Conan the Buccaneer

I have been kind of randomly picking my way through a number of the Conan pastiches, seeing what there is to see, especially with the benefit of time, since all of the ones I have reviewed have been old. I have not found any of them to be especially good, with the exception of The Road of Kings, but this time I thought it would be interesting to take a look at one that is pretty universally considered to be terrible. Conan the Buccaneer was published in 1971, another collaboration between Carter and de Camp, and I have seen it mentioned in several places as being one of the worst of them. Curiosity led me onward.

Overall, I have to say I don’t think this is that awful. I was expecting some kind of wretched crapfest, since so many of the pastiches have been bad enough, how bad would this have to be to be worse? But while this is not great by any stretch, it is still a cut above garbage like The Sword of Skelos. The plot is bog-standard, and Conan’s characterization has undergone the bowdlerization that is pretty typical for the way Carter and de Camp wrote him, but there is some cool stuff to be found.

This is likely mostly the work of Carter, as it shows his tendency to start the plot with secondary characters and then bring Conan in later. We start with a Zingaran duke who is plotting with a Stygian wizard and the pirate captain Zarono (who would turn up again in “The Black Stranger”) to seize the throne with a complicated plot involving using magic to control the king and force the princess to marry him. Princess Chabela proves a better protagonist than most when she tries to escape from this plan, only to have her ship overtaken and be captured by Zarono.

Conan kind of accidentally gets involved in this, and it’s a real weakness that he doesn’t have any clear motive for being here. They all end up on a lost island featuring a cursed temple of the serpent men and a stone idol that comes to life. Conan has to lure said idol into jumping off a cliff in a rather cartoonish sequence, but the expected confrontation with Zarono never materializes.

There’s a lot of additional hugger-mugger with Conan going ashore in the Kushite kingdoms, meeting an old friend and former mercenary who has become a chief, and then getting captured by a depraved Amazon queen. Carter was always having his heroes get captured, and then had them spend a lot of time being held prisoner and not trying to escape for no discernible reason. It always stops the narrative dead when he does this and it happens again here. The authors here and there try to mitigate the essentially racist nature of this episode, but they don’t really succeed, and the depiction of the primitive tribespeople of the “black kingdoms” is cringe-worthy at best.

Both Carter and de Camp had a habit of building up to battles and then finding excuses to not have them, and initially I thought this book would keep the tradition, but the final conflict does actually deliver a pretty good battle, with Conan and his pirate crew battling away at the supporters of the rebel duke. There’s a good amount of blood and guts, even though Thoth-Amon and Zarono escape in rather ridiculous fashion, just because the authors needed them to survive for subsequent episodes.

It’s not that bad. Conan spends too much of it as essentially a side character, motivations are weak, and the plot meanders more than the plot of a 50,000-word novel ought to, but it’s not as dull as some of de Camp’s work, nor as breathless and embarrassing as a lot of Carter’s. Rather than the worst of the Conan pastiches, I would put it rather solidly in the middle, if only because the quality of them overall is so iffy. You could do worse.