Conan the Barbarian’s creator is finally remembered in his hometown.

Cross Plains, Texas — We start where it ended. “The car would have been sitting just about here,” says Jack Baum, a few feet behind the Robert E. Howard Museum. A small group of us take it in. Several of us squirm. This is the spot where the pulp writer put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. When he killed himself in his car in 1936, the creator of Conan the Barbarian — one of the most iconic characters to spring from American fiction — was 30 years old.

The suicide has colored Howard’s reputation ever since, and perhaps …