Avarice makes for Credulity

We'll look at one last Robert E. Howard story in which the hero and the villain are forced by circumstances to team up with one another.

"Black Vulmea's Vengeance" was published in the November 1938 issue of Golden Fleece--a couple of years after Howard's death. The main character is an Irish pirate who has had a lot of success looting both British and Spanish ships.

It's the British who finally catch up to him--at a time when his entire crew is drunk from an all-night bender. Black Vulmea manages to take out a few of the Brits with a blast from a swivel gun, but the broadside he receives in return leaves him unconscious and wipes out his drunken crew.

("They'll wake up in Hell without knowing how they got there," eulogizes Vulmea a few pages later.)

The commander of the British ship is the snooty and brutal John Wentyard, who years ago had hanged a ten-year-old Vulmea when he put down a peasant's rebellion in Ireland. Vulmea, being an REH hero, survived the hangman's rope, became a kick-butt pirate, and now brought in chains before the man who killed his friends and family years ago.

Vulmea at first figures he'll leap forward and bash Wentyard's skull in with his manacles--an act of vengeance he figures is worth giving up his life to obtain. But then he gets a chance to run a con on Wentyard, telling him about a treasure hidden in the ruins of an ancient civilization on a nearby island. Looked at objectively, Vulmea's story should have been an obvious and desperate lie. But Vulmea knows that "avarice makes for credulity" and Wentyard indeed falls for it.

They travel to the island and go ashore: Wentyard, Vulmea and 15 marines. They're attacked by natives, which allows Vulmea to make a break for it. Events soon leave the marines dead, while Wentyard and Vulmea end up both hiding in some ruins that the natives are frightened to enter.

Vulmea is good at being sneaky, so he can slip out of the ruins and escape pretty much at will. So his initial plan is to first watch Wentyard starve to death. But then he decides it would be more satisfying to bring Wentyard food and water, then kill him in a fair fight. This plan is spoiled, though, when he abruptly discovers Wentyard has a wife and five-year-old daughter that will be left destitute. In fact, Wentyard was anxious to find treasure mostly to provide for them. "I can't be the cause of a helpless woman and colleen starving," says Vulmea in disgust.

This situation is what makes the character interactions particularly interesting, adding depth to an already cracking-good action tale. In our previous looks at reluctant Howardian team-ups, the goal was always either mutual survival or obtaining a treasure, after which the hero and the villain would go back to killing each other. This time, it's an act of compassion from a normally brutal pirate that brings the two characters together. It's clear that Vulmea still hates Wentyard and doesn't trust the man at all, but he'll save the Englishman (and even share a bit of treasure they stumble across) for the sake of a woman and child whom Vulmea himself will never meet.

But surviving has become more difficult. The natives won't enter the ruins, but a band of former African slaves (whose ship wrecked near the island) has no problem doing to. And these guys have no reason to love any white man--whether Irish or English. Also, there's a reason the natives avoid the ruins---a really, really creepy reason.

It's a great adventure story, with Wentyard's character arc and his changing attitude towards Vulmea giving it an interesting level of emotional subtlety. Robert E. Howard was quite capable of subtlety in his characterizations--something that he did a lot more often than casual critics of his work realize. "Black Vulmea's Vengeance" is perhaps one of the best examples of this.

That's it for our look at REH tales that force the hero to team up with an enemy. There's probably some other examples I'm not thinking of, so I may return to the idea in the future. Next week, though, we'll return to Edgar Rice Burroughs and visit with the Lord of the Jungle.

Pirates, Indians and Treachery--Oh, My!!!!

Here's a slightly convoluted bit of publishing history. At some point in the 1930s, during his all-too-brief career as a writer of pulp fiction, Robert E. Howard wrote a story starring Conan the Barbarian. Titled The Black Stranger, it involved Conan on the run from the savage Picts (a Hyborian Age analog to American Indians). Conan stumbles across the bodies of some pirates and a treasure stored in the cleft of a rock. A nobleman living in terror of--well, something--has built a fort along a deserted stretch of coastline nearby. Soon, Conan, the noble, and two seperate pirate crews are hip-deep in machinations involving that treasure--with everyone pretty much determined to backstab everyone else at the first opportunity. There's a wizard wandering around as well, stirring up some supernatural trouble.

It's a great story, culminating in a wild battle sequence as the fort is overrun by the Picts. But Howard wasn't able to sell it. So he re-wrote it, moving the action forward to the 17th Century and replacing Conan with Black Terance Vulmea, a pirate who had a well-earned reputation as the scourge of the Seven Seas. The supernatural shenanigans were toned down, becoming more implied than overt. The story's title became Swords of the Red Brotherhood. The Picts became Indians and the nobleman became a Frenchman. Everyone still tries to double- and triple-cross each other regardless of their new ethnicities.

Howard wrote one other Black Vulmea story, published after his death in the November 1938 issue of a pulp called Golden Fleece. But Swords of the Red Brotherhood, like The Black Stranger, was never sold. It went unpublished until it was included in a paperback in 1976 titled Black Vulmea's Vengenance. This book included both the Vulmea stories and another fun pirate yarn written by Howard.

Anyways, when writer L. Sprague de Camp was reintroducing Conan to the public through a series of paperback reprints, he came across Swords of the Red Brotherhood and rewrote it into a Conan story titled The Treasure of Tranicos. It first saw print in this form in King Conan (1953), then in Conan the Usurper (1967). Howard's original version--The Black Stranger--was also eventually reprinted in its unedited form in The Conquering Sword of Conan in 2005, one of an excellent three-volume set that reprinted all of Howard's original Conan stories.

So what's the point of all this? Well, as usual, I don't really have one. But I will say thatall three versions of the story (two Conans and one Black Vulmea) are entertaining, slam-bang adventures.

If I had to pick a favorite, though, I think I'd go with Swords of the Red Brotherhood. The story has such a strong pirate vibe, I think it works better when set within Piracy's Golden Age than in an overt fantasy world. All the same, it's a pretty close call between the two original versions.

The Treasure of Tranicos, though still a good tale, comes in a distant third among all the versions. de Camp was a great writer (his time-travel novel Lest Darkness Fall is a true classic) and he deserves unending gratitude for his part in rescuing Howard's work from obscurity. But I don't think he ever really "got" Conan. His prose style--very noticable even when he was re-working Howard's original prose--never quite fit the barbarian.

But whether it's Conan or Terance Vulmea wielding a sword against savages, pirates and ill-tempered noblemen, Swords/Stranger is yet another example of the many wonderful stories that came out of the pulp era. If you're in the mood for some good pirate stories, hit the Internet used book services and dig up a copy of Black Vulmea's Vengeance. Or read it online here. You won't be disappointed.