FAQ

Are you related to some famous Jones? Or are you secretly THAT famous Jones?

I don’t think so. I use the middle name to distinguish me from the English pop star Howard Jones. My father used to tell me I was almost named Andrew Howard rather than Howard Andrew, which would have made it harder to distinguish me from the famous New Zealand cricket player with that very same name. So far as I know, I’m not related to either man, nor to writer Howard Mumford Jones, or writer/historian Howard Jones, or any other well-known Joneses. According to one family researcher, I’m remotely related to Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper, though I don’t recall the details.

I see your name mentioned in conjunction with Harold Lamb a lot. What’s that all about?

Harold Lamb was a talented historical fiction writer and, later, historian and biographer. I stumbled on his works when I was young and later learned that much of it had never been collected or reprinted. In the course of tracking it down I accidentally became an expert on the man’s writing, and it was my pleasure and honor to shepherd a number of collections of his work into print. Lamb was far ahead of his time in many ways, both in pacing and his sophisticated portrayal of non-westerners, and it’s my conjecture that he’s the unsung grandfather of modern sword-and-sorcery and heroic fiction.