Decade by Decade: Part 5: Hour of the Dragon

While Cagney was blazing away with a tommy gun and the Shadow was matching wits with modern day pirates, Conan the Barbarian was busy defending his hard-won throne against assassins, wizards, carnivorous apes, giant snakes and vampires.

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Gee whiz, the 1930s really was a decade of slam-bang action.

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Conan was created by Robert E. Howard, who published the adventures of the blood-drenched barbarian in the pages of Weird Tales magazine. Howard wrote less than two dozen Conan short stories and novellas before his untimely death, recounting the character's varied lifetime in no particular chronological order. The stories jump back and forth throughout Conan's career as a thief, pirate, mercenary and (eventually) king.

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Hour of the Dragon, serialized in Weird Tales in 1935/36, is Howard's only novel-length Conan story and it is arguably the best of the lot. Picking up after Conan has become king of the powerful nation of Aquilonia, it involves a plot by a neighboring country to use a combination of military power and sorcery to overthrow the barbarian king. An ancient sorcerer named Xaltotun is resurrected to help, but soon proves too powerful himself to remain in a subordinate role.

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Conan, in the meantime, finds himself imprisoned in a dungeon, thought dead by the Aquilonians. But he soon manages to escape, killing a giant carnivorous ape on his way to freedom. He learns about a magical talisman that can be used to defeat Xaltotun and begins a quest to recover it.

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This provides a platform for Howard to give us a series of truly exciting action set pieces--everything from single combat between two opponents to epic battles involving thousands of soldiers. There's also some truly creepy stuff that reminds us Howard could provide us with horror as well as action-adventure.

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At one point, Conan has traveled to the sorcery-soaked land of Stygia (a fantasy analog to ancient Egypt) and enters a pyramid in search of the talisman. His wanderings through the pitch-dark maze, encountering a vampire and several other horrific beings along the way, makes for a truly hair-raising read.

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The plot is not perfect--relying on unlikely coincidence several times to carry the story along. Also, Conan is aided in his escape by a harem girl who pretty much pops out of nowhere (having fallen in love-at-first-sight with Conan) to aid him. But the prose is so vivid, fast-moving and just plain fun that we can easily forgive these flaws.

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This all begs the question: Who would win a cage fight between James Cagney, the Shadow and Conan the Barbarian?