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The Early Adventures of El Borak
El Borak: Francis Xavier Gordon
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The Early Adventures of El Borak
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"The Iron Terror" is first in this volume, a short tale of science fiction, where Mr. Gordon, "El Borak," is dreaming of carving himself a kingdom in Arabia. To accomplish this, he visits a scientist who has built an Iron Terror, a radium-powered automaton, built for war. Unfortunately, the mad scientist loses control of the robot and Gordon has to figure out how to stop it.It's interesting to see El Borak in a work of science fiction. The more well-known stories are far more grounded in history than this. Also, El Borak's motivation is different. Unlike the character we know, this one wants to rule! In the later stories, he battles these kinds of would-be conquerors. El Borak, however, is still a strong-willed man who finds his own path in life. This trait was an important one to Robert E. Howard, and it is in full force here, even in this bit of juvenilia.
I do wish the book indicated at least an approximation of when he wrote this. I assume it's juvenilia because it doesn't quite read like the Robert E. Howard seen in his published works. Still, it has the seeds of the crop REH would later harvest.
It's not a great story, but definitely entertaining. This story is also published in Adventures in Science Fantasy.
Next up is an untitled (and unfinished) bit. This fragment starts out with El Borak's racial biases stated. He likes "Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Zulus," but does not like "Turks, Kurds, and Tauregs."He is in Africa this time, in the Sudan, in the territory of the Tauregs. Instead of Francis Xavier Gordon, El Borak's given name is Frank Gordon. That's okay. Turns out that while Frank can be a given name in its own right, it is also short for "Francis."
REH goes into a paragraph about the camel Gordon is riding. It's an Indian camel, not an inferior African camel. He discovers an unknown forest in the desert. Uh, oh, mounted warriors are after him, but he makes a couple of insanely long shots. He is eerily accurate even in these early tales. He fights a couple with his sword, and the fragment ends.
Not a bad start, but, again, reading this still feels not quite up to REH's usual material. However, even his juvenilia is better than what I could write, so don't take that to mean this is in any way bad writing. It's not. It just isn't as good as his later work would become.
"The Coming of El Borak" is another unfinished tale. It starts off almost like Tarzan, with the author stating that he is relating a tale told to him by an Afridi named Khoda Khan.Khoda Khan here is not the character played by Cesar Romero in "Wee Willie Winkie" because that movie hadn't come out yet when REH wrote this. No... this is the Khoda Khan, who was featured in REH's "Names in the Black Book" (in Steve Harrison's Casebook, among other places). He was also one of El Borak's followers in "Hawk of the Hills," one of my favorite El Borak stories.
Honestly, I think one of the reasons El Borak worked so well is that REH wrote about so many of the secondary characters in these early stories. He knew them. They weren't just random Afghans; they had backstories known to him, even if REH never mentioned them in the later tales.
Yar Ali Khan is in this story, another character from the El Borak stories, such as "Three-Bladed Doom" and "Hawk of the Hills."
Khoda Khan and Yar Ali Khan, along with others, kidnap a British girl in hopes of ransoming her. One of their number wants the girl for playtime, and Yar Ali Khan threw that guy off a cliff.
Some of REH's dialogue could be improved. The girl's father says, "If the girl is not returned in such-and-such a time," which just doesn't sound like it should be in quotes. It's too vague and just doesn't sound right. Mohammed Ali responds, "And if the ransom is not at such-and-such a place within the same time..."
It's clear REH didn't have these "such-and-such" particulars figured out yet. Then again, Khoda Khan is telling this story, and maybe he didn't know the particulars... so maybe it makes sense after all.
They get into a fight with another tribe and when El Borak shows up... the story abruptly ends, unfinished.
Not a bad story, but like most of them in this volume, still not up to REH's later standards. But it is neat seeing him work his way to that point. I would have loved to have seen El Borak's first words with Khoda Khan and Yar Ali Khan, but, alas...
One of these days, I need to read this volume BEFORE I read the Del Rey El Borak volume.
"Khoda Khan's Tale" is another unfinished one, but it's long. I wonder if it was truly unfinished by REH or if parts of it were just lost.It starts off not long after the last one, and actually recaps the end of the last one (and since the last one didn't have an extant ending, this is appreciated). Apparently Gordon rescued the girl and caused a change in the leadership of Khoda Khan's people.
Gordon wants to raid a neighboring village and raises up some raiders to go with him. Yar Ali Khan and Khoda Khan go with him. We are introduced to Lal Singh, a Sikh who also appears in Three-Bladed Doom.
They come out of Afghanistan and take a trading schooner to Madagascar, then to Mozambique. They go hunting as they travel through the jungles, and Khoda Khan has an encounter with a rhinoceros. They meet an Arab named Hassan ibn Zaroud, and El Borak tricks him. They travel to the Limpopo River. They eventually come to the land of the Zulus. They eventually entered the lands of Matabeles, in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia in REH's time). The travelled toward the Zambesi and met the Makolala peoples. Eventually, they encountered cannibals and battled them. The reached the Zambesi and encountered the Batokas (the Tokas, a branch of the Tokaleya people, living around Victoria Falls). They travelled northwest until they reached the Belgian Congo. They encountered gorillas. El Borak gets captured by the Manyeuma in the jungles while going up an unnamed river (which is later named as the Changaan River, which feeds into the Lomani). El Borak's safari attacks the island fortress of the Manyeuma and rescue him. They continue overland, and encountered Pygmies.
They find the escarpment El Borak was expecting, but not the giant lake. He is looking for the ruins of Valooze (Valusia?). They find a passage through a particularly thick patch of undergrowth and have a battle with a large number of pythons in an stone ruin. Turns out the swamp is the great lake, changed in the thousands of years since the book El Borak read had been written. They travel to the former island, but stop at a smaller island en route and find a small ruin there. They reached the sought-after island, but Hassan ibn Zaroud's safari had reached it first!
And it is here the tale suddenly ends, mid-word.
It's a longish tale, and I wonder if there was more but it just got lost over time. It's a type of travelogue-adventure story and definitely juvenilia, but fun to read for the hints of the author REH turned out to be.
"El Borak," another long fragment, is written in first person. That person isn't identified for a bit, but it is Steve Allison, the Sonora Kid. It is 1907. He had been serving aboard the Aerial, but had to swim ashore and was alone and impoverished in Aden. He tries to mug someone for money but gets offered a job on the spot. El Bahr wants Steve to murder a Spanish gun-fighter named Diego Valdez... who is nick-named "El Borak." LOL. El Bahr is lying to Steve because El Borak is no Spaniard. He doesn't like the way El Bahr treats slave girls or prisoners, and this creates some bad blood between them, because although Steve is okay with murdering a stranger, he doesn't like to see people tortured or whipped. Murder is okay, though. I guess.
He draws on El Borak the next day, and they become friends and decide El Bahr is a bad guy. Shooting Spaniards is fine, but a fellow Texan? No way! Steve meets Yar Ali Khan. They reach El Borak's castle and the Indian man Steve rescued from torture is found. He joins the group. Steve meets Lal Singh and other members of El Borak's group. El Borak explains the treasure hunt he is on, and the story is left unfinished at this point.
"Untitled" is another unfinished fragment, told in the first person, and describes a battle the narrator has against a bunch of Arabs. The narrator fights alongside Yar Ali, and the remaining Arabs are chased off by horsemen led by El Borak.Not a lot to say about this one. It's only two pages long. I don't know what the fight was about, or what the plot could have been.
"The Land of Mystery" is another unfinished El Borak tale. This one starts off with a poem, then with El Borak narrating an adventure he had in Africa. Lal Singh, Steve Allison, Omar Bey, and Yar Ali Khan are among the listeners. El Borak fights arboreal gorillas. Then he encounters a theropod dinosaur. The dinosaurs are definitely out of place in what we think of as El Borak stories, but were a common fixture of lost world tales of the time. That lost world feel is definitely what young REH was going for here.
He battles a strange set of natives, but eventually gets chased by 200 of them. He fights and kills many, but is captured. He escapes and comes upon a ruined city in the mountains. He explores the ruins and finds a pretty white woman! A barbaric white chief comes in and when he raises his sword, El Borak stabs him three times. The girl and El Borak try to leave the city but are accosted by many of these white barbarians. El Borak kills many but needs to escape...
And thus the fragment ends.
Again, this lacks the finesse REH would gain through practice. He clearly is trying for a Lost World feel, and the story needs some pacing help. The dinosaur, while interesting, was such a minor element of the story, it probably should not have been there.
But it was a fun read.
"The Shunned Castle" is the next unfinished work. Francis Xavier Gordon is called Frank Gordon here. Anyway, El Borak (Frank) and Steve Allison are traveling through the jungle, the mighty jungle. They debate where they will sleep tonight in the jungle, the quiet jungle.They are in India. They are surprised they have not seen a tiger yet, and encounter an Indian. He is fleeing djinn from the castle of Janir Khan. They ignore him and continue on to the castle, which is in ruins. They go into the castle... and there the fragment ends.
It's short, and too short to really say much about it. I'm surprised that these early adventures make El Borak more of a jungle explorer, but the later adventures do talk about him knowing India quite well, so it makes sense.
"The White Jade Ring" is another unfinished tale. Steve haggles and buys the eponymous ring and talks about his and Gordon's war with the Si-Fan. The Si-Fan is the notorious ring ran by Dr. Fu Manchu in Sax Rohmer's novels, so it was neat to get a direct reference here.Steve, traveling with Editha Marlo, is in Canton, while El Borak is in Hong Kong. Suddenly, he senses danger, and Steve draws, killing a Chinese man with a dagger. The fragment ends here.
Again, too short to say much about it, but it is interesting that REH brought in Sax Rohmer's Si-Fan. One online source places this story in 1922, which makes it take place after the first three Fu Manchu novels' events.
"A Power Among the Islands" is another unfinished tale. Steve Allison and Gordon are on a schooner. They had boarded at Samoa. Here, El Borak is going by the name Wolf Gordon. They hear a scream, and they find the captain molesting a native girl, so Gordon throws the captain, and Steve shoots the gun out of the captain's hand. The fragment ends.Way too short to really discuss plotting or anything, but REH does show his characteristic descriptiveness of battle when Gordon tangles with Captain Herran.
"North of Khyber" is another unfinished story. It starts out in New York City. Steve Allison is there with a friend of his named Billy 'Drag' Buckner. They plan a trip to the Khyber Pass because interesting things are going on there. A mullah is preaching a jihad.They discover Moriarty is on board, a corporation detective. Moriarty, at one time, was after Steve and Billy because they robbed a large mining corporation, but evidence was insufficient to put them away. There was a two-thousand dollar reward for Steve Allison because of this robbery and Moriarty wanted to collect. Steve and Billy lay a trap for Moriarty and hold him at gunpoint. They basically for Moriarty to let them be or they'll kill him. Really unheroic, so I found it surprising that REH wrote them this way.
They land in India and proceed to Afghanistan. By chance they encounter Yar Hydar and show him Yar Ali Khan's ring (which Steve has)... and the fragment ends here.
Of course, as juvenilia, I shouldn't expect REH to write exactly as he writes later, but the villainy of Steve Allison and Drag Buckner was unexpected. The detective Moriarty is definitely portrayed as a good man on a just mission. It is also interesting that REH used the name of Sherlock Holmes' arch-enemy as this solid-gold corporate detective.
Unlike some of the other unfinished tales, I was really getting into this one when it ended. Although El Borak is mentioned, he does not appear in this unfinished story.
"Intrigue in Kurdistan" is another unfinished tale. Frank Gordon, El Borak, has been captured by Turks because he was trying to lead the Kurds into rising up and establishing a Kurdish empire. Gordon is waging a personal war against the Turks. Gordon is placed into a dungeon cell. Gordon escapes. He finds a secret door, and a weird moment in REH's writing happens: REH describes how the trap door works, then Gordon repeats how it works to himself. Clearly juvenilia. That's not a mistake the later REH would make.
Unbeknownst to the Kurds (but benownst to us), Gordon hates Kurds, too. One of the earlier fragments made that clear, and this story re-affirms this. He just wanted both of his foes fighting each other. Some racism happens, then Gordon finds a secret door into a cell and murders a Kurd like a ghost. Through another secret door, he discovers a pretty white woman... and thus the fragment ends.
Most of it, except for the one section I mentioned, feels more like the published REH, but the story doesn't quite grab me as much as the previous one did. I think the older REH would have made much more of the ifrit-like attacks of El Borak in the castle.
It was a decent start, but it didn't really catch on with me. I don't know if REH gave up on this story or if the rest of it was simply lost.
Next, the book goes into the "Lal Singh - Oriental Gentleman" section. It begins with "The Sword of Lal Singh," a poem. I feel like Lal Singh is complaining that just because he fights for El Borak, it doesn't mean he is fighting for Britain. If you follow my reviews (particularly the poetry ones), poetry is known to be a weakness of mine, in that I usually just don't get it. This is another one that I am sure I am missing the gist of it. Maybe this poem is just too short, but I really don't get it.
"The Tale of the Rajah's Ring" is next. It's a first-person tale of Lal Singh. His uncle, a gold smith, has made a ring for the Rajah and has tasked Lal Singh with delivering it. He passes a bazaar and is offered a way to make money. He is accosted for the ring, though. He escapes a group of thieves by jumping into a river, but then he faces a mugger crocodile. He arrives at the Rajah's castle, and a steward tries to short him. The Rajah arrives and pays the fee, with a penalty fine given to the steward. But then the thieves arrive and accuse Lal Singh of stealing the ring. Lal Singh gets paid and gets more money to leave the city. He leaves, a rich man.
This story didn't grab me at all. It felt almost like a bad sitcom... or a bad SNL skit. Something about it just didn't work.
"The Further Adventures of Lal Singh" is unfinished, but it seems to start off right from the finish of "The Tale of the Rajah's Ring." It's things like that which makes me think REH did finish the prior story, but that the ending is simply lost.Lal Singh goes to Delhi, but then immediately goes to Bombay. Everyone talks like a badly-stereotyped (and racist) version of a Chinese person.
It ends quickly thereafter. Not much to say about this one, except it didn't read like REH at all. Like the last one, it just came off as a bad SNL skit. I suspect that some of that is because the hokey "Oriental" dialect just sounds comical today, even though back then it probably didn't. Basically I suspect the story just didn't age well.
Of course, no one is expecting REH masterpieces from this volume.
Love your commentaries Vincent. I would love to read along with you but have so many books I read at the same time it's daunting. I plan to read this soon. I read these stories first at chap books. I had to buy several to get most of them which I assure you cost more than the REH Foundation edition! I was especially intrigued by the gunfight between El Borak and Steve Allison! The stories here are certainly not his best but I enjoyed them nonetheless!
I'm glad they are being read! This group has been very quiet of late. When you get around to re-reading these stories, please post your thoughts here!Or just read the one or two stories my commentaries make you want to read, like the gunfight one. :)
Thank you, Michael.
"Lal Sing, Oriental Gentleman" is a complete story. Right up front, several words I had to look up.Vocabulary:
Ghat: a flight of steps leading down to a river.
Jat: traditionally rural ethnic group of northern India and Pakistan.
Lathi: a long, heavy iron-bound bamboo stick used as a weapon, especially by police.
Akali: a movement in Sikhism. Akali also refers to any member of suicide squads in the armies of the Sikhs in India.
I'm always impressed by REH's vocabulary. It is very unusual for me to have to look up word meanings, but REH makes me do it fairly often... but making me do it four times in one paragraph is pretty darn remarkable.
Lal Singh is in Benares (modern Varanasi), but not to wash in the Ganges or see the sights. No, he was there to get money. Oh, there were opportunities, but Lal Singh did not want small moneys from little ventures, he wanted a big score. He saw a group grabbing up the little ventures, so he watched them, waiting for them to gather up a valuable amount.
This group accosts him. Interestingly, REH uses the term "Thag" instead of "Thug" for a follower of Kali. Looking it up, I see, Thag is defined as "a thug, cheat, an impostor." REH uses the word "Dacoit," which I am familiar with from the writings of Sax Rohmer.
Lal Singh escapes. He doubles back on the roofs and finds the group of Thags again. Luckily, the Thags get their money from their hiding place. This is honestly a bit of a weakness in the story. There was no reason for the Thag leader to actually get the money bag - this was just to make sure Lal Singh knew where it was hidden and how to get it, and was a clumsy bit of exposition. It was a visual form of the "As you know, Bob" trope of telling people things they already know for the benefit of the audience or protagonist.
Lal Singh goes off and finds a random Afghan to help him steal stolen goods from the thieves. While his random partner lead off the bulk of the thieves, Lal Singh took out the two left behind to guard their treasure. The Afghan tried to deal with the bulk of the crew, even killing the woman, but the Afghan was nearly killed. Luckily, Lal Singh returned and rescued him. Then the Afghan decided to attack his rescuer. Lal Singh won the day and all the loot.
Definitely lacks REH's later polish, but you can see it forming here. Lal Singh is a gentleman warrior, compared to the savage brawlers he is pitted against.
Now we start the adventures of Yar Ali Khan, a frequent friend of El Borak. The section starts with a poem, "The Song of Yar Ali Khan." This mostly is a braggadocio about the greatness of Yar Ali Khan, but doesn't really tell much of a story: just about the fame of Yar Ali Khan.I'm not a huge fan of poems that don't tell stories, so this isn't one that'll be praised all that highly by me. I actually don't know if it's a good poem or not... just that it didn't strike a chord with me.
"The Lion Gate" is an unfinished story in 1st person. The person telling the story is O'Brien, the crazy Irishman. Yar Ali Khan is with him. There is not much extant, but it details beginnings of a search for a lost city among the Himalayans, with a small group of people.I don't have a lot to say on this one. REH does a bit of long-winded exposition that I think he would have handled better after he became a professional writer.
A trio of untitled pieces are next: two one-page story fragments and one untitled poem.The first untitled fragment is Yar Ali Khan botching an assassination attempt.
The second untitled fragment has Yar Ali Khan waiting with a Sikh for the arrival of Ali Beg of Turkestan and a Calcutta babu.
Both of these narrative fragments are too short to really say much about them in terms of writing quality.
The third untitled item is a short poem. This poem was given the title "The Sword of Yar Ali Khan" in The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, Volume 2, page 356. It was a decent little poem. I liked it better than the "The Song of Yar Ali Khan" that began this section. It was a nice ending to the section, plus I like how the section is bookended with poems.
Next up: Steve Allison - The Sonora Kid stories.
"The Sonora Kid - Cowhand" starts off with a character named "Ogallala Brent," which struck me as hilariously unusual. I looked it up, and it's the name of a city in Nebraska, which suddenly made it a little more interesting as a name. A little more research and I find out that Ogallala received its name from the Ogala Sioux Indian tribe. The word means "scatter," or "to scatter one's own." Okay then. Named after a town or a Sioux tribe. Okay, so Ogallala is lounging on the porch of a ranch when Steve Allison rides up with a sombrero. The dialogue here is atrocious. OMG. REH will eventually write great dialogues, but he is certainly not doing it here in this piece of juvenilia.
In some ways, the dialogue reminds me of his more humorous Westerns, but I'm only on the second page of the story. The dialogue is simply that bad; it just doesn't support a serious story. Again, I am going to give REH the benefit of youth here. This tonal mistake simply wouldn't have happened during his professional career.
Allison fights Gunboat to get the job. All of this seems patently ridiculous. Then he rides a wild horse... and gets the job.
This story is more humorous in tone than the others. It almost reads like a Breckingridge juvenilia. Anyways, it's just about Steve Allison accomplishing herculean tasks to get a job on a ranch. It doesn't feel like the same character at all that appeared in the other stories of this volume.
This story is also in Western Tales.
"The Sonora Kid's Winning Hand" is an unfinished tale. Billy Buckner lets Marion know that Steve is gambling in a saloon. He does well, but Marion isn't happy, even when he tries to give her money for a new dress. It's a short two-page fragment.This story is also in Western Tales.
"Red Curls and Bobbed Hair" starts with the Allison family at dinner, excepting Frank and Mildred. Mildred comes in and suggests having her hair bobbed, which upsets most of the family. The exception is Steve. He's okay with the idea.REH makes Mildred and Steve seem a little too close for brother and sister.
Anyway, dressed in a little nightie, Mildred makes Steve carry her upstairs to bed and tuck her in. Then she escapes out the window to go to a party, but Steve is down below, waiting. He lets her go, after threatening to paddle her if she lets any boys kiss her.
But she didn't go to the ball; instead, she went to have her hair bobbed. But instead of a black wig to hide it, she accidentally bought a red wig. Luckily Steve was experimenting with dyes in his laboratory (he has a laboratory in his Western home?)
Unfortunately, he used magic changing dye, because as the family ate breakfast, the wig suddenly turned back into red! Her mom snatches away the wig and nearly faints when it comes off (not realizing it was a wig) and the bobbed hairdo is revealed. They threaten violence upon her person, but Steve shames them into quietude.
A very strange story, actually.
This story is also in Western Tales.
Six untitled fragments follow. The first fragment still has the semi-humorous tone of the preceding stories. The second one is more in the serious style of El Borak, but still a Western. At this point, Steve Allison and Drag Buckner are wanted men. When challenged, Steve and Drag shoot the man and the saloon.
The third one has Steve and Drag riding through a Western desert. REH uses blanks for cuss words. They are looking for pueblos ruins when someone traps them in a canyon.
The fourth one finds Steve Allison in Tibet (REH spells it Thibet). They find a big nugget of gold, and then some Thibetans find them... and the fragment ends there.
The fifth one has Steve back in Arizona. This one reads more like an REH that is publishable. Steve is showing his sister Helen some sights. A strange man passes them, and the fragment ends.
The sixth one has Steve in New York. His sister Mildred, with the bobbed hair, walks in on him in their household library. She tells him of a foreign girl asking after him, and leaves. Then someone from outside throws a knife at him. He calls Buck, and the fragment ends.
You can see REH's skill improving with each of these fragments, leaving behind the humor and moving toward action/adventure.
"Brotherly Advice" is an unfinished fragment. This one starts out in New York. Steve is a professional gambler despite being described as being little more than a boy. He's with some girl... one of his sisters. Mildred, of course. He has to protect his sister from Kurt Vanner who has bet a hundred dollars against her kiss in a roulette game. He threatens to spank her with a light riding whip. She slaps him and the fragment ends. These almost sound like some of his spicier stories... if not for the fact that the two characters are brother and sister. I can't even imagine where this story would have gone.
"Desert Rendezvous" finds Steve and his family in Egypt. His sister Helen has fallen for an Arabic Frenchman with Spanish blood. Steve recognizes the man's name as a nefarious one. Helen is described as a racist, but she accepts this Arabic Frenchman with Spanish blood as okay by her. Steve rides to Helen's rescue. She explains that despite his Arabic name, he is more French than anything. He hugs her until she agrees to obey him. He kisses his sister and gazes into her eyes while holding her.Steve kills two Arabs who are arriving while Helen changes her clothes. She throws her arms around him and kisses him, begging him to let her stay and wait for her Arabic Frenchman with Spanish blood... and the fragment ends.
In the unfinished "The West Tower," Steve Allison and Billy Buckner are in Berlin, Germany. They wander into an old friend, Miss Helen Tranton, and a German friend of hers, Captain Ludvig von Schlieder. Steve and Bill get invited to a party at an old castle in the Black Forest. REH is still blank-lining the cuss words, and Moriarty is still on their tail.The party is started and everyone is instructed to find their own bedrooms for the night. Helen goes off on her own and finds an abandoned part of the castle. She finds a stairway to a locked up old Tower. She gets scared and runs back to where people are. The history of the castle is told, then a ghost story about the tower where Helen got scared is related to the guests.
Erich (the host) insists women secretly prefer men to basically be rapists and Steve insists he kills rapists. Erich is not pleased by this. Captain von Schlieder suggests a game of American poker as a distraction from the resulting tension.
After the game, Steve goes to his room and talks with Buckner. Buckner also found the abandoned area of the castle and had a weird experience regarding the locked up West Tower. They return to the party and Steve tells a long story about Scotland so Buckner can get away from the party and explore the environs around that tower. Steve figures he went on long enough and returned to his room in the east tower. Soon Buckner arrived, having tangled with some unknown thing in the west tower, a thing as hairy as a gorilla!
And here the fragment ends.
The writing is still not up to par for REH. The blanks instead of cussing was jarring, but REH didn't really write a lot of cussing now that I think of it. Some of the dialogue felt unrealistic to me, but it was getting much closer to what REH would eventually be putting out in terms of writing quality.
The book winds up with a section of miscellanea. Most of these fragments are too short to do anything with, and most don't even identify the characters well."Under the Great Tiger" - Unknown 1st person scene in Kabul on some kind of business. He asks Yussef Ullah to drink with him, and gets attacked.
Untitled Fragment about a Cossack and a Turk gambling. Four paragraphs that don't really go anywhere.
"Spears of the East" - A Bedouin chief wants the 15 year old daughter of an old Arab town-dweller. Then a small force of horsemen led by a white man ride up.
Untitled fragment about the wisdom of various Eastern religions.
Untitled fragment about Thure Khan.
Untitled Synopsis for Blood of the Gods.
Maps and sketches made by REH.
Overall, it's a good book. It's definitely for someone who is already a fan of REH. I would hate for this book to be anyone's first exposure to Robert E. Howard. But, if you like REH (which I assume anyone reading this does), and want to see the beginnings of REH the Author and the origins of El Borak, this is a great book to have.
It certainly paints a wonderful world for El Borak to inhabit, and makes some of the background characters feel more rounded.
Robert E. Howard Readers
Books mentioned in this topic
Western Tales (other topics)Western Tales (other topics)
Western Tales (other topics)
The Collected Poetry of Robert E. Howard, Volume 2 (other topics)
Steve Harrison's Casebook (other topics)
More...
This book attempts to gather all the known "desert adventure" material not included in the Del Rey volume, such as juvenilia, drawings, lists, and a synopsis.
As always, you are welcome to read along, ask questions, comment with your thoughts or memories about the stories, or just talk about whatever if my reviews spark something you want to say.
My copy is #96/150.