With the biography 'Blood & Thunder,' former Abilenian Mark Finn reintroduces readers to Robert E. Howard, Cross Plains' favorite son. The author hopes to set the record straight on the tempestuous artist - opening up the whole wide world to those who think they know him.

Lots of folks think they know who Robert E. Howard, Cross Plains' now-favorite son, is.

He was a crazy loner. He wrote pulp fiction, creating Conan the barbarian ... and not much else of note before shooting himself at age 30 in June 1936 upon learning of the impending death of his mother. A melancholy, poetic suicide note was found in his Underwood typewriter.

Some of this is based partially in fact. Much of it is downright wrong.

The Robert E. Howard that former Abilenian Mark Finn, 37, now of Vernon, knows is different. Finn said he hopes readers will want to meet - or get reintroduced - to the Howard in his biography ''Blood & Thunder: The Life & Art of Robert E. Howard.''

''Blood & Thunder'' follows Howard from his birth and boyhood in Peaster and Cross Plains (47 miles southeast of Abilene) to his time at Brownwood's Howard Payne University to his writing career and his final days.

Howard did shoot himself. He did often take care of his mother, who suffered from tuberculosis. And Howard was often disheartened, perhaps even suffering from clinical depression.

But he was also intelligent and articulate. Well-read, though he often denied it. And he had good friends, including fellow pulp fiction writers who often complimented him on his work.

He even briefly had a girlfriend, Novalyne Price, whose remembrances of him were made into a 1996 movie, ''The Whole Wide World.''

When Howard hit his heights, he was as fine a Texas writer as any, ''speaking'' with a distinctly Lone Star-spangled voice, whether when he was writing of far-flung fantasy locales or the sagebrush-painted vistas of his imagination.

''The literary and critical community has shut the door on him because of 22 Conan stories,'' Finn said. ''But there's so much of Texas in his work. It's undeniable.''

Finn, who became a Howard fan as a teenager, said that while he's good friends with the top half-dozen ''movers and shakers'' in the world of current Howard scholarship, those people did not grow up in Texas like he did.

Native Texans who read the work can more easily ''hear the voices'' of those who surrounded Howard in his life, he said.

''Howard was, in truth, a regional writer,'' he said, even when his fiction flings headlong into the world of heroic fantasy and black sorcery.

''Cimmeria,'' a poem describing Conan's home turf, is taken from a remembrance of a visit to mist-shrouded Fredericksburg. In ''Beyond the Black River,'' the Brazos and the Trinity rivers become the Black and Thunder rivers of Howard's fantasy kingdom of Aquilonia.

Howard wrote every sort of pulp fiction story imaginable, from tales of boxers in the ring to yarns of fighting sailor-men, horror stories, Oriental fiction, adventure sagas of all stripes and westerns.

Many of the toughs that swagger through his chronicles, and the scenes of the inherent and inevitable corruption and fall of civilization that permeate a good number, come from remembrances of living in oilfield boom towns, including Cross Plains, Finn writes.

Those same images color much of Howard's personal philosophy, informing his thoughts about people, greed and the rise and fall of, as he once wrote, countless ''shining kingdoms ... spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars'' throughout history.

In the course of researching and writing ''Blood & Thunder,'' Finn found in the words and works of folklorist Mody C. Boatright, secretary-editor of the Texas Folklore Society from 1943 to 1964, what he believes to be an irrefutable blueprint for Howard's brand of pulp yarn.

Robert Howard took a mixture of his mother, Hester Howard's, love of literature and his physician father, Isaac Howard's, propensity for a good yarn, plus stories gleaned from friends and family throughout his life, and came up with a profoundly personal voice that would carry him through the ages.

Finn began talking with Chris Roberson of MonkeyBrain Books in late 2004 about the possibility of a book on Howard.

''The thing I really want people to get out of this is the idea that his work is worth studying,'' Finn said. ''I intentionally put what I felt was a very healthy amount of literary criticism in the book - but I tried to not ruin any of the stories, as well.''

A Tall Tale

The irony that Robert E. Howard's life has become something of a tall yarn is not lost on Finn.

''Blood & Thunder'' is in some ways a direct response to ''Dark Valley Destiny,'' the most famous - or among some fans, infamous - treatment of Howard's life, written by fantasist L. Sprague de Camp.

De Camp, Finn said, worked tirelessly, which helped vault Howard's Conan stories into public consciousness in the decades following Howard's death.

''He was always very good at promoting Robert E. Howard, but I just wish he had been nicer to him,'' Finn said.

In his biographies, including many short introductions written about Howard, de Camp always played up the Cross Plains author's faults and painted a picture of Howard as a loose cannon.

''Over time, this sort of turns into a game of telephone,'' Finn said. ''So over time he becomes an obsessed gun nut who blew his brains out when he learned his beloved mother was going to die.''

In fact, a study of the ever-evolving reports of Howard's suicide become an exercise in the study of myth-making, from the famous ''All fled, all done'' couplet found in his pocket that, in some descriptions of events, miraculously jumps to his typewriter, to the prayerful pleas Howard reportedly uttered on the way out to his car to shoot himself.

Until the last 20 years or so, it was all most readers could use to base their opinions of Howard.

There are precious few glimpses of the real Robert E. Howard in his personal writings.

Howard showed people exactly what they wanted to see, Finn said, from being on his best behavior when guests came to call to the way he presented himself to different individuals in his many personal letters.

But de Camp took a lot of stories at face value that he shouldn't have taken, Finn said.

Finn said he tried to paint a picture of someone who ''did the best with what was handed to him.''

''I don't think his parents were trying to screw him up,'' he said.

Robert Howard's father, Isaac, was gone for great stretches of time. Robert took care of his ailing mother, perhaps because it freed the family from paying for a nurse.

He showed signs of what would now be termed a clinical depression throughout his life. And Finn sees more world-weariness than mother-love in his choice of day and time for his own death.

''The last six months of his life were probably the most stressful of all,'' he said. ''Hester was in her end-phase, her body finally quitting on her.''

The Howards finally hired nurses to help Robert, but they kept asking him for everything, Finn said.

People were in and out of the house. Robert wasn't sleeping well, and when he did, he probably ''slept guilty,'' he said.

Howard wrote and sold a good number of stories during that time, and interestingly enough it is during this period that some of his best humor fiction was written, Finn said.

''Basically, it was a pressure cooker for six months,'' he said. ''If his mother's death was the last straw, I think it may have been because of relief that he no longer had to take care of her, not that he couldn't live without her.''

Finn said his biography is selling well, and his personal goal is to sell through the initial print run and go into a second printing.

Fan and scholarly reaction has been quite positive, he said, with even a close friend of the de Camps lavishing praise on the work.

''De Camp was a diligent researcher, no question,'' wrote Bill Crider, who lives in Alvin and writes mystery, western and horror novels. ''But to put things in the current idiom, Finn believes that de Camp cherry-picked the intelligence to suit his thesis and therefore was wrong about most everything.''

Even though he's happy with the work, which will be mentioned in an upcoming issue of ''Publisher's Weekly,'' Finn said he's not done with Howard. He regularly writes essays for Dark Horse Comics' trade paperback collections of their new Conan comics and has other projects in mind, including a novel he's thinking about writing. Finn is also creative director for the Violet Crown Radio Players, a theatrical group in Austin that recreates the joys of old-time radio programs for a live audience.

Finn admits that he has had to reconcile his ''fan's perception'' with the reality of Robert E. Howard. He allowed himself ''speculative indulgence'' by writing bridging sequences in the ''Blood & Thunder'' so that he would not be tempted to do so in the main text.

''I start out showing a picture of a young boy in a boomtown environment,'' he said. ''Eventually you get to his name, Robert Howard, and you learn that at 15, his life is half over. To me, that was extremely powerful.''

WRITING WITH PUNCH

Howard occasionally blew off steam at Cross Plains' local icehouse by boxing, Finn said. Through bodybuilding and exercise, Howard eventually grew to be a heroically-sized man with a devastating punch.

THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE ARTIFACTS

Howard created King Kull with an Underwood manual typewriter.

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST

Though he was an intelligent, articulate writer, Howard was often dismissed by his peers. ''The literary and critical community has shut the door on him because of 22 Conan stories,'' Finn said. ''But there's so much of Texas in his work. It's undeniable.''