Conan the Warlord

"Here honest folk starve amidst wealth, and a greedy few fatten themselves at the expense of many" (21).

Conan the Warlord is a tale of a very young Conan, too young it seems to be a real "Warlord." But he is recruited out of a Nemedian jail to be a decoy and bodyguard for the heir of the local baron. After half the book uses this circumstance to build Conan's skills, to bring into relief his distaste for civilization, and to furnish him with two quite different love-interests, various intrigues come to a head, and the baronial line comes to a grisly end with some supernatural fireworks.

In a Robert E. Howard Conan story, all that would have been sufficient, and the hero would escape with the profit of his experience. Perhaps that was show more even the extent of Leonard Carpenter's original draft. But in 1988, Tor was publishing a longer-format barbarian, and so Conan is forced into the full warlord charade of the title. After falling into the imposture he had become equipped for, Conan ends up leading his "fellow" barons and their legions against an army of possessed snake-worshipers. (The Set cult of Milius' 1982 film seems to be a source here as much as anything Howard wrote.)

The second arc has its own inamorata and its own villains. None of which is to say that the two aspects of the book are haphazardly slapped together. The snake cult and some relevant characters and settings are introduced gradually in the first part, and they help to create some ambiguity and resulting tension there. The two threads are reasonably well-braided in the denouement.

Whether my fix-up theory of the book's composition is true or not, I felt like the simpler story of Conan's accidental near-ascension to baronial office would have been more powerful and "more Conan" without the rigamarole of the campaign against the Set cult. And the novel's end was unconvincing and missed a terrific opportunity to boot:

I found it hard to credit young Conan's insight as an exorcist when he broke the curse of the Einharsons by destroying the reliquary sword, and the supposed magical causality was unpersuasive. A more bracing ending would have observed Calissa Einharson's still-secret pregnancy as the city of Dinander's hope for future protection against the curse.

Whatever my quibbles here, I still think Carpenter is one of the better latter-day writers of Conan novels. I am glad I haven't yet read all of his. Warlord appears to have been his third to see publication, and it was the youngest Conan he had written at that point.

Ken Kelly's attractive cover art looks like it might have been composed for the novel, if it had been simplified to the prompt "Conan and a girl in a chariot, fighting a mutant serpent cultist." But the girl is wrong in attitude and coloration (or it's the wrong girl), and the cultist is more lizardy and unaccountably huge, brandishing the wrong sort of weapon. show less