Castalia House’s Morgan recalls his friendship with the late author, Howard Andrew Jones:
It was late 1997 or early 1998 that Howard Jones had contacted me. I was the Official Editor of the Robert E. Howard United Press Association at the time. Periodically someone would contact me on how to get their pastiche Conan novel sold or how to get on the syndicated Conan T. V. show which was showing at the time. I never saw that show.
I received an e-mail from Howard who introduced himself and told me that he wanted to be to Harold Lamb what Glenn Lord was to Robert E. Howard. Glenn Lord was the agent for the Robert E. Howard copyright holders for around 28 years. Those Zebra and Ace non-Conan Robert E. Howard paperback collections. Glenn Lord was the agent who made the deals. He was a breath of fresh air.
Thus began a decades long friendship with Howard. We discussed fantasy fiction and historical novels we liked. We discovered new authors through each other. He seemed to like Fritz Leiber more than Robert E. Howard when I first knew him. We both tracked down old obscure hardbacks of historical fiction from the pulps. I seemed to like Arthur D. Howden Smith more than he did. Despite that, he had a copy of the first Grey Maiden story by Smith and sent me a photocopy of it. He also lent me a bound set of pulp stories including Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur’s “He Rules Who Can,” Joseph Ivers Lawrence “Swords on the Northern Sea,” and a Sargasso Sea story by F. van Wyck Mason.
He got Harold Lamb’s fiction back into print with University of Nebraska’s Bison Books. Before this, there were two collections of Harold Lamb’s cossack stories from the 1960s. Bison Books produced eight large volumes of Harold Lamb’s fiction from both the pulp and slick magazines. Howard organized them in a logical manner. We had discussed at one time of co-editing a volume of sword & sorcery fiction covering the early and middle years as an introductory volume to new readers.
At the same time, he was the fiction editor for Black Gate magazine. He championed getting new sword & sorcery fiction published. Sword & sorcery had been banished by the big publishers (for probably ideological reasons) but Howard knew there was a desire for it.
John O’Neill of the late and much-lamented Black Gate magazine also paid tribute to his former editor:
Howard has been a huge part of my personal and professional life since 2002, when I opened a submission to Black Gate magazine and found a long, rambling, and extremely enthusiastic cover letter from him, expressing his delight at finding a quality magazine devoted to heroic fantasy. The letter ended with “I want in, bad,” and was attached to a terrific tale featuring two adventurers named Dabir and Asim.
We eventually published three Dabir and Asim tales in Black Gate, and within a few years Howard’s editorial contributions had become so essential to the magazine that we named him our first Managing Editor. He ran our non-fiction department, single-handedly recruiting and managing over a dozen contributors to fill some 80 pages every issue with thoughtful essays, book reviews, gaming coverage, and much more.
In November 2008 Howard told me he wanted to remake our website, and post new articles every single day, instead of a few times a month. I told him he was crazy. How in the world could we produce that much content, especially without a budget?
Undaunted, Howard put together a top-notch team of writers, and committed to putting daily content on the Black Gate blog. It was his vision, and he executed it magnificently, with a little help from Bill Ward, David Soyka, Scott Oden, James Enge, EE Knight, Ryan Harvey, and others. Eight years later, the website won a World Fantasy Award — an honor that I still believe should have been presented to Howard.
Before long Howard’s own writing career had taken off with such magnitude that he had to step back from day-to-day duties at the magazine. Over the next fifteen years he released fifteen books, including three featuring Dabir and Asim, four novels in the Pathfinder universe, the Ring-Sworn Trilogy, three volumes in The Chronicles of Hanuvar, and the Harold Lamb collections Swords from the East and Swords from the West.
Howard was a wonderful writer. He believed in heroes, and that steadfast conviction informed all of his writing. But despite all his success Howard never lost touch with his other major talent — finding and nurturing new writers. Howard was an enormously gifted editor, and a tireless champion of underappreciated writers.
Many men have lived much longer, and left behind legacies that will not be remembered nearly as long, than Howard Andrew Jones.
