Category Archives: Conan

Blogging Conan: Jewels of Gwahlur/The Servants of Bit-Yakin

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This was one of the last Conan stories Howard wrote.  Only four more would follow, but those four contain two of his greatest masterpieces, “Beyond the Black River” and “Red Nails.”  Howard’s title was “The Servants of Bit-Yakin”, but Farnsworth Wright changed the title to “Jewels of Gwahlur” when he published it in Weird Tales.  That’s the title it was known by until the Wndering Star/Del Rey editions, which restored the original title.  However, there are some collections in print which are using the Weird Tales versions of Howard’s stories, so you might find it under either title.  Unlike some of Howard’s work, there’s no difference between his preferred version and the version that appeared in Weird Tales.

This isn’t one of the better Conan stories.  The plot requires swallowing a pretty large pill, namely that a treasure as valuable as the Teeth of Gwahlur (as they’re called in the story) could remain unmolested in a lost jungle city for so long.  Also, the heroine is way too hysterical.  She’s certainly no Belit.
The basic setup involves Conan working as a mercenary in the Black Kingdoms.  He’s there because he’s heard rumors of a great treasure in a lost city, Alkmeenon, and is waiting around to find out the details.  When an old enemy, the STygian Thutmekri, shows up and bribes some of the priests to take him to Alkmeenon, Conan is able to find out where it is.  Knowing Thutmekri is working for the kingdom of Zembabwei and the whole thing is a set-up for an invasion, Conan leaves ahead of them.
Alkmeenon is hidden in a natural amphitheater surrounded by sheer cliffs.  Not knowing the location of the secret entrance to the valley, Conan climbs the cliffs.  Near the top he encoutners a small cave in which he finds a mummy holding a tube containing a parchment.  Of course he takes it.  This was one of the more powerful images in the story for me.  Conan is hundreds of feet above the ground and comes face to face with a corpse.
I’m a sucker for lost city stories, particularly those that take place in jungles.  The thing that makes this one unique is that so much of it is set in a series of caves and underground passages beneath the city.  We know that Howard was inspired by a visit to Carlsbad Caverns when he wrote this one. 
Another powerful scene, occurring about halfway through the story, is when Conan is attempting to sneak up on one of the people who have not followed but preceded him to the valley.  Knowing the location of the secret entrance has its advantages.  It’s dusk, and Conan sees the white of his face contrasted against the darkness of the forest.  When he approaches the man, Conan discovers its only the man’s head he sees, tied to a branch by the hair.  The valley is supposed to be deserted…
“TheServants of Bit-Yakin” (or “Jewels of Gwahlur” if you prefer) isn’t the best Conan story, but it isn’t the worst either.  It’s simply an adventure story, and a better than average one at that.  While there are some problems with the characterization and some of the plot details, it still has its moments.  In my opinion, it’s worth reading.

Blogging Kull and Conan: Of Axes and Swords

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And so we reach the end of our look at the Kull stories (almost; I’ll have some general comments in a separate post) and the first of the Conan posts.  I’m looking at both of these because the first Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword”, is a rewrite of an unsold Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule!”.

“By This Axe” isn’t a bad story, but it isn’t a particularly good one, certainly not be the standards Howard had set in some of the other Kull installments.  There are two main aspects to the plot.  First, a group of dissatisfied men, two noblemen, a guard captain, and a poet, have recruited a former diplomat turned bandit, Ascalante, to help them overthrow Kull.  This portion of the story is the better half. 

The second portion of the plot concerns a young nobleman who wishes to marry a young slave girl who happens to be owned by one of the conspirators.  This type of situation seems to be a recurrent theme in the Kull series, mostly in stories not published in Howard’s lifetime.  Kull’s Councilor Tu insists that for a nobleman to marry a slave is simply not done; it would violate a centuries old law.

Kull sneaks out of the palace to wander the woods for a few hours.  He feels like a slave himself.  There’s a great deal of discussion on Kull’s part at various places in the story about how holding a throne is much more difficult than taking it.  During his walk in the woods, he encounters a young girl weeping.  Not recognizing him, she tells him that she’s a slave in love with a nobleman, who went to the king to request permission to marry.  Kull is sympathetic, but argues the king has to abide by the laws himself.

The rest of the story concerns the conspiracy attempting to assassinate Kull and failing.  In the end, he uses his axe to smash the stone tablet on which is written the law forbidding slaves and nobility to marry.  He declares that he is the law.

It’s easy to see why Farnsworth Wright rejected this story when Howard submitted it to Weird Tales.  The whole romance subplot basically ruins the story.  The slave girl comes across as both childish and childlike.  She speaks of being spanked as punishment by her master at one point.  She’s weepy and clingy.  And her dialogue reminds me of early Shirley Temple movies or child characters in Victorian novels, all sweetness and earnestness.  There’s was no way I was buying that this girl and the nobleman were madly in love.  That whole aspect of the story had an almost pedaeophilic tone to it.  I’m sure Howard didn’t intend anything of the sort.  It’s just a combination of his still developing skill as a writer and my twenty-first century cultural concerns coming together.  Still, the whole thing gave me the creeps.

One thing did make me wonder just what Howard was dealing with in his own life when he wrote this story. At one point the girl deeclares: “Why should laws not change? Time never stands still! Why should people today be shackled by laws which were made for our barbarian ancestors thousands of years ago-” It sounds like Howard may have been feeling a little bit shackled and enslaved by the culture he was living in. I know from first-hand experience that small towns in that part of Texas can be extremely conformist in their outlook, and in the 1920s I’m sure it was much worse. Howard was in his early 20s when he wrote this, and I suspect was still feeling some of the natural rebellion of youth that questions why things have to be the same as they were. This is entirely speculation on my part, but it fits with what I know about Howard and my experiences in similar environments.
 

“The Phoenix on the Sword”, while not one of Howard’s best stories, and certainly not the best of the Conan tales, is clearly the work of a more mature writer.  Howard drops the whole romance subplot, and instead introduces a villain whose hand would be felt in a couple of other stories, the Stygian sorceror Thoth-amon.  He’s a slave to the bandit as the tale opens, having lost a ring by which he maintains his power.  Of course he finds it, and uses it to wreack his revenge by sending a creature from the Outer Darkness against the bandit.  This is the only thing that saves Conan.  The creature attacks during the assassination attempt.  In the Kull story, it’s the nobleman who saves the day.
There’s also a new scene in which Conan in a cream meets a wise man who died fifteen hundred years earlier.  This man tells Conan that his fate and that of Aquilonia, the kingdom Conan rules, are entertwined.  He places a phoenix emblem on Conan’s sword, which is what allows Conan to kill the supernatural creature.
The scenes retained from “By This Axe”, portions of the conspiracy, Conan complaining about the duties of ruling, and the assassination scence are to a large extent unchanged except for some of the names.  Only when Howard made significant changes to the plot, such as the addition of the creature in the fianl fight, does he engage in any extensive rewriting.  Since the parts he retained were by far the better passages, this doesn’t hurt the story any.
Unlike the Kull series, the Conan stories weren’t written in any kind of chronological order, but jumpmed about throughout the character’s life.  Also, Kull has no interest in women.  Conan has plenty.  Even a casual reading of the two series will reveal that, while there are similarities, Kull isn’t simply Conan-lite.
So, we’ve looked at all the Kull stories mostly in the order they appear in the current edition from Del Rey.  I’ll be jumping around more with the Conan stories, looking at whichever one I’m in the mood to read at a given time.  I’ll also be giving fewer spoilers in the Conan posts.  With the movie less than a month away, I suspect I’ll pick up one or two new readers.  I don’t want to spoil any of the fun for those who haven’t read the originals.

Blogging Kull and Bran Mak Morn: Kings of the Night

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Kull:  Exile of Atlantis
or Bran Mak Morn:  The Last King
Robert E. Howard
Del Rey

This is the next to last post about Kull and the first about Bran Mak Morn.  They’re together because they appear in the same story.  This is essentially a Bran Mak Morn story in which Kull has a supporting role, although many elements of the Kull series can be seen.  Let’s take a quick look at it.

Howard uses the trick of telling his tale from the point of view of a supporting character, albeit a crucial one.  This is a device he’s used before, especially in some of the Conan stories.  The advantage to this approach is that we get to see how other characters view the hero.  This allows the reader to gain a fresh perspective of the hero and is particularly useful with a series character whose identity has been well established. The viewpoint character here is Cormac na Connacht, “a prince of the isle of Erin.”

The story is divided into three parts.  In the first, the Picts and their allies are awaiting a battle with an invading Roman legion the following morning.  With the Celts and Picts are a group of Northmen.  The northmen were defeated by Bran when they tried to invade.  Their king swore and oath that he would aid Bran against the Romans in one battle, and in return Bran would build him ships for the survivors to get home.  The problem is that the king was killed in a skirmish with Roman scouts, and his remaining men say his death released them from the oath.  Unless Bran finds them a king to fight under, “a king neither Pict, Gael, or Briton”, they will desert to the Romans.

The ancient Druid priest Gonar promises help.  Preceded by a lengthy speech about time being an illusion, he brings Kull forward in time to help with the battle, with Kull appearing to walk out of the rising sun.  At first Kull thinks Bran is his friend Brule.  Bran is descended from Brule and resembles him strongly.  He also wears a gem in his crown that was given to Brule by Kull in a ring, and from Kull’s perspective, that happened the previous night.  Kull thinks the whole things is a detailed dream.  Always eager for a good fight, he agrees to lead the Northmen.

First he has to defeat the new leader of the Northmen, Wulfhere, who is resistant to Kull taking charge.  An extended scene of single combat takes up the rest of the second part.  It’s pure Howard.  The prose is lean, exciting, and pulls you in.  Of course Kull is victorious, but he’s not unscathed.  This helps convince the Northmen he’s not a ghost.

The third part of the story is the battle.  Bran puts Kull, who still thinks he’s dreaming, at the head of the Norsemen at the end of a gorge.  They are the bait in a trap. None of the rest of Bran’s army is disciplined enough to stand and wait for the Romans to enter the gorge.  Once they do, the Gaelic cavalry and the chariots of the Britons, accompanied by the Picts, will sweep in from the sides trapping them.

It’s an effective and bloody plan.  Most of the Northmen die, as do most of the Romans, their camp followers, and many Picts, Gaels, and Britons.  Cormac sees Kull standing on the ridge, outnumbered, the sole survivor of the bait.  Just as one of the Romans is about to deliver a killing blow, the sun begins to set, and Kull is transported back to Valusia.

Appalled at the carnage, Cormac threatens to kill Bran in retribution for not springing the trap sooner.  Bran replies ” ‘Strike if you will.  I am sick of slaughter.  It is a cold mead, this kinging it…A king belongs to his people, and can not let either his own feelings or the lives of men influence him.  Now my peole are saved; but my heart is cold in my breast.”

Heavy stuff.  Even in victory there is bleakness.  This is one of Howard’s best.  A lesser writer would have taken the easy way out at the end of the story and had the victors celebrate.  Instead they mourn the loss of their friends and allies, including the Northmen, and prepare for the next battle with the Romans who will follow after those who have fallen.

This could have been a simple adventure story.  Instead, Howard infused it with some of his favorite themes.  There’s much discussion about the nature of time and reality.  Is Kull dreaming being with Bran, or was his former life a dream from which he had just awakened.  Then there’s the weight of the crown and responsibility, often fulfilled in blood, of those who wear it.  Finally, throughout the story, Howard makes references to the rise and fall of the Picts in particular and how much science has been lost since Kull’s time.  Kull’s armor and weapons are superior to any other in the battle, on either side.

The strands of melancholy and philosophy make this one of Howard’s better tales.  It’s one I’ll return to again in the future, for it’s well worth multiple readings.

The Kull series of posts is about at an end.  The only one remaining is for “By This Axe I Rule!” which was rewritten into “The Phoenix on the Sword”, the first of the Conan tales.  I’ll be comparing the two in the final Kull post.  That post will launch a series of posts looking at selected Conan stories.  This post launches a series of posts about Bran Mak Morn.  Bran, Kull, and Conan are Howard’s three warrior kings, and Kull is the common link between them.  I’ll have more to say about that as we look at Bran and Conan over the next few months.

Blogging Kull: Swords of the Purple Kingdom

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Kull: Exile of Atlantis
Robert E. Howard
Del Rey, 317 p. $17

There are three stories left in the Kull series, and they are “By This Axe I Rule!”, “Swords of the Purple Kingdom”, and “Kings of the Night”.  I’m going to skip “By This Axe I Rule!” for reasons I’ll explain at the end of the post.  Instead, let’s turn our attention to “Swords of the Purple Kingdom”, shall we?

In his afterward to this volume, “Hyborian Genesis”, Patrice Louinet says that this story was probably written sometime around June of 1929.  That makes perfect sense, considering the opening paragraph.  Here are a few lines describing conditions in the city of Valusia:

“The heat waves danced from roof to shining roof and shimmered against the smooth marble walls.  The purple towers and golden spires were softened in the faint haze.  No ringing hoofs on the wide paved streets broke the frowsy silence and the few pedestrians who appeared walking, did what they had to do hastily and vanished indoors again.”

I don’t know how many of you have ever dealt with a Texas summer, but that’s a pretty good description of what it’s like.  A high pressure dome typically forms over the state, what winds happen to blow are hot, and the air is hazy.  This passage strikes me as Howard incorporating what he knew (and may have been living at the time) into his fiction.  The description is perfect. 

The city is a powder keg waiting to explode.  The people have prospered under Kull’s rule, and consequently they have forgotten how they suffered under the tyranny of his predecessor and how they welcomed him when he took the throne.

Add to this, our old friend Delcartes is still around pestering Kull to command her father the Count to allow her to marry the commoner of her choice.  (It’s a different person than in the earlier story.  Young love is so fickle.)  Kull of course refuses, in part because he doesn’t want to interfere in a family matter on general principles, but also because Delcartes’ father is one of Kull’s closest friends and strongest supporters.

There’s a conspiracy against Kull, of course.  Betrayals and intrigues.  And an intense combat scene where Kull defends Delcartes against a small company of soldiers at the top a stair in an abandoned ruin. 

One thing the story doesn’t have, that many of the other Kull tales do, is a lot of existential philosophy.  Not that Howard didn’t include some philosophizing. He does, but it deals more with the weight of the crown Kull wears.  In the opening scene, before Delcartes enters the audience chamber, Kull and Brule are talking.  Kull laments the fickleness of the people he rules.  Here we see Howard’s fascination with the cycles of empire, where the established empire becomes soft and weak, only to be overthrown by the barbarians, and the cycle starts over again.

Consider Kull’s words to Brule:  “The empire was worse under Borna, a native Valusian and a direct heir of the old dynasty, than it has been under me.  That is the price a nation must pay for decaying – the strong  young people come in and take possession, one way or another.”

Later after Delcarrtes leaves (not before her father arrives), Kull shows extreme sensitivity to the man, who is expecting Kull to order him to allow the marriage.  “Not for half my kingdom would I interfere with your family affairs, nor force you into a course unpleasant to you.”

Two things I want to comment on.  First, we can see Howard’s philosophy of individual freedom at work here.  Kull sympathizes with Delcartes, and if it were up to him, he would allow her to marry.  He believes a person should be free to marry whomever he or she wishes.  The point is made in more than one story.  However, if Kull were to interfere and order the Count to allow his daughter to marry the man she loves, he would be in greater violation of this principle than her father in that he would deny the Count the freedom to manage his household as he wished without interference.

Second, Howard’s detractors often accuse him of writing hack-and-slash fantasy without any depth to his characters.  They need to read Howard more closely.  In “Swords of the Purple Kingdom”, Howard shows Kull having more depth and sensitivity to his subjects needs and positions than he does in any of the stories we’ve considered to date.  (I’m exempting “By This Axe I Rule!” and “Kings of the Night” since we haven’t looked at them yet.)  He does this again with Brule at the end of the tale, when Kull and Brule decide not to tell one of the recurring characters in the series that a relative of his has turned traitor because of what the news will do the man.

Lest you think this story is a touchy-feel-good piece of fluff, there’s plenty of action later in the tale.  Howard was stretching himself as a writer with this particular piece by developing the characters and their backgrounds.  By 1929 he was hitting his stride as a writer.  While the Kull series may contain a number of fragments and false starts, they represent an important phase in his development.

Now, as to why I skipped “By This Axe I Rule!”  There are two stories left in the Del Rey edition.  Both of them are significant, albeit in different ways.  “By This Axe I Rule!” was unpublished in Howard’s lifetime.  He would rewrite it a few years later as “The Phoenix on the Sword”, the story that introduced the world to his most famous character, Conan of Cimmeria.

The other story, “Kings of the Night” is really a Bran Mak Morn story in which Kull has a guest appearance.  That story will be the launching point for a series of posts about Bran, and it will be the next post in this series.

I’m also going to do the same thing with Conan.  The final Kull post will be a comparison of “By This Axe I Rule!” and “Kings of  the Night”.  That will launch a series of posts looking at selected Conan stories.  The reason I’m doing this is because of the Conan movie that will be released in August.  The movie will generate some, hopefully a great deal of, interest in Conan.  My desire is that people doing a search for Conan will find these posts, read them, and then go read the original stories rather than the pastiches.  (If they want to read the pastiches later, that’s fine with me, so long as they understand that Conan has Howard wrote him isn’t the same Conan as others wrote him.)

I’m not gong to do the Conan stories in order, or even look at all of them.  I’ve already discussed “The Frost Giant’s Daughter” at length and see no need to repeat myself on that one. What I’m going to do is pick and choose among my favorites (which will be most of them), although I don’t know if I’ll look at Hour of the Dragon simply because of its length.  I’ll start the posts sometime in July, when interest in the movie should be picking up and do a post every two weeks or so, shifting to at least a post once a week near the movie’s release, and continuing until I burn out, interest in the movie drops off, or I cover all of the Conan stories. 

The Bran Mak Morn posts should start up by the first of July.   They’ll run concurrently with the Conan series, although not as frequently. 

And that’s why I skipped “By This Axe I Rule!”

Report on Howard Days 2011, Day One

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The side of the Cross Plains library

Robert E. Howard Days 2011 was a great success, at least in my opinion.  The weather was hot, but not humid, and the breeze helped keep things cool.  Some people might say we had wind, but since the sky didn’t turn brown from dust like it has for the last few months where I live, I’ll say we only had a breeze in Cross Plains.

Festivities started on Thursday night, but I wasn’t able to arrive until Friday morning.  I’ll report on what I participated in.  Al Harron, at The Blog That Time Forgot, has posted daily summaries, starting with this one for Thursday.  Al and I participated in some of the same activities but also a number of different ones, so check out his posts as well.  Others will be posting their reports, and I’ll try to provide links throughout the week as I become aware of them.

I’ll put in more photos than I usually do, at least for the first day.  My camera battery died on the second day, so all I have are a few photos I took with my phone.  I’ll put the best of those in.

I got to the Pavilion shortly before 9:00 a.m.  Several familiar faces were already there.  I grabbed a donut and coffee and began saying hello after swinging by the bin with the issues of The Cimmerian for sale.   I picked up a few and began mingling.  One of the people I had the pleasure of meeting was Miguel Martins.  Rusty Burke was leading a trailer tour again this year.  Until last year, this was known as The Walking Tour, but a trailer with chairs on it has taken its place.  And a good thing, too.  Even though it was still relatively cool at this time in the morning (low 80s Fahrenheit), it would have been hotter than that before the tour was over.

House where Novalyne Price lived

Just before the tour started Al Harron, arrived.  I met Al last year and made it a point of saying hello before we left.  The tour was packed.  All the chairs on the trailer were taken and four people were piled into the bed of the pickup towing us.  We went by the cemetery (the Howards are all buried in Brownwood) and behind downtown, crossed the highway, and went by the house where Novalyne Price lived while she worked as a teacher at Cross Plains High School from 1934-1936.  That’s her room on the right with the air conditioner sticking out of the window.  If you haven’t read her memoir about her relationship with Bob,  One Who Walked Alone: Robert E. Howard the Final Years, you should.  It formed the basis of the movie The Whole Wide World, starring Vincent D’Onofrio and an at the time nearly unknown actress named Renee Zellweger. 

Rusty Burke leading the Trailer Tour

We also saw the building where the dry-cleaning business Bob worked at was once located, the location of the drug store where he once worked, and the building where he had his stenography business. Trying to take phhotos from a moving trailer turned out to be harder than I thought, so I don’t have many.

After we returned to the Pavilion, I wandered through the Howard house.  There were a number of new docents this year.  The gift shop had the usual number of books and zines, as well as copies of The Whole Wide World and various T-shirts and caps.

Hester’s room, left side
Hester’s room, right side

 I’ve included three photos from the house.  The first is of the left side of Hester’s room, taken from the doorway.  This is the front bedroom that looks out on the porch.  When you enter the house through the front door, you face a long hall with the living room on the right and Hester and Isaac’s room on the left.

The second photo is the right hand side of the room.  Off to the right, out of the field of view, is a dresser.  There’s a small closet to the left of the bedroom door.  As you can see, the room would be considered small by today’s standards.  My memory says that the bed was in front of the window on previous visits rather than to the side, but I’m not sure.  I’ll have to see if I can locate some photos from a previous visit.

The window on the right looks out on what was originally a porch.  It became Bob’s room.  You can see a trunk through the window if you look carefully.

The third photo is looking into Bob’s room.  The brightly lit window looks out onto the side yard.  The windows on the right have a picture of what the backyard would have looked like in the 30s.  A later owner of the house added a room which is now the gift shop.  The typewriter and writing table on the right are the originals.  The original table was sold or given to someone who cut the legs off to make it into a coffee table.  There is a typewriter whose owner claims is Howards, but last year Paul Sammons found a typewriter which may be the original one.  That question has yet to be answered conclusively.  The books on the dresser on the left are copies of ones Bob was known to have owned, although they are not original.  Until you stand in front of it, it’s hard to imagine how small Bob’s bedroom is by contemporary standards.  If I had to live in such a cramped space I think I would imagine being a wanderer.  It’s no wonder he spent so much time in his car driving around the countryside.

Bob’s room

Then it was time for the morning’s panel, which was held at the library.  Rusty Burke and Bill Cavalier related how the first Howard Days came about.  It was a group of fans who wanted to see where Robert E. Howard had written his tales of Kull, Solomon Kane, and Conan.

After the panel, I gave a ride back to the Pavilion to some friends, stopping at the Post Office on the way.  Each year the Cross Plains Post Office commemorates Howard Days with a unique postal cancellation.  I had missed the cancellation on previous visits, but this year I managed to get two post cards and an envelope with the cancellation.  They’re going to go into frames.

Lunch was chili dogs with all the fixings at the Pavilion.  Then it was back to the library for panels on They Kept the Legacy Alive with Damon Sasser, Dennis McHaney, Lee Breakiron, and Bill Cavalier and Howard’s Historicals with Barbara Barret and Amy Kerr.  I was late and missed most of the first panel, but caught all of the ladies’ panel.  Each focused on one of Bob’s strong women characters.  These ladies know their stuff.

Cross Plains has a top notch library.  It was one of the three finalists last year for Best Small Town Library in the US.  I took a minute to look at some of the pulps  and books the library put on display.  They have quite an extensive collection of Howard’s publications.  These usually stay locked up in the bank vault, but the library puts them on display for Howard Days.  Closely watched, of course.  Here are some shots of what they have.  I turn green with envy every time I see them.

Cross Plains Library collection

More of the collection
Original publication of some of Bob’s work

They don’t make covers like this anymore.  Sigh.

The last item of the afternoon was the trailer for the new Conan movie in the high school auditorium.  Specifically, the “Red Band” trailer, or the R-rated trailer in other words.  Fred Malmberg of Paradox Entertainment led the discussion.  Star Jason Mamoa had wanted to be there but was unable to due to a wedding he needed to attend.  He did send a video clip clip greeting, which was pretty cool.  I’ve got pictures of some of hte pro0ps they had on hand.  I’ll post those later this week or early next week.  We were told we could take pictures but were asked not to post them until late this week.  They hadn’t been publicly shown before.

Miguel asked me after it was over what I thought.  I said that it will be visually stunning and would probably be a good movie about a character named Conan.  Whether that character had any resemblance to a character of the same name created by Robert E. Howard remained to be seen.  
I went back to the pavilion and visited with friends for a little while, then proceeded on to the banquet.  Like last year, the food was good, fajitas with rice and beans.  Fred Malmberg sat across and and one seat down from me, so I got to talk with him some.  He seems to be very knowledgeable about Howard’s works and wants to have them adapted faithfully to the screen.  I gained some insight into how the whole process of bringing a property to film works from talking to him.  Paul Herman presented the Robert E. Howard Foundation scholarship.  This is a $1000 scholarship presented each year to the winner of an essay contest.  This year’s winner read her essay, which was over one of Howard’s poems. 

Dennis McHaney

Damon Sasser

Guests Dennis McHaney and Damon Sasser gave gave brief speeches on how they came to be involved in Howard fandom.  The silent auction was didn’t seem to have as much stuff as last year, or maybe I had better self control.  I didn’t get everything I bid on, but I did okay.  The auction is a fundraiser for Project Pride, the community development organization that hosts Howard Days.  I heard the next day they raised over $1500.  If that’s not correct, someone please let me know. 

Al Harron accepting his award

The Robert E. Howard Foundation Awards were announced.  Rob Roehm won more than anyone, but there were a number of other winners as well.  I don’t have a complete list, but I will post a link when the Foundation posts them.  Two of the most surprised winners were David Hardy and Al Harron. That’s Al accepting his award in the photo. 

Bill Cavalier

Bill Cavalier received the Black Circle Award, which is for lifetime achievement.  It’s not easy to win.  You have to be nominated one year and then receive a certain percentage of the vote the next.  That’s him holding it up.

Adventures Fantastic would like to congratulate all of the winners.

After the awards, those of us who didn’t have a long drive went to the Pavilion for the poetry throwdown.  I was tired and decided not to push my luck and headed on home.

I’ll write about the second day in a followup post.

Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, and Hawks

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This year marks a number of anniversaries in Robert E. Howard fandom:  25 years of Howard Days in Cross Plains, 50 years since the first publication of Glenn Lord’s The Howard Collector, 75 years of Robert E. Howard’s Legacy, and 100 years since the founding of Cross Plains.  In addition to these, this year is the 40th anniversary of Marvel Comics bringing Conan to comics and the 45th year since the Lancer publication of Conan the Adventurer.  It’s the last that’s of interest to us in this post. 

Or to be more precise, it’s the stories that L. Sprague de Camp either finished or rewrote that we’re going to take a look at.  Specifically, “Hawks Over Shem”, which was a rewrite of an unsold historical adventure entitled “Hawks Over Egypt”.  Those of you who are familiar with the Lancer (later Ace) editions might be saying, “Wait a minute, that story is in Conan the Freebooter“, and you’d be correct.

I was reading “Hawks Over Egypt”, remembered it was one of the stories de Camp had rewritten, and thought a post about the changes he’d made might be of interest to some of you, especially since this was the 45th anniversary of the Lancer editions.

So let’s take a look at what de Camp changed.  As you might suspect, there will be spoilers.

“Hawks Over Egypt” is currently available in the Del Rey collection Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures as  well as Lord of Samarcand and Other Adventure Tales of the Old Orient (The Works of Robert E. Howard) from Bison Books. 

The story was probably written in 1932 or 1933, although I’ve not found a definite date (if I do I’ll correct this post).  Howard had been submitting, and selling, his historical adventures to Oriental Stories (later renamed Magic Carpet), but the Depression put an end to that publication in 1933, with the last issue being January 1934. 

The story as Howard originally wrote it had seven numbered chapters.  In the first chapter, two men have an encounter in a dark alley in Cairo.  The Turk, Al Afdhal, accuses the Moor of following him. The Moor denies it, and the men are about to come to blows when they are set upon by three Sudanese, who are looking for one of them, Al Afdhal as it turns out.  The largest of the three attacks the Moor, who quickly dispatches him and intervenes to save the Turk.  They retire to an illegal tavern.  The caliph has banned the sale and consumption of alcohol.  (An echo of Prohibition, perhaps?)  There Al Afdhal reveals that he knows the Moor isn’t a Moor but a Christian.  The supposed Moor turns out to be Diego de Guzman, and he’s in town looking to settle a score with one Zahir el Gazi, who is currently on of the three general helping the caliph, Al Hakim, maintain his reign of terror on the city.  The other two are the Sudani Othman and the Turk Es Salih Muhammad.  The chapter ends with Al Afdhal pledging his help to de Guzman.

The second chapter finds a woman, Zaida, roaming the streets.  This is an offense punishable by death.  Al Hakim is mad and has decreed that women should not be out, day or night.  Zaida has no choice.  She was the mistress of el Gazi until he tired of her and turned her out.  She encounters a cloaked man who turns out to be the caliph, prowling the streets to see if his edicts are being obeyed.  In order to save her life, Zaida convinces him he is the embodiment of Allah.  (This isn’t hard to do.)  To reward her for being the first to recognize his divinity, she becomes his new consort, replacing a very jealous woman named Zulaikha.

In Howard’s version he opens Chapter 3 with a description of what the world political situation is like in the year of the story, 1021.  This type of infodump was a common practice in those days, especially in historical fiction.  It served in this case to give insight into the motivation of some of the characters in what follows without interrupting the action later.  The chapter proceeds with Al Afdhal leading de Guzman through a secret tunnel into the former palace of Es Salih Muhammad, which is now occupied by el Gazi since he has risen in the caliph’s favor above Muhammad.  After killing a guard, they find the el Gazi alone.  De Guzman engages him in a sword fight, eventually killing him, but not before el Gazi brags of the caliph’s plans to form an army and invade Spain.  De Guzman knows Spain is too fractured politically to be able to defend itself against a united attack.  He makes it his mission to stop Al Hakim.  The only way to do this is to kill him, since he’s mad.

In Chapter 4, the city of Cairo erupts in rioting after Al Hakim proclaims himself God.  De Guzman listens in on the talk and rumor and decides the best way to get to Al Hakim is through Zulaikha, who is furious over being deposed by Zaida.  He goes in search of her.

Meanwhile in Chapter 5, Al Hakim decides its beneath his godhood to mate with a mortal and gives Zaida to Othman.  While taking Zaida back to his palace, Othman is confronted by Zulaikha, who buys Zaida from him with the added incentive of threatening to tell el Gazi’s followers that Othman killed el Gazi.

Chapter 6 finds Zulaikha torturing Zaida.  Othman bursts in, kills Zulaikha.  De Guzman enters at this point, sees a black man attacking a white woman, and kills Othman.  He releases Zaida from her bonds but shows no further interest in her, even though she’s beautiful, tied down, and naked.  He’s that bent on stopping the invasion of Spain.  Al Afdhal shows up, and de Guzman reveals that he’s known the man to be the third general, Es Salih Muhammad.  De Guzman manages to convince Muhammad to kill Al Hakim, forgo the invasion, and rule Cairo as the caliph. 

Chapter 7 is fairly short.  Zaida makes her way back to Al Hakim, convinces him she’s leading him to safety, and stabs him.  De Guzman and Muhammad take over the city.

That’s the story as Howard basically wrote it.  My synopsis doesn’t do it justice.  It’s more detailed and complex than I’ve made it sound.  In the interest of length, I’ve only hit the high points and have left out some minor plot elements.

So now let’s look at what de Camp did to make the story a Conan story.  Although he has his defenders, primarily Gary Romeo, de Camp has taken a huge amount of flack over the years because of his heavy handed editing and revision of Howard and for his Howard biography Dark Valley Destiny.  The bulk of this controversy is outside the scope of this essay.

What we want to look at here is how de Camp changed “Hawks Over Egypt” when he rewrote it as “Hawks Over Shem” to make it a Conan story.  It was the lead story in the Conan the Freebooter.  There are enough characters in this tale that I’m not going to give the names of any other than Conan simply to keep things from getting too confusing.

There are no chapter breaks in the rewrite.  Instead there are merely line breaks denoting scene changes.  Also, the historical summary of  1021 has been deleted, which is not surprising since Conan’s world isn’t the real world, only an imaginary analogy.  At least de Camp didn’t try to rewrite that portion.

One of the first changes is in the opening scene, when instead of about to fight, the man who turns about to be Conan (de Guzman in the original), has beaten his opponent without killing him.  They are then set upon by not three but four Kushites.  I guess de Camp added the fourth to show what a badass Conan is.  This causes de Camp to rewrite that part of the fight.

Here’s a small part of  Howard’s original version.  De Guzman “…did not await the attack.  With a snarling oath, he ran at the approaching colossus and slashed furiously at his head.  The black man caught the stroke on his uplifted blade, and grunted beneath the impact.  But the next instant, with a crafty twist and wrench, he had locked the Moor’s blade under his guard and torn the weapon from his opponent’s hand, to fall ringing on the stones.  A searing curse ripped from [de Guzman’s] lips.  He had not expected to encounter such a combination of skill and brute strength.  But fired to fighting madness, he did not hesitate.  Even as the giant swept the broad scimitar aloft, the Moor sprang in under his lifted arm, shouting a wild war-cry, and drove his poniard to the hilt in the negro’s broad breast.”

And here’s a bit of de Camp, when Conan dispatches the second attacker, the one that matches the description of the attacker in the original:  “As the stranger struck, so did the giant, with a long forehand sweep that should have cut the stranger in two at the waist.  But, despite his size, the stranger moved even faster than the blade as it hissed through the night air.  He dropped to the ground in a crouch so that the scimitar passed over him.  As he squatted in front of his antagonist, he struck at the black’s legs.  The blade bit into muscle and bone.  As the black reeled on his wounded leg and swung his sword up for another slash, the stranger sprung up and in, under the lifted arm and drove his blade to the hilt in the Negro’s chest.”

See the similarities?  You do?  What have you been smoking?  It’s not even the same fight.  De Camp does have the fight end with a paraphrase Howard’s words, but everything that came before was completely rewritten. 

And it didn’t have to be!  There was absolutely nothing wrong with Howard’s prose.  It flowed, it pulled the reader in, it was good.  De Camp’s isn’t bad, but Howard’s was better.  And why add an opponent to the fight?  It didn’t serve any purpose as far as plot is concerned.

In the interest of time, I won’t detail all the changes.  Some of them were necessary to change the setting of the story from the real world to the Hyborian world. Others were completely unnecessary or inconsistent with Conan’s character.  For instance, the el Gazi character in both stories sets events in motion with an ambush.  De Guzman survives and is taken prisoner, only managing to obtain his freedom and come to Cairo a few years later.  Conan feigns death on the battlefield and trots into town a few months after the ambush.  Conan?  Playing dead on a battlefield?  Give me a break.

The scenes with Zaida are placed in the text in a different order.  She is also present when Conan and the Al Adfhar character burst in on the el Gazi character but escapes.  She wasn’t present in the original.  De Camp placed her here to give Conan motivation for staying after he extracts his revenge.  He wants to claim her as his own.  Conan would have no interest in stopping an invasion and most likely would have signed on to fight.

The biggest change is in the ending.  The Zulaikha stand-in is a witch in de Camp’s version.  She is summoning up some sort of creature when she’s killed.  The fight that follows between Conan and the Othman character ends not with Conan killing him, but with a creature of smoke rising up and enveloping him, draining the blood and bones from his body.  Blood sucking smoke monsters aren’t that original; Howard would have done better.  Conan frees the girl he has come there to find.  She wants him to plunder the house and run away with her; he prefers them to stay so he can be co-ruler of the city.  Then the dead body of Zulaikha rises up and runs out of the room.  Conan changes his mind and hits the road.

In the end, the mad caliph isn’t stabbed by the girl he spurned but is instead run off of a tower to his death by a mob.  A complete rewrite by de Camp.  Again, the original ending was better and would have been consistent with Conan.  Not all the villains in the Conan stories are killed by Conan IIRC.

The changes de Camp made to “Hawks Over Egypt” in turning it into a Conan story were pretty substantial.  The plot had to be significantly altered in places to make it work, and there are times when Conan’s character just isn’t all that consistent with the way Howard wrote him.  What’s more, the passages de Camp inserted aren’t as well written as Howard’s.  They tend to stand out in places. 

When de Camp was putting together the Lancer Conan books, there wasn’t much Howard in print, to put it mildly, nor was the possibility of bringing some of Howard’s other work into print a guarantee.  The first Howard boom was still a few years off.  I can understand the temptation to alter some of the unpublished historical adventures to make them Conan stories. Publishing standards in those days tended to demand books that would be considered thin or short by today’s standards.  L. Sprague de Camp was trying to impose an internal chronology on Conan and fill in what he viewed to be gaps.  Such a project would naturally require new content, and the lengths of books publishers were willing to publish mandated more books than the three Del Rey has published..  I can understand that.  I really can.  I just can’t condone it. 

I met the de Camps several times during their last decade and found them both to be cultured, erudite, and easily approachable.  Also, I’ve enjoyed many of de Camp’s original works and wish more were in print.  But I just can’t sanction him taking such liberties with Conan.  The problem with changing a tale set in the historical world and transforming it into a fantasy starring an established character in an imaginary world with its own detailed geography and history is that you have to make so many changes to the plot and/or the characters to make it fit.  If de Guzman had been more Conan-esque, it might have worked in this case.  But a careful reading of both stories will show that de Guzman and Conan aren’t the same; their personalities are too different. 

In my opinion, there hasn’t been anyone who can successfully imitate Howard.  The unique elements that came together to produce the man also produced the writing style.  The two cannot be separated.  So far, no one who has tried has been able to match that style.  I doubt there ever will be anyone who can.  De Camp and Lin Carter certainly couldn’t, and de Camp, despite his butchering of Howard’s prose, was an accomplished writer.  One whose original works were important and should be read today.  Just not his Conan pastiches.  Most people who have read Carter (and I admit I haven’t), at least those I’ve talked to, wouldn’t give him that much credit.

Personally, I prefer the original version of this story, the straight historical.  And that goes for all of Howard’s works that have been changed, edited, or adapted.

The Adventures Fantastic Interview: Mark Finn, Part 2

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Last week, in part 1 of this interview, Mark Finn discussed his own writing, both biography and fiction.  In this installment, he continues sharing his thoughts on other Howard related topics.

AF:  Do you think there been any faithful adaptations of Howard to film?
MF:  Howard films…I have to tell you a quick story, an anecdote.  We managed to get ahold of a copy of Solomon Kane from a friend who taped a bootleg.  My wife Cathy was real excited to sit down and watch it.  We were five minutes in, and she said, “Was this Robert E. Howard right here?”
And I said, “No.”
Then she said, “Okay.”  And we watch a little bit more.  He goes through the things he goes through and he’s killing people left and right, and she says, “This has got to be Howard.”
And I said, “No, this isn’t in any of the Solomon Kane stories.”  
“Huh.”
I said, “I’ll tell you what.  I’ll let you know when the Howard stuff shows up ’cause I’ll probably get real excited about it.”
She goes, “Great.”
Thirty minutes go by.  She says, “He’s met the family now.  Is this Howard?”
“No, this isn’t Howard.”
We get to about ten minutes before the end, and she says, “Honey, is there any Robert E. Howard in this?”
I said, “Well, the guy’s name is Solomon Kane.” 
She said, “Honey, that doesn’t count.”

You know, it’s a little sad that the best one of the bunch is still the old “Pigeons From Hell” Thriller episode.  Boris Karloff’s adaptation of “Pigeons From Hell” still stands out as following the storyline.  Which is such a novel approach.  Why didn’t I think of that?  Why not just take something from the books?  How simple and how basic.  “No, no, no, you don’t understand, Mark, we’ve got to rewrite Conan so that he’s on a quest for vengeance.”  Oh, cause that hasn’t been done to death.  Yeah, yeah, that makes prefect sense.  Yeah, why not, why not?  In fact, I got an idea.  Why don’t you have a Vikings kill his family.  We’ve never seen that before in a film. 
It just makes me crazy that these guys in LA have…I don’t think it’s ignorance.  I think it’s a willful self confidence there that feeds an ego that has to be the size of C’thulhu.  It’s the only thing that makes sense.  If I come to them with a proposal set in a savage land in a distant time about a guy who walks into town out of the wilderness and through strength, cunning, guile, his own wits, he pulls himself up by his bootstraps to become the most famous rogue in town.  But because he’s still new in town he hasn’t counted on the forces of civilization rallying around him, and so the story ends when he’s betrayed and has to leave town.  And they say, “What’s the name of this piece?”  and I say, “Krogan the Mercenary”.  They’d be like [snaps fingers], “Awesome, we’ll run with it.  It’ll be just like Walter Hill did in Last Man Standing.  Yeah.  We won’t give him an origin.  No, it makes him mysterious.  Perfect!  I love it!” 
That should be the Conan movie.  That should be the Conan movie.  But no, noooo, let’s give him a family.  Even though Robert E. Howard’s stuff so seldom uses family for anything, much less a motif for vengeance.  Usually it’s an excuse to move away. 

The Conan movie’s coming out.  I’ll show it at the theater.  But it’s not gonna be Conan. I mean there may be more stuff in it.  We haven’t seen it, so obviously we don’t know what elements got taken out.  But I can tell you right now, if the plot involves him going on a quest for vengeance to get the guy that got his parents, that’s not Robert E. Howard.  It’s just not.  It may be an entertaining movie.  There may be some pieces and parts where you go, “Wow, that’s a pretty Conan-esque type of thing that’s going on right there.”  Until they figure out that this stuff works because it’s been around this long and people respond to it on a visceral level, until they figure that out, we’re gonna have this problem.  I wish it was different.  Moreover, I wish they would fly me out to Hollywood for a week.  I’ll take a meeting with them.  I can fix this.  I just know it.  Get the executives out the room and let me talk to the scriptwriter, okay?  I’ll even put it in the language of film.  There’s a hundred film examples of exactly the kind of thing that can be used for this.  Most of the executives are thirty-five and don’t watch movies, so what are you going to do with that?  What’s the next question?

AF:  What one question would you have for Howard if you could ask him anything?
MF:  If I had just one question?
AF:  Or a series of questions if you prefer.
MF:  I thought about this the other day.  I was watching a Ben Franklin documentary and realized the five people that you would have breakfast with, you know, would be…one of them would be Robert E. Howard, of course.  I think I would ask him, if I had just one question to ask him, it would be, “Do you…”  Actually, this is what I would ask him.  “How do you see yourself?”  I would want to know how he saw himself because I think that would answer a lot.  And I know he writes about it in the letters, but I think in the letters he also puts on a lot of different faces depending on who he’s talking to.  If I got the chance to look him in the eyes and see what he says, I want to know how he sees himself because we’ll know.  And if I could tell him one thing, it would be “It’s gonna get better.”  I’d like to pull him aside at the beginning of 1936 and say, “You will get through this.”  Would it help?  Who knows, I mean when people have made up their minds that they’re gonna do that, especially when people are clinically depressed, decide they’re taking a path… [sighs]

AF: I think that’s the desire of every Robert E. Howard fan, to talk him off the ledge so to speak.

MF:  And the thing is, you know the question is, if you talk him off the ledge in 1936, what’s to say he doesn’t get back on that ledge in ’37?  The things that he’s dealing with, presuming he would get through the funeral and make it a few months down the road, where does he go?  Does he go with his dad?  What does he do?  There’s this continual grieving process.  For a guy who spent most of his life as a caregiver to his mother, as a guy, who, whether he wanted to or not, identified himself as a caregiver to his mother, that piece of his identity is gone.  They’ve done studies about this now, and noted that when children take care of parents in a caregiving role for a number of years, you get all sorts of depressed behavior, and suicide becomes a major thing because the one reason why they’re doing what they’re doing has been taken away.  So there’s no guarantees that we would have gotten a whole lot of stories from Robert E. Howard.  There’s no guarantees he would have made it to World War II.  When you’re dealing with someone who’s been that depressed for that long, who’s to say?  But I would ask him what he thought of himself.  Or optionally, I would ask him why he never talked about his humor because that was the stuff that put food on his table for most of his writing career.  And very little is said about it.  He’s always more interested in talking about the horror stories or whatever, but the stuff that he came to rely on for a steady paycheck was the funny boxing and the funny westerns.
AF:  What do you see as the state of Howard scholarship and where do you think it’s going over the next few years?

MF:  I think Howard scholarship is alive and well.  I think we’re in a lull right now because a lot of people’s projects are coming to an end.  And the may be the end of the second Howard boom’s scholarship push.  The internet has helped since we can react to things that are on there now, that’s been useful in keeping things alive, but until all of Robert E. Howard’s fiction is in print in some form or fashion, we won’t have Rusty and Patrice for the big stuff.  That’s what they’re doing.  That’s the job they’ve set themselves.  As a task, as fans, we should be grateful for that.  They’ve had eleven Del Rey books come out.  And even though it won’t be the funny stuff.  The funny stuff is what’s left, and once that’s done, and they take a mental break, I’m sure both of them are gonna dive into the biography.  It’s not that they haven’t wanted to work on it, it’s that they haven’t had time.  So I think we have one more big push yet to have happen, and I’m not sure yet if it’s going to be during this big push, this third age of Howard scholarship that he won’t join the American literary canon in the way that Lovecraft has and Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler, and all those guys.  I think that’s an inevitability, and we’re already moving in that direction anyway.  The next five years is when you’re gonna start seeing Rusty and Patrice come out of the cave and start talking about stuff and the biographical debate comes up again.  I think it’s around that time, either just before, during, or just after, is when he goes in the Library of the Americas.  At that point you’re gonna see a lot of people back off and go “Ahhh.  Now I can go read this and enjoy it again.”  It tends to be a singular focus when you’re working on this stuff.  There’s just one problem you’ve gotta just tackle and tackle until it’s dead and you look up and find another thing.  I think of it like that, and I don’t begrudge what anybody is doing.  Like I’ve said before, it’s important to have those authoritative texts out.  The Foundation has made all the poetry available for the first time ever.  Now we’ve got the wonder three volume set of the letters.  Essential.  So they’re setting up for the next wave.  I think that’s what all this is right here.  And if the academics continue to come to this, as we’ve seen starting with last year, with a couple of very strong academics, Justin and Diedre, I think they’re going to be instrumental in leading some more academics to Howard.  I think that’s when the real interesting stuff will begin. 

AF:  Last question.  What question would you ask that I haven’t if you were conducting this interview?

MF:  I would have asked me if I had any regrets about what I’d done in Howard studies.  But, I don’t have any regrets, so that’s kind of a boring question.  [laughs].  I wish the REH Manifesto had been a little bit shorter because I wrote it ostensibly to just tell the people:  If you going to shoot your mouth off and you’re going to come out with some alleged knowledge, don’t tell me “I’ve read a few Conan stories, and here’s what I found out about Robert E. Howard.”  You’re reading the one character that he commercially engineered over any of his other material to be something that he could sell to Weird Tales.  That’s not to say that Howard didn’t enjoy it and that’s not to say he didn’t invest in it, but the elements in the stories that a lot of people had a problem with, if you view Conan as the thing he constructed to try and get Farnsworth Wright’s attention and knew that certain things like women wearing certain things like gossamer silk robes and being whipped by other women, if he knew that stuff like that made it into Weird Tales and got cover space, which usually was a little bit more money, and became things that Farnsworth Wright featured.  And he put that in there, then the Conan stories become the anomaly, not the rule.  “Sword Woman”, which was unpublished in Howard’s lifetime, is much more Howardian in tone.  It’s not until those early Conan stories, where he’s trying to find his way, which tend to be some of the best ones, and then the later Conan stories, when he’s trying to break away, tend to be some of the best ones.  In the middle you’ve got some fairly formula Conan stories, and these were the ones that Wright was featuring; these are the ones that Wright was lapping up.  So, was Conan the way he always did things, or was it the exception to the rule.  I think Conan was the exception, but then again , I’ve been steeped in this for a decade now.  I’ve read the Conans over and over, and I’ve all the other stuff, and I”ve looked at all of this.  I don’t expect BobaFett1972 at aol.com to know that.  I wrote the manifesto as basically, if say I don’t like him, he’s too bloody for my taste, I’m not a big fan of the subject matter, and I tend to like my fantasy a little more epic and a little less down in the dirt, I can’t say anything bad about that.  But if you tell me that Howard clearly had a problem with women, and after reading three Solomon Kane stories it’s clear that he was a virulent racist, I have to put the brakes on that.  I wrote the Manifesto to basically tell people think before you type.  What they took from that was “God, he doesn’t like it if anybody says anything negative about Robert E. Howard.”  Which is not the case.  I would love to read a negative critique of Robert E. Howard based on what’s in there.  Not what you think is in there, not your mind tells you your mind tells you is in there, not what you remember from your D&D days as being in there.  So far I haven’t seen that critique yet, but maybe one day we’ll get it.
AF:  Thank you very much.
MF:  You’re welcome.

Cool Stuff at Rogue Blades’ Home of Heroics

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There have been a couple of posts up at Home of Heroics, the new feature on the Rogue Blades Entertainment site, the last few days.  Friday Bruce Durham reviewed Howard Andrew Jones‘ Desert of Souls.  This morning, Luke Forney surveyed the graphic adaptations of Robert E. Howard’s work, including Conan, Kull, Solomon Kane, and Red Sonja.  Interesting stuff, so check it out if you haven’t already.

Charles Saunders Guest Blogs at Home of Heroics

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Wednesdays at Home of Heroics is the day for guest blogs.  For the inaugural guest blog,  Charles Saunders, author of Imaro, has written a thought provoking piece on the role of fear in the heart of a hero.  He looks at three examples:  Robert E. Howard’s Conan, Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, and his own Imaro.  Check it out.