of desert adventures, If Conan had lived in, traveled throughout the Middle East with a rifle, and been a foot shorter, he would have been Francis Xavier Gordon, aka El Borak.
El Borak is known as the best man with any sort of weapon from the Sudan to the China Sea, He can track an eagle through the desert, go farther without food and water than a camel, appear and disappear like a djinn, and wherever he goes the blood of his enemies flows freely.
The story usually begins with something like "El Borak woke to the sound of a silk clad foot on the carpet and his panther like reflexes saved his life.
" He saves damsels in distress, avenges foul murder, and saves entire nations from being overthrown,
These are basically American Western tales but set on the other side of the world, mostly Afghanistan at the beginning of theth century, Much local color and some barbarian savagery, but no magic or supernatural happenings, Lots and lots of sword fighting and knife fighting and large battles involving native tribesmen and bloodthirsty thieves, All very fast paced, and El Borak is an amazing character, the western adventurer gone native who is accepted as a brother to some and hated as the most dangerous enemy to others.
Included are three related tales of Kirby O'Donnell, He is also a western adventurer like El Borak, also an unequaled fighter with gun or blade, but unlike El Borak he is a thief by nature, Good stories, notable due to the fact that they are linked together specifically, which rarely happen in REH's works,
The original unpublished version of "The Fire of Asshurbanipal" is here as well, This is the version before the addition of Tsathoggua, and it suffers from the lack,
These are just really good stories, and El Borak has become my second favorite REH hero after Conan himself, Down in the west Texas town of El Paso was born Francis Xavier Gordon, known by repute from Stamboul to the China Sea, Muhammadans called him El Borak, the swift, They feared and respected him, An evil Hungarian called Gustav Hunyadi may be his match, This villain is plotting to send a howling horde of fanatics against the Indian border and plunge Central Asia into a religious war,
El Borak has papers proving the plot and is taking them to Fort Ali Masjid, but a group of the fanatics is out to stop him.
He has not one chance in ten thousand of getting out alive! Swords Of The Hills is a ripping yarn set in the days when we British ruled India and noble, squarejawed American adventurers exercised their lean thews and fighting skills to help us out.
The first story in this book, El Borak And Other Desert Adventures, very much sets the tone for the rest of it,
In ThreeBladed Doom you have to make an effort to get the characters straight in your head right from the start, ElBorak Francis Xavier Gordon is subject to an assassination attempt in the streets of Kabul, He has been to see the Amir to plead the case of Baber Khan who is accused by others of sedition, ElBorak has promised to defend him against the charges but Baber Khan fears for his life and wont come to Kabul to stand trial, ElBorak sneaks off in the dead of night to try to persuade him,
Naturally, things get complicated with more terrifying tribesmen barring the way of our noble hero, Then he goes to track down the Hidden Ones, an assassination cult who have made an attempt on the life of the Emir, They are hidden in a lost city in the mountains, Theres a slender and supple girl, too, kidnapped from India, who needs rescuing, ElBorak is death on legs and so terrible is his reputation that he can frighten bandits into submission just by telling them his name but even he needs some help to fight a whole city full of villains.
ThreeBladed Doom is about a hundred pages long,
Howard sometimes told the heros tale through the eyes of a lesser man, Conan was seen through the eyes of Balthus in Beyond The Black River, In Sons Of The Hawk, the story opens with Stuart Brent finding a fatally wounded man on his doorstep, With his dying breath, Dick Stockton tells Stuart he must go to India, then to Afghanistan and find Francis Xavier Gordon, He must tell him that the Black Tigers have a new prince, They call him Abd el Khafid but his real name is Vladimir Jakrovitch, He is to be found in Rub el Harami, the Abode of Thieves, and then Dick dies,
Stuart Brent is a gambler, not an adventurer, but he has a code, Hes British, after all. Stockton is an old school chum and his last will must be done, So its off to Afghanistan, where he is captured, chained and spat on by beastly tribesmen who are carting him off to Rub El Harami as a slave when a mysterious lone rider fearlessly approaches.
Its El Borak, of course, but he identifies himself as Shirkuh, Clever that. A lot of these outlaw types dont want to work for a living, Sons Of The Hawk then develops along the usual lines of sword fights and treachery,
Hawk Of The Hills is a tale of treachery in Afghanistan, Treacherous Afdal Khan and his Orakzai henchmen have slaughtered Yusef Shah and several other Afridi tribesmen during what was meant to be a peaceful supper, El Borak scarcely escaped with is life and dodged his pursuers by scaling an unscalable cliff that no man had ever scaled before,
After a bit more fighting, he escapes and begins a blood feud with Afdal Khan that sees villages burned and many slaughtered, Geoffrey Willoughby is sent by the English Secret Service to end the feud which threatens the rich Persian caravan trade with India, Much of the story is told from Willoughbys point of view, Howard often views his heroes through the eyes of a secondary character as it would be immodest of them to constantly ponder how great they are, The twists and turns are good and the ending is quite clever,
There are seven ElBorak stories altogether, the bulk of the book which explains his name on the cover, The other adventurers featured are Kirby ODonnell and Steve Clarney, Although not totally dissimilar to ElBorak in that hes not an overweight clerk working in the colonial office, Kirby ODonnell is slightly different, Lean of thew, compact and powerful, he has blue eyes instead of black, He battles a bloodstained path through Gold From Tatary, Swords Of Shabrazar and The Trail Of The BloodStained God,
Steve Clarney, hard and tough as a wolf, is allotted just one story, The Fire Of Asshurbanipal which seems familiar, Perhaps it was adapted as a Conan story for comics by Roy Thomas Its the old lost city with forbidden treasure yarn, The jewel gives the story its title, The place its hidden might well be the City of Evil spoken of in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Alhazred, a nod by Howard to H, P. Lovecraft, his Weird Tales peer,
As Steve Tompkins points out in his useful and interesting introduction, El Borak is really a western hero, a gunfighter of the untamed frontier moved to the wild east for his adventures.
Like Natty Bumppo, in The Last Of The Mohicans, he is as wily and clever as the natives he battles and, like any Howard hero, hes possessed of incredible stamina, enormous courage, and the great strength of those mighty thews.
Kirby ODonnell and Steve Clarney are cut from the same cloth, also the material from which Conan was made,
In the days before television or even popular radio, the masses took their pulp adventures in print which at least had the benefit of expanding our vocabulary and making our brains work a little.
These stories are worth preserving but, like all strong medicine, best taken in small doses which is why it took me a year to read the book,
Eamonn Murphy An amazing book that I happened upon at Half Price Books in Greenfield that I wasn't even aware was a collection,
The bulk of the stories feature El Borak or Francis Xavier Gordon, a Texas born American adventurer in the MiddleEast, A character based most likely on a Wisconsin born Yah! man reared in a town called Saint Xavier in Texas who ended up in Central Asia becoming a rebel, bandit chief, and wanderer.
The stories mainly center around Gordon's dealing with one or two main baddies, plots involving gun running, kidnapping, and a particularly vicious villain wanting to create a new race.
I liked how Gordon was portrayed as an average type of man in build when compared to say Conan or Kull but with great strength, cunning, and skill.
The book also includes stories featuring two more Howard characters Kirby O'Donnell and Steve Clarney and an excellent overview of Howard, the origins of the stories, characters and work called "Gunfighters of The Wild East" by David A.
Hardy at the end of the book, I wasn't surprised by the quality,mature writing i saw these stories was written late in his short career, I was surprised how free,natural his writing got with the nonfantastic stories of El Borak and co, I have much more respect for his writing ability now and not only his vibrant,vivid storytelling, Take away the fantasy pulp mannerism and he writes like Jack London,
Also now i understand why many of his fans see El Borak as their favourite, He is one of the best heroes i have read in any fiction,
Not only is he strong but he is really smart, He tries to use strategy and cunning before brute force,relentless like a force of nature, It never got unbelievable because of how gritty,grim,realistic the stories were in their nature,setting,
I also liked how clear I saw the Afghanistan gorges,other Central Asia setting,how realistic he wrote about the different peoples of those countries, Filled with respect for those places,peoples,
Well researched too I learned about things I didn't know about those people,countries in this stage of their history,
I ratenot because he is one of my favourite authors but because this is him at his top writing ability wise,storytelling,characters,plots,themes.
The plots getting repetive is usually his weakness in his fantasy but not here,
He is more timeless than classic adventure writers he is compared to that I have read, If he didnt write great fantasy,horror he would be legendary for these stories, As a fan of Weird Fiction, this collection was not as enjoyable for me as the horror and sword and sorcery tales that I love by Robert E.
Howard. That being said, these were enjoyable tales and perfect for anyone who enjoys adventure stories without any supernatural elements, Almost as good as Howard's other big names, but not quite,
The setting is relatively realistic this time, with most of the stories taking place in Afghanistan or the Arab world during the time of the "the great game" for control of Central Asia between the British and Russian empires.
The three characters Francis Xavier Gordon, Kirby O'Donnel and Steve Clarney are all American adventurers of Irish and/or Scottish descent Howard stresses the point repeatedly whose exceptional abilities propel them to the top of the tribal hierarchies.
They make a name for themselves as treasure hunters, tribal leaders and even government agents,
While the premise is excellent, the execution is not as good as in some of Howard's more wellknown works, such as Conan, Bran Mak Morn or Solomon Kane.
First off the three characters Gordon, O'Donnel and Clarney come across as so similar as to be completely
interchangeable, Howard could easily have stuck with his most used character Gordon for all of the stories and they'd be no different, Second, these stories all tend to start in medias res with rather complicated backstories that are explained in retrospect by the characters in long paragraphs, This is a rather clumsy way of setting up a story, My third and final gripe is how all the conflicts tend to be resolved in exactly the same way a shootout followed by a duel where the vastly superior strength and precision of the main character always triumphs.
In fact I'd say these characters are so unbelievably skillful it ends up detracting from the suspense,
I'd recommend getting this collection for fans of Howard who want to read all his major works, but for people unfamiliar with Howard I'd recommend starting with the far superior Conan stories, or even Solomon Kane or Bran Mak Morn if one prefers a historical setting over fantasy.
Robert Howard at his best It is not necessary to have been to a place in order to write about itindeed, even those who sitelinkspent years there, or who were sitelinkborn and raised there, or who are sitelinkof that very culture can still show biases just as deep.
After all, as I'm sure you're tired of hearing, sitelinkThe East is a fantasy, just as any unified notion of Europe or America is a fantasyor really a collection of competing fantasiesand just because someone is born and lives in America does not mean they have an unbiased view of itquite the opposite.
But then, Howard never pretended he was writing anything but fantasies, Certainly, he spent a lot of time reading, taking notes, getting his details down, forming an understanding of culture and historybut he could still only prevent his own view on the subject, his own experience and philosophy.
In some ways, his views could be shortsightedparticularly his views of racial and cultural 'types'but there is also a grand thrust of the human spirit in his works which often raises him above mere prejudiceand the thrill of his prose doesn't hurt, either.
Of course, as with all his works, there are problems with his stylehe is always somewhat unevenand it's the same problems: as each short story was meant to be separate there's some recycling of descriptions, and themes, some redundancy in presentation.
As always, he picks a certain animal and bases half his metaphors around it: for Conan, it's the panther, for Solomon Kane, the Lion, and for his desert heroes, the wolf.
It works best in Conan, where we can take it as a sort of 'Homeric epithet'a nod to the purposefully repetitive cadence of epic poetrybut there is no such excuse for stories about cowboys in the Khyber.
He also repeats uncommon phrases in a way that makes them stand out unnaturallysuch as 'beetling cliff' or 'hellburst' only a couple of paragraphs apart, or even using the same word within a sentence:
"with a moaning cry the Jowaki released him and toppled moaning from the wall"
And of course, there's the fact that every cliff is 'knife edged', every silhouette 'etched against the sky', every muscle 'corded'.
The most frustrating part about Howard's writing is that these are such simple errors to fixthe sort of thing that would have been, if he'd had a competent editor, and that it's clear from other passages that he's entirely capable of perfectly lovely, effective passages:
"Crumbling pinnacles and turrets of black stone stood up like gaunt ghosts in the grey light which betrayed the coming of dawn.
"
Or this speech about a cursed ruby:
"how many princes died for
thee in the Beginnings of Happenings What fair bosoms didst thou adorn, and what kings held thee as I now hold thee Surely blood went into thy making, the blood of kings surely throbs in the shining and the heartflow of queens in the splendor.
"
It would be remarkable to see a Howard story where he maintained the care and skill he takes with such passages throughout the whole tale.
Yet his works are not just about wellput phrases, but quick and balanced plots, which Howard had a gift for, His tales are always exciting, always moving, always with some thrust of clear motivation to lead us from one scene to the next, full of odd characters and curious coincidences and hardships to test our hero.
It is interesting, as noted in the critical essay that accompanies this collection, that each of his desert heroes has a different approach to life, different desires and motivations for what he does.
Some are scoundrels, some men of deep moral fiber, It's the fact that he succeeds so often in many areas of storytelling, from the prose to the structure to the characters, that raises him above other writers of the pulpsand indeed, above many modernday genre authors, for all the sophistication of years that they can call upon when writing their story, where Howard had to make much of it up as he went along.
But then, that may also be the source of his power as a writer: that he wasn't writing a 'known subject', predefined and set up with a hundred different tropes that allow any hack to construct such a story 'by the book'.
Howard instead had to piece his stories together from real histories, from classic adventure writers, and from legitimate authors of literature, which tends to give them much more depth and variety than simply following a standard model.
So, if the East is a fantasy, then what is Howard's fantasy Not surprisingly, it is the fantasy of freedom, of a man making his own way in the world, unfettered by arbitrary social concerns.
When the American Southwest becomes too civilized, crowding out the adventurer to make space for the cattle rancher and the homesteader, Howard's heroes go to Arabia, to Afghanistanto places where life is not defined by train schedules and banking firms, but by will to survive, by camaraderie, and where the system of governance is the tribe and the warlord.
It is, for Howard, a place much like the ancient Hyborean world of Conan, a premodern world where the industrial revolution has not reshaped everything for convenience and assembly labor.
Yet he can set his stories in modern times, with guns and trains and bombs, using modern characters with modern concerns, but still able to tell the same tales of valiant personal combat, where one man, alone, can make a difference.
It is the same fantastic life that men like 'Chinese' Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, and Richard Burton made for themselvesmixing fact, fiction, and selfmythology into lives that sound like they belong in fiction, not history.
Howard's desert heroes have direct antecedents as well: white men who worked as soldiers and warlords in the 'Great Game' of the colonial powers as they struggled for control of central Asiamen like sitelinkJosiah Harlan and sitelinkAlexander Gardner.
It's certainly not difficult to see why such tales appealed to Howard, who was fascinated by the man out of his element, the clash of cultureas well as the mutual coming together of disparate cultures.
There is, of course, a less flattering tradition of such stories as delivered by writers like Haggard, of the sitelinkWhite Savior who outnobles the Noble Savageluckily Howard's characters, being loners with little interest in leadership roles, are less prone to this than many of their contemporaries.
Overall, these stories possess less depth and variety than the Conan stories, but they are largely wellcrafted, apart from Howard's little bad habits, and perfectly enjoyable.
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