While it wasn’t
quite as effortless as Howard makes out, there is no doubt that
Conan is one of Howard’s most fully realized characters.
The “little border town” where he first appeared to
the author is in all likelihood Mission, Texas, where the Howards
visited in early 1932. On the typescript of Howard’s poem,
‘Cimmeria,’ which he sent to Emil Petaja was the comment
“Written in Mission, Texas, February 1932; suggested by
the memory of the hill-country above Fredericksburg seen in a
mist of winter rain.” Apparently that “endless vista
- hill on hill, slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers”
triggered something in the subconscious of the writer. The first
line of the poem is “I remember.” He explained to
Smith: “Some mechanism in my sub-consciousness 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.”
As with previous characters, however, Conan’s first adventure
was not an original one. Following a tried and true pattern, Howard
dusted off an unsold King Kull story, ‘By This Axe I Rule!’
and added a weird element and background about Conan. The end
result was ‘The Phoenix on the Sword’ (December 1932),
in which the readers of Weird Tales were introduced to the Cimmerian,
who would, for the next three years, rival Seabury Quinn’s
occult detective Jules de Grandin as the most popular character
in the magazine. The Hyborian Age, Howard’s telescoped composite
of human history and cultures, allowed him free range to place
his character in myriad settings, to explore human nature and
history, and to try out new types of stories. In the spring of
1933, Howard took on Otis Adelbert Kline as his agent, continuing
to deal directly only with Weird Tales. Under Kline’s prodding,
and because his need for money was made more urgent by his mother’s
worsening health and attendant medical expenses, Howard began
‘splashing the field,’ trying to write as many different
types of stories for as many different magazines as he could.
Conan, because he could range freely throughout the world, provided
a useful vehicle for a writer trying his hand at new types of
fiction. Thus we have a Conan detective story (‘The God
in the Bowl’), Conan pirate stories (‘The Pool of
the Black One,’ ‘The Black Stranger’), Conan
frontier stories (‘Beyond the Black River’), and several
Conan oriental adventures (‘A Witch Shall Be Born,’
‘The Man-Eaters of Zamboula,’ ‘People of the
Black Circle’).
Conan’s - and his creator’s - career was very nearly
cut short by an automobile accident. On the night of December
29, 1933, Howard and three friends were returning from Brownwood
on a foggy, rainy night, when Robert ran his car head-on into
a flagpole, painted grey and set in concrete in the middle of
the street, in the town of Rising Star. One companion was thrown
through the windshield, another suffered an injured leg. Howard
himself was “driven against the wheel with such terrific
force that I crumpled it with my breast-bone,” and was gashed
across his jaw by a shard of glass, laying bare the bone. “All
parties made rapid and uneventful recoveries,” Howard wrote.
“The town where the accident occurred helped me pay for
having my car repaired, and the flagpole has been removed - though
one of their own citizens had to wreck himself on it before that
was done.”