Previously published as Howard’s Awful View of Life, revised with DL.

This review of Queen of the Black Coast is broken into five parts, mining the contents of each of the five chapters in this novelette for the substrata, in particular, the nature of the Conan character and the importance of Belit to the mythic barbarian and Howard’s awful view of life.

“I pay my way with steel!”

The story of Conan and the pirate queen begins with a look at “civilized” life from the perspective of an honorable savage. Conan forces his way onboard an outgoing merchant galley one step ahead of the corrupt law. He befriends the captain and tries to defend the small ship against the “Tigress,” a predatory war galley commanded by Belit. Belit is a pirate queen who is ethnically supposed to be of a pre-Berber tribe, who commands black pirates who worship her ‘like a goddess.’

The interesting thing here as that, when the Arab-Islamic invaders swept across North Africa, the staunchest resistance they encountered came from Berber tribes who were ruled by a warrior queen. I would bet that Belit is a composite of that Berber queen, a Chinese pirate queen of the 19th Century, and Bonnie the psychopathic gangster of Howard’s own time. Howard’s treatment of race is often overlooked, and he is assumed to have harbored a typically negative view of blacks for a man of his time, race and locality. He is also widely assumed to have been misogynistic as well. A nice example that refutes both prejudices comes in the following line, “…she knew she had found her lover, and his race meant naught…”

It is significant that Belit is the only love of Conan’s 25-story career, and that Howard was a bachelor who is thought to have only loved one woman. Conan has no qualms about helping Belit with her anarchist crusade against the entrenched powers of the age. In case you were impressed or horrified by the 1970s film Excalibur, when Euther committed the sexist crime of armored intercourse, Chapter One closes with Conan doing the same, but with considerably more encouragement from the lady beneath him.

“With the unerring instinct of the elemental feminine, she knew she had found her lover, and his race meant naught, save as it invested him with the glamor of far lands.”

“And survivors of butchered Stygian ships named Belit with curse, and a white warrior with fierce blue eyes; so the Stygian princes remembered this man long and long, and their memory was a bitter tree which bore crimson fruit in the years to come.”

For the time period of its composition, Queen of the Black Coast is absolutely scandalous: a naked mixed-race woman leading a crew of black pirates, and more troubling, directing a white man! Howard states that “hers was the mind that directed,” and “his the arm that carried out the directions.” This had to be written as fantasy—could have never been released as a historical or oriental adventure.

As Belit rashly looks for a city to sack up a poisonous river of death, she engages Conan in a discussion of his religious beliefs and superstitions, revealing herself to be something of a crazed witch. Much of Conan’s cultural back-story is fleshed out in this conversation. At this point, Howard is at his horrific best where the setting is concerned, and Belit is beginning to let her powerful relationship with Conan go to her head. She is clearly intoxicated by how their strengths complement one another and decides to take on the darkest corner of Howard’s lurid world, even as Conan professes his fatalism. This is Bonnie and Clyde in a world of horrific shadow.

“She looked at him vaguely, in her eyes the blank blaze of her strange passion, her fingers working at the gems on her breast.”

“And as they slept, a hideous shape crept red-eyed from the shadows and performed weird and awful rites about and above each sleeper.”

Howard’s generation of writers were obsessed with ancient horrors and undiscovered mysteries. Rather than have some learned character reading ancient symbols to narrate the nature and fate of the civilization that had built the city that Conan and his savage bride were plundering, Howard uses toxic plants to drug Conan into a nightmare that reveals for the reader what horrors Belit has led them into. As often happens with Conan, he is befuddled by sorcery and must find some simplistic direct means to combat its effects. This recurrent theme was a favorite of Howard’s, reflecting, I think, a fitting sentiment for a rural writer to hold concerning a world that has just been duped and plundered by a coven of bankers.

“The moon hung in the shadowy sky…”

“No smile bent Conan’s grim lips at the thought, but his eyes were lit with iron laughter.”

Chapter four is a classic berserk scene as Conan battles the “oldest race on earth,” and extinguishes it only through the inspiration of his mate. This was just about the only scene in the original Conan movie, by John Milus, that actually came from a Howard story. It also shows how personal Howard’s stories were. The Conan franchise has been squandered in film largely because the movie makers refuse to present the character in the stories he was crafted in. Howard did not write “save the world stories.” Howard wrote about individuals in an unjust and uncaring world striving against the odds. In that sense, his work was far less “fantastical” than most of what is written and filmed under the banner of science-fiction. The public will never be able to enjoy Conan in his natural setting except in print. Hollywood cannot abide an action hero that does not save the world.

“The black fury in his soul drove out all fear.”

“Now we are done with roaming, evermore;

No more the oars, the windy harp’s refrain;

Nor crimson pennon frights the dusky shore;

Blue girdle of the world, receive again

Her whom thou gavest me.”

The most iconic aspect of Conan as a character is that he either begins a story alone or ends it alone. In Queen of the Black Coast, Conan only finds companionship—rare for him in his life—when the world seems to be burning and his lady is lighting the torch. He begins the story on the run and ends it wandering and alone. In Howard’s mind this was about as much as a real man of action could hope for, to not sell out and remain the man that the one woman who loved him had fallen for. In most fiction the writer metaphorically castrates the male hero by having him buckle under the weight of society, facilitating a “happily-ever-after” ending. Howard’s Conan is more like a serial killer with a code that turns his back on the world after every angry spasm of interaction.

If you’ve just seen the movies, try this.