Welcome to Litsy!

For Lancashire, it's a sweltering day & I'm feeling a sense of desert heat reading this pulp adventure novella about Francis Xavier Gordon, known as El Borak "The Swift", amongst the cities, villages and encampments of the Near & Middle East.
The milieu is the Great Game played by the Western colonial powers, & while Gordon is a maverick with little time for bureaucracy, his loyalties lie with them.
There's a definite whiff of Yellow Peril ⬇️

For days when you dream of calling your enemies “fatherless curs” just before enjoying some aggressive negotiations with your Crom-given broadsword…there is Conan. The original and best still holds up with imaginative short stories of adventure in a long forgotten time. You don‘t have to know or care about any of the modest world-building…each clever, funny, exciting tale catches up with Conan right before the mayhem begins. Crom protect you!

94/150 Surprisingly, I've never read a Howard Conan story. I've seen the movies, read the comics, read stories by other authors (Lin Carter and L. Sprague De Camp spring to mind), but never the originals. Taken as straight adventure stories, they're excellent. Conan is a great character, short on dialogue, always jumping into the middle of the action. Unfortunately, by today's standards, these stories are staggeringly racist (Continued below) ⬇️

“Stand up naked in the storm! Shake back your mane and face the thunders and the giant winds that roar between the worlds. Face the rush of events, the gigantic Truths, the dizzying realities. Be one with the tempests, the roaring ocean, and the swirling constellations."

- A Thunder of Trumpets

The first story in this collection, "The Grey God Passes", is a blend of historical fiction and fantasy, set in early medieval Ireland, centring on the bloody Battle of Clontarf, in which 11,000 people were slain, the High King Brian Boru was killed, but the power of the Vikings in Ireland was broken. The fantasy elements of the De Danaan "Dark People", prophesy and spectral interventions of pagan gods are woven in as part of the characters' ??

"It is the death-grip. Now comes the reaping of kings, the garnering of chiefs like a harvest. Gigantic shadows stalk red-handed across the world, and night is falling on Asgaard. I hear the cries of long-dead heroes whistling in the void, and the shouts of forgotten gods. To each there is an appointed time, and even the gods must die..."

- The Grey God Passes

Howard's Grey God, Odin, predicting doom before the Battle of Clontarf, Ireland, 1014.

@TheNeverendingTBR At the risk of being a bore (last Conan post, I promise!), these are the editions I grew up with. They're Howard's stories, edited by de Camp, filled out with adaptations of other Howard stories, and with pastiches written by de Camp and Carter, with other authors drafted in towards the end. Anathema to Howard purists, but I'm still fond of them 😊

Conan quartet. The first four titles In the early 70s Sphere Books series and easily my favourite covers. Alas, Howard‘s writing hasn‘t aged well. In truth, it was never up to very much. I re-read People of the Black Circle recently and narrowly avoided bailing. Then again, much pulp was just as bad (Lovecraft, anyone?). I rate ‘Pick‘ for the Frank Frazetta covers and Rogues in the House (Howard‘s best Conan tale). Thumbs down for everything else.

"Be ready; now is the beginning of happenings."

I'm feeling quite stressed out at the moment, and just needed something easy and escapist, so to my Robert E. Howard shelf to find this book, unread since I bought it in 1980.
Like most of Howard's contemporary heroes, Kirby O'Donnell is a white, male American, reflective of his original readership, I suppose, and so the narrative is -centric of those things.
Set in Afghanistan, the story mixes pulp adventure with The Great Game politics 👇🏼