Walk on the Wild Side

The Truth Insofar As I Know It

by David Drake



Karl Wagner died during the morning of Friday, October 14, 1994.

Karl was an alcoholic. He’d destroyed his liver before reaching age forty-nine (his birthday is December 12). He d gone off to England for three weeks. I saw him the Tuesday of his return and realized he was dying of congestive heart failure. Edema, shortness of breath, extreme weakness, chest pains—it wasn’t, as he would say, a subtle diagnosis.

When Karl’s liver shut down in England, he stopped excreting fluids. They filled his tissues and body cavity, squeezing the heart and raising his blood pressure. Nothing else appearing, his heart would eventually have stopped, but instead an artery in his gut burst. He lost blood for a day or two and eventually fainted while he was standing in his bathroom. He fell over backward into the tub and finished dying there.

Think of Karl the next time you have a glass of Jack Daniel’s.

He’d told a friend in England that he knew his liver was gone and that he was dying, but he insisted to me and others here that he was just tired because of the trip and the walking he’d done in London. He refused to let us take him to the hospital; and, realistically, there was little that doctors could have done for him by that point.

I miss Karl more than I can say, but the Karl I miss died a long time ago, at the height of his commercial and critical success, while he was married to a beautiful woman who idolized him.

I met Karl in late January of 1971 shortly after I’d returned from ’Nam to Duke Law School in Durham, NC, from which I’d been drafted two years before. One of my army buddies had mentioned the year before that he’d spent part of his embarkation leave in Chapel Hill, very close to Durham, . .dropping acid with my old Kenyon College roommate.

That was Karl. I’d met Manly Wade Wellman in Chapel Hill on my embarkation leave, so I recognized Karl as the guy Manly had described as “a young friend in medical school here who’s sold a novel. It’s Robert E. Howard stuff.”

While the buddy and I were in Cambodia in 1970 he got a copy of that novel: Karl’s first book, Darkness Weaves. This was in its Powell Publications format. It had been cut from 70,000 to 50,000 by an apparently random excision of words, with amazing misspellings and additional editorial meddling that beggars comprehension.

It was still a hell of a good book. My buddy said that soon after he got back to the World he’d be seeing Karl, and that he’d arrange for all of us to get together after I got back (a couple weeks later).

He did. Karl and I became close friends.



Karl had dropped out of medical school after the authorities told him he would have to repeat his third year. His grades were fine, but they didn’t like his attitude. Karl’s parents had been supporting him through med school. They agreed to continue the same level of support through two years of writing full time, with the proviso that if Karl wasn’t self-sufficient by the end of that period he would go back and finish med school.



Powell (a pornography publisher that was trying to break into SF) had contracted to pay $500 for Darkness Weaves and actually paid about $400 before the company went bankrupt. On the strength of that sale, however, Karl had sold to Paperback Library a collection of novellas, Death Angel’s Shadow, and an unwritten novel, Bloodstone. The advance for the collection was $1,200; I think the novel may have been $1,500. That success convinced Karl that he had a real career as a writer.

The first task was to write Bloodstone. He dived into it with enormous energy. All his life Karl did his rough drafts in pencil on a legal pad, edited them in longhand, and then typed up the final copy. I sat on the floor of his bedroom/study proofreading the final pages as they came out of the typewriter. He sent the book off to Paperback Library.

It came back by return mail, unread, with a letter from his editor saying that the house had decided to drop SF. She hoped they would still publish the collection.



Knowing a little more about the business now, I wonder what kind of contract Karl had signed that gave Paperback Library the right to do that with no payment whatever. In any case, a kill fee wouldn’t have made a great deal of difference in the longer term.



For the remainder of 1971 and the following year Karl energetically shopped Bloodstone and began work on other projects. He had a beer downtown with Manly every Wednesday afternoon, and the three of us (with Frances Wellman and my wife Jo) got together regularly for dinner and to read to one another the latest things we’d been writing.

In addition to short fiction about Kane, Karl read the opening to a straight western, Satan’s Gun (an attempt to break into another genre) and the opening chapters of In the Wake of the Night, a Kane novel he’d started before I met him. It was to be over a hundred thousand words long, a very big book for the day.

Nobody bought Bloodstone. One rejection that sticks in my mind was that of Fred Pohl (then at Ace, I believe), who said that he “... couldn’t get a handle on the book.”

Karl sold “In the Pines,” a present-day fantasy novelette written several years before, to F&SF, but the magazine returned his new Kane novelette “The Dark Muse” with copy editor’s markings already on it. The decision against publishing had been made at a very late stage...



Stu Schiff started Whispers, paying a penny a word and probably doing more to keep horror alive in the ’70s than any other single factor. Whispers published some of Karl’s best fiction, including “Sticks”—written for the magazine—but the $81 payment didn’t cover rent and groceries for the time it took Karl to write the story.

Unless you’ve been there yourself you can’t really understand how frustrating all this is. Karl handled it as well as anybody could. He never gave up, but he did have to go back to med school. He graduated after two years and took a residency position (psychiatrists don’t have to intern) as the only psychiatrist at the state mental hospital in Butner who was a native English speaker.



Karl started Carcosa, a small press publishing house, in 1972, in partnership with me and a former roommate of Karl’s named Jim Groce (by then a practicing psychiatrist). It was entirely Karl’s baby, though the initial capital came from Jim and me.



Our original intention was to republish Varney the Vampire, a Victorian penny dreadful which Manly said was available on microfilm from the British Library. We actually got the microfilm—I wonder what happened to it?—but fortunately that was the only money we’d sunk into the project before Arno Press announced their three-volume edition. (Dover later came out with a much more readable text in two volumes.)

Plan B was to publish a collection of Manly’s fantasies under the title Manly had proposed for an Arkham House edition in the late 1940s: Worse Things Waiting. The Arkham project was a casualty of small-press business conditions at the time and perhaps also a falling out between Manly and Mr. Derleth over whether the latter had anything to teach the former about writing. The Arkham House and Carcosa contents were largely different.

Carcosa and particularly WTW proved extremely frustrating. We were honest but very ignorant; among other things we believed the dates our printer (in Lakemont, Georgia) gave us. We ran a year late.

Others were doubtful about our honesty. The letter from Gerry de la Ree accusing us of being another fan press rip-off was particularly hurtful; but we were, after all, holding his money.



One afternoon I dialed Karl by accident. He’d just talked to the printer and said to me, “I’m frankly suicidal.” I took the afternoon off work and we went to bookstores in Raleigh.

Worse Things Waiting is a wonderful book in every respect. It was probably worth what it cost. But it did cost, all of us and especially Karl.

Things slowly started to work out. Paperback Library did publish Death Angel’s Shadow. The company was bought by Warner Communications and restarted its SF line, including Bloodstone. Karl got a hustling young agent, Kirby McCauley, who instantly improved the terms of the new contract and sold an unwritten Kane novel, Dark Crusade, for $2,000.

The Robert E. Howard boom of the 1970s was getting well under way. Kirby sold to Zebra Books a package of non-Conan REH fiction which included a provision for Karl to write novels about the character Bran MakMorn at $2,500 apiece. Karl was convinced he could write four Bran novels annually; on the strength of that contract he quit his residency after one year.



Writing didn’t go as fast as Karl hoped. The first Bran novel, Legion from the Shadows, was long overdue and the occasion of many calls to Karl by his editor (which didn’t help).

Dark Crusade was later yet, but by 1976 Karl turned it in. Kirby then got Karl a three-book contract from Warners at excellent money for the time: $2,500 for a Kane collection, Night Winds, $4,000 to republish the complete version of his first novel, Darkness Weaves; and $10,000 for a new novel, In the Wake of the Night, which was already begun.



Then Kirby secured one of his brilliant coups: he got Karl a contract to write three Conan novels for Bantam at a base U.S. price of $60,000/book. Karl would only clear $40-45,000 per book of the U.S. money, but there were extensive sales of foreign rights which brought his share well up above the U.S. price.

And that’s when it stopped.



Karl finally managed to turn in one of the three Conan novels, The Road of Kings, in 1978. Karl sent in two-thirds of the novel, claiming it was the whole thing; worked over the weekend and sent in most of the remaining portion, claiming it had been left out of the envelope by mistake; and sent in the last chapter after another all-nighter. Conan Properties, the owner of the rights, canceled the other two (they were assigned to Poul Anderson and Andy Offutt at, I’m told, much less money).

The Road of Kings is a very good novel. It’s the last novel Karl ever wrote. In fact, he made only one more serious attempt at writing a novel: the 22,000-word fragment that appears in the KEW special issue of Weird Tales. All the other novel fragments that Karl published here and there date from before the collapse.

Kirby with his usual brilliance sold a horror novel, The Fourth Seal, to Bantam (for $65,000, with $25,000 on signing) in 1987 without an outline or a word on paper. Karl started the book only to the extent of writing two pages describing the heroine’s lingerie.

I don’t know what happened. I was there the whole time, seeing Karl five or six days a week, and I don’t have a clue.



Karl always claimed he was writing and that the problems were external. Neither statement was true. In the mid-1980s, a number of genuinely bad things happened to him: Manly Wade Wellman, our friend, died; Karl’s wife left him; and his parents had serious health problems. Karl blamed his delays on all those things, but the collapse had come long before. (While I have no use at all for Karl’s ex-wife, she was not primarily responsible for the problems with the marriage nor for its final dissolution.)

Friends who knew Karl in undergraduate and medical school tell me that though he always drank, his alcohol intake increased greatly in the later 1970s. That was my feeling also, but since I don’t drink myself I don’t have a good way to judge how much somebody else is putting down. (There’s no “Fix me one while you’re in the kitchen” for a yardstick.) It’s my suspicion that Karl drank because he couldn’t write rather than the reverse, but I don’t know.



In his later years Karl wrote a number of short stories, some of which were brilliant (here I’m thinking particularly of “Neither Brute Nor Human”). In his last year or so his output increased significantly, though I wouldn’t put the quality of those stories against that of his early work.

Karl proved unable to finish even the large fragments from his productive period. He completed one fragment as a novelette, “Blue Lady, Come Back.” I found its depiction of Manly to be both false and offensive, and the result lame by any standards. (Karl, Manly and I had together visited the haunted house of the story.)



Karl did a screenplay for a third Conan movie. That got him money ($30,000) and some anecdotes about Hollywood, but the screenplay was rejected before the studio shelved the project. He did a treatment for a film about the Asian culture-hero Monkey, for Japanese backers. They liked his work, but they ultimately picked another writer who had experience in animation when they decided to go that route. Those were the only film/TV writing projects for which Karl was paid, though he occasionally received option money and himself worked on spec on ideas which didn’t get funded.



A local artist had done half a dozen pages of art for a graphic novel, Tell Me, Dark, but he wasn’t himself a writer and came to Karl for a script. They sold the project to DC on the strength of artist’s name for very good money (Karl’s share was $15,500).

Karl wrote Tell Me, Dark with four “tracks,” as he called them, of text. Material from any or all tracks might be in a given panel.

I asked Karl how DC could make that intelligible in a comic format; he replied, “That’s their problem.”

DC ultimately solved the problem by rejecting Karl’s script. Another writer wrote the book (with Karl’s permission) from the art, with no reference to Karl’s text. At the insistence of both the artist and the actual worker, Karl was allowed to keep the whole advance and DC kept Karl’s name on the book. None of the published text is Karl’s.



There’s one more story about Karl that deserves to be told here. After Karl’s death another friend and I were emptying Karl’s house of material that the family didn’t have to know about. I was pulling things out of a closet and the friend was tossing them into a garbage bag to be taken to the dump.

I tossed out a padded envelope containing three porno novels. The friend looked more closely at them: they were three copies of the same 1973 Beeline Book, The Other Woman, credited to “Kent Allard”—the name Karl generally used in his fiction for the character representing himself. There was a typed slip from the publisher identifying them as author’s copies.

During a time when I saw Karl very frequently, and when we frequently talked in our desperation of trying porn despite the extremely low rates of pay (about $300 for all rights), he’d written a porn novel of which I knew nothing. That sort of sums up Karl: I probably knew as much about him as anybody else did, but nobody knew—or knows-the whole truth. Particularly the truth about the really basic question: why?



He was so much. He could have been so much more.

—David Drake