The Hour of the Dragon
Robert E. Howard
292 pages
published in 1936/1977
When I think of Conan I see John Buscema’s Conan: feet planted firmly on the ground, glaring at you from under his helmet, the weight of his muscular frame apparant in every picture. That’s the image I had in mind while reading The Hour of the Dragon, Robert E. Howard’s sole original Conan novel. Written in 1935 as an attempt to interest a British publisher, it was instead serialised in Weird Tales when the publisher went out of business. Recycling scenes and plot twists from earlier stories, it’s somewhat of a greatest hits story: Conan has to fight an overwhelming horde of enemies, is captured and has to escape a dungeon through his great strength, wrestle a supernatural creature and so. Buscema’s Conan naturally came to mind therefore: no other version has the sullen determination and toughness Buscema put in his Conan.
The Hour of the Dragon is set at the end of Conan’s career, after he has become king of Aquilonia. He doesn’t remain king long though as a conspiracy between neigbouring country Nemedia and Valerius, the last remaining heir of the old royalty of Aquilonia use magic to invade the country and depose him. They do this by raising an ancient evil, Xaltotun, an ancient sorcerer from the pre-Hyborian empire of Acheron. As the Nemedian army invades Aquilonia, Xaltotun nearly kills Conan and demoralises and destroys his army. Conan comes to as prisoner of Xaltotun who has … plans … for him. Valerius meanwhile has become nothing more but a pawn for the evil sorceror.
Conan escapes the dungeon with some unexpected female help and has to find the one thing that can stop Xaltotun, the gemstone that controls him. Of course this gemstone is halfway across the world, so the rest of the book has Conan getting into all sorts of dangers to get to it. Every few pages Conan escapes yet another dangerous situation only to be confronted by the next; it’s all very pulpy and the pacing is a bit odd, but it works.
The Hour of the Dragon was the first entry in Berkley’s late seventies’ reprinting of the original Conan stories, or at least those that were in the public domain, from their first magazine appearances. This was edited by Karl Edward Wagner, himself somewhat of a cult fantasy author and is presented as the first Conan series based purely on the original and untampered Howard stories. In his introduction to the series Wagner is critical of earlier series; as you probably know the old Lancer/Ace series edited by L. Sprague de Camp was heavily retouched and expanded by him to the point at which many stories are more de Camp than Howard. This series on the other hand is so faithful as to not even fix inconsistencies in spellings or what seems like obvious mistakes, like e.g. the jump from chapter 19 to 21 in this book. Of course in the end whether or not this editorial strategy is an improvement or not is a personal choice; what really matters is the story itself.
The Hour of the Dragon is not Robert E. Howard’s best Conan (my favourite would be either “The Tower of the Elephant” or “Red Nails”) but it is a good introduction of what Conan is about: pure pulp adventure, purple prose and more than a glimmer of something special.