Finally finished Robert E Howard Conan story
Queen of the Black Coast.
I have the collection as an audiobook so I had to listen to it in installments over the course of a week or so since I drive less now. Honestly I think it was to the stories detriment that I broke it up. I thought it was great but I think I would have received it well if I read it instead of listened to it. It also had a few things going against it.
1) The narrator gave Bêlit a soft pleading sounding voice which seemed counter to her dialogue and personality. It should have been more of a commanding fierce voice, but when it comes to feminine voices his (the narrator's) range isn't all that diverse. It probably would have been better if I read it instead of audiobook this story.
2) There is a lot of hand waving in the beginning of the story to get Conan aboard the Bêlit's ship and as part of her crew. Before and after that moment the story was pretty good.
Barring those issues, it was pretty good. I can see why its generally in the top 5 original Conan stories for some. (I think when I get through all these, I'll rate them all myself). Certain parts of the story is definitely dated, and if I was to bring this to a visual medium, I would probably give the Tigress crew a bit more "screen time" (see spoilers)* but other than that, it would translate pretty well as an episode on Netflix or some other streaming service. Maybe an hour long episode like Star Trek tends to do, but I am not sure it would work as a movie, unless you expand or pad it a bit more.
I also noticed that Valeria from the Arnold movie draws a lot of inspiration from the character Bêlit. Some of Valeria's lines/actions are ported or paraphrased straight from Bêlit's in this story. Compared to some of the other Conan stories, this one was pretty grim, but its a nice change of pace instead of the freeze-frame endings of the last few stories.
*
It sucked that all the black guys were basically red shirts and did little except die or go mad. Even the named crew members, N'Yaga and N'Gora could have had something to do instead of being
"ensign ricky"