Table of Contents

Here is a glossary of tribes, clothing, weapons and other stuff relating to the Arabic, Turkish, and Mongolian stories
(mainly the Historical ones, but also applicable for many Conan stories).

1. Fantasy Stories

1.1 Conan the Cimmerian

Howard’s most famous creation, the Cimmerian barbarian, thief, pirate and eventual King of Aquilonia during the pre-Ice Age Hyborian Age.

1.2 Kull of Valusia

An Atlantean barbarian and King of Valusia in the ancient Thurian Age (predating Conan’s Hyborian Age). He appears in the Bran Mak Morn story “Kings of the Night.” See here for further information.

1.3 Solomon Kane

A Tudor-period puritan adventurer, wandering across Europe and Africa. See here for a Solomon Kane timeline.

1.4 Bran Mak Morn

The King of the Picts during the Roman invasion of Britain, eventually becoming the subject of a Cthulhu Mythos cult as the “Dark Man”. He is referenced in the Kirowan story “The Children of the Night” and features in the Turlough O’Brien story “The Dark Man.” Wikipedia puts “The Little People” and “The Lost Race” here because they are “related to, but does not feature, Bran”—however, the only connection is that these stories have Picts in them, and “The Lost Race” quite clearly takes place centuries earlier (the protagonist says “my race came from Gallia only a hundred years ago,” thus fixing the story as being a pre-Roman tale of the Bronze Age). Thus, I have moved those stories to Other Fantasy below. See here for further information on Bran Mak Morn.

1.5 Turlough Dubh O’Brien

An 11th century Irish outcast. See here for further information.

1.6 James Allison

A 1930s Texan (not to be confused with Kid Allison) who recalls his past lives as ancient heroes while he lies dying from a long disease. See The Thunder-Rider for an Indian counterpart.

1.7 Other Fantasy stories

Note: wikipedia places “Black Canaan” in this section, but I moved that story to Weird West since I can see no reason for why it should fit better here.

2. Boxing Stories

2.1 Sailor Steve Costigan

A 1930s Texan sailor aboard the Sea Girl out of San Francisco, travelling with his white bulldog Mike and having fistic adventures throughout the oceans—though mainly in the Pacific, particularly the China Sea. (Wikipedia calls the ship a tramp steamer, but in “Texas Fists” Costigan directly says “the sailing vessel Sea Girl.”) Thankfully, in my opinion, the stories are not pure boxing, but have action and humour as well. I can’t really get a chronology going here, so my order is basically just that of publishing.

2.2 Sailor Dennis Dorgan

A renamed version of Sailor Steve Costigan (the ship is now the Python, and his dog is called Spike), published under the pseudonym Patrick Ervin.

2.3 Kid Allison

Referenced in the Sailor Steve Costigan story “Fist and Fang.” Not to be confused with James Allison.

2.4 Ace Jessel

A black, happy-go-lucky boxer.

2.5 Other Boxing stories

3. Western Stories

3.1 Breckinridge Elkins

Humorous stories of a kind, strong but not very smart cowboy from Bear Creek, Nevada, apparently taking place in the 1890s. (He has an uncle called Jeppard Grimes and a cousin called Bearfield Buckner, thus linking him to Howard’s two other humorous cowboy series.)

All stories with the note “(AGBC)” were later edited together to become part of the 1937 novel A Gent from Bear Creek, containing 10 stories published in Action Stories (March 1934 to August 1935) plus 3 original stories. This is also called a collection, but that is not truly correct: some names and details have been changed, and the stories were edited to make an over-arching story of Breckinridge’s romantic troubles with Glory McGraw.

3.2 Pike Bearfield

Not your traditional Westerns, these humorous stories take the form of letters and tales written in semi-illiterate fashion by the none-too-bright but all-too-big (“six foot nine in my socks”) “Pikeston Bearfield, Esquire” of Wolf Mountain, Texas. Unusually, there is no killing in these stories, though the blood splatters furiously enough anyway.

3.3 Grizzly Elkins

A giant buffalo hunter from Missouri (apparently; he’s called a “piker” once) swinging his Bowie butcher knife in bloody brawls some time in the mid to late 1880s in what is either Kansas or northern Texas (there are cattle herds heading for Ellsworth, and the Indian Territory is near).

3.4 Buckner Jeopardy Grimes

Similar to the Pike Bearfield stories in depicting a big, dumb Texan cowboy, though from Knife River this time.

3.5 The Sonora Kid

AKA Steve Allison. He also appears in some of the El Borak stories.

3.6 Other Western stories

4. Historical Stories

See also Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn and Turlough Dubh O’Brien for historical stories with fantasy elements.

4.1 El Borak

“Francis Xavier Gordon, once of El Paso, Texas, and now for years soldier of fortune in the outlands of the world.” Most stories are set in early 20th Century Afghanistan, but some occur elsewhere in the Arab world. Several of the El Borak (“the Swift”) stories also feature the Sonora Kid.

4.2 Dark Agnes de Chastillon

A red-haired peasant girl running from home to become a swordswoman in 1520s France.

4.3 Cormac Fitzgeoffrey

An Anglo-Irish knight who served in the Third Crusade and afterwards stayed in the Middle East during the early to mid 1190s.

4.4 Kirby O’Donnell

An American posing as a Kurdish mercenary in Central Asia during the early 20th Century, using the names El Shirkuh (the Mountain Lion) and Ali el Ghazi.

4.5 Cormac Mac Art

An Irish pirate during the Dark Ages. See here for further information. All four tales are collected in Tigers of the Sea (1974), with an introduction you can read here. (This is also the source from which I have taken the texts, so sadly it is not “pure Howard” but Tierney’s edited versions.)

4.6 Lal Singh

4.7 Black Vulmea

An Irish pirate, Terence Vulmea, sailing the Caribbean in the 1600s. Note: wikipedia places “Isle of Pirate’s Doom” in this section, but I moved it to Other Historical stories since the protagonist is actually Stephen Harmer and there is not a single mention of Black Vulmea in the story.

4.8 Other Historical stories

5. Horror Stories

5.1 Cthulhu Mythos

This combines wikipedia’s “John Kirowan” and “Other Cthulhu Mythos stories” sections, as there is really no need to separate them (especially since many of the “Other ...” stories are actually about Conrad and Kirowan). Oh, yes—I also renamed the “John Kirowan” stories back to Conrad & Kirowan, since they go together.

5.2 The Faring Town Saga

5.3 De Montour

A Norman werewolf of the Middle Ages (according to Howard himself; but I would amend that to the very end of the Middle Ages, probably more like the early Renaissance, even).

5.4 Weird West

These stories are hybrids, a combination of a Western with another genre, usually horror, occult, or fantasy.

5.5 Other Weird Menace

5.6 Other Horror stories

I moved the Untitled Fragment (“Beneath the glare of the sun, ...”) to the Cthulhu Mythos section, since it explicitly mentions Howard’s contribution to that.

6. Detective Stories

6.1 Steve Harrison

A police detective, often coming across weird cases on his River Street patrol (in the Chinatown of some unspecified city).

6.2 Butch Gorman & Brent Kirby

Private detectives.

6.3 Steve Bender, Weary McGraw and the Whale

7. Comedy Stories

8. Spicy Stories

According to wikipedia, “The ‘Spicy’ pulp magazines printed stories that were almost pornography (usually limited to nudity and implied sex rather than anything more explicit).” However, Howard’s spicy stories seem to have about the same amount of “pornography” as any Conan story involving a girl. (Ingredients: a beautiful young woman, scantily clad or nude, add bondage, stir with kisses.) Part of this “lack of sex” could perhaps be attributed to the fact that most issues of Spicy-Adventure Stories from late 1935 through late 1937 appeared in two different versions—one uncensored and the other self-censored. The censored version was identifiable by a star within a box located at the top of the cover. Little information is known about the differences between these issues but some, at least, contained different stories and possibly had different covers.

8.1 Wild Bill Clanton

“Wild Bill Clanton, sailor, gun-runner, blackbirder, pearl-poacher, and fighting man de luxe.” With only two stories to go on, I guess all I can say is that he sort of reminds me of a smarter Sailor Steve Costigan, roaming the Pacific at some random time (1870s-1920s). The stories are numbered by publication dates, but I doubt it matters very much in which order they are read.

8.2 Other Spicy stories

9. “True Adventure” Stories

Note: wikipedia places “Wild Water” in this section, but I moved that story to Other Western stories since that is what it really is, despite its Depression-era setting. (The only reason it was placed here is because it features a fictional version of the 1932 bursting of a dam near Howard’s home town.) Also, wikipedia has “The Ideal Girl” both here and below in Essays and Articles—I deleted this duplicate. Then I moved “Musings of a Moron” to the Comedy Stories, since that is where it should be.

10. Other Stories

Note: wikipedia places “Aha! or The Mystery of the Queen’s Necklace” and “Unhand Me, Villain” in this section, but I moved them to Comedy Stories to keep all three Hawkshaw the Detective stories in one place.

11. Essays and Articles

Note: wikipedia places “The Hyborian Age” here, but I moved it to the Conan section to keep that stuff together.

12. Poetry

Main article: List of poems by Robert E. Howard. (This links directly to the wikipedia article.)

There are so many poems that I would almost have to make a separate master file like this one just to enumerate them all, but because I’m lazy I put them all in a single document. Note that poems belonging to a specific fiction series (like the Solomon Kane poems, etc) are linked from here, and are not found in the Poetry document. Also, I have ignored the various “epigraphs” (short poems placed as chapter headings in various stories), since as far as I know they were not published separately from the stories in which they appeared.

13. Other Fragments

13.1 Other untitled stories

14. Introductions

This section contains a number of “extras” taken from collections of stories—introductions, essays, biographies, and assorted other stuff not written by Howard but still of interest.

14.1 The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard

A series from Wildside Press.

14.2 The Works of Robert E. Howard

A series from Bison Books / University of Nebraska Press.

14.3 The Best of Robert E. Howard

A series from Del Rey Books.

14.4 Conan: Wandering Star/Del Rey editions

A three-volume collection of Howard’s original stories, published by Wandering Star in the United Kingdom and Del Rey (a division of Random House) in the United States. These editions contain notes, rough drafts, and other miscellanea by Howard.

14.5 Conan: Gollancz editions

A new edition of Howard’s original stories purporting to feature all of Howard’s Conan fiction in the two volumes, and to present only Howard’s writings. Includes all the classic stories, apparently in their unrevised form (The Black Stranger is quite different from its De Camp cognate The Treasure of Tranicos); uncompleted or fragmentary tales have been left in that state. The two parts were put together in 2006 to form one stand-alone Centenary Edition to celebrate the 100 years since the birth of Howard.

14.6 Other Robert E. Howard Collections

Various collections of stories not belonging to any series above (though The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard is a Del Rey title basically identical in format to the “Best of” series above).