Three-Bladed Doom

Rating:
Summary: AN EL-BORAK ADVENTURE!
Review: Robert E. Howard is best known as the creator of such Swords & Sorcery characters as Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane. But another genre that howard loved and worked in frequently was middle eastern adventure. He created several adventure heroes in the vein of Indiana Jones and others.

While Howard rarely left his home state of Texas, he was a voracious reader and thus was able to bring the exotic middle-eastern settings of the 20's and 30's to life.

Perhaps his most famous adventurer was Francis Xavier Gordon who was given the name El-Borak by the arabs. "Three Bladed Doom" is a short novel, actually novella detailing one of his adventures.

Written in 1934 (and revised down a year later to half its original length), this was never sold by Robert E. Howard in his lifetime. You know, if Howard had somehow been paid back then for every story of his that has been put in print since the 1960s, the guy could have bought the whole town of Cross Plains, Texas.

This is El Borak`s longest and in many ways most epic adventure, but it somehow is not quite his most compelling. Francis X. Gordon takes on a revival of the ancient Assassins, after a series of stealthy murders of Middle East rulers sympathetic to the English. (Gordon is an American of Highland Scots and Irish ancestry, and he freely admits he has no love for the English rulers; he just thinks they are more humane and tolerable than the nations trying to replace the British Empire with their own imperialism. The Russians, for example.)

It`s classic pulp adventure, like Talbot Mundy with the wily strategems turned down and the lightning violence cranked up full blast. Gordon enters the shunned region of Ghulistan (just what it sounds like), where a hidden fortress city is the headquarters of an Assassin revival, complete with a new Old Man of the Mountain as leader. Recruits from every tribes and sect are welcome, brainwashed with hashish and promises of hookers in Paradise if they carry out their murderous missions faithfully. They have been abducting young girls from all over India to serve as houris, no ruler is safe and a new tyranny is about ready to take over. Well. El Borak loads his rifle, sharpens his tulwar, spits on his hands and rubs them together, and then proceeds to tear the city apart.

However, as Gordon and the author comment on, this modern revival is not quite up to the standards of the original cult, and although they`re certainly dangerous enough, the Three Bladed boys have weaknesses which a crafty old schemer like El Borak can exploit. One of the things I like best about Gordon is that, while he`s a walking weapon himself and infinitely more dangerous with gun or sword, he prefers to use psychological manipulation and guile. He`s a tricky little guy who can always cut you to ribbons if his con games don`t work.

One of the best scenes features an inescapable maze where condemned people are thrown to the dread djinn. Broken skeletons are scattered about, and Gordon sees with a chill what looks like the `print of a bare, misshapen human foot.` If you`ve read other Howard stories, you know the kind of critters his heroes have to tangle with. I always liked the way he showed the wrestling with giant snakes and apemen and so forth as being extremely damaging and risky; even when the heroes win, they`re always gouged and bruised enough to put the average guy in the ER. (I wish Burroughs would have had Tarzan get chewed up a bit when the Apeman tackled all those lions. It always seemed a bit too easy and safe for him.)

Where this story falters just a bit is toward the very end, where it culminates in a full scale battle. As he sometimes did, Howard sets up different armies who all hate each other with a fury and sets them loose on each other, but he quickly just lets it all go in a mad red haze of slashing and clubbing that gets vaguer as the fight goes on.
His one on one duels, though, are the most vividly described and kinetic in pulp adventure. This time, Gordon comes up against an old enemy, the giant Cossack named Ivan Konasevski, and you just know that before the story ends, these two are going to be slinging blades at each other.

Gordon sometimes seems to pull an ace out of nowhere a bit too fortuitously, also. Surrounded by savages in a hopeless situation...no, wait, there just happens to be a trap door under this rug. Too greatly outnumbered to have a chance of fighting back...oh, okay, here comes a tribe of allies no one expected. Stuff like that weakens Gordon`s resourcefulness just a bit, but in the rush of the story, it usually can be overlooked.

One asset to the El Borak stories is the feeling that Gordon really cares about the tribesmen he leads; their loyalty to him and his concern for their welfare adds a lot to the emotional weight as some have to be sacrificed or when Gordon has to be left behind to seeming death. A lot of Robert Howard stories featured a mean group of cutthroats who all were scheming against each other, leaving the reader no one to cheer for. Gordon is more heroic in the traditional sense. He has a sense of right and wrong, and his lifework is trying to establish as fair an arrangement among an assortment of warlike tribes as possible.

Rating:
Summary: AN EL-BORAK ADVENTURE!
Review: Robert E. Howard is best known as the creator of such Swords & Sorcery characters as Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane. But another genre that howard loved and worked in frequently was middle eastern adventure. He created several adventure heroes in the vein of Indiana Jones and others.

While Howard rarely left his home state of Texas, he was a voracious reader and thus was able to bring the exotic middle-eastern settings of the 20's and 30's to life.

Perhaps his most famous adventurer was Francis Xavier Gordon who was given the name El-Borak by the arabs. "Three Bladed Doom" is a short novel, actually novella detailing one of his adventures.

Written in 1934 (and revised down a year later to half its original length), this was never sold by Robert E. Howard in his lifetime. You know, if Howard had somehow been paid back then for every story of his that has been put in print since the 1960s, the guy could have bought the whole town of Cross Plains, Texas.

This is El Borak`s longest and in many ways most epic adventure, but it somehow is not quite his most compelling. Francis X. Gordon takes on a revival of the ancient Assassins, after a series of stealthy murders of Middle East rulers sympathetic to the English. (Gordon is an American of Highland Scots and Irish ancestry, and he freely admits he has no love for the English rulers; he just thinks they are more humane and tolerable than the nations trying to replace the British Empire with their own imperialism. The Russians, for example.)

It`s classic pulp adventure, like Talbot Mundy with the wily strategems turned down and the lightning violence cranked up full blast. Gordon enters the shunned region of Ghulistan (just what it sounds like), where a hidden fortress city is the headquarters of an Assassin revival, complete with a new Old Man of the Mountain as leader. Recruits from every tribes and sect are welcome, brainwashed with hashish and promises of hookers in Paradise if they carry out their murderous missions faithfully. They have been abducting young girls from all over India to serve as houris, no ruler is safe and a new tyranny is about ready to take over. Well. El Borak loads his rifle, sharpens his tulwar, spits on his hands and rubs them together, and then proceeds to tear the city apart.

However, as Gordon and the author comment on, this modern revival is not quite up to the standards of the original cult, and although they`re certainly dangerous enough, the Three Bladed boys have weaknesses which a crafty old schemer like El Borak can exploit. One of the things I like best about Gordon is that, while he`s a walking weapon himself and infinitely more dangerous with gun or sword, he prefers to use psychological manipulation and guile. He`s a tricky little guy who can always cut you to ribbons if his con games don`t work.

One of the best scenes features an inescapable maze where condemned people are thrown to the dread djinn. Broken skeletons are scattered about, and Gordon sees with a chill what looks like the `print of a bare, misshapen human foot.` If you`ve read other Howard stories, you know the kind of critters his heroes have to tangle with. I always liked the way he showed the wrestling with giant snakes and apemen and so forth as being extremely damaging and risky; even when the heroes win, they`re always gouged and bruised enough to put the average guy in the ER. (I wish Burroughs would have had Tarzan get chewed up a bit when the Apeman tackled all those lions. It always seemed a bit too easy and safe for him.)

Where this story falters just a bit is toward the very end, where it culminates in a full scale battle. As he sometimes did, Howard sets up different armies who all hate each other with a fury and sets them loose on each other, but he quickly just lets it all go in a mad red haze of slashing and clubbing that gets vaguer as the fight goes on.
His one on one duels, though, are the most vividly described and kinetic in pulp adventure. This time, Gordon comes up against an old enemy, the giant Cossack named Ivan Konasevski, and you just know that before the story ends, these two are going to be slinging blades at each other.

Gordon sometimes seems to pull an ace out of nowhere a bit too fortuitously, also. Surrounded by savages in a hopeless situation...no, wait, there just happens to be a trap door under this rug. Too greatly outnumbered to have a chance of fighting back...oh, okay, here comes a tribe of allies no one expected. Stuff like that weakens Gordon`s resourcefulness just a bit, but in the rush of the story, it usually can be overlooked.

One asset to the El Borak stories is the feeling that Gordon really cares about the tribesmen he leads; their loyalty to him and his concern for their welfare adds a lot to the emotional weight as some have to be sacrificed or when Gordon has to be left behind to seeming death. A lot of Robert Howard stories featured a mean group of cutthroats who all were scheming against each other, leaving the reader no one to cheer for. Gordon is more heroic in the traditional sense. He has a sense of right and wrong, and his lifework is trying to establish as fair an arrangement among an assortment of warlike tribes as possible.