From the 1930s onward a number of fans and scholars have analyzed the numerous Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard and later writers, and attempted to organize them into a chronological timeline.
But the middle part – the various tales of his being a pirate, brigand, and mercenary at various locations around the world – are more difficult to arrange in neat order.
[3] The essay A Probable Outline of Conan's Career (1936) was completed during Howard's lifetime by P. Schuyler Miller and John D. Clark.
Howard, who reviewed it in the draft and made a few corrections, stated it followed his vision of Conan's career "pretty closely.
The chronology has been criticized for missing some in-story chronological indications pointing to a slightly different arrangement (such as "Xuthal of the Dusk" preceding "The Devil in Iron"),[6][7] for force-fitting posthumously discovered Howard tales into its scheme (e.g. "The Black Stranger," in which Howard has Conan turn pirate between his stints as general and king in Aquilonia, rewritten by de Camp to omit the piratical interlude),[7] and for having Conan wander "all over the Hyborian world in a scattered and illogical pattern, and at a break-neck pace.
Apocryphal: Joe Marek's chronology is limited to stories written (or devised) by Howard, though within that context it is essentially a revision of the Miller/Clark/de Camp tradition.
Noting Howard's general approval of the Miller/Clark chronology, he tends to follow it when it does not contradict the internal evidence of the stories or force Conan into what he perceives as a "mad dash" around the Hyborian world within timeframes too rapid to be credible.
[7][2] Marek considers four changes from this chronology as central to his own: Marek provides arguments for his story placements, though he fails to incorporate into his scheme the chronologically wide gap between "Beyond the Black River" and "Wolves Beyond the Border" he admits to being indicated by Howard's version of "The Black Stranger" as he believed doing anything more to filling the hole would require a major reordering of the stories that would take attention away from his four primary changes.