EXTRACTS: The Complete Conan of Cimmeria Volume 3 © The Book Palace (416 PAGES in Full edition)

It is therefore in these that we will find Howard’s final words on Conan, the conclusion to his four-year stint with the character that brought him fame. They do not represent any sort of conclusion whatsoever to the character’s life (how could they when Howard himself pleaded ignorance: “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.”), but they are the conclusion to the series: Red Nails was completed in July 1935, eleven months before Howard’s suicide. No evidence exists that Howard ever wrote anything about the character after that date. Weird Tales’ inability to pay Howard regularly probably played a great part in this, and it could be said that Howard was forced by circumstances to abandon the character. The fact that he submitted only one story to Weird Tales after Red Nails supports the idea. However, by late 1934, Howard was clearly branching out from fantasy fiction, and was more and more interested in the history and lore of his own country, the American Southwest, and in its potential as a subject for fiction. It is this growing passion which colored the last Conan tales: for the first time, Howard’s interest was something with which he was in touch in his everyday life. His knowledge of the Celts, which had permeated many of the early Conan stories, was gained from books only. The last Conan stories – those contained in this volume – were tales in which Howard would continue, as he had in all the stories to date, to explore his theme of “barbarism versus civilization,” but for the first time he was in a position to add much more sincerity and firsthand knowledge of his subject. Three of the tales contained in this volume are among Howard’s best Conan stories: Beyond the Black River , Red Nails, and The Black Stranger . The first two are overwhelmingly considered by Howard scholars and connoisseurs alike to be among the best tales of the entirety of Howard’s fiction. Here was a writer at the peak of his talent producing the tales which would eventually propel him beyond the status of exceptional storyteller, to that of an author who also had a message to deliver. With these last Conan tales, Howard proved that he was indeed worthy of critical attention. It is in that sense that we can consider the last Conan stories as a conclusion to the series, but also as a form of literary testament. The events depicted in Beyond the Black River were nothing especially new in Howard’s fiction, replete with tales depicting successful forays of savages against civilized settlements and cities that had grown too weak to defend themselves. In Beyond the Black River , as in those other tales, it is the inevitable division of the civilized people and the weakening that goes with it which brings about their defeat. What sets Beyond the Black River apart, however, is that the background and characters ring true, because all were drawn from sources that were so much closer to Howard than his usual pseudo-Celtic or pseudo-Assyrian settings. The settlers, farmers, and workers that people this Introduction v