In a departure from many Cthulhu Mythos stories, Lumley's characters are not helpless victims of unimaginable forces which can drive humans mad by merely manifesting themselves. Instead, Titus Crow, his friend Henri-Laurent de Marigny, and other Lumley characters confront Cthulhu's minions in a series of increasingly large-scale encounters, in which humans, although outmatched, try to fight back. In a letter to the journal Crypt of Cthulhu, Lumley wrote:
I have trouble relating to people who faint at the hint of a bad smell. A meep or glibber doesn't cut it with me. (I love meeps and glibbers, don't get me wrong, but I go looking for what made them!) That's the main difference between my stories...and HPL's. My guys fight back. Also, they like to have a laugh along the way.[2]
Crow has been known to survive any number of encounters with monsters, although he may not always be able to defeat the creatures. For instance, he may fall unconscious upon running into a monster that kills anything that moves.
In The Transition of Titus Crow, Crow is almost totally destroyed when the Clock crashes while fleeing from the Hounds of Tindalos. (Pt.4 -Fragments). He is slowly recreated from surviving cells & his memories stored in the Clock, as a cyborg over many decades, by a robot who theorized that robots were originally created by organic beings. As a cyborg he now has powers that can better deal with the monsters of the mythos.
He is described as a man who spends most of his money on commodities and keeps the rest of it in the bank. Crow owns several Cthulhu Mythos objects, including the Clock of Dreams. The Clock is a time-space machine in the form of a coffin-shaped clock. It was previously owned by Randolph Carter and by de Marigny's father, and is referred to as "de Marigny's clock" in many of the early short stories.
Elysia (1989, ISBN0-932445-32-2), in which the characters of the Titus Crow series meet characters from Lumley's two other series, Dreamlands and Primal Land, for a grand confrontation with the Dark Forces.
Short stories
Collected in The Compleat Crow (1987 Hodder and Stoughton). (ISBN0-340-69544-7)
"Inception" (1987)
"Lord of the Worms" (originally published in Weirdbook 17, 1983)
"The Caller of the Black" (originally published in The Caller of the Black, 1971 Arkham House)