If you're honest with yourself, it's not difficult to see the appeal of Conan, Robert E Howard's archetypal sword-wielding barbarian who crystallised the hack-and-slay genre later to become known as Sword & Sorcery. Conan can be seen as the ultimate revenge fantasy, of the sort we all-too-human beings occasionally find ourselves indulging in to blow off a little steam.

Robert E Howard, it's pretty safe to say, had one hell of a head of steam. His writing — often variable in quality, often borrowing effects and ideas from other writers — is always gutsy, with a barbaric force that makes his Conan stories so convincing. They were convincing because they were honest.

Howard grew up in depression-era Texas, where he was surrounded by the sort of tough characters he would later write about. Bullied at school, he retreated into his own world, imagining himself a Pictish warrior in ancient Britain or a Viking raider. Eventually, he took to body-building and developed the sort of impressive physique which would keep him from being picked on, but not until he had developed a strong dose of paranoia and a permanent inferiority complex — all of which, combined with his prolific energy and imagination, stood him in good stead as a writer for the pulps.

Conan was by no means his only creation. He loved historical tales and westerns, and wrote to fit all the pulp markets, including sports and "spicy" stories. But it is obvious he felt something special about his Cimmerian barbarian, as can be seen by this quote from a letter to fellow Weird Tales writer Clark Ashton Smith:

"I know that for months I had been absolutely barren of ideas, completely unable to work up anything sellable. Then the man Conan seemed suddenly to grow up in my mind without much labor on my part and immediately a stream of stories flowed off my pen — or rather, off my typewriter — almost without effort on my part. I did not seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred... For weeks I did nothing but write of the adventures of Conan. The character took complete possession of my mind and crowded out everything else in the way of story-writing... I still write Conan more powerfully and with more understanding than any of my other characters."

Strangely enough — and throwing some doubt on the above account of Conan's origins — the first Conan story to be published, "The Phoenix on the Sword" was a rewrite of a rejected tale, previously starring Howard's Atlantean King Kull. But soon Conan originals were coming thick and fast. (And, when Conan took off again in the 70s, L Sprague de Camp converted others of Howard's non-Conan tales to add to the 27 originals).

He rapidly became a popular character, perhaps because he provided the perfect escape from the down-and-out days of early Twentieth Century America.

Conan, born on a battlefield, is a thief, a mercenary, a pirate, an adventurer and, later in life, a king. He is a loner, alienated from civilisation but grudgingly aware of its strange rules and regulations — such as not immediately killing people who insult you — but quite happy to live off its spoils. When it comes to the crunch, however, Conan knows the rule by which all barbarians live: look after number one. He is driven by basic desires: hunger, greed, lust and revenge, but never stoops to the cynicism or decadence of civilisation.

In this, he echoed Howard himself, who wrote:

"For the world as a whole, civilisation, even in decaying form, is undoubtedly better for people as a whole. I have no idyllic view of barbarism — as near as I can learn, it's a grim, bloody, ferocious and loveless condition... But I do say that if I had the choice of another existence, to be born into it and raised in it, knowing no other, I'd choose such an existence [as Conan's]. There's no question of the relative merits of barbarism and civilisation here involved. It's just my own personal opinion and choice."

Howard's tales are formulaic. They abound in bloody battles, scantily-dressed girls, supernatural monsters, decadent wizards, effete princes and treasures beyond the dreams of avarice. All this has since become the standard fare of fantasy, but, even then, there were dissenting voices:

"I am awfully tired of poor old Conan the Cluck, who for the past fifteen issues [of Weird Tales] has every month slain a new wizard, tackled a new monster, come to a violent and sudden end that was averted (incredibly enough!) in just the nick of time, and won a new girl-friend, each of whose penchant for nudism won her a place of honor, either on the cover or on the inner illustration."

The writer of this particular epistle was Robert Bloch. But he was — and is — outnumbered. After a hiatus following Howard's death (he shot himself in the head, aged 30, following the death of his dog and the news that his mother, dying of cancer, would not recover from the coma she had just fallen into), L Sprague de Camp went through his papers and found some unpublished Conan tales. He published these, along with other incomplete ones that he finished himself. Several books were released in hardback, collecting the new and old tales. Once these were republished in paperback, the Conan industry took off.

And it is an industry. Like any other fantasy or science fiction world that captures the public imagination, it spawned adaptations and pastiches. Writers such as de Camp, Lin Carter, Karl Edward Wagner, Poul Anderson and Robert Jordan (author of the Wheel of Time series) wrote Conan tales. Marvel comics started its adaptations, beautifully drawn by Barry Windsor-Smith. There have been two films, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the first of which was co-written by Oliver Stone and featured, at the start, a quote by German philosopher Nietzsche: "Whatever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger", which elegantly sums up the will-to-power atmosphere of the entire Sword & Sorcery genre.

Undoubtedly the best Conan by-product of all, though, has to be the paperback covers by Frank Frazetta, in which all the brooding power, bloodthirstiness, horror and barely-subdued sex of the stories achieved realisation in visual form.

Conan may be ultimately escapist, but the power and passion with which the original stories were written can but remind us that escapism has a point: it is not merely a turning away and hiding, it is a search for something better. And, in the nobility and simplicity — as well as the danger and gore — of Conan and his world, Robert E Howard and his many readers found that something better.