Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,1
up until his untimely death.
One of the things that we had discussed during that pleasant evening in the Tavistock bar was the World Fantasy Convention.
I had missed the first one the previous year in Providence, Rhode Island, simply because I had known nothing about it until it was too late.
The second gathering was to be held in New York City, and Karl encouraged me to attend. And so it was that over the Halloween weekend of 1976 I found myself for the first time in the United States without my parents, attending The 2nd World Fantasy Convention at the Statler Hilton hotel, on Madison Square Garden, where a single room cost a now-unbelievable $23.00 a night.
Besides the Wagners, the only other person I knew was co-Guest of Honor Michael Moorcock from Britain. So Karl made sure he looked after me. He pointed out or introduced me to a host of famous writers and editors, including H. Warner Munn, AndrewJ. Offutt, Fritz Leiber, Christopher Stasheff, Lin Carter, L. Sprague De Camp, Theodore Sturgeon, Frank Belknap Long, Donald and Elsie Wollheim and numerous other luminaries.
I was fortunate to strike up a conversation with another GoH— the renowned SF writer C.L. Moore—at the disappointing $8.50 “Special Awards Cocktail Buffet,” and Karl even got me an invitation to his agent Kirby McCauley’s exclusive champagne party on the Sunday evening. I think it was there that he introduced me to my first taste of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey, which has been my drink of choice ever since.
For a young fantasy fan such as myself, it was an unforgettable weekend at which, although I didn’t know it at the time, the seeds of my future life and career were being sown. However, the most memorable event for me took place on my first night in the city, when Karl and Barbara invited me out to a Chinese dinner with a group of their friends. I don’t know how it began—although I believe artist John F. Mayer may have been involved— but no sooner had we stepped outside the hotel when I found myself embroiled in a potential street brawl.
Karl’s group was squaring off against a gang of tough-looking locals, and while the name-calling and pushing went on, he whispered to me to not panic and hold my position—it would all be over in a minute. And he was correct. With some well-chosen expletives, the two groups soon went their separate ways with their individual pride intact. As a result of our encounter, Karl nicknamed me “Streetfighter” Jones, and the diminutive stuck.
The following year the Wagners were back in London with Manly, David A. Drake, Jim Groce and their respective wives.
I think that may have been the first time that I took them to the Dickens Inn—a picturesque pub dating back to the turn of the 18th century, situated at St Katherine’s Docks on the River Thames. As their visits to London became regular, so did our trips to the Dickens Inn. (In fact, there is a photo of Manly in 1980 sitting outside the pub on the back jacket of Lonely Vigils. That’s my elbow sneaking into frame on the left.)
With Dave and Jim as business partners, Karl had founded the World Fantasy Award-winning publishing imprint Carcosa in 1972. Carcosa produced four beautifully-produced collections of pulp story reprints: Worse Things Waiting by Manly Wade Wellman (1973), Far Lands, Other Days by E. Hoffman Price (1975), Murgunstrum and Others by Hugh B.Cave (1977) and Lonely Vigils, again by Manly (1981).
Meanwhile, Karl’s own writing career was going from strength to strength. He had been regularly selling his Kane stories and poems to various small press magazines, which was a market he vigorously supported throughout his life. “Two Suns Setting,” another Kane story, appeared in the May 1976 issue of Fantastic Stories and was selected by Lin Carter for his anthology The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories: 3 (1977). The story won the 1977 British Fantasy Award and was also a World Fantasy Award nominee.
Night Winds (1978) was a collection of six previously-published Kane tales and, around the same time, Warner also reissued all the previous books in the series, each now sporting distinctive Frazetta paintings.
Karl openly admired the exploits and intrigues of the Hyborian Age hero created by Robert E. Howard, and he edited three definitive volumes of the author’s Conan stories: The Flour of the Dragon (1977), The People of the Black Circle (1977) and Red Nails (1977).