Howard Andrew Jones, 1968-2025

21 February 2025

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Writer, editor, and historian Howard Andrew Jones passed away last month after a difficult uphill fight with multifocal glioblastoma. He was a friend of mine, and he was a decent man.

“Decent” is a weak word for such a potent quality.

I wish we had a better phrase in English. The Germans or the French or the Japanese might knock something bespoke and pithy together as they like but in English I have to pile words on words to make my point, so for Howard I will pile words on words.

So, he was decent. Not “decent” meaning inoffensive or adequate or gosh we can’t think of anything else to say about him, but that he embodied a quiet sense of goodness that defused cynicism and made you think that maybe, just maybe, we really can be all in this together. He was honorable, he was reflective, he was curious. He moved himself to be kind. He shared things without warning or preamble or any expectation except the pleasure of generosity itself.

There is a scene in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty” in which Sherlock Holmes, the great logical machine, is enraptured by a rose and gives us a rare glimpse into his thoughts beyond the material:

"There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

Howard was such a rose, he was such an extra. We still have much to hope for, in a world that gives us men like him. Even when it takes them away long, long before their time.

I must have met Howard at a convention, one of the middle-American ones, about a dozen years ago. GenCon in Indiana, or ConFusion in Michigan. All those hotel room parties become a blur after a while, and it was certainly a hotel room party. Perched on the edge of a bed to keep ourselves clear of the other nine thousand people sharing those thirty square yards of space, we made friendly awkward small talk until for some reason we started discussing the work of Fritz Leiber. I enthused about a scene in which Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser improvise a song narrating an opponent’s demise while they are in the midst of swashbuckling him to his death from the top of a ship’s mast (“Oh, Lavas Laerk had a face like a dirk, and of swordsmen twenty-and-three…”), at which point Howard, even more excitedly, joined in and finished the song with me. That was basically what did it, the Lavas Laerk song. It was off to the races after that.

Howard shared his work with me, his fiction starting with the Dabir and Asim stories, certainly, but also his scholarly and editorial work. He was fascinated by all the currents of pulp and adventure fiction that had eventually joined to the river we now think of as fantasy, and he sent me a complete set of the Harold Lamb collections he’d edited for the University of Nebraska Press, part of his effort to keep the work of historic adventure writers from slipping into the shadows. We hurled things back and forth at random; I sent him Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser comics, and he sent me paperback westerns. He loved digging into the real writers hiding behind the pseudonyms or “house names” used on series fiction (for example, “Carolyn Keene,” the woman behind the Nancy Drew mysteries, was actually dozens of people who worked on the books over the course of fifty years). He would send me gems of superior writing hidden as #17 of this series or #23 of that series; he would also send me the worst pieces of crap he’d sifted through in order to mine those rare objects, so that I could “enjoy a fair comparison.” I have no practical ongoing use for the damn things, they’re yellowing clumps of dry hackery, but simply because Howard gave them to me those stupid little pieces of shit have now acquired a value beyond money.

From time to time our conversations would swerve into the serious; Howard once confided to me that he worried, shall we say, that he hadn’t done enough for his family’s security and that he might have thrown himself into the sort of career that routinely offered buckets of money instead of the slimmer benefits packages of the genre fiction market. I wasn’t trying to blow sunshine up his ass when I told him it never would have worked; he was never going to be a hedge fund manager or a cluster-bomb manufacturer, he was always going to spend his life making good and thoughtful things. To be good and thoughtful was his inescapable doom. He was the powerful, stubborn sort of decent. And I, for my part, grew into a blithe assumption that he would always be there, that we would always have time to talk more, and more deeply, and age together happily tossing good and thoughtful things back and forth at one another.

I have often been wrong in my life but I don’t think I’ve ever regretted an assumption more.

He was a treasure and we were beyond lucky to have him, but losing him diminishes the world. It dims the lights. It lengthens the shadows and chills the hearth, and in time the blessing of his memory might return some of that lost light and warmth but now I mostly feel the cold and see the shadows. I think uselessly of what I’d give to be able to send him one more story, or to see one more hilariously godawful old paperback show up in my mail.

I hope and trust in new warmth, as the turning of the seasons, but I will miss him forever.

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Howard’s visitation and celebration of life will take place tomorrow in Indiana.

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“Scott,” Howard might have said, “you can’t leave them hanging on that. You’ve hit them with the mope-stick, now you’ve got to dangle the carrot.” And he would have been right. So. Ahem. Happier things on Monday the 24th.