“Beyond were the dark forests, gloomy and forbidding.”

-A Century Too Soon by John Musick, 1893

The Black Stranger was, in my opinion, one of Howard’s best works, in which he mixed three action genres into one fantastical tale of adventure: the frontier story, the pirate yarn, and the fantasy-horror he was master of. The Black Stranger did not sell, and would remain unpublished until 40 years after his death. Interestingly enough, when it was released [in three different 1970s issues that I read], it was released under the title The Treasure of Tranicos, which entirely misses the point of the story and plays only to the pirate yarn aspect of it.

Was the mention of a black villain on the cover of a book too inflammatory for both the dominant white racial view of the 1930s and the ascendant liberal black-identified sensibilities of the 1970s? Titles chosen, and not chosen, for commercial releases are telling of the political climate, as such titles are concerned with only one thing, eliciting the broadest possible positive reaction from the most people. Eventually the story was released under its actual title in the 2005 anthology The Conquering Sword of Conan, from which this reading is taken.

One of the most endearing things about Howard’s pulp style is his habit of naming the episodes of a novella or novelette, elevating it above its length in terms of texture. These are mostly mood setting devices, such as I: The Painted Men.

Conan is stalking along a wilderness trail, near the end of his endurance, at the close of a 100 mile flight into the wilderness from the hungry knives and axes of his Pictish enemies.

“Half-way across the glade he stopped short and whirled, catlike, facing back the way he had come, as a long-drawn call quavered out across the forest. To another man it would have seemed merely the howl of a wolf. But this man knew it was no wolf. He was a Cimmerian and understood the voices of the wilderness as a city-bred man understands the vices of his friends…He might have known these human wolves never quit a blood-trail.”

Conan was racing away from his savage enemies toward a cursed pirate treasure sought by two rival captains, and the wilderness castle of logs of an exiled Count, who has fled in terror to a forsaken coast, 1,000 miles from civilization. Two pirate crews, the retainers of a haunted nobleman, and the savage hordes out of the wilderness are set on a collision course by Conan, who for Howard in the tale is his serendipity engine.

In the midst of this hyper-masculine drama laced with supernatural peril, stood the Count’s neglected niece, Belesa, and Tina, a little slave girl she has freed from bondage. As much of this novella as can realistically be seen through the imperiled eyes of the two tormented girls, unfolds from their fragile viewpoint, one who knows well the evil that men do, and one who is about to find out.

Belas and Tina stand on the sea shore of this savage land, with their back to an idyllic slice of feudal manor life hacked out of the virgin timber, as a ship sails into sight. And framing it all is the menace of the primeval forest, that evokes equally well the green fastness of Iron Age Europe and the terrifyingly deep forests of the New World. In the following passage Howard says it best:

“She feared the forests, and that fear was shared by every one in that tiny settlement. Nor was it an idle fear—death lurked in those whispering depths, death swift and terrible, death slow and hideous, hidden, painted, tireless, unrelenting.”

And out of those depths, like a composite of Blackbeard and a leather stocking hero of James Fenimore Cooper, stalked Conan, the only man ruthless enough to bend the cutthroat pirates to his will, cunning enough in the ways of the wild to deal with the Picts, and with the dynamism to stand against the horror that stalks Belesa’s mad uncle. Conan represents the three aspects of the Whiteman’s character—as understood by Howard—that set him uniquely and fleetingly above the other races of Man in their many lands. Throughout the dealing with the pirates and savages and civilized fools, he emerges as the only white man who has not sold his soul for a purse of gold.

In the meantime the count is paying a horrific price for the wrong he did some black sorcerer—in the name of a fortune in gold and slaves—who has set a dark demon on his trail. The Black Stranger emerges as a tale of tribal retribution and racial guilt. And, according to Howard, when greedy and foolish white men bring the wrath of the colored races upon them in their lust for money, you need a white man who has not sold his soul to hold things together—the very barbarian that skulked beyond the pale of Civilization before disaster struck. For Conan states repeatedly that he will never abandon a fellow white man to his savage enemies, no less his hereditary foes the Picts.

I will have to give the postscript away in order to present Howard’s argument against materialism in full. Along the way he explored the option of suicide as a final defiance for the powerless, as Belesa and Tina rued their fate. In the final scene Belesa and Tina are discussing their fate, as they stand penniless and naked on the beach awaiting a pirate ship Conan means to use to rape and pillage. For once, he has not ended an adventure penniless, as he lifted a sack of rubies and emeralds from the pirate treasure.

Conan speaks to the distraught noblewoman and tells her that setting a woman adrift in a civilized country without money would be like leaving her in the forest for the savages, and, “You can sell them and buy a castle, and slaves and fine clothes, and with them it won’t be hard to get a husband, because civilized men all desire wives with these possessions… nay, nay, no thanks! What are a handful of gems to me, when all the loot of the southern seas will be mine for the grasping?”

In one stroke, Howard resurrects the primal big man, who does not hoard his gains, but disperses them before going about the gathering of more. This figure is now the rarest of mythic heroes in our own age of hoarded and venerated things, and to the extent that Howard could, he made sure that ideal of the primitive hero survived the madness of the American Dream.