Chronological order of the CONAN series:

  CONAN

  CONAN OF CIMMERIA CONAN THE FREEBOOTER CONAN THE WANDERER CONAN

  THE ADVENTURER CONAN THE BUCCANEER CONAN THE WARRIOR CONAN THE

  USURPER CONAN THE CONQUEROR CONAN THE AVENGER CONAN OF

  AQUILONIA CONAN OF THE ISLES

  Robert E. Howard, L Sprague de Camp

  and Lin Carter

  ace books

  A Division of Charter Communications Inc. A GROSSET & DUNLAP COMPANY

  360 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010

  Copyright © 1967 by L. Sprague de Camp All rights reserved

  The letter from Robert E. Howard to P. Schuyler Miller was originally published in The Coming ofConan, by Robert E. Howard, N.Y.: Gnome Press, Inc., 1953; copyright 1953 by Gnome Press.

  The Hyborian Age, Part 1, by Robert E. Howard, was originally published in The Phantagraph for February, August, and October-November, 1936; re-printed in the booklet, The Hyborian Age, by the Los Angeles-New York Cooperative Publications, 1938; in Skull-Face and Others, by Robert E.How-ard, SaukCity, Wis.: Arkham House, 1946; in The Coming ofConan (revised by JohnD.

  Clark); and in A'mg/fw//, by RobertE. Howard andLinCarter, N.Y.: Lancer Books, Inc., 1967.

  The Tower of the Elephant, by Robert E. Howard, was originaly published in Weird Tales for March, 1933; copyright 1933 by Popular Fiction Publishing Co.; reprinted in Skull-Face and Others and in The Coming ofConan.

  The Hall of the Dead, by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp, was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for February, 1967; copyright © 1966 by Mercury Press, Inc.L. Sprague de Camp wrote the story in accordance with an outline found in 1966 by Glenn Lord among Howard's papers.

  The God In the Bowl, by Robert E. Howard, was originally published in Space Science Fiction for September, 1952; copyright 1952 by Space Publications, Inc.; reprinted in The Coming ofConan.

  Rogues in the House, by RobertE. Howard, was originally published in Weird Tales for January, 1934; copyright 1934 by Popular Fiction Publishing Co.; reprinted in Terror by Night, ed. by Christine Campbell Thomson, Lon.: Selwyn & Blount, Ltd., 1934; in Skull-Face and Others; in The Coming of Conan; and in More Not at Night, ed. by Christine Campbell Thomson, Lon.: Arrow Books, Ltd., 1961.

  Distributed by Ace Books

  A division of Charter Communications, Inc.

  A Grosset & Dunlap Company

  Printed in U.S.A.

  Contents

  Introduction (de Camp)

  9

  Letter from R. E. Howard to P. S. Miller

  16

  The Hyborian Age, Part 1 (Howard)

  21

  The Thing in the Crypt (Carter & de Camp)

  34

  The Tower of the Elephant (Howard)

  51

  The Hall of the Dead (Howard & de Camp)

  81

  The God in the Bowl (Howard)

  107

  Rogues in the House (Howard)

  131

  The Hand of Nergal (Howard & Carter)

  162

  The City of Skulls (Carter & de Camp)

  189

  Pages 6 and 7: A map of the world of Conan in the Hyborian Age, based upon notes and sketches by Robert E. Howard and upon previous maps by P. Schuyler Mil-ler, John D. Clark, David Kyle, and L.

  Sprague de Camp, with a map of Europe and adjacent regions superimposed for reference.

  COVER PAINTING BY FRANK FRAZETTA

  The biographical paragraphs between the stories are based upon A Probable Outline of Conan's Career, by P. Schuyler Miller and Dr. John D. Clark, published in The Hyborian Age (1938), and on the expanded version of this essay, An Informal Biography of Conan the Cimmerian, by P. Schuyler Miller, John D.

  Clark, and L. Sprague de Camp, published in Amra, Vol. 2, No. 4, copyright © 1959 by G. H. Scithers; used by permission of G. H. Scithers.

  Introduction

  robert ervin howard (1906-36) was born in Peaster, Texas (not in Cross Plains, as has been written elsewhere), and spent most of his life in Cross Plains, in the center of Texas between Abilene and Brownwood. His father was a local physician, and both his parents came of pioneer stock. Howard received his main education in Cross Plains and completed his high-school career in Brown-wood, at Brownwood High School and Howard Payne Academy. After taking a few courses at Brownwood Col-lege, he plunged into free-lance writing.

  As a boy, Howard's precocious intellect made him something of a misfit, especially in Texas. For a time he suffered the bullying that is the usual lot of brilliant but puny boys. Partly as a result, he became a sport and exercise fanatic and an accomplished boxer and horse-man. That soon ended the bullying, especially since in maturity he was six feet tall and weighed over 200 pounds, most of it muscle. His personality was introverted, uncon-ventional, moody, and hot-tempered, given to emotional extremes and violent likes and dislikes. Like most young writers, he read voraciously. He was a pen pal of the fantasy writers H. P.

  Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

  During his last ten years (1927-36), Howard turned out a huge volume of general pulp-magazine fiction: sport, detective, western, historical, oriental-adventure, weird,

  9

  and ghost stories, besides his poetry and his many fan-tasies. In his late twenties he earned more money from his writings than any other man in Cross Plains, including the town banker—although that is not saying much, since during the Depression years magazine rates were low and payment often late.

  Although moderately successful in his work and a big, powerful man like his heroes, Howard was maladjusted to the point of psychosis. For several years before his death, he talked of suicide. At thirty, learning that his aged mother—to whom he was excessively devoted—was on the point of death, he ended a promising literary career by shooting himself. His novella "Red Nails," a Conan story, and his interplanetary novel Almuric were pub-lished posthumously in Weird Tales.

  Howard wrote several series of tales of heroic fantasy, most of them published in Weird Tales.

  Howard was a natural story-teller, whose narratives are unsurpassed for vivid, gripping, headlong action.

  His heroes—King Kull, Conan, Bran Mak Morn, Turlogh O'Brien, Solomon Kane—are larger than life: men of mighty thews, hot passions, and indomitable will, who easily dominate the stories through which they stride. Howard thus explained his preference for heroes of massive muscles but simple minds:

  "They're simpler. You get them in a jam, and no one expects you to rack your brains inventing clever ways for them to extricate themselves. They are too stupid to do anything but cut, shoot, or slug themselves into the clear." (E. Hoffmann Price: "A Memory of R. E. How-ard," in Skull-Face and Others, by Robert E. Howard, copyright © 1946 by August Derleth.) Of all Howard's fantasies, the most popular have been the Conan stories. These are laid in Howard's imaginary Hyborian Age, about twelve thousand years ago, between the sinking of Atlantis and the beginning of recorded

  10

  history. He wrote—or at least began—over two dozen Conan stories. Of these, eighteen were published during or just after his lifetime, one in a fan magazine and the rest in Weird Tales. Howard explained how he came to write about Conan thus:

  "While I don't go so far as to believe that stories are inspired by actually existing spirits or powers (though I am rather opposed to flatly denying anything) I have some-times wondered if it were possible that unrecognized forces of the past or present—or even the future—work through the thought and actions of living men. This occur-red to me when I was writing the first stories of the Conan series especially. 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 typewriter—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. 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 convinc-ingly of him at all. This has happened in the past with nearly all my rather numerous characters; suddenly I 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." (Letter to Clark

  11

  Ashton Smith, December 14, 1933; published in Amra, vol. II, no. 39; copyright © 1966 by the Terminus, & Ft. Mudge Electrick Street Railway Gazette.)

  "It may sound fantastic to link the term 'realism' with Conan; but as a matter of fact—his superantural adven-tures aside—he is the most realistic character I have 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 sub-consciousness took the dominant characteristics of vari-ous prize-fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I had come in contact w ith, and combining them all, produced the amalgama-tion I call Conan the Cimmerian.'' (Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, July 23, 1935; published in The Howard Collec-tor, vol. I, no. 5; copyright © 1964 by Glenn Lord; reprinted in Amra, vol. II, no. 39.)

  During the last two decades, a large number of unpub-lished story manuscripts have turned up in collections of Howard's papers. These include eight Conan stories, some complete and some in the form of unfinished manu-scripts , outlines, or fragments. It has been my lot to prepare most of these stories for publication, completing those that were incomplete. I have also, in collaboration with my colleagues Lin Carter and Bjorn Nyberg, written several pastiches, based upon hints in Howard's notes and letters, to fil gaps in the saga. Two of these are included in the present volume.

  When the story "The God in the Bowl" appeared in manuscript in 1951, I revised it considerably for publica-tion. For the present edition, however, I have gone back to the original manuscript and produced a version much closer to the original, with a bare minimum of editorial changes. The present volume is chronologically the first volume of the complete Conan saga.

  12

  "Heroic fantasy" is the name I have given to a sub-genre of fiction, otherwise called the

  "sword-and-sorcery'' story. It is a story of action and adventure laid in a more or less imaginary world, where magic works and where modern science and technology have not yet been discovered. The setting may (as in the Conan stories) be this Earth as it is conceived to have been long ago, or as it will be in the remote future, or it may be another planet or another dimension.

  Such a story combines the color and dash of the histori-cal costume romance with the atavistic supernatural thrills of the weird, occult, or ghost story. When well done, it provides the purest fun of fiction of any kind. It is escape fiction wherein one escapes clear out of the real world into one where all men are strong, all women beautiful, all life adventurous, and all problems simple, and nobody even mentions the income tax or the dropout problem or socialized medicine.

  William Morris pioneered the heroic fantasy in Great Britain in the 1880s. In the early years of this century, Lord Dunsany and Eric R. Eddison developed the genre further. In the 1930s, the appearance of the magazines Weird Tales and, later, Unknown Worlds furnished out-lets for stories of this type, and many memorable sword-and-sorcery narratives were written. These include Howard's stories of Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane; Clark Aston Smith's macabre tales of Hyperborea, Atlan-tis, Averoigne, and the future continent Zothique; Henry Kuttner's Atlantean stories; C. L. Moore's narratives of Jirel of Joiry; and Fritz Leiber's Gray Mouser stories. (I might also mention Fletcher Pratt's and my tales of Harold Shea.) After the Second World War, the magazine market for stories of this kind shrank, and it looked for a while as if fantasy had become a casualty of the machine age. Then, with the publication of J. R. R.

  Tolkien's trilogy, The

  13

  Fellowship of the Ring, and the reprinting of many earlier works in the field, the genre revived. Now it is flourishing again, and it is inevitable that one of its giants—Robert E. Howard—and his greatest imaginative effort—the Conan saga—should be made available.

  L. Sprague de Camp

  14

  letter from R. E. Howard to P. S. Miller

  Early in 1936, two fans of Howard's Conan stories— P. Schuyler Mitter, the educator and science-fiction writer, and Dr. John D. Clark, the chemist—worked out, from the stories that had appeared up to then, an outline of Conan's career and a map of the world in the Hyborian Age. Miller wrote Howard about the results of this research. He received a reply, written just three months before Howard's death, which sheds light on Howard's concept of Conan and of the setting for the stories:

  Lock Box 313 Cross Plains, Texas March 10, 1936 Dear Mr. Miller:

  I feel indeed honored that you and Dr. Clark should be so interested in Conan as to work out an outline oi his career and a map of his environs. Both are surprizingly accurate, considering the vagueness of the data you had to work with. I have 'the original map—that is the one I drew up when I first started writing about Conan— around here somewhere and I'll see if I can't find it and let you have a look at it. It includes only the countries west of Vilayet and north of Kush. I've never attempted to map the southern and eastern kingdoms, though I have a fairly clear outline of their geography in my mind. However, in writing about them I feel a certain amount of license, since the inhabitants of the western Hyborian nations were about as ignorant concerning the peoples and

  16

  countries of the south and east as the people of medieval Europe were ignorant of Africa and Asia. In writing about the western Hyborian nations I feel confined within the limits of known and inflexible boundaries and territories, but in fictionizing the rest of the world, I feel able to give my imagination freer play. That is, having adopted a certain conception of geography and ethnology, I feel compelled to abide by it, in the interests of consistency. My conception of the east and south is not so definite or so arbitrary.

  Concerning Kush, however, it is one of the black king-doms south of Stygia, the northern-most, in fact, and has given its name to the whole southern coast. Thus, when an Hyborian speaks of Kush, he is generally speaking of not the kingdom itself, one of many such kingdoms, but of the Black Coast in general. And he is likely to speak of any black man as a Kushite, whether he happens to be a Keshani, Darfari, Puntan, or Kushite proper. This is natural, since the Kushites were the first black men with whom the Hyborians came in contact—Barachan pirates trafficking with and raiding them.

  As for 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.

  Your outline follows his career as I have visualized it pretty closely. The differences are minor. As you deduct^

  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. He was born on a battle field, during a fight between his tribe and a horde of raiding Vanir. The

  17

  country claimed by and roved over by his clan lay in the northwest of Cimmerian, 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 con-cerning 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 weight 180 pounds, though he lacked much of having his full growth.

  There was the space of about a year between Vanarium and his entrance into the thief-city of Zamora.

  During this time he returned to the northern territories of his tribe, and made his first journey beyond the boundaries of Cimmeria. This, strange to say, was north instead of south. Why or how, I am not certain, but he spent some months among a tribe of the AEsir, fighting with the Vanir and the Hyperboreans, and developing a hate for the latter which lasted all his life and later affected his policies as king of Aquilonia.

  Captured by them, he escaped southward and came into Zamora in time to make his debut in print.

  I am not sure that the adventure chronicled in "Rogues in the House" occurred in Zamora. The presence of op-posing factions of politics would seem to indicate other-wise, 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

 

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