Robert E. Howard's last published story in the pulps for which he wrote, a sword and planet novel (arguably a novella), first published three years after his death. Howard's editor, Otis Adelbert Kline, is consequently suspected by some of having written the whole thing and put Howard's name to it, but this is unlikely in my view since there would have been much more promising fragmentary material for him to complete instead.

The premise of the story is as follows: Esau Cairn, a man of Earth, adopts the Dick Tracy solution to a local corrupt politician (to wit: he punches him hard enough to literally cave his face in), due to being, according to the narrator of the introduction, too primitive and direct for modern civilization; obliged to flee lawmen of limited anthropological understanding, he winds up in the observatory of his acquaintance, the initial narrator, a conveniently vague scientist, who uses a recent breakthrough of his to hurl Cairn through space to the exceedingly distant, primitive planet Almuric, where he might fit in better and will in any case not be blasted to fine mincemeat by the police. Amusingly, the scientist flat out states that he refuses to reveal anything about his method of interstellar transport, except that he was able to communicate with Cairn through it later and hear the narrative of his adventures on Almuric, which, naturally, make up the plot of the book proper.

(Almuric is apparently a name Howard was fond of; a character in his Conan story Xuthal of the Dusk bears the same name and there are also not less than three separate Conan characters named Amalric — a real French name of the middle ages, of course.)


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