The Complete Chronicles of Conan: Centenary Edition

by Robert E. Howard

  ‘Shadows in Zamboula’ appeared in the November 1935 issue of Weird Tales with a cover illustration by Margaret Brundage.

  Howard was ignored or simply dismissed as eccentric by most of the inhabitants of his hometown of Cross Plains, Texas, but he 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 title 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 the author, ‘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.

  Conan’s first British publication was ‘Rogues in the House’ in the 1934 anthology Terror by Night edited by Christine Campbell Thomson.

  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 recognised 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 misnumbered 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’: ‘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 DC. ‘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, admitting, ‘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.’

  ‘The Hour of the Dragon’ began its serialisation in Weird Tales with the December 1935 issue, featuring another cover illustration by Margaret Brundage.

  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 valour 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 (supposedly) paying on publication some of the lowest rates in the pulp field, he began to look around for better and more dependable 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.

  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 sickbed, slipped out of the house, climbed into his 1935 Chevrolet sedan, which was 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 always 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 after Howard shot himself. It contained two typewritten lines taken from Viola Garvin’s poem ‘The House of Cæsar’:

  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 three hundred 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 H.P. 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. He often expressed hope that you might visit in our home some day, so that he, his mother and I might see 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 south west … 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.’

  Robert and Hester Jane Howard’s Funeral Notice, June 1936.

  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 Wei
rd 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 WT’s finest contributors.’

  Although it is true that Robert E. Howard neither 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 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 unrecognised 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 especially … 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.’