‘Aboard the Old Buoy’ Follows Its Cheerful Warrior Into Gritty Diners, Dank Fight Clubs, And Dark Alleys

It’s a fairly bold move to build upon someone else’s fiction. Even bolder when that someone else is the legendary creator of Conan the Barbarian, Robert E. Howard. That’s exactly what author Andrew Rihn does with his Novella, Aboard the Old Buoy. Rihn doesn’t take on Howard’s sword-and-sorcery tales; instead, he focuses on the son of one of Howard’s most consistent subjects, sailor and brawler Steve Costigan. 

Costigan appeared in more than 25 Howard stories, most printed in magazines in the late ‘20s and into the mid ‘30s. Rihn builds on the Costigan clan by featuring Steve Costigan Jr. as his protagonist. Jr. is preceded not only by his father, but also by his uncle, “Iron” Mike—a fighter as well, as the nickname might tell you. 

Aboard the Old Buoy is told as a series of letters—most of them from Junior Costigan to Senior. Rihn captures a very particular Texan voice with the younger Costigan. The character speaks in a colloquial fashion that immediately speaks to a blue-collar, working-class background. 

For reasons best explained in the book, Costigan Junior finds himself in New Orleans. While we don’t immediately get the sense that he is running from something, his decision to take up the sailing life as a neophyte deckhand comes with curiosity. Could it be that Junior, a young man in his twenties in 1955, is looking to sow some wild oats and meet with adventure? Or is there something darker trailing him? Maybe it’s both.

Over 139 briskly devoured pages, we see Junior board the cargo ship the Old Buoy and find adventure in Havana, Panama; Bonaventura, Ecuador; and finally Patagonia, before docking in San Francisco. Junior’s shipmates are a colorful crew with names like Jimmy Muggs, Jalisco, and another brawler named Clint, known as “The Brick Who Hits Back.”

All of them are good company, but none more than Jimmy Muggs, a scrapper and hustler who specializes in life on the edges, with gambling, deal-making, and fight matching. Junior speaks of Muggs like so: 

“He wasn’t a deep-down bad guy. He jus’ loved th’ thrill a’ not bein’ good.” It’s a wonderfully descriptive sentence in a book full of them.

There are plenty of fights in Aboard the Old Buoy, but this isn’t a boxing book per se. Junior isn’t a heavyweight contender; he fights in clubs, takes on smokers, and once sparred with a champ. The bouts he takes on are in seedy locations with questionable men and gyrating women filling the scene. Even so, the descriptions of the fights in Aboard the Old Buoy are breathless and bruising, almost like hearing an old-school ring commentator pontificate, but from within the ring while taking and giving the blows as opposed to talking up the fight from the safety of ringside. 

You don’t have to be a sailor or a boxer to enjoy Aboard the Old Buoy, because at its heart, Rihn’s book is an adventure story about an ignorant (in the ways we are all ignorant in our twenties) but open young man. No, Junior isn’t discovering a lost covenant or an ancient text; he’s seeing the world for the first time and taking it in as it comes to him—sometimes through blackened eyes. He may not know it, but what he’s discovering is himself and who he might be in the future.

Junior Costigan may think of himself as a simple Texan, but as he muses on being a laborer on the cusp of space exploration, he wonders whether the world is passing him by. When his perception of Panama is countered by a Panamanian woman who explains to him what the U.S. occupation of the fabled canal has meant to her people, he doesn’t push back. He listens and accepts her point of view. 

Even better is his conversation with an old expat philosopher high in the mountains of Ecuador. This “hermit philosopher” (who goes by the name of “FS”) speaks on the ills of capitalism, the trouble with boxing (both are hard on the working man and great for the pullers of strings). 

Of boxing, the geezer/inventor/teacher says:

“I do love it,” FS said, “but I hate the pulverization of the working class. It’s a macabre theater, the rich so snugly ensconced in their ringside box seats. The bookmakers and the mafiosos with their fingers on the scales and their hands in the fighters’ pockets. It’s become a sick game, Steve. And it’s the fighters who always lose.”

Has it not been forever so? The world of boxing is littered with gangsters, fixers, and broken men. What FS shares is true, and the young Costigan knows it. FS also makes him aware that it’s not just boxing, but the system of goods, services, owners, and workers that fuel our economy and create disparity.

When FS shares his invention, an early robotics prototype, he tells Junior that he knows it may not be practical: 

“I never forget the present. When I soar ahead into the future, I always leave a string by which to find my way back again. Dispatches from the new world, addressed to the old.”

What a beautiful stretch of words by a (semi)-pragmatic dreamer. In his own way, Junior Costigan is a dreamer himself. He just hasn’t sorted out where they should take him.

Rihn’s book has a real touch of poetry. The final chapter jumps ahead thirteen years as Muggs relays a story Junior had shared with him, and perhaps no one else. It ends the book with a revelation and a touch of melancholy. 

Aboard the Old Buoy follows its cheerful warrior into gritty diners, dank fight clubs, dark alleys, and the jungles of South America. All of it is seen through the wide-eyed, open mind of a cheerful warrior, even when he busts up three men at once while taking damage himself. 

I have no idea if Rihn will publish another volume of Steve Costigan Jr. stories. Maybe this one terrific book is enough. But if he does, I will eagerly receive it. I think Robert E. Howard would too.

You can click HERE to preorder Aboard the Old Buoy.

David Phillips

David Phillips has been writing on boxing for just over a decade for The Sweet Science and NY Fights. He runs his own blog dedicated to the appreciation of classic and overlooked films, reelreframe.com, and writes on film and television for Awards Daily. His essay “My Black Grandpa” was shortlisted as “Best of Folklore” by The Bitter Southerner in 2018. Author of Goodnight to the Peoples. You can follow David on Twitter @BrotherJulius83

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