"The Devil in Iron" -- Robert E. Howard (WEIRD TALES, August 1934)

The first section of The Big Book of Adventure Stories is entitled "Sword and Sorcery," and the second story in the collection, "The Devil in Iron" by Robert E. Howard, is apropos, as the phrase "Sword and Sorcery" was practically invented to refer to Howard's visceral pseudo-historical adventure yarns, featuring such larger than life heroes as Solomon Kane, a Puritan swordsman and exterminator of evil; Bran Mak Morn, last king of the Caledonian Picts; and most famous of all, Conan the Cimmerian, a wandering swordsman, thief, and eventually king by his own hand who roamed the fictitious "Hyborian Age," a period taking place about 12,000 years ago.  "The Devil in Iron" is a relatively early Conan tale, seeing publication in the August 1934 issue of Weird Tales.  It's never been one of my favorites of the Howard canon, but let's take a look, shall we?

Conan has risen to the position of hetman of the kozaks, an ethnically-ambiguous group of robbers, murderers, scoundrels and ne'er-do-wells, driven out of the established nearby kingdoms of Turan and Hyrkania (loosely corresponding to Turkey/south-eastern Europe and the Mongolian steppes, respectively).  Under Conan's command, the kozaks have become more organized and destructive then ever before, leading a pair of Turanian nobles to concoct a plan to lure Conan away from the safety of his people and assassinate him.

Unbeknownst to the Turanians or to Conan, the island chosen as the site for the ambush has recently become the home of a resurrected demon, a creature from an elder age clothed in the form of a man cast from iron.  Released from its slumbering prison by chance (a lightning strike opening its stony tomb and a fisherman removing the magic dagger keeping it asleep), the demon has set about recreating the ancient city that it once ruled.

"The Devil in Iron" is generally reckoned as one of the weakest of the early Conan tales, and I have to agree.  With a plot hinging heavily on coincidence and deus ex machina, and settings and character archetypes seemingly lifted from Howard's earlier "Iron Shadows in the Moon" (published in Weird Tales, April 1934, as "Shadows in the Moonlight"), "The Devil in Iron" also feels in many ways like a practice run for Howard's later (and much, much better) "The Servants of Bit-Yakin" (published in Weird Tales, March 1935, as "Jewels of Gwahlur") with its competing factions and forbidding, nigh-inaccessible island setting.

The biggest failing in "The Devil in Iron," I think, is that Howard barely deviates from presenting Conan as being exactly as the Turanians perceive him to be - a gluttonous, lecherous meathead easily lured to his death by the right blonde bait.  Other than recognizing an animal skin as belonging to the extinct Hyborian leopard and identifying a giant python as being a species long since extinct, Conan offers little to none of the surprising insight and knowledge he's gained as a wanderer, and for the most part he's too busy thinking with a more southern aspect of his anatomy to recognize the trap that's been laid for him.

Art by Boris Vallejo

The female lead, a Nemedian princess-turned-slave named Octavia is nothing really to write home about either.  Howard's female characters tend to fall into three camps: Evil witches, totally bitchin' swordswomen, or spirited women in way over their heads.  Octavia is very much the last of these.  While she has the daring and audacity to escape from the seraglio of one of the wickedest men in Turan, she quickly becomes a damsel in distress for Conan to sling across his shoulders in the face of the supernatural; however, kudos to her for regaining her composure in time to give Conan a metaphorical poleaxing with a well-chosen sarcastic comment at the story's conclusion.  He's still adding her to his list of conquests, of course.  He is Conan after all.