Richard Louis Tierney (August 7, 1936 – February 1, 2022) was an American writer, poet and scholar of H. P. Lovecraft, probably best known for his heroic fantasy, including his series co-authored (with David C. Smith) of Red Sonja novels, featuring cover art by Boris Vallejo. He lived the latter part of his life in Mason City in the great Corn Steppes of Iowa. Some of his standalone novels utilize the mythology of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. He is also known for his Simon of Gitta series (which cross historical Gnosticism with Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos) and his Robert E. Howard completions and utilisation of such Howard-invented characters as Cormac Mac Art, Bran Mak Morn and Cormac Fitzgeoffrey.
Tierney is especially renowned for his weird and fantastic verse, which has been acclaimed by such critics, writers, and poets as S. T. Joshi, Don Herron, Ramsey Campbell, Robert M. Price, Donald Sidney-Fryer, and Frank Belknap Long. In 1993, Tierney was presented with the annual Minnesota Fantasy Award. He was nominated for Science Fiction Poetry Association Grand Master in 2010.
Ancestry and Youth
Tierney was of Irish origin on his paternal side. His great-grandfather emigrated from Dublin with his family to the United States. His maternal parentage traces its lineage to the Mayflower and the first Quaker settlement at Nantucket Island, Mass via the line of Thomas Macy (1608–1682), an early settler of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and of Nantucket Island.
Tierney was born in Spencer, Iowa. His family moved to Mason City in 1942 when Tierney was six years old. He went through the public school system, attending Madison grade school, Roosevelt Junior High and a high school he referred to as "Old Bastille" since it was built of old dark brick and always felt like a prison to him. Tierney read two of H. P. Lovecraft's stories ("The Rats in the Walls" and "The Dunwich Horror") in the anthology Great Tales of Horror and the Supernatural edited by Wise and Frazer (1949) at about age thirteen, but was not especially impressed by them since they contained no conventional ghosts. At age 14, he read "Colossus' by Donald Wandrei in August Derleth's 1950 anthology Beyond Time and Space. Tierney has referred to this tale as "one of the most fascinating stories I had ever encountered, largely because of [its] poetic mood evoking a setting of trans-cosmic vastness. He would many years later become a neighbor and friend of Wandrei's in Minneapolis. Aged 15, and reading heavily in science fiction, Tierney read Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time" in Donald A. Wollheim's Viking Portable Novels of Science and was 'hooked'. "Shadow" and At the Mountains of Madness became his two favourite Lovecraft tales.
Tierney was also influenced by the work of Tarzan creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs. At around the same age (15 or 16), he was inspired to write poetry by August Derleth's fantasy verse anthology Dark of the Moon: Poems of Fantasy and the Macabre which he read several times in the Mason City Public Library. While he had previously been a devotee of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, he was especially inspired by the H. P. Lovecraft poems in the anthology (particularly the "Fungi from Yuggoth" and also those of Donald Wandrei, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long and others).
1950s: Early writing (fiction and poetry)