I read The Hour of the Dragon, Robert E. Howard‘s only full-length Conan novel, back when I was in high school.
I had found a copy of the 1977 Berkley edition of Howard’s novel, part of the series edited by Karl Edward Wagner that restored the original text, removing Lyon Sprague De camp‘s editorial changes.
It was reading K.E. Wagner’s introduction that I found out the mystery of chapter 20.

It’s not that complicated, mind you.
Quite simply, in The Hour of the Dragon we get from chapter 19 to chapter 21.
There is no Chapter 20.

Now, three hypotheses have been made about this fact.

• there never was a Chapter 20; it was just an error of the editor, that mis-numbered the chapters when the novel was serialized between 1935 and 1936.

• there never was a Chapter 20; Howard planned and outlined it, but then never got round to write it, or he wrote it and thought it was not good enough.

• there was a Chapter 20, and it got lost.

And this third option, of course, is the fascinating one.
Could the editors of Weird tales have misplaced a whole chapter, or cut it without rearranging the numbering?

Maybe it’s a different story.
Fact is, Howard wrote Dragon for a British publisher that was interested in publishing a hardbound edition – they had read and appreciated Howard’s Conan stories, but thought that it would be better to start with a novel, as an ice-breaker on the British market.

So, here’s the way legends are born.
What if Howard put together his novel, Chapter 20 and all, and then mailed it across the Atlantic, and when the project fizzed – because it fizzed – he got it back with one missing chapter?

It’s a long shot, certainly.
It’s highly unlikely.
And yet, as K.E. Wagner observed in that introduction, so many years ago, isn’t it good to imagine that before the project fizzed a few dozens copies were printed, and now somewhere, in a basement somewhere in England, there’s a box full of unbound copies of The Hour of the Dragon, featuring the mysterious Chapter 20?
Wouldn’t it be great?
Ten pages of Conan nobody ever read, sitting there in the dark, waiting to be discovered.
That would be a nice pursuit for Indiana Jones¹!

More seriously, it is interesting to observe how, because of the nature and structure of pulp fiction, it is possible to write a 70.000-words novel that would still stand and function, as a work of fiction, if we droped a full chapter.
Well, ok, maybe not just any chapter, but one out of most chapters.
It comes, I guess, from a certain modular approach, an episodic nature of adventure stories written the old way (whatever that means).
All of which makes a strange counterpoint to the point that Samuel Delany made in his seminal The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, when he noted that removing even a single word from a text might alter radically the whole narrative.

Incidentally, I read Delany’s essay more or less while I was reading The Hour of the Dragon.
Maybe that’s why the two come to my mind, now, at the same time.

In the end, it is highly unlikely that a Chapter 20 ever was written.
And yet, this is the stuff of legends.