The work of Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian (and, arguably, the entire "sword and sorcery" subgenre of fantasy fiction), is slowly but surely slipping into the public domain in jurisdiction after jurisdiction, making his work easy pickings for the good people at Wordsworth Editions, whose new "Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural" line has been featured previously on FerretBrain. The Right Hand of Doom is a slim compilation containing all the stories Robert E. Howard completed in his lifetime concerning the adventuring Puritan Soloman Kane, as well as a fragmentary story and a few poems. Like just about all of Howard's protagonists, Kane is a man of action, strong with his fists, fast with his sword, and deadly with his pistols. Unlike Conan, he is gaunt and sinewy, and lacks the Cimmerian's appetite for hard drinking and loose women. Interestingly, he also lacks a certain self-awareness; Howard states explicitly that Kane is ruled by a thirst for adventure and exploration, but never closely analyses his motives and rationalises them as an eternal quest for justice. This "justice" usually takes the form of bloody retribution; in many Kane stories he will come across evidence of a horrible atrocity, and then pursue the culprits to their utter destruction, no matter how far he must travel or how many years he must invest in the chase. Thus, Kane cuts a bloody swathe through the 17th Century just as Conan cuts one through the Hyborean Age.

So far, so good. There is, however, just a mild problem with the subject matter.

All of the Big Three of the pulp fantasy market of the 1920s and 1930s - Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and HP Lovecraft - were a little racist, in their own way, and I've always found Howard's racism, when it manifests, to be the most distasteful. Smith strikes me as honestly having his heart in the right place, but lacked any real contact with people of other cultures and races. Lovecraft's racism was of the cold and pseudoscientific sort common in the 1920s. It is in Howard's fiction that I occasionally see real hatred; there's a couple of Conan stories which degenerate into Conan slicing up dark people, or conquering a tribe (because a white outsider is clearly always going to be superior to a black person who's lived in the tribe all their life). But it's a curiously inconsistent bigotry, which sometimes isn't even manifested: I seem to recall that Conan was allied more than once with potent non-European warrior women who proved to be just as capable as he, although my memories might be confused by Grace Jones in Conan the Destroyer.

The same prejudice, and the same inconsistency, are evident in the Solomon Kane stories, but appear much more regularly, since the majority of them are set in Africa. Not all of them - a quarter to a third are set in Europe, with Kane battling ghosts and undead sorcerers and the like. But much of the time he is wading through Africa, an Africa at the very beginning of European colonisation, where beyond the Slave Coast are lands that no European has ever penetrated. And the problem is that in hanging out in Africa he encounters more than a few African people, which means that Howard's inconsistent handling of black characters is very, very evident.

It is quite obvious that Howard finds writing about black people uncomfortable; he simply isn't sure how to handle them. A case in point is N'Longo, a shaman who makes a pact with Kane in the first story and appears a couple of other times. When he is first encountered, he's almost a comic figure; the only black character to have a speaking part in the story in question, he's all "Me big ju-ju man, me have mighty magic". At the same time, he has vast occult power and, whenever he shows up, understands what's going on far better than Kane does. In a later story, it's revealed that he talked funny in his earlier encounters with Kane because he was speaking pidgin English (a patois which, to be fair, is pretty much designed to make the speaker sound retarded); when he shifts into speaking his own dialect he's clearly an eloquent, intelligent man.

The inconsistent treatment of N'Longo in general is mirrored in the inconsistent treatment of Africans in general; sometimes they are baying savages, throwbacks to a primeval era who need to be tamed by European civilisation; other times they are innocent and even virtuous sorts, living in an untamed land with parallels to the American frontier and menaced by horrors - harpies, vampires, debased outposts of forgotten Atlantis - that provide suitable enemies for Kane to battle. In The Moon of Skulls Kane encounters an Atlantean priest who sees no difference between "white savages" and "black savages"; in about half the Kane stories, humanity as a whole is a horde of ignorant barbarians utterly unaware of the ancient wonders and terrors that dwell in the forgotten parts of the Earth - in those stories, black people and white people alike are victims of the horrors. When reading these stories, one can almost forget the racism of the less sensitive tales, but even in the more "really, aren't we all a bit savage in our own way?" stories there's a nasty undercurrent; often, the implication is that the solution to the woes of the harassed Africans is for a white person to come along with a gun and a sword to violently purge Africa of its primeval nastiness.

The inherent problem with the Kane stories is that "Africa" is used as a shorthand for "the forgotten, untamed parts of the world that civilised people don't understand", but defining it in that manner implicitly denies any sort of civilisation on the part of Africa's inhabitants. As the stories develop a consistent internal mythos, it turns out that Africa is not a uniquely evil place; many of the demons and monsters that Kane battles were banished to Africa by other cultures, which drove them out of Europe and Asia. The racism of the Kane stories is born out of ignorance, but slides into hatred all too easily.

On the other hand, this has the inadvertent effect of making the character of Kane more interesting than he may have been originally; the way the stories are written allows the reader, a lot of the time, to ascribe the nastier views to Kane as opposed to Howard; thus, Kane is transformed from square-jawed champion of civilisation to terrifying psychopath, wading throughout Africa in response to a strange calling that he does not understand and doesn't wish to think about, speaking more and more in awkward King James Bible English as he does, and recognising within himself - and, by implication, within European "civilisation" the exact same primitivism and savagery that is manifested openly in precolonial Africa. At one point he receives from N'Longo a mysterious ju-ju staff, of ancient origin; in a later story, where Kane is captured by a party of Arab slavers, a sage travelling with the slavers recognises the stave as one formerly belonging to the ancient Egyptian cult of Bast, and to King Solomon. Thus, even Kane's Christianity, the religion which underpins his European cultural roots and which, as a Puritan, he regards as the one constant thing in his life, is in fact a product of the same bizarre and alien past which yields the terrors he encounters in Africa.

Named after a wise sorcerer-king and the first murderer, Kane exhibits certain of the qualities of both, and it appears that Howard had a special destiny planned for him. The Kane series, however, was cut short - pretty much as soon as Howard started writing the Conan stories, his Kane output simply stopped, the Puritan's travels no longer holding his interest. Ultimately, that's the context these stories should be viewed in: flawed preliminary sketches for Howard's most important literary output. If you can look past the uglier elements there's some interesting historical horror-adventure stories in here, but if you can't it'll just make for uncomfortable reading; but hey, at least if you get the Wordsworth Edition neither Howard nor anyone connected to him gets the money, so it's not as if you're supporting the Solomon Kane Fund for Pacifying the Brown People by reading it.