It’s been a busy week – and while I kept reading Conan, I had a hard time posting about it.
So today I will bundle together a few items.

Let’s start with Devil in Iron, a story I normally mix up with Shadow in the Moonlight – we start on an island, there are ancient ruins, and a young woman named Olimpia.
Other Howard staples include: an unsavory Turanian nobleman has plans that involve Conan, but a resurrected wizard has other ideas; Conan fights the resurrected wizard and a giant serpent.

It’s fun? Yes.
Is it good? Reasonably so.
Is it great? No.

Reading Conan in chronological order is particularly hard on Devil in Iron, that appeared in Weird Tales in August 1934, and therefore in squeezed between Queen of the Black Coast and People of the Black Circle, that are both excellent.

Following Devil in Iron in the September, October and November 1934 issues of WT, People of the Black Circle is probably my favorite Conan story, and I discussed it at length here.

Next up in December 1934 is A witch shall be born.
Howard and Conan are pretty popular with the Weird Tales crowd at this point – and they make the cover of the magazine regularly.
A witch shall be born is again not a great story, buy it has a killer structure – I usually point it out as a masterclass in how to write a tight, compact story cramming in all you need.

We get a bit of a Prisoner of Zenda plot when Queen Taramis of Khauran is replaced by her evil twin Salome, and Conan is sucked in the plot, after a stint hanging on a cross.
Yes, this story is where that scene comes from.

And we end this bundle piece with Jewels of Gwaluhur, that Fritz Leiber described as “repetitious and childish, a self-vitiating brew of pseudo-science, stage illusions, and the ‘genuine’ supernatural.”

And you know, Leiber’s harsh but it is not wrong.

It is a routine Conan yarn, once again penalized for coming after the solid Witch and before the masterful Beyond the Black River.
Once again we get a lost city in the jungle, a girl in peril, a treasure and a bunch of giant apes.
Fun, because Conan is always fun, but we’ve read better.

And this is it for the time being – next up is one of the best Conan stories aver, and we’re going to have fun.