As free-agents of the hard-boiled school, Conan and Mattias Tannhauser share a deep skepticism of the State. Kingship, the demands and prerogatives of the State, all that is meaningless in comparison to a man’s honor and loyalty to his dearest friends.
Read MoreTen years after I first read it, The Religion by Tim Willocks still speaks to me in a language filled with brutal beauty and beautiful brutality.
Read MoreTim Willocks' birthday has rolled around again. I've had my hardcover copy of The Religion at my bedside the last couple of weeks, doing fairly random rereads . What strikes me now, just as it did in the winter of 2011, is just how quotable the novel is. Like The Iliad--to which I've compared it on numerous occasions--The Religion has sentences and passages on nearly every page which can stand on their own as things of worth. Sometimes bloody, sometimes beautiful, sometimes philosophical. Often all three at once.
Read MoreThis past Friday marked the four hundred and fifty-fifth anniversary of the definitive end to the Great Siege of Malta. On September 11, 1565, the tattered and battered fleet of Suleiman the Magnificent sailed away from the tiny island of Malta, utterly humiliated.
Read MoreAuthor Tim Willocks, a Robert E. Howard fan, has written some of the best historical adventure novels of the last thirty years. His sixteenth-century protagonist, Mattias Tannhauser, is a worthy successor to Conan.
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