Background Colour:  -White-  -NavajoWhite-  -Wheat-  -Beige-  -AntiqueWhite-  -LightGray-  -Silver-  -BurlyWood-  -Tan-  -Black-  -Blue-

Text Colour:  -Black-  -Brown-  -Blue-  -Green-  -Red-  -Yellow-  -White-  -Orange-  -Silver-

Conan: Gollancz editions

  

Contents

The Conan Chronicles, 1

Robert E. Howard and Conan:

The Early Years

Robert Ervin Howard was born in the fading ex-cowtown of Peaster, Texas, about forty-five miles west of Forth Worth, on January 22, 1906. He was the only son of Dr Isaac Mordecai Howard and Hester Jane (Ervin) Howard. The couple met while living in Mineral Wells, in Palo Pinto County, and were married on January 24, 1904.

Named after his great-grandfather, Robert Ervin, Howard later revealed in a 1931 biographical sketch: “I come of old pioneer American stock. By nationality I am predominantly Gaelic, in spite of my English name—some three-fourths Irish, while the rest is a mixture of English, Highland Scotch (sic), and Danish. . . . Practically all my life has been spent in the country and small towns, outside of a few brief sojourns in New Orleans and some of the Texas cities.”

After moving around the state and living briefly in a number of different locales, in September 1919 the family finally settled in the small oil-boom town of Cross Plains, in Callahan County, Texas. Howard would live there for the rest of his life.

“As my father had his practise and did not attempt to run a farm, I had more leisure time that the average country kid,” Howard later recalled. “I lived pretty much the average life of the time and place. Then (as now) I had more enemies than friends, but I did not lack companionship of my own age. I played the rough and savage games popular in those parts then, wrestled, hunted a little, fished a little, trapped a little, stole watermelons, went swimming and spent more time than all in wandering about over the countryside on foot or on horseback.”

Suffering from poor health (probably rheumatic fever) as a child, he once told his father, “Dad, when I was in school, I had to take a lot because I was alone and no one to take my part, so I intend to build my body until when anyone crosses me up, I can with my bare hands tear him to pieces, double him up, and break his back with my hands alone.”

Although he started attending school when he was eight, Howard was mostly self-educated and read voraciously, revealing in one letter: “In my passionate quest for reading material, nothing could have halted me but a bullet through the head.”

Despite hating “the clock-like regularity” of school, in 1923 he graduated at the age of seventeen from Brownwood High School and, not being able to afford college, attended the Commercial School at Howard Payne College in Brownwood, where he studied non-credit courses in shorthand, typing, book-keeping and commercial law.

In her 1986 memoir about Howard, One Who Walked Alone, former Cross Plains high-school teacher Novalyne Price Ellis described her first meeting with the author in the late spring of 1933: “He was not dressed as I thought a writer should dress. His cap was pulled down low on his forehead. He had on a dingy white shirt and some loose-fitting brown pants that only came to his ankles and the top of his high-buttoned shoes. He took off his cap and I saw that his hair was dark brown, short, almost clipped. He ran his hand over his head.”

E. Hoffman Price was one of the few writers and fellow correspondents who actually visited Howard. In 1934 he drove down to Cross Plains and recalled years later meeting a “. . . broad, towering man with a bluff, tanned face and a big, hearty hand, and a voice which was surprisingly soft and easy, instead of the bull-bellow one would expect of the creator of Conan and those other swashbucklers. . . . Robert Howard was packed with whimsy and poetry which rang out in his letters, and blazed up in much of his published fiction but, as is usually the case with writers, his appearance belied him. His face was boyish, not yet having squared off into angles; his blue eyes, slightly prominent, had a wide-openness which did not suggest anything of the man’s keen wit and agile fancy. That first picture persists—a powerful, solid, round-faced fellow, kindly and somewhat stolid.”

However, Hoffman also discovered that there was a darker side to Howard whilst his host was driving Hoffman and his new wife, Wanda, to the nearby town of Brownwood for a shopping and sightseeing trip: “Suddenly, he took his foot off the throttle, cocked his head, idled down. We were approaching a clump of vegetation which was near the roadside. He reached across us, and to the side pocket. He took out a pistol, sized up the terrain, put the weapon back again, and resumed speed. He explained, in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘I have a lot of enemies, everyone has around here. Wasn’t that I figured we were running into anything but I had to make sure.’ ”

Some time later Howard confided to Novalyne Price Ellis that a man with as many enemies as he had needed to be careful. “Anybody who is not your friend is your enemy,” he explained pleasantly to her.

Howard had written his first story—a historical adventure about a Viking named Boealf—at the age of nine or ten, and he was fifteen when he began writing professionally. “I took up writing simply because it seemed to promise an easier mode of work, more money, and more freedom than any job I’d tried. I wouldn’t write otherwise.” He sent off his first effort to Adventure, but it was rejected, and it was another three years before Howard made his professional debut in the pulp magazine Weird Tales.

Originally selling for just twenty-five cents on newsstands, and printed on low-grade “pulp” paper, Weird Tales was the first magazine devoted exclusively to weird and fantastic fiction. It ran for 279 issues, starting in March 1923 and finally giving up the ghost in September 1954. Although just one title amongst many hundreds being published at that time, it carried the subtitle “The Unique Magazine”, and during its original thirty-two-year run (the title has been revived—unsuccessfully—on several occasions since) it presented all types of fantasy fiction, from supernatural stories to Gothic horror, sword and sorcery to science fiction. Among some of its most famous contributors were H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Seabury Quinn, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Manly Wade Wellman, Jack Williamson, Henry S. Whitehead, and even Tennessee Williams.

At the time Howard began submitting manuscripts, Farnsworth Wright had replaced Edwin F. Baird as editor of the Chicago-based magazine, after founder and owner J. C. Henneberger was forced to reorganise the title owing to debts. From the November 1924 issue onwards, Weird Tales began to flourish under Wright’s guidance, and he edited 179 copies before retiring after the March 1940 edition. He died from Parkinson’s disease in June that same year.

Written when Howard was just eighteen, “Spear and Fang” was a story about the struggles between prehistoric man. Wright published it in the July 1925 issue and paid its teenage author a fee of $16.00 at half-a-cent a word. Even in pre-Depression Texas that would not go far, and Howard quickly realised that he would have to work at a variety of jobs to supplement his meagre income from writing. These included picking cotton, branding cattle, hauling garbage, working in a grocery store and a law office, jerking soda in a drug store, trying to be a public stenographer, packing a surveyor’s rod and working up oil-field news for some Texas and Oklahoma papers. However, by his own admission, he “. . . wasn’t a success at any of them”.

In his 1931 biographical sketch he told Wright: “Pounding out a living at the writing game is no snap—but the average man’s life is no snap, whatever he does. I’m merely one of a huge army, all of whom are bucking the line one way or another for meat for their bellies—which is the main basic principle and reason and eventual goal of Life. Every now and then one of us finds the going too hard and blows his brains out, but it’s all in the game, I reckon.”

Thanks to Wright and Weird Tales, things soon began to change for Howard. In just three years his income from writing jumped from $772.50 to $1,500.26. The prolific author also began to sell other types of fiction—Westerns, sports stories, horror tales, “true confessions”, historical adventures and detective thrillers—to pulp markets besides Weird Tales, while at the same time he began to develop a series of characters with whom he would for ever be identified with: the English Puritan swordsman Solomon Kane (actually created while he was still in high school); the king of fabled Valusia, King Kull; Pictish chieftain Bran Mak Morn; prize-fighter Sailor Steve Costigan; Celtic warrior Turlogh O’Brien; soldier of fortune Francis X. Gordon, also known as “El Borak”; humorous hillbilly Breckenridge Elkins; and of course the mighty barbarian, Conan.

Conan quickly became his most popular character, and Howard set his savage exploits in the Hyborian Age, a fictional period of pre-history “. . . which men have forgotten, but which remains in classical names, and distorted myths”. He detailed Conan’s world in a pseudo-historical essay entitled “The Hyborian Age”, which ran as a serial in Donald A. Wollheim’s amateur magazine The Phantagraph in the issues dated February, August and October-November 1936. However, the fanzine only published the first half of the essay, and it finally appeared in its complete form as a mimeographed booklet in 1938.

According to his creator, Conan “. . . was born on a battle field, during a fight between his tribe and a horde of raiding Vanir. The country claimed by and roved over by his clan lay in the northwest of Cimmeria, but Conan was of mixed blood, although a pure-bred Cimmerian. His grandfather was a member of a southern tribe who had fled from his own people because of a blood-feud and, after long wanderings, eventually taken refuge with the people of the north. He had taken part in many raids into the Hyborian nations in his youth, before his flight, and perhaps it was the tales he told of those softer countries which roused in Conan, as a child, a desire to see them.

“There are many things concerning Conan’s life of which I am not certain myself. I do not know, for instance, when he got his first sight of civilized people. It might have been at Vanarium, or he might have made a peaceable visit to some frontier town before that. At Vanarium he was already a formidable antagonist, though only fifteen. He stood six feet and weighed 180 pounds, though he lacked much of having his full growth.”

However, despite what Howard would claim later, the mighty-thewed barbarian did not leap fully formed into his creator’s mind. The June 1932 issue of Strange Stories contained Howard’s story “People of the Dark”, whose hero was a pirate named Conan the reaver, who was physically similar to the later Conan and also swore “by Crom!”

The first published Conan story, “The Phoenix on the Sword”, is one of the final adventures in Conan’s chronology, set after he had become king of Aquilonia. Wright conditionally accepted it in a letter dated March 10, 1932, describing it as having “. . . points of real excellence. I hope you will see your way clear to touch it up and resubmit it.” It eventually appeared in the December 1932 issue of Weird Tales and was an instant hit, as indicated in the February 1933 edition of the letters column, “The Eyrie”, where readers and writers alike were invited to air their comments and opinions about the magazine: “ ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’ fairly took my breath away with its fine intrigue and excellent action and description,” exclaimed a reader from Denver, Colorado, adding: “It was a magnificent story. Mr Howard never writes but that he produces a masterpiece.” In fact, the story was a reworking of an unsold King Kull tale entitled “By This Axe I Rule!”, which finally saw print in its original form in the 1967 collection King Kull.

Still king of Aquilonia, Conan was ambushed and shackled in a dungeon, where he encountered an enormous serpent in “The Scarlet Citadel”, published in the January 1933 Weird Tales. Although Howard had already been awarded the coveted cover spot on previous issues of the magazine (his first had been for “Wolfshead” back in April 1926), the covers for the December and January issues were two out of four, which J. Allen St John produced consecutively for Otis Adelbert Kline’s serial “Buccaneers of Venus”.

Howard also missed out on the cover for the March 1933 issue, which contained “The Tower of the Elephant”. As Howard later explained in a letter written to P. Schuyler Miller, “Conan was about seventeen when he was introduced to the public in ‘The Tower of the Elephant’. While not fully matured, he was riper than the average civilized youth at that age.” The author apparently borrowed the setting for the Zamorian thieves’ quarter from one of his favourite movies, the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Conan led an army against a revived wizard in “Black Colossus”, his fourth adventure in Weird Tales, in the June 1933 issue. It also marked the first of nine cover appearances Howard’s Conan series would make on the magazine.

Margaret Brundage’s paintings were featured on most of the Weird Tales covers during the mid-1930’s, and her cover for “Black Colossus” depicted the naked Yasmela reaching out to touch the seated stone idol. A former Chicago fashion artist, Brundage was paid $90 per cover and usually worked in delicate pastel chalks on canvas. Wright admitted in the magazine that they had to be careful handling the artist’s work: “The originals are so delicate that we are afraid even to sneeze when we have a cover design in our possession, for fear the picture will disappear in a cloud of dust.”

“They were so impressed by the cover, that they brought it to the best engraver in Chicago,” Brundage recalled. “Wright later told me that it generated the most mail ever for a cover for Weird Tales.”

That was probably because her depictions of nude or diaphanously draped women, often in risque or blatant bondage positions, provoked many outraged letters to “The Eyrie”. However, Farnsworth Wright was a smart enough editor and businessman to note that issues which featured a Brundage nude on the cover invariably sold more copies on the newsstands.

In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith postmarked July 22, 1933, Howard told his fellow Weird Tales writer: “Thanks, too, for the kind things you said about Conan. I enjoy writing about him more than any character I have ever created. He almost seems to write himself. I find stories dealing with him roll out much easier than any others.”

Originally tided “Xuthal of the Dusk”, “The Slithering Shadow” in the September 1933 Weird Tales found Conan in yet another lost city battling an evil Stygian witch and the toad-like god, Thog. The story was also featured on the cover with one of Brundage’s most infamous “whipping” scenes. Future author Henry Kuttner commented in “The Eyrie”: “Allow me to pan you for your charmingly sadistic cover illustrating ‘The Slithering Shadow’. I haven’t the slightest objection to the female nude in art, but it seems rather a pity that it is possible to find such pictures in any sex magazine, while Weird Tales is about the only type of magazine which can run fantastic and weird cover illustrations and doesn’t.”

Conan joined up with a group of buccaneers in search of a treasure island in “The Pool of the Black One” in the October 1933 issue of Weird Tales. In another letter to Clark Ashton Smith, postmarked December 14, 1933, Howard gave some more background to the creation of his most memorable character: “I’m rather of the opinion myself that widespread myths and legends are based on some fact, though the fact may be distorted out of all recognition in the telling. . . . I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen—or rather off my type-writer—almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. Episode crowded on episode so fast that I could scarcely keep up with them. For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of story-writing. When I deliberately tried to write something else, I couldn’t do it.”

By now Howard’s stories in the magazine were bringing him the same kind of popularity that such authors as Seabury Quinn and H. P. Lovecraft were also receiving in the letters column. In fact, except for Quinn’s exploits of the psychic detective Jules de Grandin, Conan was the most popular character ever to appear in Weird Tales.

“Rogues in the House”, which appeared in the January 1934 Weird Tales, was another of those Conan stories which seemed to write itself. This time, the young barbarian thief was saved from a dungeon by a nobleman seeking revenge. As Howard recalled: “I didn’t rewrite it even once. As I remember I only erased and changed one word in it, and then sent it in just as it was written.”

Perhaps that was why, in a letter to P. Schuyler Miller written in 1936, Howard admitted that even he was not absolutely certain of the background to his own story: “I am not sure that the adventure chronicled in ‘Rogues in the House’ occurred in Zamora. The presence of opposing factions of politics would seem to indicate otherwise, since Zamora was an absolute despotism where differing political opinions were not tolerated. I am of the opinion that the city was one of the small city-states lying just west of Zamora, and into which Conan had wandered after leaving Zamora. Shortly after this he returned for a brief period to Cimmeria, and there were other returns to his native land from time to time.”

Despite being set in the Hyborian Age, “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” was possibly originally written as a non-Conan story entitled “The Frost King’s Daughter” and featured a Conanesque hero named Amra of Akbitana. It had originally been submitted to Weird Tales back in 1932 along with “The Phoenix on the Sword”, but Wright had rejected it in the letter dated March 10, in which he declared: “I do not much care for it”. The Amra version finally appeared in Charles D. Hornig’s amateur journal The Fantasy Fan for March 1934 under the tide “Gods of the North”, while the Conan version didn’t see print until many years after Howard’s death.

“Shadows in the Moonlight” in the April 1934 Weird Tales was originally given the title “Iron Shadows in the Moon” by Howard. This time Conan and his female companion escaped from a battlefield slaughter and found themselves menaced by iron statues imbued with life by the rays of the full moon.

According to one reader from Rockdale, Texas, in the June 1934 edition: “As usual Conan provided some real thrills in Robert E. Howard’s story, ‘Shadows in the Moonlight’. In my humble opinion Conan is the greatest of WT’s famous characters.”

Conan fell in love with the female pirate Belit, leader of the Black Corsairs, in his next adventure. After keeping Conan off the cover for several issues, Wright used a Margaret Brundage painting for “Queen of the Black Coast” on the May 1934 Weird Tales. It featured a delicate-looking Conan with a diaphanously draped damsel throwing her arms around his neck as he warded off a flying attacker with an ineffectual knife.

Meanwhile, the Brundage debate continued to rage in “The Eyrie”: “I do not think it would be at all an easy task to find anything to compare with Brundage’s representations of sheer feminine loveliness without the touch of vulgarity and suggestiveness which usually accompany nudes in magazines,” commented a male reader from El Paso, Texas, in the June 1934 issue, adding: “The cover illustration ‘Black Colossus’ was about as beautiful a piece of art as I have seen in a long time.”

However, in the same issue, a female reader from Oregon declared: “I do enjoy Weird Tales and usually manage to acquire one each month, even though I do tear off the cover immediately and stick it in the nearest receptacle for trash. Are such covers absolutely necessary?”

Like Wright, Howard also knew his markets, and he knew how much he could get past his editor and still be certain of an eye-catching cover: “Another problem is how far you can go without shocking the readers into distaste for your stuff—and therefore cutting down sales—I don’t know how much slaughter and butchery the readers will endure. Their capacity for grisly details seems unlimited, when the cruelty is the torturing of some naked girl. The torture of a naked writhing wretch, utterly helpless—and especially when of the feminine sex amid voluptuous surroundings—seems to excite keen pleasure in some people who have a distaste for wholesale butchery in the heat and fury of a battlefield.”

Conan was the leader of a band of outlaws who battled a giant god of living metal in “The Devil in Iron” in the August 1934 issue. It was the tenth Conan story to appear in Weird Tales and was voted by the readers as the best in that issue, despite another feeble Brundage cover depicting an unlikely-looking Conan entrapped by the coils of a giant green serpent while a semi-naked blonde looked on.

A much better Brundage cover was used for the first instalment of “The People of the Black Circle”, a three-part serial set in exotic northwest Asia which ran in the September, October and November 1934 editions of the magazine. This time the artist ignored Conan in favour of the beautiful princess Yasmina being held in the clutches of an evil sorcerer.

This is how Wright introduced the serial to his readers: “Rough, and at times uncouth, Conan is a primitive man, who will brave almost certain death against terrific odds to rescue a damsel in distress; yet he will just as quickly give her a resounding slap on the posterior or drop her into a cesspool if she displeases him. But rude though he is, he possesses a sort of primordial chivalry and an innate reverence for womanhood that make him wholly fascinating.”

Obviously the readers agreed, as this short novel was again voted the best story in the magazine and editor Wright revealed that “Robert E. Howard’s spectacular and original hero, Conan the barbarian adventurer and fighting-man, has captured the fancy of our readers by his brilliant exploits and his utter humanness.”

However, not everyone was so enamoured with the mighty Cimmerian. In the November 1934 Weird Tales, the following letter appeared in “The Eyrie”: “I am awfully tired of poor old Conan the Cluck, who for the past fifteen issues has every month slain a new wizard, tackled a new monster, come to a violent and sudden end that was averted (incredibly enough!) in just the nick of time, and won a new girl-friend, each of whose penchant for nudism won her place of honor, either on the cover or on the interior illustration. . . . I cry: ‘Enough of this brute and his iron-thewed sword thrusts—may he be sent to Valhalla to cut out paper dolls.’ ” The author of this anti-Conan diatribe was none other than seventeen-year-old Robert Bloch, later to find lasting fame as the author of Psycho, whose own first story would be appearing in the January 1935 edition of “The Unique Magazine”.

When “A Witch Shall Be Born”, with its memorable crucifixion scene, was published in the December 1934 issue of Weird Tales, Brundage instead went for another of her suggestive “whipping” scenes on the cover, this time involving two near-naked women and a cat-o’-nine-tails.

Editor Farnsworth Wright’s lengthy introduction announced that since Howard’s first publication in the magazine back in 1925, “. . . he has had forty stories in Weird Tales alone, and has gained an enormous following among the readers of this magazine. Many thousands of readers eagerly buy any magazines that feature one of Mr Howard’s stories. . . . He has the faculty of making real characters of his heroes, not mere automatons who act as they do merely because the author pulls the strings.”

In early 1935 Howard’s mother underwent a serious operation, remaining in hospital for a month before returning home. Novalyne Price Ellis later recalled meeting her: “Mrs Howard was sitting on the end of a divan. Her hair was nearly white, short, and parted on one side, not stylish. It looked as if she just combed it quickly to get it over with, not to make her look better. She got up with a great effort and stood leaning slightly to one side.” Hester Howard never fully recovered her health, and she would spend the rest of her life visiting various hospitals and sanatoriums or being cared for at home by her husband and son.

“Jewels of Gwahlur” appeared in the March 1935 Weird Tales. It was a minor Conan tale, about the stealing of a cursed treasure from yet another lost city, which Howard had originally titled “Teeth of Gwahlur”.

However, there was nothing minor about “Beyond the Black River”, the second of Conan’s four serial-length appearances in Weird Tales, published in the May and June issues for 1935. Drawing upon its author’s Texas background, it was a variation on the American frontier saga, with Howard’s fictional Picts standing in for Native American warriors. It was also in this story that Howard had one of his characters famously observe: “Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always triumph.” There is little doubt that the author was expressing his own views directly to the reader.

With “Beyond the Black River” Howard was still experimenting with the series, as he revealed in a letter to H. P. Lovecraft: “I wanted to see if I could write an interesting Conan yarn without sex interest. . . . I’ve attempted a new style of setting entirely—abandoned the exotic settings of lost cities, decaying civilizations, golden domes, marble palaces, silk-clad dancing girls, etc., and thrown my story against a background of forests and rivers, log cabins, frontier outposts, buckskin-clad settlers, and painted tribesmen.”

It was around this time that Howard also wrote but failed to sell “Wolves Beyond the Border”, which was set in the same milieu as “Beyond the Black River” but did not feature Conan directly.

The May 1935 Weird Tales also included another letter from Robert Bloch, whose story “The Secret of the Tomb” ran in the same issue: “I have been highly interested in the comments anent my so-called ‘attack’ on Howard in the Eyrie. . . . At no time have I ever, directly or indirectly, maligned Mr Howard’s fine and obviously talented abilities as a writer; I confined myself solely to a criticism of Conan’s career.”

Meanwhile, the cost of Mrs Howard’s continued medical treatment and the effect it was having on his own practise was draining Dr Howard’s finances, and the family were in need of urgent cash.

At the time, Weird Tales still owed Howard more than $800 for stories which had already appeared and were supposedly paid for upon publication. In frustration, Howard wrote to editor Farnsworth Wright on May 6: “For some time now I have been receiving a check regularly each month from Weird Tales—half checks, it is true, but by practicing the most rigid economy I have managed to keep my head above the water; that I was able to do so was largely because of, not the size but the regularity of the checks. I came to depend upon them and to expect them, as I felt justified in so doing. But this month, at the very time when I need money so desperately bad, I did not receive a check. Somehow, some way, my family and I have struggled along this far, but if you cut off my monthly checks now, I don’t know what in God’s name we’ll do. . . .”

In an autobiographical sketch in the July 1935 issue of Julius Schwartz’s amateur Fantasy Magazine, Howard told the readers: “Conan simply grew up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in a little border town on the lower Rio Grande. I did not create him by any conscious process. He simply stalked full-grown out of oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures.”

In a letter that same month to Clark Ashton Smith, Howard continued: “It may sound fantastic to link the term ‘realism’ with Conan; but as a matter of fact—his supernatural adven aside—he is the most realistic character I ever evolved. He is simply a combination of a number of men I have known, and I think that’s why he seemed to step full-grown into my consciousness when I wrote the first yarn of the series. Some mechanism in my subconsciousness took the dominant characteristics of various prize-fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call Conan the Cimmerian.”

Between the early months of 1932 and July 1935, Robert E. Howard wrote twenty-one adventures of Conan the barbarian. These tales varied in length from around 3,500 words to the almost novel-length of 75,000 words. Of these stories, seventeen were published in Weird Tales.

As the author explained: “Literature is a business to me—a business at which I was making an ample living when the Depression knocked the guts out of the markets. My sole desire in writing is to make a reasonable living. I may cling to many illusions, but I am not ridden by the illusion that I have anything wonderful or magical to say, or that it would amount to anything particularly if I did say it. I have no quarrel with art-for-art’s-sakers. On the contrary, I admire their work. But my pet delusions tend in other directions.”

Although Howard’s writing career was improving again, his mother’s fragile health was not. She had terminal tuberculosis. Also, as Novalyne Price Ellis later observed: “His mother had him so completely in her power that he hovered over her, even in a store. She was, of course, the only woman in his life.”

Howard’s idolisation of his mother would be his downfall. What neither knew was that time was quickly running out for both of them. . . .

Stephen Jones
London, England
January 2000

The Conan Chronicles, 2

Robert E. Howard and Conan:

The Final Years

Despite enjoying an all-time high in sales during 1935 to such diverse pulp magazines as Action Stories, Argosy, Dime Sports Magazine, Spicy-Adventure Stories, Star Western, Thrilling Adventures, Thrilling Mystery, Top-Notch, Western Aces and, of course, Weird Tales, Robert E. Howard had started talking about taking his own life when it appeared that his mother was dying of tuberculosis. As his father, Dr I. M. Howard later recalled: “Last March a year ago, again when his mother was very low in the King’s Daughters Hospital in Temple, Texas, Dr McCelvey expressed a fear that she would not recover; he began to talk to me about his business, and I at once understood what it meant. I began to talk to him, trying to dissuade him from such a course, but his mother began to improve. Immediately she began to improve, he became cheerful and no more was said.”

Ignored or simply dismissed as eccentric by most of the inhabitants of his home town of Cross Plains, Texas, Howard began to exhibit even more bizarre behaviour. He had told writer E. Hoffman Price the previous year: “Nobody thinks I amount to much, so I am proud to show these people that a successful writer thinks enough of me to drive a thousand miles to hell and gone out of his way to visit me.”

Howard now decided to grow a long walrus moustache and walk around town dressed somewhat unconventionally, as Novalyne Price Ellis described in her memoir One Who Walked Alone: “The first thing that startled me was the black sombrero he had on. It was a real Mexican sombrero with little balls dangling from its rim. The chin strap was a thin little strip of leather attached to the hat. It came down and was tied under his chin. The vaqueros used the chin strap to keep their hats from being blown off by the incessant winds that swept the plains. But the flat crown and chin strap made Bob’s face look rounder than ever. . . . The red bandana around his neck was tied in the back. He didn’t have on those old short, brown pants. Not this year! He had on short, black pants that came to the top of his black shoes.”

In “Shadows in Zamboula”, which was published in the November 1935 issue of Weird Tales, Conan found himself staying in a city filled with intrigue and cannibalism. Howard’s original tide for the story had been “The Man-Eaters of Zamboula”. The issue once again featured a Conan cover by Margaret Brundage, with a naked Nafertari surrounded by four hissing cobras. However, the story was closely beaten in the readers’' poll by “The Way Home” by Paul Frederick Stern (a pen-name for writer Paul Ernst).

At around 75,000 words, Howard’s next entry in the series was twice as long as any other Conan story and Howard’s only completed novel. Written over four months in the spring of 1934, he cannibalised and expanded a number of his earlier Conan stories—specifically “The Scarlet Citadel”, “Black Colossus” and “The Devil in Iron”—to create one of his finest and most mature works.

According to Howard, “Conan was about forty when he seized the crown of Aquilonia, and was about forty-four or forty-five at the time of ‘The Hour of the Dragon’. He had no male heir at that time, because he had never bothered to formally make some woman his queen, and the sons of concubines, of which he had a goodly number, were not recognized as heirs to the throne.”

Howard had already had several stories reprinted between hardcovers in Britain in the Not at Night series of horror anthologies edited by Christine Campbell Thomson (including the Conan story “Rogues in the House”, which appeared in the 1934 volume Terror at Night). The Hour of the Dragon was submitted to British publisher Denis Archer in May 1934. The year before, Archer had turned down a collection of Howard’s stories (which featured two Conan tales) with the suggestion that “any time you find yourself able to produce a full-length novel of about 70,000-75,000 words along the lines of the stories, my allied Company, Pawling & Ness Ltd., who deal with the lending libraries, and are able to sell a first edition of 5,000 copies, will be very willing to publish it.”

In fact, Archer accepted The Hour of the Dragon, but the publisher went bankrupt and his assets, including Howard’s novel, were put into the hands of the Official Receiver. The book was never published, and the story finally appeared as a five-part serial running in Weird Tales from December 1935 to April 1936 (with chapter 20 apparently mis-numbered as chapter 21).

Despite Margaret Brundage’s cover depicting her most pathetic-looking Conan ever, chained in a cell while a scantily clad Zenobia hands him the keys, readers reacted favourably to the serial in “The Eyrie”, the magazine’s letters column: “If ‘The Hour of the Dragon’ ends as good as it began I shall vote Mr Howard your ace writer,” promised a reader from Sioux City, Iowa. “Robert E. Howard’s ‘Hour of the Dragon’ is vividly written, as are all Mr Howard’s stories,” praised a reader from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, who continued: “Conan is at his bloodthirsty worst, killing off his enemies left and right; lovely damozels walk about in scanty shifts and pine to be held in his muscular arms—so what more could one want, I ask you?”

However, the Brundage controversy continued to rage: “I was greatly pleased with the stories in the December WT, but at the same time greatly disappointed with Mrs Brundage’s illustration of Conan,” complained a reader from Washington D.C. “From Howard’s stories I have always pictured Conan as a rough, muscular, scarred figure of giant stature with thick, wiry, black hair covering his massive chest, powerful arms, and muscular legs; and a face that’s as rugged as the weather-beaten face of an old sea captain.”

Howard expressed his own opinion of Brundage’s work in a letter in the June 1936 issue: “Enthusiasm impels me to pause from burning spines off cactus for my drouth-bedeviled goats long enough to give three slightly dust-choked cheers for the April cover illustration . . . altogether I think it’s the best thing Mrs Brundage has done since she illustrated my ‘Black Colossus’. And that’s no depreciation of the covers done between these master-pictures.”

“Howard was my favourite author,” Brundage recalled many years later, “I always liked his stories best.”

In terms of Conan’s history, “The Hour of the Dragon” (which was later reprinted under the title Conan the Conqueror) is the final story in the sequence. It was also the last Conan story Howard himself would ever see published.

Howard was still upset over his mother’s failing health, as his father later revealed: “Again this year, in February, while his mother was very sick and not expected to live but a few days, at that time she was in the Shannon Hospital in San Angelo, Texas. San Angelo is something like one hundred miles from here. He was driving back and forth daily from San Angelo to home. One evening he told me I would find his business, what little there was to it, all carefully written up and in a large envelope in his desk.”

In a letter to Novalyne Price Ellis dated February 14, 1936, Howard admitted: “You ask how my mother is getting along. I hardly know what to say. Some days she seems to be improving a little, and other days she seems to be worse. I frankly don't know.”

Conan’s final appearance in Weird Tales was the three-part serial “Red Nails” in the July, August-September and October 1936 issues. Howard described it as “. . . the grimmest, bloodiest and most merciless story of the series so far. Too much raw meat, maybe, but I merely portrayed what I honestly believe would be the reactions of certain types of people in the situations on which the plot of the story hung.”

In a letter dated December 5, 1935, he called it “. . . the bloodiest and most sexy weird story I ever wrote. I have been dissatisfied with my handling of decaying races in stories, for the reason that degeneracy is so prevalent in such races that even in fiction it can not be ignored as a motive and as a fact if the fiction is to have any claim to realism. I have ignored it in all other stories, as one of the taboos, but I did not ignore it in this story. When, or if, you ever read it, I’d like to know how you like my handling of the subject of lesbianism.”

In fact, there is only the slightest suggestion of lesbianism in the published version of the story, in which Conan and beautiful Aquilonian mercenary Valeria discovered yet another lost city and battled a monster reptile.

Introducing “Red Nails” in the July 1936 issue, editor Farnsworth Wright recalled: “Nearly four years ago, Weird Tales published a story called ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’ built around a barbarian adventurer named Conan, who had become king of a country by sheer force of valor and brute strength. . . . The stories of Conan were speedily acclaimed by our readers, and the barbarian’s weird adventures became immensely popular. The story presented herewith is one of the most powerful and eery (sic) weird tales yet written about Conan. We commend this story to you, for we know you will enjoy it through and through.”

Margaret Brundage’s suggestive cover depicted a naked Valeria about to be sacrificed on an altar by three seductive slave girls. It was the last illustration Brundage would do for a Howard story and with the next issue of Weird Tales she ended her continuous run of thirty-nine covers for “The Unique Magazine”. She would still occasionally make an appearance on the cover over the next nine years, and her final original painting—her sixty-sixth—appeared on the January 1945 issue.

Written in July 1935, “Red Nails” was the final Conan story—and the final fantasy story—which Howard would complete. With his mother’s hospital bills escalating, and Weird Tales paying on publication (supposedly) some of the lowest rates in the pulp field, he began to look around for better and more dependable paying markets.

As Howard revealed in a letter dated February 15, 1936, to E. Hoffman Price: “For myself, I haven’t submitted anything to Weird Tales for many months, though I would, if payments could be made a little more promptly. I reckon the boys have their troubles, same as me, but my needs are urgent and immediate.”

Price observed that during his 1934 visit to Cross Plains: “I had often got the impression that Robert was a parent to his parents; that while he could have done the gypsying which other authors permitted themselves, solicitude for his father and mother kept him fairly close to home.”

Novalyne Price Ellis agreed: “I do think Bob has tried to take over his parents’ lives. He said once that parents and children change places in life. When parents become old and sick, you take care of them as you would a child.”

During the spring of 1936, Hester Howard appeared to grow stronger, much to the relief of her son, as Dr Howard later explained: “He accepted her condition as one of permanent improvement and one that would continue. I knew well that it would not, but I kept it from him.”

In a letter written to young Wisconsin writer August Derleth, dated May 9, 1936, Howard offered his own thoughts after recent deaths in Derleth’s family: “Death to the old is inevitable, and yet somehow I often feel that it is a greater tragedy than death to the young. When a man dies young he misses much suffering, but the old have only life as a possession and somehow to me the tearing of a pitiful remnant from weak old fingers is more tragic than the looting of a life in its full rich plume. I don’t want to live to be old. I want to die when my time comes, quickly and suddenly, in the full tide of my strength and health.”

In a letter dated May 13, he also confided to his old correspondent and fellow Weird Tales writer H. P. Lovecraft that he did not know whether his mother would: “. . . live or not. She is very weak and weighs only 109 pounds—150 pounds is her normal weight—and very few kinds of food agree with her; but if she does live, she will owe her life to my father’s efforts.”

For three weeks Robert E. Howard continued to maintain an almost constant vigil at his beloved mother’s bedside as her condition began to decline rapidly. Atypically, his mood became almost cheerful, as if he had finally made up his mind about something.

Then, on the morning of June 11, 1936, Howard learned from one of two trained nurses attending Mrs Howard that his mother had entered a terminal coma and that she would probably never recognise him again. He rose from beside her sick-bed, slipped out of the house, climbed into his 1935 Chevrolet sedan parked in front of the garage and rolled up the windows. At a few minutes past eight o’clock in the morning, he fired a single bullet from a borrowed Colt .380 automatic into his right temple. He had come to the decision that he would not see his mother die.

The bullet passed through his brain and he survived for eight hours in a coma. He was thirty years old. His mother died shortly after ten o’clock on the evening of the following day, without ever regaining consciousness. She was sixty-six (although she had claimed to be several years younger). They were buried in adjacent graves in identical caskets at Brownwood’s Greenleaf Cemetery.

A strip of paper was discovered in Howard’s wallet in his hip pocket after he shot himself. It contained two typewritten lines:

All fled—all done, so lift me on the pyre ?
The Feast is over and the lamps expire.

Having pretty much ignored him for most of his life, on the day of his death the local newspaper reprinted one of Howard’s last Western stories, along with a 6,000-word article and an obituary—more space than any citizen of Cross Plains had ever received.

On June 24, 1936, Howard’s beloved library of some 300 books and file copies of all the magazines which contained his stories were donated by his father to Howard Payne College to form The Robert E. Howard Memorial Collection. Nine months later Dr Howard reclaimed all his son’s magazines because they were falling apart.

In a letter dated June 29, 1936, Dr Howard wrote to Lovecraft: “. . . Robert was a great admirer of you. I have often heard him say that you were the best weird writer in the world, and he keenly enjoyed corresponding with you. Often expressed hope that you might visit in our home some day, so that he, his mother and I might see you and know you personally. Robert greatly admired all weird writers, often heard him speak of each separately and express the highest admiration of all. He said they were a bunch of great men and he admired all of them very much.”

Lovecraft’s own “Robert Ervin Howard: A Memoriam” was published in the September 1936 issue of Julius Schwartz’s Fantasy Magazine: “The character and attainments of Mr Howard were wholly unique. He was, above everything else, a lover of the simpler, older world of barbarian and pioneer days, when courage and strength took the place of subtlety and stratagem, and when a hardy, fearless race battled and bled, and asked no quarter from hostile nature. All his stories reflect this philosophy, and derive from it a vitality found in few of his contemporaries. No one could write more convincingly of violence and gore than he, and his battle passages reveal an instinctive aptitude for military tactics which would have brought him distinction in times of war. His real gifts were even higher than the readers of his published works would suspect, and had he lived, would have helped him to make his mark in serious literature with some folk epic of his beloved southwest. . . . Always a disciple of hearty and strenuous living, he suggested more than casually his own famous character—the intrepid warrior, adventurer, and seizer of thrones, Conan the Cimmerian. His loss at the age of thirty is a tragedy of the first magnitude, and a blow from which fantasy fiction will not soon recover.”

While writing those words, Lovecraft could hardly have realised that the world of fantasy fiction would soon be mourning the impact of his own premature death, at the age of forty-seven, little more than nine months later.

Howard’s father continued to correspond with E. Hoffman Price until he died, a lonely old man suffering from diabetes and cataracts in both eyes, on November 12, 1944. As Price later recalled: “Whenever I think of Dr Howard, well into his seventy-fourth year, and with failing eyesight, having for these past eight years faced alone and single-handed a home and a world from which both wife and son were taken in one day, I can not help but say, ‘I wish Robert had had more of his father’s courage.’ ”

The notice of Howard’s death appeared in the August-September issue of Weird Tales: “As this issue goes to press, we are saddened by the news of the sudden death of Robert E. Howard of Cross Plains, Texas. Mr Howard for years has been one of the most popular magazine authors in the country. . . . It was in Weird Tales that the cream of his writing appeared. Mr Howard was one of our literary discoveries. . . . Prolific though he was, his genius shone through everything he wrote and he did not lower his high literary standards for the sake of mere volume.”

At the time, the magazine still owed Howard $1,350 for stories it had already published.

Regular Weird Tales cover artist Margaret Brundage remembered how she learned of the author’s death: “I came into the offices one day and Wright informed me of Howard’s suicide. We both just sat around and cried for most of the day. He was always my personal favourite.”

Robert Bloch, who had previously criticised Howard in the magazine wrote: “Robert E. Howard’s death is quite a shock—and a severe blow to WT. Despite my standing opinion of Conan, the fact always remains that Howard was one of WTs finest contributors.”

Although it is true that Robert E. Howard never wrote nor published the Conan stories in any particular sequence, in a letter dated March 10, 1936, to science fiction writer P. Schuyler Miller, the author responded to an attempt by Miller and chemist Dr John D. Clark to put the Conan series into chronological order with his own concept of Conan’s eventual fate: “Frankly I can’t predict it. In writing these yarns I’ve always felt less as creating them than as if I were simply chronicling his adventures as he told them to me. That’s why they skip about so much, without following a regular order. The average adventurer, telling tales of a wild life at random, seldom follows any ordered plan, but narrates episodes widely separated by space and years, as they occur to him.”

The Cimmerian’s adventures appeared as the author imagined them—consequently the first two stories published, “The Phoenix on the Sword” and “The Scarlet Citadel”, feature an older Conan who has already been crowned king of Aquilonia, while the character appears as a teenage thief in the third published tale, “The Tower of the Elephant”.

One explanation for this apparently random chronology appears in a letter postmarked December 14, 1933, to writer Clark Ashton Smith, in which Howard hinted at a possible preternatural power behind the creation of his character: “While I don’t go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existent spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly denying anything) I have sometimes wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces of the past or present—or even the future—work through the thoughts and actions of living men. This occurred to me when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series expecially. . . . I do not attempt to explain this by esoteric or occult means, but the facts remain. I still write of Conan more powerfully and with more understanding than any of my other characters. But the time will probably come when I will suddenly find myself unable to write convincingly of him at all. That has happened in the past with nearly all my rather numerous characters; suddenly I would find myself out of contact with the conception, as if the man himself had been standing at my shoulder directing my efforts, and had suddenly turned and gone away, leaving me to search for another character.”

Howard’s death did not mark the end of Conan. The unpublished manuscripts of four completed Conan stories, which had been rejected by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, were discovered amongst the author’s papers many years after his death.

The first of these, “The God in the Bowl”, appeared in the September 1952 issue of Space Science Fiction. A combination of murder mystery and magic, it was revised considerably for publication by writer L. Sprague de Camp, who produced yet another version of the story, closer to the original manuscript, for paperback publication fifteen years later.

Another greatly abridged version by de Camp of Howard’s story “The Black Stranger” appeared under the title “The Treasure of Tranicos” in the February-March 1953 issue of Fantasy Magazine. This 33,000-word short novel had been written around the same time as “Beyond the Black River” and “Wolves Beyond the Border” and mixed Conan with Picts and pirates. When he could not sell it as a Conan adventure, Howard had attempted to rescue the story by turning the hero into swashbuckling pirate Black Vulmea, but it remained unpublished until 1976, when it appeared in the collection Black Vulmea’s Vengeance under the title “Swords of the Red Brotherhood”. The complete version finally saw print, exactly as Howard wrote it, in Karl Edward Wagner’s 1987 anthology Echoes of Valor.

Originally rejected by Wright in 1932, Howard had submitted an apparently earlier draft of “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter”, featuring the Conan-like hero Amra of Akbitana, to the amateur journal The Fantasy Fan, which had published the story in the March 1934 issue as “Gods of the North”. When Howard’s Conan version appeared in the August 1953 issue of Fantasy Fiction, it had been extensively rewritten by de Camp, and it was not until 1976 that the author’s original manuscript finally saw print.

“The Vale of Lost Women” eventually appeared in the Spring 1967 issue of Robert A. W. Lowndes’ Magazine of Horror. This story was probably rejected by Wright because of scenes where an older Conan massacred an entire village and the heroine had to barter her virginity in order to be rescued. Reaction to its publication was decidedly mixed: “The so-called ‘Conan’ story with its fantasy domino slightly askew is a thinly masked ‘porny’ of the cheapest sado-sexual variety and doesn’t belong in your pages,” wrote one reader to the magazine’s letters column, while another was of the opinion: “I cannot imagine why ‘The Vale of Lost Women’ was not published during Howard’s lifetime. . . . It is certainly one of Howard’s better works.”

Howard also left behind a number of fragments and brief outlines for never-completed adventures which various authors, including L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, completed and added to in an attempt to fill in the gaps in Conan’s career. Some of these manuscripts were Oriental adventures which the writers then converted into Conan stories by changing names, deleting anachronisms and introducing a supernatural element.

In 1953, Ace Books issued Howard’s novel Conan the Conqueror as an “Ace Double” paperback, bound back-to-back with The Sword of Rhiannon by Leigh Brackett, and the following year the book finally made its British debut, exactly twenty years after it had first been submitted by Howard, in a hardcover edition from T.V. Boardman & Co. of London. Unfortunately, the uncredited dustjacket artist decided to illustrate the same scene that Margaret Brundage had used for her cover of the December 1935 Weird Tales, with equally wretched results!

Between 1950-57 New York’s Gnome Press published seven hardcover volumes of Conan stories. These included several tales either edited by or in collaboration with de Camp, who later explained: “Late in 1951, I stumbled upon a cache of Howard’s manuscripts in the apartment of the then literary agent for Howard’s estate. . . . The incomplete state of the Conan saga has tempted me and others to add to it, as Howard might have done had he lived. . . . The reader must judge how successful our posthumous collaboration with Howard has been.”

However, as author and editor Karl Edward Wagner wrote in 1977, “The only man who could write a Robert E. Howard story was Robert E. Howard. It is far more than a matter of imitating adjective usage or analyzing comma-splices. It is a matter of spirit. Pastiche-Conan is not the same as Conan as portrayed by Robert E. Howard. Read such, as it pleases you—but don’t delude yourself into thinking that this is any more Robert E. Howard’s Conan than a Conan story you decided to write yourself. It is this editor’s belief that a Conan collection should contain only Robert E. Howard’s Conan tales, and that no editorial emendations should alter the authenticity of Howard’s creation.” And this coming from one of the better writers of Howard pastiches.

In fact, Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright had told his readers much the same thing four decades earlier: “Sorry to deny your request for some other author to carry on the Conan stories of the late Robert E. Howard. His work was touched with genius, and he had a distinctive style of writing that put the stamp of his personality on every story he wrote. It would hardly be fair to his memory if we allowed Conan to be recreated by another hand, no matter how skilful.”

Amateur publications such as Glenn Lord’s The Howard Collector, George H. Scithers’ Amra and The Robert E. Howard United Press Association (REHupa) rekindled interest in Howard’s fiction during the 1960s and ’70s, and beginning in 1966 Lancer Books in America, and later Sphere Books in Britain, collected the Conan stories into a series of twelve paperbacks, many of which featured distinctive cover paintings by Frank Frazetta. Edited by L. Sprague de Camp, once again Howard’s original texts were altered, and the series included revisions, posthumous collaborations, fixed-up novels and totally new pastiches. Over a million copies of the Lancer editions were sold during the first few years of publication, ranking Howard second only to J. R. R. Tolkien in the field of fantasy fiction.

In 1957 a Swedish fan named Björn Nyberg had collaborated with L. Sprague de Camp on a new novel entitled The Return of Conan, and with Howard’s renewed popularity, soon other authors were adding original novels to the Conan canon. These included Karl Edward Wagner, Poul Anderson, Andrew J. Offutt, Robert Jordan, John Maddox Roberts, Steve Perry, Roland Green, Leonard Carpenter and John C. Hocking.

Thirty-five years after his creator’s death, Howard’s mighty Cimmerian had turned into a money-spinning franchise.

In October 1970, Marvel Comics Group launched its hugely successful Conan the Barbarian title, written by Roy Thomas and initially illustrated by artist Barry (Windsor-)Smith. Many issues adapted or were based on Howard’s original stories, and there was even a two-issue crossover with Michael Moorcock’s character Elric of Melniboné. The following year, Marvel Comics introduced another series of Conan adaptations by Thomas in Savage Tales. Conan the Barbarian King-Size appeared in 1973, and it was followed over the years by such titles as The Savage Sword of Conan, King Conan, Conan the Destroyer and The Conan Saga.

In 1982 director John Milius, along with co-writer Oliver Stone, turned Conan the Barbarian into a multi-million dollar fantasy movie, with Austrian bodybuilder and former Mr Universe Arnold Schwarzenegger cast as the eponymous sword-wielding hero pitted against James Earl Jones’ evil shape-changing sorcerer, Thulsa Doom. Two years later Schwarzenegger returned to the screen in Conan the Destroyer for veteran director Richard Fleischer. This time Sarah Douglas’ treacherous Queen Taramis sent Conan and his companions on a quest for a magical key to unlock the secret of a mystical horn. Filmed on a lower budget in Mexico, this pulpy sequel was more faithful to the spirit of Howard’s characters, probably because it was based on a story by comic-book writers Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway.

Robert E. Howard was not even credited on the 1992-93 half-hour children’s cartoon series Conan the Adventurer, in which the brawny barbarian and his comrades set out to undo the spell of living stone cast upon Conan’s family by driving the evil serpent men back into another dimension. German weight-lifter Ralph Moeller took over the role for the 1997-98 live-action television series Conan, produced by Brian Yuzna. The pilot film, The Heart of the Elephant, was loosely based on Howard’s story “The Tower of the Elephant” and featured a bizarre computer-created image of the late Richard Burton as the Cimmerian god Crom.

Even more unexpected was director Dan Ireland’s little 1996 independent film The Whole Wide World, based on Novalyne Price Ellis’ book One Who Walked Alone. Filmed on location in Texas, Rene Zellweger portrayed the young schoolteacher who befriended eccentric pulp magazine writer Robert E. Howard, played by Vincent D’Onofrio. It is difficult to imagine a more perfect film biography of Howard’s final years.

Howard himself had already hinted in letters that he was planning to move away from fantasy fiction, and there has been much conjecture over the years that, had he lived, he would have made his name as a regional writer, with more mainstream stories or histories set in his native Southwest.

In his Foreword to the 1946 Arkham House collection of Howard’s short fiction, Skull-Face and Others, editor August Derleth supports this view: “The late Robert E. Howard was a writer of pulp fiction. He was also more than that. He had in him the promise of becoming an important American regionist, and to that end he had been assimilating the lore and legend, the history and culture patterns of his own corner of Texas.”

We shall never know how he may have developed as a writer. But if he had continued to work in the fantastic field, we can only speculate as to where Howard himself might have taken Conan. In his 1936 letter to P. Schuyler Miller he left behind a number of clues: “He was, I think, king of Aquilonia for many years, in a turbulent and unquiet reign, when the Hyborian civilization had reached its most magnificent high-tide, and every king had imperial ambitions. At first he fought on the defensive, but I am of the opinion that at last he was forced into wars of aggression as a matter of self-preservation. Whether he succeeded in conquering a world-wide empire, or perished in the attempt, I do not know. He travelled widely, not only before his kingship, but after he was king. He travelled to Khitai and Hyrkania, and to the even less known regions north of the latter and south of the former. He even visited a nameless continent in the western hemisphere, and roamed among the islands adjacent to it. How much of this roaming will get into print, I can not foretell with any accuracy.”

Tragically, because of Howard’s suicide, none of it ever did.

As we approach the centenary of Robert E. Howard’s birth, it is worth noting that these stories—often written for less than a cent per word and published in disposable magazines printed on cheap pulp paper—have remained with us over the decades. Today, through films, television and comic books, Howard’s name is more widely known that it ever was during his lifetime. His most famous creation, Conan the Cimmerian, has outlived his creator and, with the exception of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, is possibly the best-known character in modern fantasy fiction.

Towards the end of 2000, it was announced that Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee had purchased the rights to Conan for $4.3 million through the exchange of common shares in his Stan Lee Media group, and Wachowski brothers Larry and Andy (The Matrix, etc.) were involved in developing a new Conan movie for Warner Bros., with John Milius once again attached to write and direct.

But those who only know the barbarian through his media incarnations have not experienced the real Conan. At his best, Robert E. Howard could sweep the reader away on a red tide of bloodlust to lost cities, unexplored jungles and savage pirate galleons, where all a brave man needed was a sharp sword in his hand and a beautiful woman by his side to face whatever hideous horror or supernatural menace confronted him.

These, then, are the original tales of Conan, as fresh, atmospheric and vibrant today as when they were first published more than sixty years ago in the pages of Weird Tales and elsewhere.

As H. P. Lovecraft accurately observed: “It is hard to describe precisely what made Mr Howard’s stories stand out so sharply; but the real secret is that he himself is in every one of them. . . . He was greater than any profit-making policy he could adopt—for even when he outwardly made concessions to Mammon-guided editors and commercial critics, he had an internal force and sincerity which broke through the surface and put the imprint of his personality on everything he wrote. Before he concluded with it, it always took on some tinge of vitality and reality in spite of popular editorial policy—always drew something from his own experience and knowledge of life instead of from the sterile herbarium of desiccated pulpish standby. Not only did he excel in pictures of strife and slaughter, but he was almost alone in his ability to create real emotions of spectral fear and dread suspense. No author—even in the humblest fields—can truly excel unless he takes his work very seriously; and Mr Howard did just that even in cases where he consciously thought he did not.”

For the discerning reader of fantasy fiction, Robert E. Howard’s talent and tragedy will continue to live on through these authentic adventures of his greatest creation, Conan the barbarian.

Stephen Jones
London, England
December 2000

Index