It’s May 1934 and Weird Tales hits the stands with an issue featuring stories by E. Hoffman Price and C.L. Moore and one of the most important stories in the Conan canon – Queen of the Black Coast is a game changer, covering a lot of the biography of the Cimmerian, and more.
The story makes the cover, as it should.

It’s a young Conan that boards an Argosean ship as he flees arrest after having brained a judge who did not understand his simple barbaric way. The Cimmerian is young but well-traveled – and Howard gives us a tour of the Hyborian nations by describing his clothes, weapons and armor.
When the ship whose crew he has joined is attacked by the pirates led by Belit, the sailors are killed without mercy, and Conan, the lone survivor, boards the attacking vessel, trying to take as many pirates with him in a last battle stand.
But he catches piratess Belit fancy (and he is smitten too), and gets invited to become her right hand man and ride in piratical bliss the Black Coast. And become lovers.

It’s all fun and piracy until the duo find some lost ruins in the jungle, guarded by a flying monster. Belit falls under the spell of a sinister necklace, the expedition goes to hell in a bucket, Belit is killed, everyone else is killed, and Conan survives only because Belit comes back in spirit to fight at his side one last time.

It’s apparently a nice serving of the usual stuff, but is not.
There is a passion and a darkness in Queen of the Black coast, that has so far never been seen in a Conan story.
It channels a lot of adolescent angst, and it has an underlying desperation that elevate the story above its basic adventurous plot to deliver a hard punch in the finale.

Maybe for this reason Belit, appearing in a single story, becomes such a memorable character.
Sure, Roy Thomas would later feature her in a number of apocryphal adventures in the comics, but that was much later.

This is where Conan starts to be something more, and something better, than plain old sword & sorcery adventure.

[Wordpress is giving me a hard time. I’m overworked and under the weather.
I’ve got 16 days and 11 short stories and one novel to read and post about.
It’s going to be fun]