John Lee Mahin, Jr. (1902-1984)-Part Two

John Lee Mahin, Jr., had one story in Weird Tales. Entitled "The Red Lily," it appeared one hundred years ago last month, in July 1925, when its author was just twenty-two years old. The FictionMags Index has two more credits for him, the short stories "Yo-Ho-Ho, and a Bottle" in Ladies' Home Journal (Feb. 1928) and "Back to Glory" in Liberty (Feb. 7, 1931).* By the time that second story appeared, Mahin was moving towards a date with destiny as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Mahin wrote newspaper reviews of movies and plays during his two years at Harvard University. He worked two more years as a journalist in New York City before switching to the advertising business. Maybe that was in his father's business, but Mahin's father died in late 1930. Maybe Mahin Junior needed a new line of work as 1931 rolled around. Luckily for him, he became acquainted with Ben Hecht, a former Chicago newspaperman who was rapidly becoming one of the most accomplished and successful of Hollywood screenwriters. According to his obituary in the New York Times (Apr. 21, 1984), Mahin "was brought to Hollywood by the screenwriter Ben Hecht, who had read one of Mr. Mahin's short stories." Mahin assisted Hecht in writing the screenplay for The Unholy Garden, which was released in October 1931. That suggests that Mahin began working as a movie scenarist in 1931. The New York Times doesn't say which story by Mahin that Ben Hecht had read. Maybe it was "The Red Lily," a bitterly ironic tale that would easily have lent itself to a treatment for the screen. We know that Hecht was interested in genre fiction, including weird fiction.

I won't list Mahin's screenwriting credits except for a few near the beginning of his career. They include: The Beast of the City (1932), Scarface (1932), Red Dust (1932), and Bombshell (1933). The Beast of the City is a memorable crime drama with a very memorable ending. The male lead was played by Walter Huston. A quarter of a century later, Mahin was nominated, along with Huston's son, John Huston, for an academy award for best screenplay for Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957). He had previously won a Christopher Award for his screenplay for Quo Vadis (1951). Mahin was friends with Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, among other actors and actresses, and was a favorite writer among Hollywood directors. He wrote screenplays for several crime dramas but only one for a fantasy or horror movie as far as I know, this one for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941). In this month of anniversaries regarding the atomic bomb, I can say that Mahin was brought in early on in the making of The Beginning of the End (1947), about the Manhattan Project. However, he was not credited for any work he might have done on that film.

In 1937, Mahin married Patsy Ruth Miller (1904-1995), who years before had played Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). They had a son, Timothy Miller Mahin (b. 1941), who appeared as a baby in the movie Thoroughbreds in 1944. In addition to being a movie and stage actress, Patsy Ruth Miller wrote radio scripts, short stories, and books.

From the Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1937, page 3.

The Mahins' marriage must have ended in divorce by 1948, for Mahin remarried on June 16, 1948, in California. His new wife was named Barbara A. Bonnett, and if I have all of this right, they had a daughter named Margaret Lee "Maggi" Mahin (b. 1949). Mahin's fourth wife--and widow--was Muriel M. "Micca" McKinnon Mahin (1914-1984), whom he had married on October 16, 1954, also in California. She had previously been married to Argentinian swimmer and actor Justo José Caraballo (1914-2003). But maybe that's enough Hollywood gossip and name-dropping for now.

By the way, Mahin served in the U.S. Army Air Force from September 14, 1942, to August 13, 1945. I believe he was stationed in Los Angeles, where he wrote scripts for training films and rose to the rank of captain.

John Lee Mahin, Jr., died on April 18, 1984, in Santa Monica, California, at age eighty-one. He was survived by his fourth wife, but only for a few months. Mahin was also survived by three of his four children. His remains were cremated and his ashes scattered at sea.

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*I also found a poem by Mahin called "The Song of the Bridge and the River," published in the Twin City Sentinel of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and dated September 27, 1922 (page 10). Mahin's poem was undoubtedly syndicated. 

John Lee Mahin, Jr.'s Story in Weird Tales
"The Red Lily" (July 1925)

Further Reading

There is a lot of reading on John Lee Mahin, Jr., in newspapers alone. Maybe he is in books about the Golden Age of Hollywood, too.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

John Lee Mahin, Jr. (1902-1984)-Part One

Author, Poet, Journalist, Reviewer, Screenwriter, Movie Producer, Stage Actor, Performer, & Director
Born August 23, 1902, Evanston, Illinois
Died April 18, 1984, Santa Monica, California

I have been writing about lesser-known writers who contributed to Weird Tales. John Lee Mahin, Jr., isn't one of them. He was in fact very well known in Hollywood for his dozens of screenplays. Even so, there aren't any biographical facts for him in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb). The ISFDb could link to Wikipedia, for there is an entry on Mahin on that website, but they don't. I don't blame them, for the entry on Mahin is typical Wikipedia. When Wikipedia doesn't lie, by omission or commission, or spout left-wing propaganda, its information is often incomplete, erroneous, or self-contradictory. So I guess I'll write about Mahin here.

John Lee Mahin, Jr., was born on August 23, 1902, in Evanston, Illinois, to John Lee Mahin, Sr. (1869–1930) and Julia Graham (Snitzler) Mahin (1867-1934). A native of Muscatine, Iowa, Mahin Senior got his start in the newspaper business but made a name for himself in advertising. He had his own advertising firms in Chicago and New York and wrote books on advertising and sales. His father had been a newspaperman before him. If you go searching for Mahins and related families, you won't lack for newspaper accounts of their activities.

John Lee Mahin, Jr., got his name and face in the newspaper at age eleven when his picture and a boosterish but vague profile of him appeared in the Chicago Tribune along with those of a dozen other children, all of whom were candidates for future fame. This thing--I'm not sure whether to call it a feature article, contest, promotion, publicity campaign, or what--is so foreign to me that I have a hard time understanding its purpose. In any case, it appeared as a full-page spread in the Chicago Tribune on June 14, 1914. There at the bottom of the page is a portrait photograph of John Lee Mahin, Jr., No. 12, dressed in a suit and tie, posed and serious, sitting, as a child, below a possible pinnacle of future fame. I haven't checked out the other candidates, but his candidacy for fame proved to be a good one, for he became well known for his work in Hollywood.

Mahin graduated from Middlesex School in Massachusetts in 1921, giving the valedictory address for his class. One of his classmates was Finley Peter Dunne, Jr., another future screenwriter and son of the famed humorist and author. Mahin was in the Harvard University class of 1925, but I don't know that he ever graduated. His life began taking another turn during that roaring decade.

In his early career, Mahin was a poet and a stage actor. He was with the Clark Street Players in Brooklyn, New York; the Provincetown Players; and the Fenimore Players, of which he was also director. He was also an actor with MacGowan, O'Neill and Jones, a firm that may or may not have been the same as the Provincetown Players. (Macgowan was Kenneth Macgowan, O'Neill was Eugene O'Neill, and Jones was Robert Edmond Jones.) Mahin played on Broadway in Bad Habits of 1926, a revue that ran for only nineteen performances in April and May 1926. He was in other revues and played with stock companies in the East during the 1920s.

Mahin married Hume Nancy Derr, also known during her life as Hume Dixon (1903-1955), on June 25, 1926, in Greenwich, Connecticut. She also performed on the Broadway stage, also in Bad Habits of 1926 with Mahin and Robert Montgomery. Later she wrote radio scripts for Robert Ripley's radio show, called Ripley's Believe It or Not!, just like his syndicated comic panel. She was involved in promotions for Karo syrup and other products. Hume Derr had her own radio show in later years. After her divorce from Mahin, she married Alfred Dixon. She and Mahin had two sons, future editor and screenwriter Graham Lee Mahin (1927-2008) and Michael John Mahin (1928-1965). Hume Derr Dixon died entirely too young in 1955.

To be concluded . . .

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

R.G. Macready (1905-1977)-Part Two

R.G. Macready contributed to student publications at all of the schools he attended. He also contributed to the Volta Review, a publication for the deaf and hard of hearing that is still being published today. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1945, he went to work as a teacher of English, history, and journalism at the Oklahoma School for the Deaf. He planned to write in his spare time.

Macready contributed just one story to Weird Tales. Entitled "The Plant Thing," it was published in July 1925 when its author was just twenty years old. "The Plant Thing" is a brief tale of a large, carnivorous plant, bred by a scientist who lives in a walled estate with his daughter and a Malay servant. The narrator of the story is a newspaper reporter. "The Plant Thing" has similarities to "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud (Weird Tales, Mar. 1923), as well as to "The Hand" by Guy de Maupassant (1883). Stories of murderous or carnivorous plants are common in weird fiction, horror fiction, and science fiction. I have written before about plants like these that appeared on the cover of Weird Tales. Click here to find your way. And of course there is in "The Plant Thing" the scientist and his beautiful daughter, with his wife and her mother nowhere to be found. Women in popular culture should know better than to marry scientists and to give them beautiful daughters. They're likely to end up like Dr. Morbius' wife in Forbidden Planet (1956) or Dr. Medford's wife in Them! (1957).

"The Plant Thing" has been reprinted several times since its original publication, as early as 1925 in Not at Night, edited by Christine Campbell Thomson, and as late as 2022. In a newspaper article from 1946 ("Deaf Man Receives M.A. in Journalism," in The Deaf Mississippian, Feb. 1, 1946, p. 1), Macready was described as having written "two horror novels and numerous short stories and novelettes, as yet unsold." I wish that these novels and stories were still in existence, but I fear they have been lost, for Macready never married and died without issue. He was survived only by two brothers and several nieces and nephews.

Macready had two letters in "The Eyrie." Here is the text of his first, from June 1925:

You are to be commended on the determined stand you, as well as the great majority of WEIRD TALES readers, have taken against those who protest at the weird quality of the stories printed in your periodical. Why do not these people, who are trying to wipe out of existence the only magazine of its kind, turn their artillery upon the sex-exploiting magazines that are crowding the best magazines out of place on our news stands? Anyway, a mind that can go undiseased through that so-called literature should be able to survive the pleasantly exhilarating 'kick' of a good horror tale. There can be no question as to the literary status of WEIRD TALES. In it have appeared stories worthy of Kipling himself, to say nothing of Poe.

Macready worked as telegraph editor at the Galveston Daily News in 1948 and at the Big Spring Daily Herald in 1949 and after. I don't have anything on his career after 1950. Reginald G. Macready died on May 10, 1977, in Arlington, Texas, at age seventy-two and was buried at Southland Memorial Park in Grand Prairie, Texas.

R.G. Macready's Story & Letters in Weird Tales
Letter to "The Eyrie" (June 1925)
"The Plant Thing" (July 1925)
Letter to "The Eyrie" (July 1925)

Further Reading

Many interesting and detailed newspaper articles about him and his career as a student and journalist. You might start at the website of the Oklahoma Historical Society and its archive of newspapers.

 Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

R.G. Macready (1905-1977)-Part One

Reginald Goode Macready
Author, Linotype Operator, Newspaper Writer & Editor, Teacher
Born April 18, 1905, Silo, Oklahoma
Died May 10, 1977, Arlington, Texas

Reginald Goode Macready was born on April 18, 1905, in Silo, Oklahoma, to Edward Daniel Macready (1849-1927) and Sallie Mattie (Goode) Macready. Born in New York State of an English immigrant father and an American mother, Edward D. Macready was an Oklahoma pioneer, arriving in the territory in the 1890s. He taught school for many years and was a newspaper editor and publisher. He also wrote poetry. His poem "Dream Valley," from 1912, was described as illustrative of "the weird, brooding spell of the Sonora Desert." (Source: "Necrology," in Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol. 5, No. 3, Sept. 1927, pp. 354-355.) My source for this poem is too faint in parts for me to read, but I can say that "Dream Valley" is in the genre of hidden valleys and lost worlds.

Reginald Goode Macready, called Goode in his youth, grew up in Bryan County, Oklahoma, where his father taught school. When he was seven, Macready contracted meningitis and as a result was made completely deaf. He studied at the Oklahoma School for the Deaf in Sulphur, where he was president and valedictorian of his graduating class of 1922. For his high honors, he was awarded a scholarship of $500 per year to attend Gallaudet College in Washington, D.C., where he began in the fall of 1922. His course of study was to be for five years.

Upon his father's death in 1927, Macready went to work in the newspaper business in order to support himself. He worked as a linotype operator at the Durant Daily Democrat, Madill Record, and Holdenville Tribune, all in Oklahoma, and at the Denver Post. In 1939, he matriculated at the University of Oklahoma, where he studied journalism, English, and psychology. His ambition was to become a writer and teacher. Macready supported himself by working as associate editor and linotype operator for the Oklahoma Daily student newspaper. For his journalistic work, he received a Citation for Professional Achievement from Sigma Delta Chi. His studies were interrupted by injuries sustained when he was hit by a car in June 1942. Macready returned to school in 1943 and graduated with a bachelor of arts in journalism on June 26, 1944. He continued with graduate work and received his master of arts in journalism from the University of Oklahoma on July 31, 1945.

To be concluded . . .

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Harold E. Somerville (1885-1935)

Author, Newspaperman, Editor, Amateur Astronomer & Mathematician

Born March 1, 1885, Vermont
Died April 26, 1935, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I will assume that the Harold E. Somerville who contributed to Weird Tales in July 1925 was the same Harold E. Somerville who worked as a newspaperman and editor in New England and Philadelphia from the early 1900s to his death in 1935.

Harold Ernest Somerville was born on March 1, 1885, in Vermont, possibly in Waterbury. His parents were Josiah Somerville and Florence L. (Brown) Somerville. He had two older brothers, Charles Edward Somerville (1866-1929), a telegraph operator, and Frederick Holland Somerville (1872-1937), a schoolteacher. The younger boys were apparently orphaned. In 1900, they were enumerated in the U.S. Census in the household of their aunt, Louisa S. Watts, in Waterbury, Vermont.

Harold E. Somerville was something of a prodigy. In 1901, he had letters in the Boston Globe regarding astronomy. These included a letter of March 11, 1901, about the planet Venus. He graduated from Waterbury High School in June 1901 at age sixteen. In 1902, he provided solutions to mathematical problems posed in a column called "Puzzle Problems" in the Boston Globe.

Somerville began working in the field of journalism as a young man. His first newspaper job was with the Waterbury Record. He matriculated at the University of Vermont in 1904, winning honorable mention in his freshman entrance examination in mathematics. While at the university, Somerville served as treasurer of the Green and Gold Debating Club (1906); associate editor of The Vermont Cynic, a weekly journal (1906-1908); and editor of The Vermont Handbook, yearbook published by the university Y.M.C.A. (1908). He graduated in 1908.

In 1908, Somerville secured a position as a teacher in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, where his brother Fred had taught before him. By 1910, he was back in Waterbury, in the household of his aunt, and working as a window sign painter.

Somerville's newspaper career began in earnest on January 1, 1914, when he became night editor of the Burlington Free Press. He resigned in July 1915 to take a job with the New Bedford Evening Standard in Massachusetts. In 1918 and 1920, he was working in Boston as a journalist and editor. This must have been with the Boston Herald. By 1930, he was living in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and working as a newspaper editor. Somerville was night editor for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. At the time of his death, in 1935, he was an editor with the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.

As a New Englander, a writer, and an amateur astronomer, Somerville would seem to have been in the right time and the right place, and interested in the right things, to have come in contact with H.P. Lovecraft and others of his circle. But I haven't found any connections between them. Somerville contributed one story, "The Sudden Death of Luke A. Lucas," to Weird Tales. This was in July 1925. His story is very short and lightly humorous. It's about life in a small town and includes a visit to a newspaper office. Maybe it's an episode from Somerville's youth or from the town in which he grew up. The FictionMags Index has two other credits for Somerville, "Coming!--a Lunar Eclipse," in The Scrap Book (May 1909) and "Wreck at Clay," a short story in Overland Monthly (Aug. 1919).

Harold E. Somerville died on April 26, 1935, at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital and was interred at Northfield, Vermont. He was at the time of his death just fifty years old.

Harold E. Somerville's Story in Weird Tales
"The Death of Luke A. Lucas" (July 1925)

Further Reading
Only a few newspaper items.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Adrian Pordelorrar (?-?)

I would like to start out writing about the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales by writing about the last author listed in its table of contents. He or she was Adrian Pordelorrar.

Adrian Pordelorrar was almost certainly a pseudonym. I haven't found anyone by that name or surname in my searches of newspapers and public records. The last name Pordelorrar is unusual to say the least. Nothing comes back for it in an Internet search, either. That makes me think that there is meaning in the name, and so I have tried breaking it apart and entering its parts in an online translator. I had thought that the name could be from the Esperanto, but I didn't get very far in that. Por and del are easy enough. They are prefixes in Spanish. That leaves -orrar as the main part of the name. Orrar isn't a word in Spanish, but llorar is. It means "to cry."

If the last name Pordelorrar has significant meaning, then maybe the given name Adrian does, too. It's an ancient Latin name, a variation of Hadrian or Hadrianus. The root word seems to be adur, meaning "sea" or "water." Together, maybe the poet's name means something like "water of the crying" or "water for the crying." Maybe someone who knows Spanish can propose a better meaning or translation. As an alternative, maybe Adrian refers to the Roman emperor Hadrian as a conqueror as Time seems the conqueror in the poem.

The next step in all of this would seem to be: read the poem. And so here it is, a sonnet:

The Conqueror
By Adrian Pordelorrar 

Dark, even in the sunset's crimson glare,
     There grows, unknown, an ancient forest grove; --
A voice of myst'ry murmurs in its air
     Where Night for centuries has whispered love!
Dim mirrored in a crystal pool, found there,
     Lie strange, forgotten worlds, and things, whereof
One dares not dream. Dark eyes, through matted hair,
     Laugh from its depths, to mock at Life above.

Soft words, from unseen lips, make known their thought--
     The uselessness of lab'ring through the years,
While worlds and men and kingdoms they have wrought,
     Their efforts, and their loves, and secret fears,
Crumble before the sweep of Time, as nought,
     Despite their anguish, and unnoticed tears!

If -lorrar is a play on llorar, referring to crying, and Adrian refers to water also, then the imagery of crying and water in the name of the pseudonymous poet is also in the poem.

We will probably never know who was the author of "The Conqueror," but why not consider Farnsworth Wright as a possibility?

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Leavenworth MacNab (1872-1933)

Archibald Leavenworth MacNab
Author, Poet, Newspaperman
Born December 21, 1872, Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada
Died June 25, 1933, Illinois Masonic Hospital, Sullivan, Illinois

Archibald Leavenworth MacNab was born on December 21, 1872, in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada. His parents were Alexander MacNab and Margaret (McArthur) MacNab. MacNab was educated at the University of Toronto. He came to the United States in June 1895 and was naturalized as an American citizen on May 25, 1923, at the age of fifty.

MacNab dropped his first name, sometimes or often, and went by Leavenworth MacNab. He worked as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco for ten years or more. He reported on the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906. MacNab also worked for the St. Louis Globe Democrat, the Chicago Chronicle, and The Music Trades. He also contributed to The Argonaut.

MacNab had stories in National Magazine and Sunset in the period 1902 to 1904. More than two decades passed before he had his next magazine credits, this according to the list in The FictionMags Index. These were four poems and a short story in Weird Tales, beginning in June 1925.

MacNab's story, "The Hanging of Aspara," isn't a short story so much as a slightly fictionalized piece of reporting. A footnote to the story tells us as much. The reporter in the story is named MacTavish, or Mac, a pretty transparent disguise made by the author. Mac works for a newspaper called only "the News." The subject of the story is Sam Aspara, also known as Sam Sparo or Sam Asparo. Or maybe "Aspara" was just another alias. In any case, he was hanged on April 28, 1905, in New Orleans for the murder of a mafioso named Antonio "Tony" Luciano. You can read more about the whole thing on a website called Mafia Genealogy, published by Justin Cascio, by clicking here. I take all of that to indicate that MacNab worked as a newspaperman in New Orleans, circa 1905.

Archibald L. MacNab died on June 25, 1933, at Illinois Masonic Hospital in Sullivan, Illinois. He was buried at Prospect Cemetery in Toronto, Canada.  

Leavenworth MacNab's Short Story & Poems in Weird Tales
"The Hanging of Aspara" (short story, June 1925)
"Lake Desolation" (poem, Aug. 1927)
"Despair and the Soul" (poem, Nov. 1927)
"Dirge" (poem, Aug. 1928)
"Let Night Have Sway" (poem, Jan. 1929)

Further Reading
A few newspaper articles.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley