Anthony M. Rud (1893-1942)-The First Cover Story

Chicago native Anthony Melville Rud wrote the first cover story in Weird Tales, "Ooze," published in March 1923. Born on January 11, 1893, he was the son of two medical doctors. Rud studied medicine, too, but he gave that up to go into the fiction-writing business. From 1918 to his death on November 30, 1942, he authored scores of stories for pulp magazines in many of the most popular genres, including detective stories, adventure stories, Westerns, and fantasy, what we would call science fiction, science fantasy, and/or weird fiction. I'll let the author's profile below tell you more about his career. You can also read what I have written about him before in three parts:

• "Anthony Rud and the Tango Dancer Murder-Part One" from February 3, 2016

• "Anthony Rud and the Tango Dancer Murder-Part Two from February 4, 2016

• "Anthony M. Rud (1893-1942)" from February 5, 2016

I find now that what I wrote seven years ago is incomplete. I'll fix part of that below.

Eight out of nine of Rud's first published stories are about a detective called Jigger Masters. I have never read these stories but would like to. I can speculate that Rud had connections to a real-life Chicago police detective named John O'Keefe, who investigated the murder of Mildred Allison Rexroat, subject of my two-part series on the Tango Dancer Murder. Rud was connected only briefly and very peripherally to that case. I'll have more on O'Keefe, a fellow Irishman, just in time for St. Patrick's Day.

Anthony M. Rud wrote Westerns under the pen name Anson Piper, his mother's maiden name. He also wrote under the name R. Anthony and apparently under the name Ray McGillivray. In addition to writing the first cover story in Weird Tales, Rud wrote the first letter published in "The Eyrie," the regular letters column that also began in March 1923. He had just one more letter after that, a very brief one in the second issue, April 1923. Following are his complete credits in "The Unique Magazine." All are under the byline Anthony M. Rud unless otherwise noted:

Anthony M. Rud, Ray McGillivray, and R. Anthony's Stories & Letters in Weird Tales

• "Ooze" (Mar. 1923; reprinted Jan. 1952; reprinted Summer 1983)-The first issue
• Letter to "The Eyrie" (Mar. 1923)-The first letter in the first issue
• "A Square of Canvas" (Apr. 1923; reprinted Sept. 1951)-The second issue
• "The Forty Jars" as by Ray McGillivray (Apr. 1923)
• Letter to "The Eyrie" (Apr. 1923)
• "The Parasitic Hand" as by R. Anthony (Nov. 1926; reprinted Aug. 1934)
• "The Endocrine Monster" as by R. Anthony (Apr. 1927)
• "The Witch-Baiter" as by R. Anthony (Dec. 1927)
• "The Spectral Lover" as by R. Anthony (Apr. 1928)
• "The Place of Hairy Death" (Feb. 1934)
• "Bellowing Bamboo" (May 1934)

So it looks as though Rud, after helping to get Weird Tales started in 1923, made two returns, first as R. Anthony in 1926-1928, then as himself in 1934.

Weird Tales in Alabama

Anthony Rud opened his first letter in "The Eyrie" with these words:

Dear Mr. Baird: Delighted to hear that you contemplate WEIRD TALES. I hope you put it through--and without compromise.

I take it that Rud and Edwin Baird, the first editor of Weird Tales, were in touch before the magazine even began and that Baird sought him out as a potential contributor. Remember that Rud was a Chicago native and that Weird Tales was more or less based in Chicago, even if its editorial offices were in Indianapolis at the time. Remember, too, that Jacob Clark Henneberger, the co-publisher of the magazine, had cast about for Chicago authors (namely Hamlin Garland, Emerson Hough, and Ben Hecht) to help fill the pages of his planned magazine. Henneberger didn't get those men, but at least he got Rud. In his letter, Rud offered a story he had written in his college days, "A Square of Canvas," which appeared in the second issue of "The Unique Magazine," April 1923. If Ray McGillivray was indeed one of his pen names, then Rud had a third story in those first two issues.

"I am buried deep in the heart of the piney woods," Rud wrote, "35 miles from the nearest news-stand selling even a Sunday paper, and I want to make sure of seeing each issue of WEIRD TALES." Evidently, Weird Tales found its way even into remote places in the South, and Rud helped spread the word, writing:

     It's a corking title [Weird Tales], and it will get all the boosting I can give. Herewith a clipping of my last platform appearance. I told 'em of the coming magazine, and that it offered a field of reading unique. At Atlanta and Montgomery, where I speak later in the winter, I'll give the sheet a hand. I have two more dates in Mobile, and I'll mention your project.

So Rud was a public speaker in the South, working out of a base in "the piney woods" of southern Alabama. (I'll have more evidence of that in a minute.) He must have written sometime in late 1922 or early 1923, so in those few months before the first issue appeared, Rud was spreading the word in Alabama and Georgia about a new and unique magazine on its way. I don't know what kind of public speaking he did, but in his travels Rud may very well have come in contact with other writers. His story "Ooze" is set in southern Alabama, presumably near Mobile. His narrator even mentions a "reporter on the staff of The Mobile Register." I have written before about Weird Tales in Alabama (on Dec. 18, 2022, here). It looks as though most of the authors I included in that summary worked on newspapers in Birmingham, well north of Mobile. Nonetheless, Artemus Calloway, who also worked on newspapers in Birmingham, contributed to the second issue of Weird Tales, April 1923.

I have an item from The Bookman, October 1921, page 186, regarding writers in Alabama. Katherine Hopkins Chapman wrote:

     The little town of Citronelle, Alabama, is rich in literary traditions. [. . .] Two miles south of this spot is the famous estate locally known as "Mann's Folly," built by Charles Mann, brother of Colonel William D'Alton Mann, late editor of "Town Topics." A quarter section of woodland was laid out in a chain of Italian lakes and rare shrubs and trees imported to beautify the grounds. [. . .] A handsome house was started, but when it was half completed, Charles Mann, who was said to have taken a flier on 'change, went broke. [. . .] [T]he estate, neglected and forlorn, is referred to by the townspeople as "Mann's Folly."

Colonel William D'Alton Mann was at one time the owner of the Mobile Register.

Katherine Hopkins Chapman continued:

     Other interesting, if less spectacular writer folk come and go at Citronelle. Anthony M. Rud, magazine and fiction writer ("Saturday Evening Post" et al.), after spending the winter and spring there, drove through to Chicago for the summer--and so far as the thermometer counts, had better stayed south! While in this section Mr. Rud found much to interest him in the way of story material. One of the scenes of his forthcoming tales, he states, will be laid between Citronelle and Vinegar Bend, while another will be just this side of Mobile. He found the negro character rich in story suggestion and will use it to a large extent.

"Ooze" is of course set in Alabama, and now maybe we have a place: Citronelle or its environs. (Citronelle is about thirty-four miles from Mobile. Vinegar Bend is north of Citronelle. Oak Grove, which lies between Citronelle and Mobile, is mentioned in "Ooze" as a source for lumber.) "Ooze" begins with a description of a ruined house in the swampy backwoods of southern Alabama. And there is a description of a nasty, fish-smelling pond of ooze on the grounds of the house. Could Rud--except for the ooze--have been describing Mann's Folly?

Anthony  M. Rud's story:

"Ooze" is a novelette in nine chapters, told in the first person by a writer out of the Chicago area, "a scribbler of general fact articles." It is told in the form of an investigation after-the-fact of terrible and murderous events that happened at a now ruined house in backwoods Alabama, not far from Mobile. The year is 1913, six years after the events under investigation.

The main characters in "Ooze" are--or were--Lee Cranmer, a writer of what is called "pseudo-scientific" stories, his wife Peggy Breede Cranmer, and Cranmer's father, scientist John Corliss Cranmer. The narrator knew all three and was a friend and college roommate of Lee Cranmer. He is dismayed to know that the elder Cranmer had been accused of murdering his son and daughter-in-law. Declared insane and confined to a mental institution, John Corliss Cranmer escaped and went missing. By the end of the story, the narrator discovers the truth behind the mystery. (The couple of Lee Cranmer, teller of tales, and his father, a scientist, is more or less equivalent to the couple of Rud, the pulp writer, and his father, the medical doctor.)

The subject of Cranmer's scientific research was protozoa and the possibility of altering their "chromosome arrangement" to affect change in their size and growth. The mysteries are manifold: Just what was Cranmer up to in his researches? What happened to him, his son, and his daughter-in-law? (There was another victim, too, the octoroon man Joe, who, according to a witness, was engulfed by "a slimy, amorphous something.") How did Cranmer's house, called "the Lodge" or "the Dead House," come to ruination? And what was Lee Cranmer's "pet" kept in the now oozy pond surrounded by the breached, doorless, brick wall surrounding both it and the house? Rud's unnamed narrator answers all of these questions in the course of his investigations. The story ends with an all-revealing quote drawn from a notebook, another one of those conventions of weird fiction.

"Ooze" is an early science fiction story, but it lacks the positive and progressive aspects of science fiction. The theme of science run amuck (no pun intended) and a resulting horrible fate visited upon the protagonists is more nearly weird-fictional, as is the remote setting, the physical isolation, and the prevailing atmosphere of decay. Rud's narrator is a writer of fact, and his tone is pretty even and matter-of-fact. There isn't any of the overwrought narration so common in weird fiction. Descriptions of the monster, a giant amoeba, and what it does are effective and horrifying. We don't need any Lovecraftian prose to see that.

"Ooze" is a somewhat jumbled story, but this is in the nature of investigations done after-the-fact. The investigator discovers pieces of information on events not in the order of their occurrence but in the order that he finds them. He then has to piece it all together. Readers of Weird Tales in March 1923 would have read a story like this one before, in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a story of scientific hubris and overreach. They would read another even more like it afterwards, in "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, written in 1926 and published in Weird Tales in February 1928, for in Lovecraft's story there is a similar investigation and a piecing together of separated events. I don't have any direct evidence that Lovecraft was influenced by reading "Ooze." But the similarities are there, including a scene in "The Call of Cthulhu" set in a southern swamp. We also shouldn't rule out that Joseph Payne Brennan was influenced by "Ooze" in his writing of "Slime," published in Weird Tales thirty years later, in March 1953.

From the New York Daily News, August 6, 1933, page 107. I have colorized this image.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley