THE HALL OF THE DEAD

“The Hall of the Dead” is the first short story of my adventure through this chronology that was outlined by Robert E. Howard some time during the 1930s and was then fleshed out into a finished short story by L. Sprague de Camp in the 1960s. The original synopsis/outline/brief from Howard is only about two pages long, but hits all the major beats that make it into the final story. I became really interested in how the posthumously-published stories were found while I was reading this short story. 

It looks like we owe most of the credit to Glenn Lord, who became the literary agent for the Howard estate in 1965. It seems like most everything that would be published after that came from one, single trunk that was in the possession of E. Hoffman Price, who was a friend of REH and H.P. Lovecraft. The trunk contained tens of thousands of pages of Howard material, according to Wikipedia, and was the source for every Howard-related item that was published until 1997. Lord published the stuff just about everywhere, including all kinds of extra material like letters, poetry, a Howard biography, and even served as part of getting the 1982 movie made.

After that trunk was acquired by Lord in 1965, Sprague de Camp had the synopsis version of this story in his possession by 1966. Conan scholars frequently refer to that version only as the "Nestor synopsis."

By February of 1967, the built-out final version of the story, by then christened "The Hall of the Dead," was published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I’d love to know how that came about. Was de Camp specifically asked by Lord to finish it? That seems to be the case for later story "The Hand of Nergal," where Carter was asked to take a crack at fleshing it out. I couldn’t find anything online getting more detailed than just the paper trail of who had this story. “The God in the Bowl,” which is up next in the chronology, was also started by Howard and finished decades later by de Camp.
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We are still in Zamora following the events of “The Tower of the Elephant” (and, in a perhaps apocryphal way, Conan and the Sorcerer) By my estimation, it has been between a few weeks to a few months since those stories ended as Conan has apparently gathered enough heat on his back though thievery to have to skip town. Shadizar the Wicked is the capital of Zamora, and is there a single city in this entire region that doesn’t have a Maul? It sounds like, very similar to the City of Thieves, that there is a tavern-laced, crime ridden section of every Zamorian city. As a side note, Howard was rather general in parts of his synopsis, so de Camp takes some liberties to do things like filling in names. Howard never names which city Conan has left or the name of the city of the ancients, but de Camp fills in Shadizar and Larsha for them. Because of these generalities, it is possible that the Maul mentioned here was the same Maul as the one in "The Tower of the Elephant." I’m not sure. 

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But the other parts of Zamorian society don't sound much better. It seems that Howard intended most Zamorians to be scoundrels, cheats, thieves, murderers, and double-crossers (as they are all described in the Mauls), or, at best, cowards (as the guards accompanying Nestor are in the opening of this tale). It seems hard to separate this from the fact that Howard, a vicious racist, describes the people of Zamora as “dark haired and dark-eyed.” I couldn’t help but notice that Conan’s ally in this story, and the only other character with much competence, is a more northern, western, Gunderman much more similar to Conan than those of Zamora.

That Gunderman named Nestor is a fun character who’s on Conan’s trail at the beginning, following him to the abandoned city of Larsha the Accursed to collect the bounty on his head. Larsha is the star of “The Hall of the Dead” for me, and gives the story some true Indiana Jones vibes. Larsha is the city of the ancients, built millenia before the other Zamorian cities- maybe even before the Cataclysm- and it sits untouched save for the wear of time. The city is white in the moonlight as Conan enters it, with an “aura of evil” hanging over it and expressive little details like half-beast, half-demon gargoyles dotting the buildings. My favorite part of the story was Conan and Nestor’s entrance into the Hall of the Dead, gradually seeing what their torches will illuminate and stepping through ruins that probably haven’t been seen in eons.

User OttoB63 created this version of Conan slaying the slug over on DeviantArt.

Conan bests a gigantic slug by dropping several gargoyles on it. Gary Romeo notes something at Sprague de Camp Fan that I also noticed: Conan’s been killing everything swordless so far. He burned the Thing in the Crypt, smooshed the giant spider in the Tower of the Elephant and has now sort of gruesomely impaled a giant slug while it writhes to death, not dissimilar to when you have to really swat at a wasp a couple of times before it dies.

That’s not the only thread running through some of these early stories. Elements of the actual Hall of the Dead feel remarkably similar to “The Thing in the Crypt;” there are some tempting riches surrounded by still mummies on thrones, removing those riches cause their sentinels to come to life, and essentially the first thing noted about the reanimation is the movement of their jaws. Maybe de Camp still had some of this rattling around in his mind 12 years later when he wrote “Thing.” Unlike that story, however, Conan seems to suddenly be able to read, not only some Zamorian but dabbling in other languages as well? Conan notes that he can’t read the inscriptions in the Hall even though he knows some Zamorian, and this directly contradicts “The Thing in the Crypt,” in which Conan says he can’t read and considers it effeminate. Perhaps de Camp didn’t consult stories like this for continuity when writing that one, or maybe he just figured enough time had passed with Conan in society that he’s picked up some of the languages, including some written text. It seems too soon for my taste, but nobody’s really asking what I think.

Conan is still young (around 18) in this story, and his immaturity costs him something at least three times over the course of the narrative. However, he does seem to be getting better and better at what he does. While he’s always had the natural physical advantage in a fight, he seems to be growing in his skills as a swordsman in the fight against Nestor. He’s becoming a better thief and even gaining his first reputation.
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Just like in “Tower,” Conan ultimately leaves empty-handed, which I think is a much more fun ending than letting him get all his riches. He’s still young, he’s still hungry, and it gives him narrative reason to move from place to place at this point in his career. Conan doesn’t seem too worried about it either, as de Camp lets him laugh it off with Nestor along the Corinthian road at the end of the story. I’d say this is a pretty decent Conan story (or “yarn,” as Howard frequently called them), mostly due to the fun of plundering Larsha. It’s a good time.

We’re now leaving Zamora after three consecutive stories in the triangle-shaped (but also sometimes crescent-shaped?) region. Conan is headed west on the Corinthian Road and we will next see him on the other side of Corinthia, in Nemedia.

★★★★☆