L. Sprague de Camp, the Col. Parker of S&S?

I just read an amazing 15-part article over at rehupa.com, starting July 2008, on the influence of L. Sprague de Camp on the development of Conan in the late 1960s and later (I was referrered to it by its author Morgan Holmes.)

It is worth a look. I very well remember the 3 vols of Conan stories Karl Edward Wagner edited (remember the ones with the little pull-out posters? Amazing cover art!) And I knew since then, from reading here and there, that apparently L. Sprague de Camp, who had co-written, edited and pastiched numberous Conan works posthumous and otherwise with Lin Carter, working from fragments of Howard material and even changing Howard non-Conan stories into stories featuring the brawny Cimmerian, I had *no idea* of the extent of de Camp's influence on the Conan "cottage industry," much of it negative. Which included causing the termination of the KEW project after 3 volumes instead of six.

In fact, it reminded me of nothing so much as the stories of Col. Parker simultaneously promoting, vampirizing, and screwing up the career of Elvis Presley. Like Tom Parker, de Camp savagely fought to "corner the market" on the material (and as Morgan Holmes shows in explicit detail, the de Camp/Carter material was almost always quite inferior to the Howard source material), but in later years he actively worked to promote a poorer product, insisting on the "dumbing down" of the pastiche novels written by others after he and Carter finished their series of "canon" books.

I had operated for years under the assumption that if not for de Camp, Conan wouldn't have been re-discovered, and there might well not have been a sword & sorcery boom in the 1960s/1970s. Boy was I wrong. In fact, de Camp had as much as anybody to do with ending it...

Solomon Kane

I assume the impending Solomon Kane movie is of more interest to us than anything since the original "Conan the Barbarian," 27 years ago. I have read rave reviews of it and screaming bashes. The previews, of course, look amazing.

There are two ways the movie can go wrong; one is that it isn't true to the original material, and the second is that it just sucks as a movie.

For a certain group of people -- purists -- if a movie doesn't hew closely to the source material, it's wrong. I take it from reviews that the movie gives Kane a sort of redemption motivation lacking in the original Howard series of stories.

Personally, I don't have a lot of problem with that, as presented. Howard's Kane is kind of a static character, described (in the Wikipedia entry on him) as "a somber-looking man who wanders the world with no apparent goal other than to vanquish evil in all its forms." Certainly fine for a short story series character, but one imagines even Howard would have fleshed out his background had he tackled Kane at novel length.

The other way the movie can go wrong is if it simply blows. Maybe it does. The Internet Movie Database gives it 8.5 stars out of 10. Rotten Tomatoes doesn't have a rating yet but the few remarks there were positive.

Prediction: if you're not up on Solomon Kane, you'll dig the movie. If you are a hardcore REH fan, you'll pick it apart. If you have a tolerance for screen adaptations, I'll bet it's great. I will be there as soon as it comes to town, myself.