When the two Black Vulmea stories were printed together in 1970s collections – from Zebra Books, for instance – another story, “The Isle of Pirates’ Doom” was included with them. This is the only Howard yarn to feature the young female pirate Helen Tavrel, adopted daughter of another Irish pirate, Roger O’Farrel. (O’Farrel, evidently, is educated and high-born, while Vulmea is purely roughneck peasant stock.) Both, in my estimation, would have been Terence Vulmea’s contemporaries, O’Farrel a full generation older and Helen a few years younger.

This doesn’t matter, in the context of a review of the “Vulmea” stories, but as with most of REH’s yarns, there are a lot of casual references that would have made entire novels if Howard had chosen to write them. The other pirates in “Swords of the Red Brotherhood”, well-born Frenchman Guillaume Villiers and Bristol gutter-rat Dick Harston (who hate each other) must each have had a bloody and interesting career in his own right. We’re told that “unless rumour lied”, Villiers had once been a familiar figure at Versailles. And the names of (fictional) pirates known to Vulmea are mentioned in passing in “Black Vulmea’s Vengeance.” We receive the most information about the Dutch buccaneer, van Raven, in whom Captain Wentyard is intensely interested. Vulmea immediately sees that this is because van Raven had taken treasure from a Spanish plate fleet – the sort of achievement that not just every sea-rover could claim, so the Netherlander must have been an outstanding sea-thief as well as a restless, impulsive one. Vulmea says, “Van Raven? He’s a bird of passage. Who knows where he sails?”

He also asks, knowing the answer anyway, why Wentyard is interested in van Raven and not a number of others more destructive to English shipping, like Villiers (we can suppose Wentyard doesn’t know Villiers died in “Swords of the Red Brotherhood”) or “Tranicos”, or “McVeigh.” L. Sprague de Camp rewrote “The Black Stranger” as “The Treasure of Tranicos”, but the "Tranicos” mentioned in “Black Vulmea’s Vengeance” sounds as though he might have been Greek, perhaps with a history of fighting his Ottoman overlords, and I picture “McVeigh” as a dark, dour little Scots Presbyter, quoting scripture and devilishly handy with a dirk.

Well, Robert E. Howard never wrote anything about these rogues except their names, so we cannot know, but it would have been interesting if he had. At least we have his two stories about Black Terence Vulmea. Like most fans who’ve read them, I found them memorable and Vulmea a powerful, fascinating character. He’s quite a bit more than just a Caribbean version of Conan.