Gordon first appeared in print in the December 1934 issue of Top Notch, but he had been a long time in coming. Howard revealed a bit about the character’s origin to fan Alvin Earl Perry. The details were published in “A Short Biographical Sketch of Robert E. Howard” in the June 1935 edition of Fantasy Magazine. Perry quotes Howard: “The first character I ever created was Francis Xavier Gordon, El Borak, the hero of ‘The Daughter of Erlik Khan’ (Top Notch), etc. I don’t remember his genesis. He came to life in my mind when I was about ten years old.” Then, speaking of another character, Bran Mak Morn, Howard added, “Physically he bore a striking resemblance to El Borak.”
This comment about similarity between Bran Mak Morn and Gordon is significant. Howard was careful and consistent in describing his characters. Both Bran Mak Morn and Gordon are compact men, not physically large, but incredibly strong. Their hair and complexions are dark and their eyes are an icy, intense black. Of course there was a practical side to this. A dark complexioned, dark eyed man can disguise himself as an Arab or Afghan more easily than a fair, blue-eyed fellow. But Howard used physical appearance to denote racial origin, not just in a broad sense, but with a very exact, almost tribal specificity. In “Hawk of the Hills,” Gordon describes himself as being of Highland Scotch and Black Irish descent. Those are the very groups identified in Howard’s day as modern descendants of the Picts. Much as Howard created a mythical global migration for the Picts, so Gordon acts out the racial memory of the Pictish volkerwanderung in the crossroads of conquest employed by the Bronze-Age Aryans, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane and so many others.
It is characteristic of Howard that Gordon, Bran Mak Morn, and Solomon Kane were hold-overs from boyhood daydreams. A writer who can take the germ of an idea he had as a youngster and, after an eighteen-year span, craft it into polished work at the peak of his career proves the validity of Lovecraft’s eulogy.
Long before this polished work, however, Howard had attempted to commit Gordon to paper. Between 1922 and 1923 he began a number of Gordon stories, but none have come to us complete. One of these, “The Iron Terror,” provides an interesting look at both Howard as a writer and the character of Gordon. Gordon is plotting a revolt in Arabia as a first step to conquering his own empire. This touches on a theme that runs like a blood-soaked thread through the fabric of Howard’s tales: the usurper who wins a throne by dint of his indomitable will to power. That is part of the basic identity of Kull, and the Conan stories begin with the hero unsteady on his new throne. In “The Iron Terror” Gordon meets with an arms-dealer who compares Gordon to Genghis Khan. There is a brief exchange that might serve to describe many Howard heroes.
“I am no soldier,” says Gordon.
The arms dealer replies, “No, you are a conqueror.”
Howard’s conquerors are not men who direct others from behind a desk, nor are they uniformed servants of the state. They are utterly free, wild, and ferocious in their will to power. When Howard was writing “The Iron Terror” he was struggling to find his own road. Becoming a full-time writer in the face of his parents’ reservations required much determination. Howard was no one else’s soldier, he followed a lonely road to conquer the life he wanted.
At the same time Howard manages to question the worth of conquest and imperial glory. Although clearly fascinated by self-willed men who imposed their rule on the world, Howard regularly raised existential questions that suggest the futility of such a life.
“My road is my own,” Gordon replied.
“Aye, and you will travel it. Like all conquerors. They came, they saw, they conquered! Where are they now?
“Here is the dagger that was carried by Genghis Khan. But where is Genghis Khan? So all conquerors go!”
Just as much as Howard returned to the theme of the usurper, he returned to the ephemeral nature of glory.
The Gordon stories from this period are unfinished, but they form a framework of motifs that bear on the mature tales. One, published as “The Coming of El Borak,” concerns an English woman kidnapped by Afghan tribesmen. This fragment introduces a pair of supporting characters, the cheerful warrior Khoda Khan and the intense and brooding Yar Ali Khan. Gordon appears only at the end of the fragment. Both Khoda Khan and Yar Ali Khan appear in several other unfinished stories, as does Lal Singh, a Sikh warrior.
What is striking is that the story is told entirely in the first person by Khoda Khan. Howard liked to shift the point of view character and told several of the later El Borak stories using an alternate central character. However, he never again used an Afghan narrator to tell an El Borak story.
The motif of rescuing a white woman from the natives is a well-worn theme. In fact, about the time Howard was writing the early El Borak stories, a British mem-sahib was captured by rebellious tribesmen. In 1923, a gang led by Ajab Khan Afridi, a Pathan gun-runner who had a score to settle with the British, attacked the home of a British officer, Colonel Ellis. The raiders killed Col. Ellis’s wife and kidnapped his daughter. The story was reported in The Dallas Morning News, so Howard may well have read of it at the time. Admittedly, Miss Ellis was not rescued by a grim-faced American gunslinger. Instead the British employed a medical missionary, Mrs. Lillian Starr, and a local civil servant, Kuli Khan. Mrs. Starr wrote an account of her negotiations for Miss Ellis’ release in her 1923 memoir, Tales of Tirah and Lesser Tibet.
Another of the early stories, published as “Khoda Khan’s Tale,” introduces “El Borak” as Gordon’s nom de guerre. The name means “the swift,” and indicates his deadly speed with gun and sword and fast thinking under pressure. The name also gives depth to Gordon, giving a name to the Asian side of his character.
Howard gave the theme of empire building a twist in a piece published under the title “Intrigue in Kurdistan.” The setting is a Turkish castle with an elaborate network of secret passages, a motif that would recur in several El Borak stories. Gordon instigates a Kurdish revolt, ostensibly to forge an empire with himself as ruler. His true motive is revenge for Turkish atrocities against Armenians. The subject had been employed by Talbot Mundy in his 1920 novel, The Eye of Zeitoon, in which his heroes hold an Armenian fort in a desperate battle with Turkish troops. Characteristically, Howard’s protagonist is far more ruthless in his approach. Gordon’s revolt is intended to provoke European intervention that would destroy Turkey as an independent country. Gordon is quite frank in his desire to see a mass slaughter of the Turks and Kurds. In his essay, “A Touch of Trivia,” Howard reflected on his personal reactions to historical events. His judgment on the Turks was harsh:
Say what you will, wholesale massacre is never justifiable — I mean the slaughter of helpless people. Except in the following case: when a nation has over and over again proved itself to be absolutely without mercy, as in the case of the Turks with the Armenians, it is in my mind no crime but a duty of the nations to extirpate them, to destroy all men capable of bearing [arms] and to scatter the helpless people far and wide, not in barren exile to die, but to be absorbed by other races.
The motif of building an empire on the slaughter of entire races would return in the last and most ferocious of the El Borak stories, “Son of the White Wolf.”
There are other fragments that show Howard was still experimenting with Gordon’s setting, character, and even his nickname. Some are efforts at “Lost Race” stories: tales of quests for lost treasure in unexplored regions. H. Rider Haggard’s romances have a strong influence here, and several are in fact set in Africa. Fantastic elements such as living dinosaurs and a cursed ruin appear in a couple of the fragments. In the fragment published as “A Power Among the Islands” Gordon appears as a sailor nicknamed “Wolf Gordon,” echoing Jack London’s Wolf Larsen from The Sea Wolf.
There are several fragments in which Gordon is paired with Steve Allison, a drifting Western outlaw who nonetheless has a double life as a New York sophisticate. Howard later developed Steve Allison as the “Sonora Kid,” a gunslinger in Western
tales, mercifully dropping the New York connection.
In one of these Allison/Gordon fragments Gordon is referred to as “Diego Valdez,” and Allison responds by quoting two lines of Kipling’s poem, “The Song of Diego Valdez.” The narrator of Kipling’s poem tells how he found his ease in adventure on the high seas, but when he became “Diego Valdez, High Admiral of Spain,” the duties of his public persona deprived him of the wild and free life of an adventurer. The tension between duty to office and to others and the desire to seek adventure for its own sake is a motif in some of Howard’s best Conan stories, such as “Black Colossus” and “Hour of the Dragon.” Was this how he conceived of Gordon? When El Borak reappeared in the ’30s, he was no longer a treasure hunter or a man seeking a crown, but a very different character.
From 1923 until 1933, as Howard worked to establish himself as a professional writer, El Borak lay dormant. But as the young author sought to expand into new markets as the Depression settled over the land, and his old standbys Weird Tales and Fight Stories struggled, the Desert Gunfighter made a comeback. Aiming at the adventure-story magazines, Howard experimented with the idea, in the process creating what might be thought of as an extended El Borak cycle, which includes not only the stories of Gordon, but those with other characters as well. Taken as a group, they help define what El Borak is and is not.
One tale that could fairly be considered part of this extended El Borak canon is “The Fire of Asshurbanipal.” According to Glenn Lord it was probably written in the early thirties and later re-written. The re-write was published in Weird Tales in December of 1936. The heroes are Steve Clarney, an American adventurer, and his companion, Yar Ali, a giant Afridi warrior. Yar Ali is a variation on Yar Ali Khan, Gordon’s bear-like Afridi friend. Steve Clarney, while not explicitly called a Texan, speaks in Texan dialect. Clarney and Yar Ali are searching for a giant ruby, known as “the Fire of Asshurbanipal,” deep in the interior of Arabia away from the Persian Gulf. The gem is said to be clutched in the hands of a mummified king on a throne in a desolate, haunted ruin.
The business of the ruby has its immediate antecedents in “The Blood of Belshazzar,” a story from the Cormac FitzGeoffrey series. In that tale the Crusader protagonist learns of a giant ruby, found by a pearl diver clutched in the hand of a skeleton on a throne sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf. In “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” the throne is moved to a more plausible location on land, though the pearl diver still gets a cameo.
In October 1934, a new Howard story featuring an American adventurer seeking a vast treasure in city of outlaws hidden deep in Central Asia appeared in Top Notch Magazine. The name of the dauntless swordsman was Kirby O’Donnell. Despite all the effort Howard put into creating Gordon over the years, it was Kirby O’Donnell that saw print first. Howard had written two O’Donnell stories in close succession, “Gold from Tatary” and “Swords of Shahrazar.” The second tale is a sequel to the first. For whatever reason, Top Notch bought “Swords of Shahrazar” but did not buy “Gold from Tatary,” which was published in Thrilling Adventures in January 1935.
There is a degree of similarity between O’Donnell and Gordon, enough that some might think of O’Donnell as an alternate version of Gordon. O’Donnell is Irish-American while Gordon is Scots-Irish. Both have a nom de guerre: O’Donnell’s is “Ali el Ghazi.” Both are able to disguise themselves as natives. Both men are dark haired, of medium height yet well muscled, and have skin bronzed by the sun. Gordon’s comrade-in-arms is Yar Ali Khan, a ferocious and gloomy killer; O’Donnell gets help from Yar Muhammed, a cheerful bandit. O’Donnell’s eyes are Aryan-blue while Gordon’s are Pictish-black. To a superficial critic Gordon and O’Donnell might seem like cookie-cutter heroes, mass-produced by Howard. The critical difference between the characters is in their motives and reactions to the situations they encounter.
The crux of “Gold from Tatary” and “Swords of Shahrazar” is O’Donnell’s friendship with Orkhan Bahadur, a dashing yet ruthless Turkoman khan. The complicating factor in that friendship is a massive pile of gold amassed by the Khan of Khuwarezm and hidden since the Mongol invasion of the 1200s. Ultimately, O’Donnell faces a choice: get his share of the loot and let Orkhan Bahadur take the rest, which the khan will use to finance bloody wars of conquest, or deny Orkhan Bahadur (and himself) the gold but thereby risk a violent break with his friend. This story isn’t about getting the loot, it is about the moral dilemma of having the loot. Instead of predictable pulp-fiction plot-complications the reader finds a resolution that pits the hero’s self-seeking instinct against his impulse to do what is best for others. It is indicative of Howard’s fascination with and ambivalence towards conquering warlords that Orkhan Bahadur, no matter how sympathetic, doesn’t get the money to make war.
When O’Donnell disposes of the gold, he finds himself being blackmailed. Herein lies an even greater difference between O’Donnell and Gordon. Where Gordon’s dynamic personality allows him to dominate any situation, O’Donnell tends to follow the path of least resistance. Though he is a savage fighter, O’Donnell has to wait for his opportunity to come rather than making it, El Borak style.
The treasure of Shahrazar links these tales into Howard’s cycle of Crusader tales. In “Sowers of the Thunder,” the protagonist, Cahal O’Donnel, rides into the East in search of the treasure of Shahazar, where the sultans sent their gold. A character in the tale tells of a legendary raid on the treasure by Cormac FitzGeoffrey. However, Cahal doesn’t find the gold. Instead he finds the shattered remnants of the Kharesmian Turks fleeing the Mongols. Despite the variations in spelling, Shahazar and Kharesmian are cognates of Shahrazar and Khuwarezm. None of this would have been particularly apparent to readers of the tales, as the stories were published in different magazines over a period of several years. Nor is it precisely economy of ideas, any treasure would do, as would any name for a hidden city. What one finds here is a personal mythology in which the connections are only apparent to a reader lucky enough to have all the material at hand. Lovecraft’s observation holds true for Kirby O’Donnell just as for El Borak.
There is a third O’Donnell story which remained unpublished in Howard’s lifetime. “The Trail of the Blood-Stained God” continues the treasure hunt motif. O’Donnell plays the part of the honest thief, who seeks treasure without succumbing to the amoral avarice that brings the others to their doom. It is as if Howard wanted to resurrect the treasure hunting aspect of Gordon, but didn’t see that as part of Gordon’s character anymore. The El Borak of the 1930s is more of an idealist, while O’Donnell carries his greedier side.
Just as Gordon is too large to be contained in his own stories, Howard’s supporting cast was too restless to corral in Central Asia. Khoda Khan shows up in “Names in the Black Book,” a story Howard wrote in 1934 during his brief fling with the detective genre. Khoda Khan is a supporting character, this time with Detective Steve Harrison and Joan La Tour in a sequel to “Lord of the Dead.” Essentially the tale is a Fu Manchu pastiche. Howard’s underworld has no gangsters as such, instead being full of swaggering swordsmen from the Djebel Druse and the Hindu Kush. The villain is not a civilized Chinese in imitation of Fu Manchu, but a Mongol, a criminally minded heir to Genghis Khan. This Tamerlane of the Underworld is named Erlik Khan, thus linking him to the devil-worship cult of the Black Kirghiz in “The Daughter of Erlik Khan.”
Much as the Conan stories gleefully pillage freely from history and genre fiction, “Lord of the Dead” and “Names in the Black Book” mix a cast more at home in an El Borak tale into a detective story. Incongruous though it may be, the strategy is not a bad one. Dashiell Hammett wrote detective stories and added the trappings of adventure fiction, most notably in The Maltese Falcon. Unfortunately, Howard’s interlude with the detective genre proved to be a dead-end.
While the stories of Steve Clarney and Kirby O’Donnell are entertaining, full of vigor and action, these treasure hunters lacked something: for whatever reason, they were not the charac
ter into which Howard could really put himself. He had to return to his boyhood dreams.
In November 1933 Howard sent “Swords of the Hills” to his agent, Otis Adelbert Kline. With this tale El Borak was back. Howard used quite a few of his favorite themes: the adventurer with dreams of conquest, the lost city, and he even put a boxing match in the story. One distinction that signals the turn that Gordon was to take in the stories written in the ’30s is that the man seeking an empire is the villain. The Genghis Khan-Gordon of the “Iron Terror” is gone.
Essentially the tale inverts Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King.” Kipling’s protagonists, Carnehan and Dravot, find a hidden kingdom founded by Alexander the Great in remote Afghanistan. They usurp the kingship, but soon are overthrown. Dravot is cast over a cliff to his death; Carnehan is crucified, but survives (shades of Conan in “A Witch Shall be Born”!), bearing away Dravot’s crowned skull, a memento strongly indicative of the hollow nature of glory.
In “Swords of the Hills,” Gordon visits a valley of long-lost Alexandrian Greeks and wins the right to be king by defeating the ruler in single combat. But Gordon refuses to make himself king: his goal is to stop the plot of Hunyadi, not to exploit the people of Iskander. Where Hunyadi (or Dravot and Carnehan or even Conan) reaches for power, Gordon is self-denying. From a practical perspective, Howard’s heroes tend to be peripatetic loners and kingdoms are not usually portable. Kingship is an end-point, not a beginning.