Karavansara

From December 1935 to April 1936, Weird Tales was the home of the only full-length Conan novel by Robert E. Howard, and it feels right to post about it as the last entry in this long Cimmerian September.
I have been unable to do one post for every story as I planned – I am somewhat overworked (that’s good, my mortgage will be happy), I have problems with my eyesight, and I feel the tiredness of this overheated September.
But The Hour of the Dragon deserves a full post.

There was a British publisher, Dennis Archer, that was interested in bringing Conan to the UK. But before committing to the series, he wanted a novel, to introduce the character and the Hyborian age to British readers. And so Howard wrote a novel.

The Hour of the Dragon is an episodic novel, going back to the origins of the series and starting off with yet another palace conspiracy and a revived sorcerer, and King Conan losing his crown and being imprisoned in a dungeon.
It’s The Scarlet Citadel all over again, but this time Conan is helped by a slave girl, Zenobia, and not by a manipulating spellcaster.
To defeat the sorcerer Xaltotun, from the ancient and evil empire of Acheron, Conan needs the Heart of Arhiman. Thus, escaping his prison, Conan embarks on a long quest, that reads as a travelogue of his world and a recap of his previous adventures.

The novel is fun, the call-backs to Conan’s early adventures are fine, the style is solid, the pace fast.
Its episodic nature (each chapter working as an adventure) has often been used to support the idea that sword & sorcery works best in short stories, and if you want a novel-length book, you might as well write a series of shorts with an overarching metaplot. Debatable, but interesting.

On the down side, Xaltotun is an OK adversary, but not overly original, and Zenobia – coming after characters like Belit, Valeria or Yasmina – is not memorable. It was Karl Edward Wagner, if I remember correctly, that said the final promise from Conan, to make her his queen, is just empty talk on the part of the barbarian – and only because De Camp and Carter it did come true in subsequent apocrypha.

When I first read the novel, seventeen years old me was much more impressed by Akivasha, the immortal vampiress witch residing underneath a pyramid in Stygia. Sure, she is a rep-off of H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha, but the Stygian chapter of The Hour of the Dragon was forever burned in my synapses.

“I am Akivasha! I am the woman who never died, who never grew old! Who fools say was lifted from the earth by the gods, in the full bloom of her youth and beauty, to queen it forever in some celestial clime! Nay, it is in the shadows that mortals find immortality! Ten thousand years ago I died to live for ever! Give me your lips, strong man!”

Back when I first discovered Conan, this novel, called Conan the Conqueror in the L. Sprague de Camp edit, was almost impossible to find in the Italian edition – and if found, it was priced high above the possibilities of a high-schooler. But I did find a battered copy of The Hour of the Dragon, in the Berkley edition curated by K.E. Wagner.

Much later (I was in my thirties) I managed to find a copy of the hardback Donald M. Grant edition.
It’s still here on my shelf. It’s probably worth money.

The Hour of the Dragon is almost The Concise Conan the Cimmerian – it features high adventure, intrigue, horror, magic and battles, with a smattering of Hyborian history and geography.
It was designed by Howard as an introduction to the series, and as such works perfectly.
It is, to quote L. Sprage de Camp

a sanguinary combination of sorcery, skulduggery, and swordplay

We are not asking for more.