Having yesterday found “The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich” as an early example of an early strongly Lovecraft-influenced tale of substantial length, today I also found something similar for R.E. Howard.
The first writer to closely follow Robert E. Howard into sword and sorcery was apparently one Clifford Ball. Having been an avid young reader of Weird Tales magazine since 1925 he produced six stories for Weird Tales from 1937-1941. Wikipedia has it that…
The setting of the first three is vaguely like Howard’s Hyborian Age of warring kingdoms, and features the barbarian adventurers Duar, an amnesiac king protected by a guardian sprite, and Rald the thief and mercenary.
Interesting, but is he worth a look today? Well, he was good enough to be published in Weird Tales in the 1930s… and I see from Archive.org search snippets that the sentiment from readers of Weird Tales was that he was a “neat craftsman” for “Duar” and that “Thief” was “the best story” of the issue.
All three Howard-alike stories are available to read as scans on Archive.org. In order of publication:
I can’t immediately find anyone stating that he added much to the roots of sword and sorcery other than the hero’s “guardian sprite”, and his other later stories are said to be fairly conventional fantasies. But he obviously did his bit to help preserve for a few more years the sword and sorcery approach Howard had developed with Conan, and showed other writers that there was demand and payment for it. He dropped from sight circa 1938.
Last year DMR Books published the first ever Clifford Ball collection, containing all six of his stories.
https://dmrbooks.com/the-thief-of-forthe