Rogues in the House
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 | 3.78 (641 ratings, collected 2026-09-13) |
| Page count | 48 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781633553521 |
Synopsis
Jailed in a Zamoran city and awaiting execution for a killing committed in self-defense, Conan is visited by the young aristocrat Murilo, who offers him freedom and gold in exchange for assassinating Nabonidus, the corrupt and feared priest known as the Red Priest who effectively rules the city from behind the throne. After a friend helps him escape his cell, Conan makes his way to Nabonidus's fortified mansion to carry out the killing, only to discover the priest has enemies far stranger and more dangerous than Murilo or himself, including a rival gang leader and something monstrous kept hidden within the house. Conan must navigate the mansion's traps and its unexpected inhabitants before he can complete, or abandon, the job he was hired for.
Where it sits
- Universe: Conan / Kull / Bran Mak Morn
- Series: The Conan Stories core; position 6 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 6 of 20: previous Black Colossus (1933) · next Shadows in the Moonlight (1934)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Howard_bibliography
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogues_in_the_House
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