CONAN THE BUCCANEER

I wasn't originally going to read Conan the Buccaneer for this chronology, but now that I have, I can't remember why I was so resistant to the idea.

I was at a Christmas party in Fort Collins, Colorado this weekend and toward the back of the house was a small shelf that I looked up on to see a whole slew of the Lancer / Ace books.  One of the guys who lives there turned out to be a huge Conan fan with several Frazetta prints around the place, and he leant me Conan the Buccaneer and Conan of the Isles since those are the only two of the lot that I haven't read (thanks, Austin!). 

Conan the Buccaneer, written by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter and published in 1971 as part of the Lancer series of Conan books, is a fun little pirate adventure that takes place during Conan's days with the Barachans on the western ocean. I actually really enjoyed reading this one, but I feel like it highlights the difference between the writing of Robert E. Howard and his standard-bearers, de Camp and Carter. 

Conan is captain of the Wastrel, getting wasted in Zingara as he is want to do at the beginning of the novel. We are treated to the return of the "Treasure of Tranicos" character Black Zarono, which was very welcome for me- he was excellent in that story (chronologically speaking, though, this is Zarono's first appearance since "Tranicos" will take place right before Conan's kingship). The two pirate crews of Zarono's Petrel and Conan's Wastrel are at odds with one another, chasing each other down the coast to a mysterious Nameless Isle in search of treasure. We get to explore an ancient temple on that island before heading over to Kush to be reunited with Juma, one of Conan's best companions from "The City of Skulls" and we get up to all sorts of shenanigans fighting amazons and sentient trees.

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Chronologically, Conan the Buccaneer takes place after "The Pool of the Black One" and before "Red Nails." It says on page 58 that "less than a year had elapsed since, in this selfsame Wastrel, he had sailed with its former captain, the saturnine Zaporavo, to an unknown island in the west, where Zaporavo and several of the Zingaran crew had met their doom. Few things in Conan's adventurous life had been stranger or more sinister than the Pool of the Black One and its inhuman attendants."

Additionally, the story place's itself in Conan's life by stating that Conan is now "over 35 and past the first flush of youth."

There are two chronological curiosities for me in this narrative. One, Conan ends this story aboard the Wastrel headed south, which makes sense as he heads toward Xuchotl, but I feel like there's a slightly important episode that happens between the two that we're not privy to. Conan is well-outfitted, well-respected in Zingara now, and he has his full crew aboard his ship. When we see him next in "Red Nails" he's on land, shipless and crewless. Could be a good story there to fill in the gap. And two, Conan fights a sentient evil tree in Gamburu toward the end of the novel and remarks that it reminds him of his days fighting in an arena in Messantia, but I don't recall any adventures like that. Perhaps they're in something I somehow skipped over.

This story's a good time. I don't mean to make it sound like this was one of the best Conan adventures by any means, but I was kind of surprised at how good it was because it was written right before the four "Old Man Conan" stories (which constantly reference Buccaneer) and all of those were absolute garbage.

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My main takeaway from Conan the Buccaneer, though, is how sharply it draws the difference between Howard's writing ability and the powers of de Camp & Carter. The lone review on its Wikipedia page agrees with me:

"Reasonably good plot but substandard writing."

Yeah, the plotting is good, but there's just something missing in the prose itself. Take this tomb description from Howard's "Black Colossus" as an example and let's compare it to a tomb description by de Camp and Carter. From "Black Colossus:"

"​Gingerly stepping over it, the thief thrust against the door, which this time slid aside, revealing the interior of the dome. Shevatas cried out; instead of utter darkness he had come into a crimson light that throbbed and pulsed almost beyond the endurance of mortal eyes. It came from a gigantic red jewel high up in the vaulted arch of the dome. Shevatas gaped, inured though he was to the sight of riches. The treasure was there, heaped in staggering profusion—piles of diamonds, sapphires, rubies, turquoises, opals, emeralds; zikkurats of jade, jet and lapis lazuli; pyramids of gold wedges; teocallis of silver ingots; jewel-hilted swords in cloth-of-gold sheaths; golden helmets with colored horsehair crests, or black and scarlet plumes; silver scaled corselets; gem-crusted harness worn by warrior-kings three thousand years in their tombs; goblets carven of single jewels; skulls plated with gold, with moonstones for eyes; necklaces of human teeth set with jewels. The ivory floor was covered inches deep with gold dust that sparkled and shimmered under the crimson glow with a million scintillant lights. The thief stood in a wonderland of magic and splendor, treading stars under his sandalled feet."

And from Conan the Buccaneer:

"The structure was of roughly cubical shape; but its surfaces, instead of being simple squares, were made up of a multitude of planes and curves of irregular form, oriented every which way. There was any symmetry to the structure. It was as if every part of the building had been designed by a different architect, or as if the building had been assembled from parts of a score of other structures chosen at random from many lands and eras... The temple looked wrong. The style was like nothing he had seen in his far voyaging. Even the ghoul-haunted tombs of Stygia were not so alien as this irregular block of black stone. It was as if the builders had followed some inhuman geometry of their own---some unearthly canon of proportion and design."

Both of these passages describe mysterious, legend-haunted, treasure-packed, ancient, dangerous crypts, but one of them is captivating, and the other is just... fine. It's hard to even describe the difference in prose, but Howard's just feels more immediate, more alive, and like he's describing the tomb as he's standing in it rather than a game master talking about a dungeon to their players over their DM screen. The actual, physical thing de Camp and Carter are describing is even actually a little more unique than the tomb in Kuthchemes that Howard is describing, at least in its basic construction, but there's a magic in Howard's writing that is absent in de Camp and Carter's.

Like many of de Camp and Carter's Conan forays, this story pulls from different parts of the Conan canon, bringing back characters and elements from previous stories, which, while something that Howard almost never did, is fun to see. Conan the Buccaneer was adapted in Savage Sword issues 40 through 43. I've now read the first 117 issues of Savage Sword and none of them have taken the opportunity to explore how Conan loses the wastrel and ends up near Xuchotl, but maybe one will soon...

If you're interested at all in this book, you should check out the great video that Grammaticus Books did on it a few months back.

Since I also borrowed Conan of the Isles, I suppose I'll read that one next!

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