Red Nails
core novella 1936 Conan the Barbarian
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 |
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan the Barbarian
- 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
← Conan the Barbarian dossier · All universes
One of 3732 works in the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.