Today, while its form and function as a genre has changed, the appeal of historical fiction remains undiminished. It is the literature of spectacle and pageantry; at its simplest it is pure entertainment wrapped in a veneer of respectability often denied to its close cousin, fantasy. In the hands of a master, however, historical fiction does more than entertain … it puts a distinctly human face on our collective past.

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) was such a master. Though his professional career spanned but a little more than a decade, he wrote, by conservative estimate, some three million words of poetry and prose, much of it having an historical slant. Indeed, a love of times past ran deep in Howard’s veins; a survey of his correspondence reveals that virtually every letter between 1923 and 1936 makes some mention of his interest in things historical – from the Celtic migrations to the lives of local gunfighters. With this in mind, it’s relatively easy to make the case that even Howard’s non-historical writings, his tales of Conan of Cimmeria or Kull of Atlantis, are at heart historical fiction. Who can read Black Colossus, for instance, and not see the shadow of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the plight of the tiny city-state of Khoraja? Does not the blood-feud in Red Nails echo the equally bloody Lincoln County War? Such parallels abound in Howard’s fiction – some tenuous, others flare-bright and obvious.

The stories collected in this volume, however, are solidly historical. They owe their genesis to Howard’s literary patron and Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, who solicited the young Texan in the summer of 1930 to contribute to his newest pulp magazine, Oriental Stories: “I especially want historical tales,” Wright’s letter stated, “tales of the Crusades, of Genghis Khan, of Tamerlane, and the wars between Islam and Hindooism.” This was a welcome opportunity for Howard, and he seems to have wasted little time in acting upon it.