Queen of the Black Coast
core short fiction 1934 Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
Record
| First published | 1934 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | short fiction |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 3.88 (1,138 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 119 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781633553514 |
Synopsis
Fleeing Argos after killing a merchant captain who tried to have him arrested, Conan boards a vessel bound for the southern land of Kush, only for the ship to be attacked by the pirate queen Belit and her crew. Rather than kill him, Belit, drawn to Conan's strength and defiance, invites him to join her as both warrior and partner aboard her ship, the Tigress. Together they raid coastal settlements along the Black Coast and venture inland toward ancient, overgrown ruins rumored to hold treasure and secrets far older than any living kingdom, forging a fierce partnership built on plunder, loyalty, and mutual respect.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 8 of 20 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert E. Howard
Notes
- From the series record (The Conan Stories): 20 works wholly written by Robert E. Howard himself (16 published in his lifetime, 1932-1936, plus 4 complete manuscripts he finished but that were rejected by Weird Tales and only published posthumously in his own unaltered text, 1954-1996), the modern Del Rey 'Original Conan' trilogy (ed. Patrice Louinet, 2002-2005) presents all 20 together as the definitive, textually-restored, Howard-only edition. No internal in-story chronological order is recorded here: at least six independent, mutually disagreeing chronologies have been proposed by different editors/scholars since 1936 (Miller/Clark, de Camp's two versions, William Galen Gray, Joe Marek, Dale Rippke), and Howard himself is documented as having 'had little more than a general idea of the character's career path' and deliberately wrote the stories out of sequence, the same principled non-invention applied to Steven Brust's Dragaera. Book order here follows first-publication-of-the-actual-registered-text year, which is a sourced fact, not an invented reading order.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Conan Stories: position 8 of 20: previous Shadows in the Moonlight (1934) · next The Devil in Iron (1934)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_the_Black_Coast
← Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.