Red Nails
core novella 1936 Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
Record
| First published | 1936 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novella |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.04 (2,245 ratings, collected 2026-08-06) |
| Page count | 295 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781681463841 |
Synopsis
Fleeing a relentless pursuit alongside his companion, the fierce pirate captain Valeria, Conan takes shelter within the walls of Xuchotl, an ancient city he assumed to be abandoned amid the wilderness. Once inside, the pair discover the city is in fact still inhabited, by the last remnants of two noble houses locked in a generations-old blood feud that has consumed most of the population and left the survivors sustained by treachery, sorcery and secret passages built for murder. Conan and Valeria quickly find themselves drawn into the feud's deadly machinery, unable to remain neutral observers as both factions maneuver to use the newcomers against their rivals.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 16 of 20 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Robert E. Howard
Notes
- Serialized in 3 parts, Weird Tales Jul-Oct 1936; the last Conan story published in Howard's lifetime.
- 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 16 of 20: previous The Hour of the Dragon (1935) · next The Frost-Giant's Daughter (1954)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Nails
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