And Solomon rose and bared his sword,
And swift as tongue could tell,
The dark spewed forth a painted horde
Like shadows out of hell.

--The Return of Sir Richard Grenville
Robert E. Howard

Robert E. Howard was an amateur historian. Through his personal library he sailed across time and space, thinking more of lost Greek civilizations in Afghanistan or thundering files of Mongol riders than his more mundane life in central Texas. He spoke frequently of the fall of civilization and the triumph of the barbarian. He wrote that the cycle could not end there; that the barbarian would be corrupted as his society advanced, and that his civilization would fall in turn at the hands of new barbarians.

Howard’s three great fantasy characters, Kull, Conan, and Solomon Kane, could be said to symbolize a civilization’s three epochs. Conan the Cimmerian represented a brash new force rising to kick down a corrupt old order, Kull (like another Howard creation, Bran Mak Morn) the last king of a failing but still formidable nation.

Solomon Kane was a character of out of a young civilization standing at the threshold of its brief, glorious apogee–Elizabethan England. As Kane wandered from the pits of the Inquisition to the Spanish Main, from the Colonial coast to the slave ports of Africa, his lank form blazed a fictional trail for the vigorous British Empire in its first great growth spurt as it challenged the hollowing Spanish Empire.

The Solomon Kane stories mark Howard’s evolution into a series storyteller, showing him able to create a striking character whose nail-shortening adventures left readers wanting more–to the point where they wrote Weird Tales demanding additional stories like junkies looking forward to their next fix. This didn’t always please Howard, who had arguments with Weird Tales editor Wright over the content of his stories. “I lose readers sometimes,” Howard said to his sometime-girlfriend, Novelyn Price. “I admit that. But damn it, I always gain them back or get new ones. Wright forgets that. It’s a damn losing battle.”

Howard wrote the Kane stores “as swift as tongue could tell,” in and around 1928. Howard could probably be described as the inventor (and certainly be named the popularizer) of the Sword & Sorcery tale when Solomon Kane strode out of the jungle and accepted the voodoo staff of N’Longa, his sorcerous West African ally. While James Fenimore Cooper and Alexander Dumas wrote of determined, gifted adventurers weaving themselves in and out of real events and interacting with real personages, Howard threw together a mix of history and myth more evocative of a Norse Saga or Greek Theater than any other prominent author before him save General Lew Wallace. And as Ben-Hur deals with revealed religion rather than spellcraft, Wallace might safely be taken out of the Sword & Sorcery mix.

Howard loved listening to Irish legends, voodoo stories, and American Indian mythology. He found them so enthralling that he incorporated them into a fast-and-furious literary style more suited to prizefighters and pirates than Arthurian epic, thus giving birth to the genre he will be remembered for pioneering.

A writer has to match manner to material to become successful. Howard’s vivid, energetic style, with its powerful strokes and cacophonous clamor, is suited to swordplay.. He is an adept in the muted patina of shadowy horror, where muttered spells call forth fluttering hymenopteran death over the rattle of bones. Such skill is ill-suited to gothic romance or cozy mystery, but ideal for giving birth to iron-thewed heroes like Solomon Kane.

So who was Solomon Kane, and why did he catch fire in Howard’s imagination, and that of his readers?

“An Englishman. And a Puritan, by the cut o’ that garb…I am glad to see a countryman in this outlandish domain, even such a melancholy fellow as you seem” says a character who meets Kane on the road in the unfinished story “The Castle of the Devil.”

Every American schoolchild wandering the outlandish domains of Weird Tales would feel a thrill of recognition at that. In many ways Solomon Kane was a countryman to his pulp readers. As we’ve been taught by the gods of our copybooks, the Puritans founded the first distinctly American colony, looking for religious freedom and creating a society distinct from the more typical Virginia colonial settlements. Kane might be an Englishman, but he was the sort of Englishman who would become an American: an expert swordsman and pistol-shot, a righter of wrongs, an explorer of new frontiers stalking terra incognita in his black clothes and slouch hat with a blade of Toledo steel in his scabbard, pistols at his belt. Tall and wolf-lean, grim and measured of voice, he was a proto-cowboy in hip-boots and cape, a plain man in a time of ruffed frippery.

So much for mien.

The true attraction of Solomon Kane came from his equally forbidding character.

All his life he had roamed about the world aiding the weak and fighting oppression; he neither knew nor questioned why. That was his obsession, his driving force in life. Cruelty and tyranny to the weak sent a red blaze of fury, fierce and lasting, through his soul. When the full flame of his hatred was waked and loosed, there was no rest for him until his vengeance had been fulfilled to the uttermost. If he thought of it at all, he considered himself a fulfiller of God’s judgement, a vessel of wrath to be emptied upon the souls of the unrighteous. Yet in the full sense of the word Solomon Kane was not wholly a Puritan, though he thought of himself as such.

“God’s Angry Man” he’s called in the tales. Solomon Kane fought a very personal war with what he saw as Satan’s imps and henchmen. They could be conventional wrongdoers, as in “Red Shadows” quoted above, when Kane comes across a girl, raped and stabbed and left to die in a roadside ditch by a gang of bandits. He promptly swears an oath of vengeance and extracts it in brutal measure (the first of the reavers is found nailed up to a tree with his own dagger, “SLK” carved bloodily into his cheeks). Kane gives up years and crosses an ocean to track down and kill the last member of the band. He also fights fantastic foes, as in “Wings in the Night.” This tale is the equal of the best of Howard’s work in compelling storyline, imaginative world building, and verbal energy. Kane rids darkest Africa of a race of bat-people, preying on the savannah natives from an accursed plateau. “Wings of the Night” features a marathon running fight through ruin, countryside, and even air that only a team of computer animators with a sixty-million dollar budget and the latest rendering technology (or a single Texan from Cross Plains hammering the story out with worn typewriter ribbon) could bring properly to life.

Thus Kane serves the role of a civilization in full flower, protecting and serving, exacting justice from evil according to his lights. While Conan is out for himself–at least until the crown settles uneasily onto his head–and twilight heroes such as Kull and Mak Morn fight a battle they know they are doomed to lose to keep their people’s greatness alive, Kane has the belief and the energy to venture into the darkest pits as he pursues his, and God’s, foes.

Kane took on a murderous tavern owner in “Rattle of Bones,” pirates in “Blades of the Brotherhood” and voodoo vampires in “Hills of the Dead.” His unfinished tales are especially tantalizing. One wonders what the dread Baron in “Castle of the Devil” was up to, or the lost Assyrians found deep in Africa from “The Children of Asshur.”

Howard’s fast flying keys had no doubt moved on to other characters in forgotten realms by then, leaving story fragments as all hardworking writers do. Having invented Sword & Sorcery, he needed wider horizons to fill with stories of civilizations as they rose and fell around their lost heroes, following a path first marked by Solomon Kane.