El Borak and Other Desert Adventures (1934 - 1936; compilation 2010)

Before Conan, before Solomon Kane, there was Francis Xavier Gordon, otherwise known as "El Borak". Equally adept with the gun as he is the sword, Robert E. Howard's ass kicking Texan soldier of fortune battles ruthless Turk bandits, surly Afghan chieftains, and wily Russian despots across all corners of the Middle East. It's the kind of fiction that'll put hair on a man's chest, by God!

Full disclosure here: this review is likely going to be pure gushing rather than any kind of nuanced look at a particular book. The reason for this is simple: Robert E. Howard is one of my favorite writers and El Borak is my favorite of his characters - and that's saying something coming from a Conan superfan.

This Del Rey collection features all of the El Borak stories Howard dreamed up in the mid 1930's. As such, for brevity's sake I'm reviewing the entire collection as a whole rather than focusing on each individual story here.

I was initially attracted to the El Borak stories thanks to the promise of western style action in a completely different setting - the "eastern" as some have called it. Although the stories take place half a world away from the Old West, it's fair to say they have all of the same visceral, elemental aspects of a great western story: from the man versus nature survival segments to the blood and thunder of cacophonous battles to the hero who was once renowned as a gunfighter back home, it's all here.

Moreover, it is simply remarkable how well the reader can envision the mountains, gorges, and baking desert plains of the Middle Eastern setting given the fact that Robert E. Howard never ventured anywhere near that part of the world during his lifetime. Howard conjured his Middle East from nothing more than guidebooks he acquired for his personal library. His other characters may have gained more mainstream popularity over the years, but Howard's El Borak tales are the true heavyweights of his writing career, giving the reader a glimpse at some of the very best writing the Texan author was capable of producing.

If I had to pick one of the short stories as a favorite it might be "The Lost Valley of Iskander", which sees Gordon stumbling upon a lost city of Greeks living in a secluded part of Afghanistan. It's arguably the closest any of these particular stories gets to the fantastical, but it features a nice mélange of mystery and survival alongside a grandiose final battle. Howard even works some of his beloved boxing pastime into this story when Gordon has to compete in a meaty bare knuckle brawl with the giant leader of the Greeks for macho supremacy.

This particular compilation uses artwork from Tim Bradstreet with actor Thomas Jane modeling as El Borak. The artwork is a fantastic addition to these stories and makes me pine for an El Borak movie starring Tom Jane we never got to see...

I would be remiss in pointing out that this particular compilation also features stories with two other American adventurers: Kirby O'Donnell and Steve Clarney. While these stories are just as enthralling as the El Borak oeuvre, Howard simply didn't write enough of them in his lifetime for these characters to get their own volumes, so the publishers have (wisely, in my opinion) included them alongside Gordon's adventures. Despite sharing a similar premise of an American in the far east searching for treasure or adventure, both O'Donnell and Clarney have their own personalities. Clarney in particular seems to have more of a wiseass style that readers didn't often see in Howard protagonists. Don't sleep on these stories just because Gordon is out of the picture, they're still fun reads.