Edited by L. Sprague de Camp

The Flame Knife is a 1955 fantasy novella by American writers Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp, featuring Howard’s sword and sorcery hero Conan the Barbarian. It was revised by de Camp from Howard’s original story, a then-unpublished oriental tale featuring Francis X. Gordon titled “Three-Bladed Doom”. De Camp changed the names of the characters, added the fantastic element, and recast the setting into Howard’s Hyborian Age. The story was first published in the hardbound collection Tales of Conan (Gnome Press, 1955), and subsequently appeared in the paperback collection Conan the Wanderer (Lancer Books, 1968), as part of which it has been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, Dutch, and Italian. It was published itself in paperback book form by Ace Books in 1981, in an edition profusely illustrated by Esteban Maroto.

Contents

• Conan: The Flame Knife • [Conan] • (1981) • novel by L. Sprague de Camp and Robert E. Howard
• Conan: The Flame Knife • interior artwork by Esteban Maroto [as by Maroto]

Plot

Conan, leader of a band of Kozaki mercenaries in the service of King Kobad of Iranistan, quarrels with his employer over the king’s command to capture Balash, chief of the Kushafi nomads and Conan’s friend. Instead, Conan has his men warn the Kushafi. In the Gorge of Ghosts, the two armies are attacked by members of the Sons of Yezm, a cult of assassins whose symbol is the Flame Knife. The cultists kidnap Nanaia, Conan’s current girlfriend. The Cimmerian tracks them to their stronghold, where he becomes embroiled in a conflict with his old rival Olgerd Vladislav, an opponent first encountered in Howard’s story “A Witch Shall be Born”.

Notes

Price: $2.50 (1st, 2nd, and 3rd printings)
Price: $2.95 (4th and 5th printings)
“Three Bladed Doom” features El Borak and has both a long (42,000 words) and a short (24,000 words) version.
L. Sprague de Camp rewrote the long version into a Conan story titled “The Flame Knife.”
This book is lavishly illustrated by Esteban Maroto.
There are 50 black and white illustrations.
Some fill part of a page, some are full page, and some are double page spreads.

1981 (2nd printing)
December 1982 (3rd printing)
September 1985 (4th printing)
September 1986 (5th printing)
ISBN-10: 0441116655 (4th printing)
ISBN-10: 0441117163 (5th printing)

The Maroto art credit per the title page. The copyright page gives the copyright to Estaban Maroto, a misspelling of Esteban Maroto.