Chronologically Speaking, Part Seventeen: The Nestor Synopsis ("The Hall of the Dead")

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.

With "Red Nails," which I covered last time in this column, I reached the end of the Conan of Cimmeria stories that were published in Weird Tales during Robert E. Howard's lifetime. For a time, most of the rest of Howard's Conan stories were hidden away in a trunk. Years went by without a new story to be published, except for some items like the "Hyborian Age" essay in 1938. Sixteen years passed before a new narrative would come out.

I've been re-reading the Conan stories in publication order for this series, and now that I'm to the posthumous publications, I've got to make a decision: do I read them in the order that any version of them came out in, or by order of when we saw the original, unadulterated text penned by Howard? So many of these stories were heavily edited by L. Sprague de Camp or others and then sometimes had decades between the edited version becoming public and Howard's original story debuting later. Picking one or the other doesn't really matter for this exercise, but since I'm focusing so heavily on Howard's original intent, I'll be picking the order in which the Howard original was published. 

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Literary agent Glenn Lord acquired the Howard trunk full of thousands of unpublished pages and L. Sprague de Camp had the original synopsis for this story by 1966. L. Sprague de Camp's version, entitled "The Hall of the Dead" was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction as early as 1967 and then was reprinted in the Lancer paperback Conan that same year.

The following decade, Howard's original synopsis, referred to by Conan scholars as "The Nestor synopsis" since Howard's version is untitled, was printed in the fanzine Fantasy Crossroads #1 by the Graceland College Club. Due to its unfinished nature, it has largely been overshadowed by the L. Sprague de Camp edit.

My copy of The Complete Chronicles of Conan came with the original Howard version as one of the last stories inside, but it puts de Camps's "Hall of the Dead" title at the top. Let's take a look at any chronological clues in this short piece:

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• Conan is acting as a thief in Zamora. A section of the city is referred to as "The Maul," which likely refers to the same Maul from "The Tower of the Elephant." Since the city is unnamed, it is possible that it's not Zamora the City of Thieves and that there are multiple Zamorian cities that have a slum section called "The Maul," the same way many cities have a generically-named "Red Light District" or "Chinatown" or "downtown." I think it's most likely that this city is the same as the one in "The Tower of the Elephant."
  • de Camp moves this to Shadizar the Wicked, but there's no reason to believe Howard had this in mind at all.
  • Additionally, one common hypothesis about Zamora is that the City of Thieves has no name (it's not officially "Zamora, Zamora" like "New York, New York" in this hypothesis), and this city matching many other aspects of the one in "The Tower of the Elephant" lends some credence to that idea. 
• Conan is apparently a more skilled thief than we've seen before, as he has stolen from noblemen and merchants in the nearby Zamorian city, enraging the upper class.
• Conan opts to allow Nestor to take all the coins and gold in the treasure room while only taking a jade serpent and set of green gems for himself. This strikes me as rather naïve, or perhaps informed by what Conan had seen of the Heart of the Elephant in Yara's tower. 
• Conan escapes the unnamed city with a young woman, but not with Nestor, so I find it unlikely that the Gunderman mentioned in the beginning of "Rogues in the House" is necessarily the same one as Nestor. That Gunderman was specifically stated to be a deserter, but Nestor is not acting in the service of the military in Gunderland. He's a mercenary, not a conscripted solider. It doesn't really change the placement of "Rogues in the House" or anything right now, but I have a feeling I'll be moving it soon...

With the above (which isn't much!) it seems like the only real placement we have that makes sense is that this story immediately follows "The Tower of the Elephant," with an implied time of several months elapsing between them so that Conan can become a much more skilled thief. 

Next time, we'll be looking at yet another thief story in "The God in the Bowl."

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Here's the updated chronology:

1. The Tower of the Elephant
2. The Nestor synopsis
3. Rogues in the House
4. Queen of the Black Coast
5. Xuthal of the Dusk
6. Iron Shadows in the Moon
7. The Devil in Iron
8. The People of the Black Circle
9. A Witch Shall Be Born
10. The Man-Eaters of Zamboula
11. Black Colossus
12. The Pool of the Black One
13. The Servants of Bit-Yakin
14. Red Nails
15. Beyond the Black River
16. The Phoenix on the Sword
17. The Scarlet Citadel
18. The Hour of the Dragon