.epub downloage page: https://hub.hubzilla.de/cloud/grundy/Epub%20Files/Names%20in%20the%20Black%20Book%20-%20Robert%20E.%20Howard.epub
.mobi downloage page (for older ereaders): https://hub.hubzilla.de/cloud/grundy/Epub%20Files/Names%20in%20the%20Black%20Book%20-%20Robert%20E.%20Howard.mobi
HTML page to read online: https://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601701h.html
Before Robert E. Howard was sending Conan into temples full of monsters and lunatic sorcerers, he wrote some weird-ass occult detective stories.
And in this story, Howard goes nuts with the weird-menace formula: poison cigarettes, cobras, assassins, opium dens, secret passages, hallucinogenic drugs, knife fights, torture chambers, a sacrificial altar, a supposedly dead criminal mastermind, and a dude running around with a freaking spiked mace.
Steve Harrison is investigating a string of bizarre murders when Joan La Tour shows him something very uncool: a page from the Black Book of the Dead.
Books with that title are never awesome in pulp stories. Five names are written on it. Three have already been crossed out.
The remaining two are Joan La Tour and Steve Harrison!
It gets worse, the man apparently responsible is Erlik Khan, the Lord of the Dead, a criminal mastermind Harrison had previously watched get stabbed and apparently burned to death.
Apparently that didn't take. Some people are just hard to kill, man.
Published in Super-Detective Stories in May 1934, and reads as if Conan accidentally got a job as a detective.
WARNING: this is a 1934 weird-menace story and contains some very dated racial language and stereotypes.
