The Conan tales are seminal works, meaning they are the seeds from which works by other authors grow. As such the Conan stories lack precise literary precedents. Instead, the stories seem to be a stew made from varied literary traditions. Perhaps the most important of these would be Zane Grey-style westerns, with their self-sufficient lone gunmen facing down evil doers. The battle scenes, with their shining armor and waving pennants, echo nineteenthcentury historical romances set in the middle ages such as Ivanhoe (1820) by Walter Scott. The tone of The Hour of the Dragon is distinctly Modernist and has echoes in such American-style detective novels as The Maltese Falcon (1930) by Dashiell Hammett, in which a lone detective faces ancient evil in the form of the statue of a falcon, and in which the tone is hard-bitten, blunt, and unsympathetic. On the other hand, the morality of The...