mighty white hero beats them all to butter.
I certainly cannot claim that there’s no racist content here, not when Howard claims that Skull-Face’s avowed people, the Egyptians, are a people “more despised than the Jews.” Howard apparently based this absurd assertion on the same sort of racial theories that informed the Conan stories, which often posited the idea that certain races, be they Egyptian or Chinese, were not fully human like Caucasians. Howard goes a step further here, in that he eventually reveals that Kathulos is actually a revenant from ancient Atlantis, revived into a mummy-like state by arcane magic/science. For all of Skull-Face’s resources, though, he’s largely a cardboard fiend, with none of the perspicacity of Rohmer’s devil-doctor.
I don’t imagine that a story like “Skull-Face” promoted racism in anyone who wasn’t already racist. It does reject people of color from the table of privilege, and flatters the status quo, but both the good guys and bad guys are so broadly drawn that few would deem them any more than overheated entertainments. Further, though I’ve established in other essays that the mythopoeic impulse can appear in any authors despite their holding offensive beliefs, “Skull-Face” doesn’t really offer any memorable mythic images. Even Howard’s playing to White Americans’ fears of a Black Uprising—a thing readers would never find in Rohmer—lacks any sort of imaginative conviction. (That said, Howard does have Skull-Face mention that he has no intention of liberating Blacks, since he believes they should be his slaves as they were for the Atlanteans.)
Coming from deeper recesses of the mythopoeic mind is Howard’s 1936 short story “Black Canaan.” Here too we encounter the notion that a non-white people, specifically American Blacks descended from Deep South slaves, are not fully human. However, here Howard grounds his fantasy in the notion that because Black Africans predate Caucasians as a culture, the former’s ancestors conferred on all their descendants an inhumanity stemming from their interactions with monstrous demon-gods.
“Canaan,” which takes its title from a real-life Arkansas city, takes place in the 1870s and is told from the viewpoint of heroic white local Kirby Bruckner. The earlier Union victory over the Confederacy has made no difference in the wilds of this domain. Here, white people call the shots while blacks brood in “the jungle-deeps of the swamplands,” which are patently a displacement for the real jungles of Black Africa. Neither Kirby nor any other white character acknowledges any inequity in the hegemony: Howard wants to portray the enmity of whites and blacks for one another to be an inevitable clash of civilizations, not anything founded in social injustice.
Oddly, the individual who warns Kirby that the blacks may be rising against their masters is an old black woman, who enjoys an “Ides of March” moment at the story’s beginning and then disappears. Kirby, being a doughty hero, braves Goshen, the swampy recesses near Canaan, to investigate the rumor. He learns that there is a “conjure-man” named Saul Stark who is stoking the Black folk to rise up against the whites (Howard purportedly based the character on a real-life personality from the period, albeit not one involved in fomenting race wars.) But Kirby meets an even more insidious threat in a young “quadroon” woman who beguiles him in the forests, summons Black henchmen to attack him, and ultimately masters him with what may be either hypnotism or real magic. The mysterious woman, given no name and addressed just once as “the Bride of Damballah,” is a source of endless allure for Kirby. This white hero is clearly capable of lusting for forbidden fruit, a vice one would never find in a genuine frontier-hero of the the 1800s hero, such as Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bummpo.
Saul Stark and the Bride are two of Howard’s best villains. They make no complaints about white people’s injustice; they’re both willing to bring about chaos for the sake of sheer power. And in “Canaan” Howard also makes a much more substantive reference to Lovecraft than anything one sees in “Skull-Face,” for by some magic Stark can transform his hapless worshipers into fish-like monsters a la the piscine predators of HPL’s Innsmouth.
Howard’s use of Biblical lore also enhances the mythicity of the story. The Biblical Saul, of course, embodies the trope of the illegitimate king, and Stark seeks to carve out his own kingdom in an illegitimate manner, though the latter-day Saul does have the blessings of the only “gods” that have objective reality in the story. It’s of even more interest that while Canaan is the name of the town inhabited by the whites, Goshen was the name of the land where Pharaoh sent the Jewish slaves prior to the Exodus. It’s patently absurd to imagine that Howard was not aware of the extent to which American Blacks identified with the Jews of the Exodus through the common theme of slavery, and that if Goshen was the place to which Stark’s minions were confined, even as the Jews were confined, Canaan was the land of plenty that both Jews and Blacks aspired to conquer. It goes without saying that Howard’s tale upholds the status quo both in the historical era and in Howard’s own environment. Nevertheless, Kirby’s partial attraction to the deep truth of humanity’s savage origins ensures that the whites’ triumph is at best a temporary one.