Books like The Conquering Sword of Conan

This book is notable for two hard-to-find tales from Conan universe from the creator of the most famous barbarian himself. There is not much to say about Conan the Barbarian tales: they are still fun to read despite their age. The plot of the most stories can be outlined in the following way. A problem comes to Conan, usually started by an evil sorcerer. Conan solves the problem using his sword, or even just bare fists taking care of the bad guy along the way. I will give more details about the two stories I mentioned above. The first one is The Black Stranger. Chronologically it comes right after Beyond the Black River. Conan flees from his imprisonment by Picts and stumbles right into a dispute over some treasure between different pirate groups. The barbarian shows up fairly late in the story with almost half of which is spent on the pirate groups trying to double-cross each other. As such it is more complex than an average Conan story and shows the progress of Robert E. Howard as a writer right before his untimely death.The second story is called Wolves beyond the Border. It was told in two different drafts which were not finished by the author. The first one is very brief and gives just bare outline of the plot. The second one can be considered as a final version, but it stops right in the middle of the tale; the last two lines of the first draft tell how the story would end, but no details are given. Conan is only mentioned; he just took Aquilonian throne and caused some unrest by doing so. Picts are involved once again.The last published tales of Conan do not disappoint, as usual: 5 solid stars for sheer entertainment value. This review is a copy/paste of my BookLikes one: http://gene.booklikes.com/post/914718...