This originated as a private email to Boyd about one of the stories listed in (surprise!) "Short Stories," but in his reply he suggested I express my views on the main forum. Even for private use, I rewrote this several times so that - I hope - it didn't read like me using it as an excuse for a slap at Lin Carter (who inspired me to try writing for myself.) If it does still read a bit that way, I apologise. Anyway, those views are as follows:

This was going to be some publication information for The Stairs in the Crypt, but I see from the Bibliography/Anthologies section that Eldritch Dark is already aware of most of it: The Year's Best Fantasy Stories # 3, ed. Lin Carter, DAW Books 1977, and The Book of Eibon, ed. Robert M. Price, Chaosium 2003. I think it first appeared in Fantastic, a small US-based SF/F story magazine, sometime in 1975.

Having just read it again after looking up the copyright info, I'm also expressing an opinion I've long held about this story, which is that it's not by CAS at all. This is your website, and your decision, but maybe it shouldn't be included among the real CAS stories, at least not without a note about its provenance. Here's my reasoning:

In his introduction to the anthology version, Carter claims to have completed Stairs from unfinished (and at that time unseen) notes by CAS, but the clumsiness of the writing suggests to me that he's actually responsible for most if not all of the story. (Incidentally, there are two more paragraphs in the DAW version than in the one on the website. Despite suggesting that this story doesn't belong with known CAS original work, I can transcribe and send them along for completeness - though frankly, you're not missing much.)

Carter also claims to have "posthumously collaborated" with CAS on several other stories; these are all listed under The Book Of Eibon in the Anthologies section. I've read one other, The Scroll of Morloc (in The Year's Best Fantasy Stories #2, ed. Lin Carter, DAW Books 1976) and again feel that the "collaboration" involved no more than CAS sharing author credit with Carter, a fair enough editor but a hack writer, cursed with the ability to see originality and talent in others yet never find any himself.

It's one thing to work in another creator's world, the many Conan novels are a case in point, but another to imitate that creator's style, especially if it's distinctive - and CAS had a very distinctive style which mere over-use of long archaic words and repetitive adjectives won't match. It's more reprehensible to claim the imitation is valid and authentic because it's based on access to unpublished notes, especially when those notes, published a couple of years later, reveal the validation was done with a fake stamp.

This was The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith, Arkham House 1979; I have a copy, and see you also include information from it in the "Nonfiction" section here. Rather than finishing uncompleted stories or fleshing out original plots the way he and De Camp did so ineptly with some of R. E. Howard's work, it appears that Carter merely picked through word-lists for character names and titles - "Avalza(u)nt," (the "Stairs" villain) "Double Tower" and "Morloc" are all from such lists, but nowhere else - then reached for thesaurus and dictionary, faked up something he could pass off as a completed CAS story and claimed the resultant mishmash as a collaboration.

Why, I don't know: maybe it made him feel that, like Isaac Newton, he was "standing on the shoulders of giants." Maybe seeing his name as the "co-author" of a famous writer's story was better than not seeing it at all.

It's possible to be horribly cynical and suggest that, paid to edit the anthology, he got himself paid again for a story of his own (Year's Best Fantasy #2 and #3 both have a Carter Thongor original, and for all I know the others did too) then paid a third time for his "collaboration" pastiche.

I'm a writer myself, and I can understand the attraction of being paid like that and, fair enough, the editing and writing were all done by the person cashing the cheques; but could the pastiche(s) not have been accepted without the pretence of faux-collaboration? After all, Carter as editor was the one doing the accepting...

Ah well, LC and LSdC and CAS and REH are probably somewhere they can discuss it amongst themselves... But I still don't think "The Stairs in the Crypt" has a place among the Real Stuff.


Peter

"I fight not for your Crown, but for your Half-Crown, and your Handsome Women!" - Capt. Carlo Fantom (in Aubrey's "Brief Lives")

Sounds to me like you've made the case, Peter. CAS is surely the last person anyone should try to imitate. It isn't just the arcane vocabulary, but the poetic rhythms, mordant humor, exotic settings, evocative name-conjuring, and sheer imaginative force put him out reach of even the best mimics. You cannot create a believable CAS world with a thesaurus. (And I agree that Lin Carter, for all his virtues as an anthologist, was a terrible writer.)

Good post; very appreciated.