2005, Ballantine Books, NY, pages xvii-xxi

In this introduction to the third and final book in the Wandering Star collection of Robert E. Howard Conan stories Patrice Louinet gets to the root of what makes this 1930s pulp character resonate with certain men and boys to this day, by going into detail as to how this Depression Era creation was mishandled, misrepresented, and warped by each and every effort of the American media over a 50 year period, only to continually spring back into the author’s original focus of ‘a wild life at random’ in the eyes of readers and artists.

Note: In my opinion the artists illustrating Conan over the years have preserved the character while the editors, posthumous coauthors, and comic script and screen play writers have pretty much tried to denature the original character to fit an emasculated audience. I think that the artists, and the readers they sold on Conan, saw through to the real message.

Patrice goes into detail of how the very concept of wild and random does not fit the ‘cohesive’ ‘Tolkienesque quest’ that mainstream media from Mark Twain to current moviemakers insist is the only way to tell a tale. She makes it clear that the various publishers’ need to structure Conan’s life as a ‘career’ [largely based on the economic need to have other authors complete the storied barbarian’s life] erased ‘that intense freedom’ that was the hallmark of the Howard’s creation, making Conan into ‘nothing more than a superman’.

‘Nothing more than a superman.’

That statement is profound, and permits the reader of Conan, within 200 words, to understand that in these stories he holds one man’s clear vision of the lineal materialistic gauntlet that is the soulless hierarchy of civilized man. The Conan stories are at their core social protest yarns spun for the poor reader who could not afford a book but could put down a quarter for a pulp.

Over the rest of the introduction proofs and details are presented, along with this telling comment ‘For Conan in the media suffered the same fate as Burroughs’ Tarzan: both mysteriously lost their ability for articulate speech’. Patrice is noting the literary person’s [particularly of the Hollywood variety] common need to portray a physically dominant man as a brute.

Her best point involves the concept of kingship in Howard’s fiction. In the first Conan story he is depicted as a king. The modern materialistic mind then yearns for this to be a retrospective prologue, offered before Conan’s inevitable accumulation-based ascent to wealth and power in the manner of a Hollywood actor, modern president or CEO. Ernst Junger had a similar problem with the lineal artificially truncated ‘career’ type aspect of the novel over the more realistic spiritually inspired story.

In this brilliant thesis Patrice Louinet presents Howard as a craftsmen who chose Conan as his vehicle for charting the course of a man who gains and thereby loses over and over again, demonstrating a really Nordic strain of fatalism where temporal power is concerned that goes at least as far back as Beowulf. Howard is himself quoted as worrying that he used ‘Too much raw meat’ in a realistic way that goes against everything taught in prose and screenwriting then and today.

The essay closes with a discussion of fantasy of this type as the most ‘truthful story’ that can be told, and that if you want it at its ‘best’ you need to get it at its ‘rawest.’