I’ve been aware of Nancy A. Collins and her work for many years, but I don’t think I’ve ever read anything by her until now. She was a member of REHupa, the Robert E. Howard United Press Association, for a while (as was I), and she recently rewrote and expanded a Solomon Kane short story she wrote originally for her REHupa ’zine. THE DEATH’S HEAD TAVERN: A SOLOMON KANE STORY is now available as an e-book with a good cover on Amazon.
The story finds Howard’s Puritan adventurer Solomon Kane stopping at an
isolated tavern at the edge of a Scottish moor. As we all know, nothing good
ever happens on a moor. (“They were the footprints, Mr. Holmes, of a gigantic
hound!”) The tavern’s only other customers are a traveling merchant and his
beautiful daughter. Kane is looking for a former comrade-in-arms who
disappeared in the area while searching for his missing brother. With two men
missing, something sinister is definitely going on, and in a night of violence,
fire, and gruesome death, Kane discovers what it is.
Collins does a fine job of capturing Howard’s character and the story moves
right along at a very nice pace. The action scenes are excellent. One thing I
really like is the way Collins ties this Solomon Kane yarn in with another of
Howard’s series. You’ll have to read it to find out which one, but it works
really well. There’s a reference to another literary property not by Howard
that I appreciated, too.
THE DEATH’S HEAD TAVERN is just a good story, a Front Porch Yarn, and I enjoyed
it a lot. If Collins wants to wrote more Solomon Kane stories, I’ll read them,
that’s for sure.
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