Chronologically Speaking, Part Nine: "The Devil in Iron"

Chronologically Speaking is a series focused solely on placing the Conan of Cimmeria stories in timeline order. It's an analysis of only the text of Robert E. Howard's original Conan tales. I'm examining the stories one at a time, in publication order, to show explicit chronological notes to order the stories.

When Robert E. Howard sat down to write "The Devil in Iron," the tenth Conan story to reach publication, it was after a period of nine months during which he didn't write anything for his sword-and-sorcery series character. He had been experiencing bouts of burnout, taking a few months between Conan stories and trying out different genres. He did the same thing right before "Queen of the Black Coast." Perhaps this long gap is why this story is so devoid of other connections to the Hyborian world.

"The Devil in Iron" was published in the August 1934 issue of Weird Tales and followed a very similar plot to the previous story Howard had written, "Iron Shadows in the Moon." Both feature islands in the Vilayet Sea, pirates, iron golem enemies, and fairly forgettable one-off companions. "Devil in Iron" was voted the best story of the issue despite how it re-tread earlier subjects and earned Howard $115.

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There is very little mooring this to one single place in Conan's life.

• Conan is a new chief to the kozaks: "'That is because of the new chief who has risen among them,' answered Ghaznavi. 'You know whom I mean.' 'Aye!' replied Jehungir feelingly. 'It is that devil Conan; he is even wilder than the kozaks, yet he is crafty as a mountain lion.'
  • As a side note, I wondered in my Chronologically Speaking entry about "Iron Shadows in the Moon," why Conan bristles at the term "kozak." Seeing as this story tells us it means "wastrel," I get the sense that it's sort of a slur.
  • Conan evidently met the kozaks with nothing but the clothes on his back and quickly rose through the ranks: "This was Conan, who had wandered into the armed camps of the kozaks with no other possession than his wits and his sword, and who had carved his way to leadership among them."
• Conan refers to the black lotus of Xuthal, which places this story after "Xuthal of the Dusk:" "Her sleep was too deep to be natural. He decided that she must be an addict of some drug, perhaps like the black lotus of Xuthal." This line has vexed many previous chronologizers, because the general consensus seems to be that Conan should be a little older in "Xuthal," but since I've placed it early, this isn't a problem for me right now.
• Has Conan seen a copy of the Book of Skelos? This story seems to imply that he has: "Conan had seen rude images of them, in miniature, among the idol huts of the Yuetshi, and there was a description of them in the Book of Skelos, which drew on prehistoric sources." But where would he have seen a Book of Skelos? The copies seem to be exclusively in the hands of powerful wizards, who Conan is famously not a fan of. Or is this a strangely-worded sentence that just means that there are pictures in the Book of Skelos of the snake creatures he's looking at?
• Conan evidently understands Nemedian: "There was no door in that wall, but he leaned close and heard distinctly. And an icy chill crawled slowly along his spine. The tongue was Nemedian, but the voice was not human." This makes sense based on the placement of "Rogues in the House" well before this.

Here's the really tricky question about placing this story: Are the Free Companions / kozaks essentially the same group as the pirates of the Red Brotherhood? Consider this line about the kozaks.

Ceaselessly they raided the Turanian frontier, retiring in the steppes when defeated; with the pirates of Vilayet, men of much the same breed, they harried the coast, preying off the merchant ships which plied between the Hyrkanian ports.

If the barriers between the kozaks and the pirates are permeable, which this line seems to imply they are, then when we see Conan "carving" out leadership in the group, perhaps this is the same event we see at the end of "Iron Shadows in the Moon," when Conan meets the Red Brotherhood and immediately starts rising in the ranks. In the previous stories in which Conan is a mercenary, he's apparently just of the rank-and-file members, not in leadership, so those stories would go before this.

Some fellow Conan chronology nerds like Dale Rippke have hypothesized that Conan is younger in "Iron Shadows" because of how he approaches the Red Brotherhood (they would argue he does so naively), but that's not an impression I agree with.

Other timelines place this story chronologically right before "The People of the Black Circle," in which Conan is the hetman of the Afghuli hillpeople. That's possible, but I'm inclined right now to place it right after "Iron Shadows in the Moon." That way, he isn't traipsing back all over the world and spends some time on the Vilayet before going anywhere else. I'm not opposed to changing its placement if that makes more sense in the future, but right now, I think it works best immediately after its twin "iron" story.

Our full chronology is now:

1. The Tower of the Elephant
2. Rogues in the House
3. Queen of the Black Coast
4. Xuthal of the Dusk
5. Iron Shadows in the Moon
6. The Devil in Iron
7. Black Colossus
8. The Pool of the Black One
9.  The Phoenix on the Sword
10. The Scarlet Citadel