The seventh Conan story, Rogues in the House, shares the pages of the January 1934 issue of Weir Tales with the usual suspects – Seabury Quinn, Clark Ashton Smith, Edmond Hamilton, Abraham Merritt, Howard Wandrey. H.P. Lovecraft appears in the mail section.
The Howard story does not make the cover, but has other points of interest.

The plot starts out almost hard-boiled – a nobleman is in danger of being exposed as a traitor by a high priest, and arranges for Conan to escape from jail on the condition the Cimmerian will kill the priest. Things get complicated and the three main characters end up trapped in the priest’s house, playing hide and seek with a simian creature.

The story is short and economically written, and shows Howard trying out new plot devices and structures, while at the same time exploring the Conan biography – we have met the king, the mercenary, the pirate, now we meet the thief.
Conan is his usual barbaric self, and the civilized characters are there to act as foil.
Howard continues to portray the aristocracy as corrupt and unreliable – both a critique of civilization and of the class system at large; but the criminals in the thieves’ quarter are no better, of course.

In the end Conan faces Thak, the simian servant of the High Priest, who has finally decided to free himself from his master. The scene was made famous in a Frank Frazetta cover, and was used in the second Conan movie, in a sequence partially inspired, of all things, by Enter the Dragon.

While the story threads much of the usual terrain, the different premise and the setting are a welcome change.