I have issues with Robert E. Howard...

[guacamole]

Namely, with the fact that he spent so much time writing about Conan when Solomon Kane is a much much much cooler character. I just finished reading a collection of Solomon Kane stories and about half of them are fragmentary, while he had tons and tons of Conan stories, that are about as formulaic as you can get. What was up with Howard anyway....

[The Curtmudgeon]

Namely, with the fact that he spent so much time writing about Conan when Solomon Kane is a much much much cooler character. I just finished reading a collection of Solomon Kane stories and about half of them are fragmentary, while he had tons and tons of Conan stories, that are about as formulaic as you can get. What was up with Howard anyway....

Actually, Guac, your issues aren't so much with Howard as with the pulp magazine readership in the 1930s. REH wrote a lot of everything, but he would only continue with what was selling to the pulps. The publishers, in turn, were driven by what the reading public would pay their nickel for. If the Kane stories had sold better, REH would have written more of them.

Besides Conan (and the similar Kull stories) and Solomon Kane, REH wrote: boxing stories (many with a fighting sailor named Dennis Dorgan), Middle Eastern historical fiction, Irish historical fiction, horror fiction a la H.P. Lovecraft (REH's contribution to the HPL "eldritch library" was von Juntz' Unaussprichlichen Kulten), science fiction, westerns (both serious and comic -- the Breckinridge Elkins stories in A Gent from Bear Creek and others are hillarious), Fu Manchu-style mysteries, poetry and more. He would write for any pulp magazine at all, and would often take an unsold story written for one character and re-write it for another in an attempt to sell it.

The (I'm another Solomon Kane fan, BTW) Curtmudgeon