HAWKS OVER SHEM

In the early Spring of 1933, Conan the Cimmerian had hit something of a low point, at least in the mind of his writer, Robert E. Howard. Howard had written a dozen of them, but only three had made it to publication, so he was yet to see what a smash hit his barbarian would be. None of the stories had graced the cover of the magazine. Howard's agent, Otis Kline, was encouraging REH to diversify his portfolio a bit to keep the cash flowing. Howard, who was already very interested in western and boxing stories, didn't need a ton of convincing. 

He wouldn't return to writing Conan stories for several months. During this period away from the Hyborian Age, he tried his hand at writing a novel several times and even banged out about 5000 words a day, 7 days a week, for a time. He tried to sell collections of his short stories, and he wrote in other genres. One of the books he wrote during this time was a novella of political intrigue that was set in Cairo, Egypt, among factions vying for power. It was called Hawks Over Egypt. 

Kline received the Hawks Over Egypt from Howard on October 23rd, 1933, and it didn't go out to the publishers for one reason or another. In August 1935, Kline received a rewrite of the story and submitted it to the magazine Argosy. They rejected it. He sent it to Blue Book in January of 1936. They rejected it. He sent it to Complete Stories in April. They rejected it. The next day he sent it off to Short Stories. They rejected it. He didn't send it out again. 

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For the next twenty years, Hawks Over Egypt sat in a trunk with everything else Robert E. Howard failed to publish during his short lifetime. In the early 1950s, that trunk was accessed by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, who picked through to find unpublished Conan stories. They pulled out eight fragments or outlines of Conan material, but with it they found four unpublished stories that weren't set in the Hyborian Age. In 1953, publisher Martin Greenberg suggested that they be turned into Conan tales.

de Camp rewrote them with Conan as the central character, "by changing names, deleting anachronisms, and introducing a supernatural element." It wasn't hard, he said, "since Howard's heroes were pretty much all cut from the same cloth." One of those stories was Hawks Over Egypt, which became "Hawks Over Shem," and was first published in the collection Conan the Freebooter in 1968. As such, the story is credited to both Howard and de Camp.

Conan the Freebooter is up on the Internet Archive for free and I really owe a beer to whoever uploaded all these books, because I've been reading entirely for free. 

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In "Hawks Over Shem," Conan has decided to make some dough at what he's usually been best at: mercenary work in Shem. After his whole army is wiped out, we find him in Asgalun looking for revenge. The story has a great opening and it's a pretty decent adventure: there's lots and lots of political intrigue, assassinations, secret passageways, cleaved body parts...

I still think we're on a bit of an upswing from the low point of "The Vale of Lost Women" and filler of "The Castle of Terror," but the story isn't top-notch. This is partially because it has so many names of one-off characters or other vocabulary terms to learn. I tried to keep track as I read and came up with Asgalun, Akhirom, Anakim, Abibaal, Abdashtarth, Othbaal, Zeriti, Pelishita, Imbalayo, Farouz, Mazdak, Rufia, Mattenbaal, Bombaata, Keluka, and Khannon. I'm usually pretty quick on the uptake for those sorts of things, but I found myself struggling with which of the characters whose names start with "A" were which.

I read Roy Thomas's version of this story prior in Savage Sword #36 and found it to be vastly superior. 

The original Hawks Over Egypt did eventually see publication, in the collection called The Road of Azrael in 1979.

I've noticed that now that Conan is at the very least in his mid-20s, the stories don't often point out that he is young anymore. He seems to finally be solidly in the period that we think of as prime Conan. His skill is unmatched, his cunning and maturity are growing, and he's much more well-traveled. Next time, in "Black Colossus," we're leaving Shem, but we won't go far. We're headed to the tiny nation of Khoraja, which I don't think we've seen referenced in any other Conan story so far. 

Chronologically speaking, I really appreciate that this section of stories has featured only small moves at a time. Conan is spending a story or two in every nation, moving only one country at a time, in a general direction of coming back up north from the Black Kingdoms. Sometimes the chronologies move him really far between stories (like when he goes from Khitai all the way back below the Vilayet sea to the Hyborian kingdoms again), and that always feels like maybe there's a better way to sort them, but I can't think of one. These fit together nicely. 

★★★☆☆

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