Craig's Reviews > Conan the Wanderer

This is the fourth volume of Lancer's editions of the Conan saga. L. Sprague de Camp, with the help of Lin Carter, expanded Howard's original Conan stories and edited them into chronological sequence in a twelve-volume series in the late 1960's, and the controversy has never quite died off completely. Many people believe that only Howard's original versions of the complete stories are acceptable, and many believe that the Lancer series with the original Frazetta covers are canon (though this one has a cover by John Duillo), and then there are those who accept or reject the Bantam titles, the Jordan series (and/or/or not the other Tor titles), the comics versions, and on and on and on... They're all right and all wrong.... This Lancer series is the one I read while growing up, so I'm all for it. I can accept comics hero stories by different writers, and pulp heroes frequently had different writers under a house name, so... This one features a Conan who's just turned thirty and has two of Howard's originals: The Devil in Iron and Shadows in Zamboula, both classics. It also has a nice original pastiche by Carter & de Camp, Black Tears, along with one written by de Camp from a different Howard piece, now called The Flame Knife, which first appeared in one of the Gnome Press series volumes in the 1950s. Howard was the consummate pulp adventure writer, and I think de Camp and Carter enhanced his legacy without tarnishing it. They helped Conan become one of the most recognized literary characters of the last century.