The Devil in Iron
()
About this ebook
Read more from Robert E. Howard
Dead Men Tell No Tales - 60+ Pirate Novels, Treasure-Hunt Tales & Sea Adventure Classics: Blackbeard, Captain Blood, Facing the Flag, Treasure Island, The Gold-Bug, Captain Singleton, Swords of Red Brotherhood, Under the Waves, The Ways of the Buccaneers... Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Christmas Library: 250+ Essential Christmas Novels, Poems, Carols, Short Stories...by 100+ Authors Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Complete Works of Robert E. Howard (Golden Deer Classics) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Conan Saga Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Robert E. Howard's Conan the Cimmerian Barbarian: The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Start Conan the Barbarian Super Pack Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Adventures of Solomon Kane Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRed Nails: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Cthulhu Mythos MEGAPACK®: 40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Occult Detective Megapack: 29 Classic Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Greatest Christmas Stories: 120+ Authors, 250+ Magical Christmas Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Horror Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Tales of Cthulhu Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Weird Fiction MEGAPACK ®: 25 Stories from Weird Tales Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Adventure MEGAPACK ®: 25 Classic Adventure Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsShadow Kingdoms: The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard, Vol. 1 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Robert E. Howard Western Super Pack Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related to The Devil in Iron
Related ebooks
The Weird Tales of Conan the Barbarian Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Devil in Iron Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSecrets of the Bosphorus: Ambassador Morgenthau's Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Devil in Iron: With linked Table of Contents Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJewels of Gwahlur Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Devil in Iron, Respawned Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack Colossus Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRed Blades of Black Cathay Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNocturnes in Purgatory Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Spirit of the Border: A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Blood of Belshazzar Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Lion of Tiberias Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBeyond the Black River and Other Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRed Nails Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hawk of the Hills Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Shadow of a King Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Prairie Flower A Tale of the Indian Border Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsZane Grey: 22 Novels Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe History of Xenophon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJewels of Gwahlur Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTHE SAGA OF KING KULL: 3 NOVELS, 1 POEM Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsConan the Barbarian: Black Colossus Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Border Rifles: A Tale of the Texan War Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Good Day to Die Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Sword of Bedwyr Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Swords of the Red Brotherhood Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Suppressed Gospels and Epistles of the Original New Testament Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Spirit of the Border Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Trail-Hunter A Tale of the Far West Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Classics For You
The Bell Jar: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Warrior of the Light: A Manual Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fellowship Of The Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hell House: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5East of Eden Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rebecca Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Sun Also Rises: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Animal Farm: A Fairy Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Republic by Plato Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Two Towers: Being the Second Part of The Lord of the Rings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Scarlet Letter Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Things They Carried Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Learn French! Apprends l'Anglais! THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY: In French and English Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Count of Monte-Cristo English and French Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5As I Lay Dying Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sense and Sensibility (Centaur Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad (The Samuel Butler Prose Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Quiet American Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for The Devil in Iron
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
The Devil in Iron - Robert E. Howard
The Devil in Iron
by
Robert E. Howard
Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Contents
The Devil in Iron
Robert E. Howard
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
Robert E. Howard
Robert Ervin Howard was born in Peaster, Texas in 1906. During his youth, his family moved between a variety of Texan boomtowns, and Howard – a bookish and somewhat introverted child – was steeped in the violent myths and legends of the Old South. Although he loved reading and learning, Howard developed a distinctly Texan, hardboiled outlook on the world. He became a passionate fan of boxing, taking it up at an amateur level, and from the age of nine began to write adventure tales of semi-historical bloodshed. In 1919, when Howard was thirteen, his family moved to the Central Texas hamlet of Cross Plains, where he would stay for the rest of his life.
At fifteen Howard began to read the pulp magazines of the day, and to write more seriously. The December 1922 issue of his high school newspaper featured two of his stories, ‘Golden Hope Christmas’ and ‘West is West’. In 1924 he sold his first piece – a short caveman tale titled ‘Spear and Fang’ – for $16 to the not-yet-famous Weird Tales magazine. He published with the magazine regularly over the next few years. 1929 was a breakout year for Howard, in that the 23-year-old writer began to sell to other magazines, such as Ghost Stories and Argosy, both of whom had previously sent him hundreds of rejection slips. In 1930, he began a correspondence with weird fiction master H. P. Lovecraft which ran up to his death six years later, and is regarded as one of the great correspondence cycles in all of fantasy literature.
It was partly due to Lovecraft’s encouragement that Howard created his most famous character, Conan the Cimmerian. Conan – a barbarian-turned-King during the Hyborian Age, a mythical period of some 12,000 years ago – featured in seventeen Weird Tales stories between 1933 and 1936, and is now regarded as having spawned the ‘sword and sorcery’ genre, making Howard’s influence on fantasy literature comparable to that of J. R. R. Tolkien’s. The Conan stories have since been adapted many times, most famously in the series of films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Howard was enjoying an all-time high in sales by the beginning of 1936, but he was also deeply upset by the ill health of his mother, who had fallen into a coma. On the morning of June 11, 1936, he asked an attending nurse whether she would ever recover, and the nurse replied negatively. Howard walked to his car, parked outside the family home in Cross Plains, and shot himself. He died eight hours later, aged just thirty.
I
The fisherman loosened his knife in its scabbard. The gesture was instinctive, for what he feared was nothing a knife could slay, not even the saw-edged crescent blade of the Yuetshi that could disembowel a man with an upward stroke. Neither man nor beast threatened him in the solitude which brooded over the castellated isle of Xapur.
He had climbed the cliffs, passed through the jungle that bordered them, and now stood surrounded by evidences of a vanished state. Broken columns glimmered among the trees, the straggling lines of crumbling walls meandered off into the shadows, and under his feet were broad paves, cracked and bowed by roots growing beneath.
The fisherman was typical of his race, that strange people whose origin is lost in the gray dawn of