Henry Leverage (1879-1931)-Part Two

David Carroll Henry, later known as the author Henry Leverage, was born in Wa-Keeney, Trego County, Kansas, on October 9, 1879, to John Cummings Henry (1848-1901) and Susan Ann (McFadden) Henry (ca. 1856-?). David C. Henry had younger sister, Sadie Lucinda Henry, later Vinschger.

I found David C. Henry in the U.S. Census of 1880 (in Wa-Keeney, Kansas) and Henry Leverage in the New York State Census of 1915 (at Sing Sing Prison) and nothing in between. That's okay, for Robert Messenger has the early part of Leverage's career covered in his blog posting of November 7, 2019. Henry, aka Leverage, was a liar, or a self-booster, however you'd like to think of it. He told all kinds of stories about going to sea, traveling in the Far East and Europe, and fighting in the Great War. He was a bit like L. Ron Hubbard, minus the utter insanity and the deadly danger he represented to people he perceived as his enemies. (Both men claimed expeditions to Alaska. Leverage was charged with inciting a riot in San Francisco in 1912, too, at Pier 54 as the Star of Russia was about to sail. That's one example I can find of his criminal misadventures.) In any case, Leverage's crazy way of life caught up with him in late 1914 when he was sent upriver by New York Judge William H. Wadhams for receiving stolen property (an automobile). Claiming that his real name was Charles Henley, Leverage was received at Sing Sing Prison, Ossining, New York, on December 16, 1914. He was single, in good health, stood 5 feet 5-1/2 inches tall, and weighed all of 121 pounds. After two years, four months, and 28 days in Sing Sing, Leverage was released on April 17, 1917, just eleven days after the American entry into the Great War, a war in which Leverage did not fight, even if he later claimed that he had. Before going up, he said in court, "I admit that I have been an ocean card sharp and a general crook and that I did not have to steal." But he did anyway. The good thing, I guess, is that he seems to have turned his life around while in prison.

Leverage was a newspaper editor at Sing Sing. He began as editor of The Star of Hope in April 1916, succeeding former attorney Henry Hoffman Browne. After The Star of Hope went out of business, Leverage became editor of the weekly Star-Bulletin, in February 1917. While he was in prison, Leverage also wrote the screenplay for The Twinkler (1916), a prison drama based on his own story. The film, now lost, starred William Russell and Charlotte Burton and was released on December 18, 1916.

William Leverage was the author of scores of short stories in the crime, detective, aviation, railroad, Western, romance, and other genres. His series characters include Chester Fay and "Big Scar" Guffman. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists the following stories in the genres of science fiction and fantasy:

• "The Wild Star" in All-Story Weekly, December 29, 1917
• "The Skywaymen" in All-Story Weekly, February 15, 1919
• "The Voice in the Fog" in Weird Tales, June 1923
• "Black Light" in Scientific Detective Monthly, April 1930
• "The Sealed Room" in Amazing Detective Tales, June 1930
• "The Black Cabinet" in Amazing Detective Tales, September 1930

For Munsey's Magazine, he wrote "The Absconder," "The Gray Brotherhood," "The White Moll," and others. For The Saturday Evening Post, he wrote perhaps his most successful story, "Whispering Wires," a mystery adapted to the stage by Kate L. McLaurin and to the silver screen by William M. Conselman. The movie version was released in 1926 and starred Anita Stewart.

The FictionMags Index has a list of Henry Leverage's credits from 1917 to 1932. These include stories in Adventure, The Argosy, Battle Stories, Black Mask, The Blue Book Magazine, Clues, Cosmopolitan, Detective Story Magazine, Flynn's Weekly, Prison Stories, Railroad Man's Magazine, Short Stories, Star Magazine, Telling Tales, Top-Notch, and others. I found two more in newspapers, "Shyster Lawyers and Human Souls" in the Leavenworth New Era (July 14, 1916) and "An Occasional Offender" in the Sacramento Union (Nov. 27, 1927).

In addition, Leverage wrote novels, The Shepherd of the Sea (1920, a "Northern" rather than a Western), Where Dead Men Walk (1920), The Ice Pilot (1921), The Phantom Alibi: A Detective Story (1926), and The Purple Limited: A Detective Story (1927). His non-fiction included "Two Years of Prison Reform" in Forum, published in May 1917, just a month after he was released from prison. He also wrote a column, "Dictionary of the Underworld," which appeared in Flynn's Weekly from January to May 1925.

Henry Leverage married a woman named May. They were enumerated in the 1930 U.S. Census while living in Los Angeles. He died on February 24, 1931, at Druskin Hospital in New York City at age fifty-one, the same age as his father when he died.

Henry Leverage's Story in Weird Tales

"The Voice in the Fog" (June 1923)

Further Reading

Yesterday's Faces: From the Dark Side by Robert Sampson (1987, pp. 81+), plus lots of newspaper articles about him and his father.

An advertisement for the stage adaptation of Whispering Wires, from the Sacramento Union, November 10, 1926.

Thanks to The Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The FictionMags Index.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Henry Leverage (1879-1931)-Part One

Né David Carroll Henry

Aka David Carl Henry, Carl Henry, Carl Henry Leverage, Charles Henley, Winfield Byrd, Sing Sing No. 65368
Author, Newspaper Editor, Movie Scenarist
Born October 9, 1879, Wa-Keeney, Trego County, Kansas
Died February 24, 1931, Druskin Hospital, New York, New York

I began with the author Henry Leverage on June 30, 2022, but gave up on him when his case became too complicated, confused, unclear, and uncertain. Usually when you're doing this kind of research, if something seems wrong, it is wrong. Or as a fence builder I met in the Missouri Ozarks said when talking about fence posts, "If it looks crooked, it probably is crooked." Anyway, there was a reason for my confusion, and it's because "Leverage" was a liar, and he seems to have lied about everything in his life. From more than one hundred years distance, he looks crooked, like a crooked post. In fact he admitted that he was a crook, and so I can honestly say that I'm not impugning the reputation of a long-dead man. Yes, he was a liar, or a teller of tales if you want to be nice about it, and a convicted criminal, but he also told real fictional tales--i.e., pulp fictional tales--after he was released from prison. You could say that Leverage leveraged his lies against potential profits to be made as an author. Maybe personal economic considerations decided him on his adopted surname.

I am not the discoverer of Henry Leverage's identity. That distinction goes, I assume, to Robert Messenger of Canberra, Australia, who writes on the blog ozTypewriter: The Wonderful World of Typewriters. You can find Mr. Messenger's posting on Henry Leverage, entitled "Henry Leverage -- The Pulp Fiction Author Who Made His Corona 3 Portable Typewriter Sing Sing: Seven Million 'Sold Words' in 11 Years" and dated November 7, 2019, by clicking here. Mr. Messenger's angle is to write about Leverage's use of a Corona portable typewriter during his successful career as an author of short stories and novels. I won't rehash Robert Messenger's biography of Leverage. I'll just provide some facts, many of which are peripheral, as well as make some corrections.

According to Robert Messenger, Henry Leverage was actually David Carroll Henry, not British at all, as he claimed, but peculiarly American and born plumb in the middle of the country, in fact about one hundred miles from the geographic center of the United States at that time. His father was John Cummings Henry (b. June 19, 1848, Ontario, Canada; d. May 3, 1901, at home, Denver, Colorado), who is supposed to have invented the first electric streetcar in the world, put into operation in Kansas City in 1883. The elder Henry was an electrical engineer and was supposed to have held more than 70 patents. He was more than that, too.

I have found John C. Henry in the U.S. Census of 1880 in Wa-Keeney, Kansas. His son, David C. Henry, was then eight months old. It is from that record that I have been able to find out more about John C. Henry and to trace him and his family through public records. Unfortunately, the man later known as Henry Leverage is hard to find in those records, and so his life story and all of the assumptions I must make about him are secured only on one end, at least at this point in my research. (We'll see how things develop.) If Henry Leverage wasn't David Carroll Henry, then I don't know what to think. It seems like he was, though.

John C. Henry was a pioneer in what is now Trego County, Kansas. I assume that he arrived in that place by railroad, which had been laid down in the area in 1868. A newspaper item from 1888 states that Henry was "the first to obtain a patent for a quarter section of land [i.e., 160 acres]" and "the first to build a substantial residence" in Trego County. The first patent for his quarter-section of land was dated March 1, 1873. I have found record of a second patent, dated September 6, 1876*, for that same quarter-section, namely, the Northwest 1/4 of Section 8, Township 12 South, Range 23 West. A newspaper article from 1879 says that "the first furrow of prairie sod [in Trego County] was turned by him." He later grew millet and wheat. Henry built his house, a stone construction, at Trego Tank in 1875. His farm, described as "handsome" and "prosperous," was about a mile west of the later site of Wa-Keeney.

Prior to that, on May 28, 1874, Henry was appointed postmaster of Park's Fort, a 30-foot x 30-foot sod embankment with no buildings, only tents, located about six miles west of Ogallah and about two miles east of what became Wa-Keeney. That same article states that the railroad station at Park's Fort was moved to Henry's farm, and though the wording is ambiguous, it appears as though there were two or three saloons there, while "the principal industry was the collection of buffalo bones and hides." In other words, Henry's farm seems to have been the original settlement in Trego County, before the founding of Wa-Keeney in 1877-1879. In 1879, Henry and a partner acquired a general store in Wa-Keeney, renaming it Henry & Kyle. He ran a meat market in a 12 x 15-foot building in Wa-Keeney and became secretary of the Wa-Keeney Coal Prospecting Company in 1880. Henry seems to have been a prominent and accomplished man in his adopted home country, state, county, and town.

There is still a house in that lonely quarter, located not far to the west of the current Wakeeney. (The hyphen was dropped in the early 1900s.) An online "street" view from dusty Old U.S. Highway 40 shows a lane behind a double pipe gate that leads to a distant, weathered house, well away from the road. It looks like there are other structures there, too. Was that Henry's house? I can't say. But Trego Tank was located one mile west of Wa-Keeney, and so it was in about the right place for Henry's quarter-section and that old gray house still standing. Trego Tank was for several years the only stop along the Kansas Pacific Railroad in what became Trego County. There was a deep well there and a large windmill. I don't see a windmill in the "street"-view picture I'm looking at, but there is a low, brushy area with a few trees, and so maybe there is water not far below the surface. This is at the top of a ravine that flows to the south, soon into Big Creek. There must be water there after all. Now comes news that Henry's horse Patsey was killed at Trego Tank on July 16, 1880, by a westbound train. Called "the old favorite," Patsey "had a reputation second to none for his speed and endurance." A month later, an article by Henry on "changing the climate" made the rounds of Kansas newspapers. His article was about water, which was and is one of the defining resources and issues of the American West.

Platted and established in 1877-1879, Wa-Keeney was named for its founders, Albert E. Warren and James F. Keeney. The two men were boosters, and the place that they founded is referred to on line as a "colony." That colony seems to have been from Chicago. A plat map from 1886 shows a place west of Wa-Keeney called Colony Station. I'm not sure whether there is a connection between the "colony" of Wa-Keeney and the place called Colony Station. In any case, by 1883, Wa-Keeney was in decline due to crop failures and other misfortunes. Nonetheless, Wakeeney still exists as the seat of Trego County government. As it so happens, we drove that way several years ago on our way to Denver. Not long after that, I based a long short story on that trip and one of its sights, the World's Wonder View Tower, or Tower Museum, at Genoa, Colorado.

John C. Henry seems to have been gone from Trego County by 1884, when he appears to have lost his farm after having become delinquent on his taxes. Maybe the misfortunes of the early 1880s turned Wa-Keeney from a boomtown to a bust. Anyway, when I said that Henry Leverage was peculiarly American, what I meant is that he may have been what I have described before as an American type, the commercial crackpot or the earnest conman. He seems to have been a low type of character, but maybe he came into the world in a place started by high and respectable men of the same essential type. Maybe he learned something from them.

By the way, Trego County was named for Captain Edgar Poe Trego (1838-1863) of the 8th Kansas Infantry, who was killed in action at the Battle of Chickamauga on September 19, 1863. So it looks like Henry Leverage, a teller of weird tales, began life in a place named for a man who was named (presumably) for the original teller of weird tales in America, who was of course Edgar Allan Poe.

---

*That was less than three months after the Battle of Little Bighorn, which happened two-and-a-half states and about 700 miles to the northwest of Trego Tank.

* * *

According to Robert Messenger, Henry Leverage, né David Carroll Henry, was born in Wa-Keeney, Trego County, Kansas, on October 9, 1879, so just a few months after Trego County was organized on June 21, 1879. His father was, again, John Cummings Henry. His mother was Susan Ann (McFadden) Henry, a Pennsylvanian born in about 1856. David C. Henry and his younger sister, Sadie Lucinda Henry (b. July 28, 1881, Kansas City, Missouri; d. ?), were baptized in Philadelphia, at Norris Square Methodist Episcopal Church, on November 4, 1886. The Henry family lived in Wa-Keeney, Kansas, and Denver, Colorado, presumably also in Kansas City, Missouri (in the 1880s). John C. Henry died at home in Denver on May 3, 1901, and was buried at Fairmount Cemetery in that city. His wife and daughter afterwards shared a household in Montclair, New Jersey (1910, 1920, 1930). By 1940, Susan A. Henry was gone. In the meantime, Sadie L. Henry had married Edward J. Vintschger, later chairman of the board of Markt & Hammacher Company, a New York-based export firm co-founded by his father. They lived in Montclair for many years. David C. Henry was nowhere in sight. Sadie's husband, then, was presumably straight, while her brother was admittedly crooked.

To be continued . . .

Wa-Keeney, Kansas, 1880s, from the website Legends of Kansas.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Return

I'm back after nearly three months since writing last and nearly two months after my last posting. My situation hasn't changed. In other words, it's still messed up. But I have missed writing and am happy to be back. My program for this year is the same as before. Part of that program includes finishing some entries that have been in draft form for months and years. I would also like to work on some unfinished series and unfinished ideas. I'll begin tomorrow morning with a teller of weird tales named--but not named--Henry Leverage.

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Requests

My last entry is a biography of author Clyde Irvine. I wrote it in response to a request from last year. I would like everyone to know that I am available to write about authors, artists, and other types of people, as well as on topics of interest to fans and readers of weird fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and so. I would ask that people not use my work or what I write on my blog as free content for their own projects. I don't do what I do so that others can benefit monetarily from it. I understand that, people being people, some will take what I write here for their own purposes, without permission, credit, attribution, or citation, needless to say without compensation paid to me. I would ask that the best of you show some respect and consideration. I'm not anyone's employee. What I write hasn't just fallen out of the sky. I created it.

Please contact me with requests. Although I write for free on this blog, I would seek compensation for any writing I do outside of it. That seems reasonable enough, even if those who seek content for free might be shocked, offended, or insulted by such a request.

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Clyde Irvine (1899-1948)

John Clyde Irvine
Aka Lindsay Nisbet
Author, Playwright, Newspaper Drama Critic/Reviewer and Feature Editor
Born April 15, 1899, Glasgow, Scotland
Died June 21, 1948, Los Angeles, California

John Clyde Irvine was born on April 15, 1899, in Glasgow, Scotland. His name echoes those of geographic features in his native land: the River Clyde flows through Glasgow and into the Firth of Clyde north of Irvine. Knowing something about his life as a Scotsman transplanted to America and Canada makes me wonder whether he could have been the pseudonymous author Abrach in Weird Tales.

Clyde Irvine was the son of John Irvine, an agricultural worker and gamekeeper, and Jessie Easton Evans. Irvine attended school in Glasgow and served in the British army. In the census of 1921, he was counted in Maymyo, Burma, where he was a private in the Second Battalion of the King's Own Royal Regiment. A far more well-known writer was also at Maymyo. His name was Eric Arthur Blair, but we know him as George Orwell (1903-1950). Blair was at Maymyo in about 1923. I can't say whether these two men ever met, but crossed paths and the possibility of crossed paths are always fascinating to consider.

Eric Blair was a police officer in Burma. John C. Irvine seems to have been a police officer in Mashonaland, a region of what was at that time called Rhodesia. I base that supposition on a piece published in Short Stories magazine in its issue of October 25, 1939, credited to Clyde Irvine. Co-written with a Major Desmond, "I Was a Cop in Mashonaland" was Irvine's first known credit in an American pulp magazine, and it seems to establish his connection to Rhodesia. That connection will come into play shortly.

On February 28, 1921, Irvine married Kate Doreen "Scotty" Nisbet (1900-1980) in Glasgow. She was a pianist and, after her husband's death, a musician in a nightclub in Southern California. The couple had four children, Noreen Nisbet Easton Irvine Wilson (1922-2009), Rex John Irvine (1924-1996), Mona Hay Irvine Warren (1928-2001), and Clyde Irvine, Jr. (1933-2003), three of whom lived into the current century. According to The FictionMags Index, Irvine wrote as Lindsay Nisbet in Weird Tales magazine, March 1940. Nisbet was of course his wife's maiden name. There are other Nisbets listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, but I can't say whether any was related to her. Irvine had a short story under his own name in that same issue of Weird Tales.

Irvine was an author, playwright, newspaper drama critic/reviewer, and feature editor of The Daily Record, then and now based in Glasgow. Irvine's plays include "So Free We Seem" (performed at the Arran Drama Festival in 1938), "Scrap" (1938), "Yet They Endure" (1940), "The Last Cavalier," "Death Chair", and "Saltire in Crimson." He was also a member of International P.E.N.

All of that was in his first career in Scotland.

In late 1938 or early 1939, Irvine came to the United States as a representative of the Southern Rhodesia Government in its exhibit of a replica of Victoria Falls, put on display at the World's Fair in New York City. Irvine handled publicity around the exhibit and gave talks to clubs, groups, and organizations in the area of the city. He also returned dispatches to The Daily Record in Glasgow about his stay in New York.

When the enumerator of the U.S. Census came around in 1940, she found Irvine living in Queens Village, Queens, New York. He gave his occupation as freelance writer. I wonder if Irvine encountered pulp magazines for the first time when he came to the United States, for all of his credits in that type of magazine were published in 1939 and after. Here's a list from The FictionMags Index from before and after 1939:

• "Some Kind Letters and Cross Words" (with The Duke), column, in Ziffs Magazine, Nov. 1925
• "I Was a Cop in Mashonaland" (with Major Desmond) in Short Stories, Oct. 25 1939
• "Bush Devil" in Jungle Stories, Spring 1940
• "The Centurion’s Prisoner," in Weird Tales, Mar. 1940, as by Lindsay Nisbet--First installment of "It Happened To Me"
• "The Horror in the Glen," in Weird Tales, Mar. 1940
• "Second Chance Booter," in 12 Sports Aces, Mar. 1940
• "Bride of the Dragon," in Mystery Tales, May 1940
• "Idol of Death," in Jungle Stories, Fall 1940
• "The Eye of Death," in Action Stories, Oct. 1940
• "The Devil’s Bodyguard," in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Dec. 1940
• "Satan on Safari," in Jungle Stories, Winter 1940
• "Code of the Veldt," in Jungle Stories, Summer 1941
• "The Singing Skull, " in Jungle Stories, Fall 1941
• "Bush Gamble," in Jungle Stories, Winter 1941
• "The Crocodile’s Bride," in Jungle Stories, Spring 1942
• "White Man’s Voodoo," in Jungle Stories, Summer 1942
• "Kraal of Blood-Miracles," in Jungle Stories, Fall 1942
• "The Juju of N'Jola," in Jungle Stories, Winter 1942
• "Diamonds of Death," in Jungle Stories, Apr. 1943

There is also a credit for a John Irvine, a poem called "Mairi," published in The Cornhill Magazine in February 1938. There are enough stories there to make a collection. I would like to read them.

Irvine's credits in the list above ended in 1943. I think there's an easy explanation for that, for he relocated to Canada during World War II. There he appears to have served once again in the military, and he continued to write. I have as evidence one credit for him in that part of his career, a feature article called "Two-Time Winner--The Story of a Guy With Courage Plus!," by Sgt. J. Clyde Irvine, in the Canadian military newspaper Khaki, in its issue of February 16, 1944. Irvine's story is about Sgt. George Alfred Hickson (1915-1979) of Kitchener, Ontario, a Canadian war hero.

After the war, Clyde Irvine moved with his family to Southern California. He died on June 21, 1948, in Los Angeles at age forty-nine and was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery, Inglewood, California.

Clyde Irvine's Story in Weird Tales
"The Horror in the Glen," (Mar. 1940)

Lindsay Nisbet's Story in Weird Tales
"The Centurion’s Prisoner" (Mar. 1940)--First installment of "It Happened To Me"

The list from The FictionMags Index is the work of that website and its compilers, and I thank them for it. I also thank them for the image shown below.

Jungle Stories, Summer 1942. "White Man's Voodoo" by Clyde Irvine is inside. His name is on the cover.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

H.P. Lovecraft, Cosmic Horror, & August Derleth-Part Two

August Derleth quoted Harold Farnese on H.P. Lovecraft, putting words at the tip of Lovecraft's pen that were never there.

Derleth also misquoted Lovecraft in a newspaper column called "The New Books," published in the Madison, Wisconsin, Capital Times on August 2, 1942. His subject was Clark Ashton Smith and his new book Out of Space and Time (Arkham House, 1942). Derleth wrote:

"None strikes the note of cosmic horror so well as Clark Ashton Smith," wrote the late great master of the macabre H.P. Lovecraft.

It's nice that Smith was getting some press. Somewhat questionable is the idea that Derleth the reviewer was promoting in his column a book that Derleth the publisher had just made available for sale. Unacceptable is the fact that Derleth misquoted his "late great master," for what Lovecraft actually wrote, in "Supernatural Horror in Literature," is this:

Of younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic terror so well as the California poet, artist, and fictionist Clark Ashton Smith [. . .].

Emphasis added in both quotes.

So Derleth replaced "terror" with "horror." You might call that a quibble. Someone else might see it differently. After all, terror and horror are not the same thing. More to the point, by 1942, "cosmic horror," perhaps already synonymous with Lovecraftian horror, at least in the fan's imagination, had probably become or was beginning to become a thing.* Clark Ashton Smith may have written Lovecraftian tales of cosmic horror, but Lovecraft didn't say that. Derleth did, thereby putting words into Lovecraft's mouth. Again we have to wonder whether this was a simple mistake or misinterpretation, or something done because it suited Derleth's purposes. Did he seek to make a claim to "cosmic horror" as a concept in the way that he seems to have done to the ideas and works of H.P. Lovecraft? Answering that question would take more research than what I can accomplish right now. I'll just add that in her review of Out of Time and Space, Gail Stackpole of the Oroville (California) Mercury-Register was original in describing Smith's collection as "these tales of cosmic horror" (Nov. 12, 1942).

In misquoting Lovecraft in print, Derleth once again propagated an inaccurate idea about his subject, in this case Clark Ashton Smith. When Robert Elder wrote his obituary of Smith (Auburn [California] Journal, Aug. 17, 1961), he perpetuated that idea, using Derleth's exact words--"cosmic horror"--from 1942. Elder may have used Derleth's previous review as a source for his quote. Again, this might be just so much quibbling, but if "cosmic horror" is a real category, we should use the term describing it with as much precision as possible. A larger principle is that we should be as assiduous in our research and as accurate in our quotations as we can be.

------

*The first use of the modifier Lovecraftian in newspapers that I have found was by William T. Evjue, writing in the Capital Times on November 28, 1945, in regards to an essay ("Tales of the Marvellous and Ridiculous") by Edmund Wilson in The New Yorker (Nov. 24, 1945). The first of its opposite, un-Lovecraftian, is in R.S. Devon's review of The Lurker at the Threshold by August Derleth (1945), in the same paper on December 31, 1945. I agree with Devon that Derleth's book is un-Lovecraftian, possibly even anti-Lovecraftian. I have written before on Wilson and The Lurker at the Threshold. Click on the name and title for a link.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

H.P. Lovecraft, Cosmic Horror, & August Derleth-Part One

The phrase "cosmic horror" or "cosmic horrors" was in use as early as 1879, though not in the way scholars, fans, and readers of genre fiction use it today. That kind of meaning came later, perhaps around the turn of the nineteenth century, certainly by the pulp fiction era of the 1920s through the 1940s. I base all of this on an online search of newspaper articles from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The word cosmic is in "Supernatural Horror in Literature" by H.P. Lovecraft (1927; 1933-1935; 1939). The exact phrase "cosmic horror" appears five times in his essay. There are other "cosmic" phrases as well:

• "cosmic mystery"
• "cosmic fear"
• "cosmic terror"
• "cosmic tragedy"
• "cosmic setting"
• "cosmic unreality"
• "cosmic panic"
• "cosmic malignity"
• "cosmic adumbrations"
• "cosmic space"
• "cosmic alienage"
• "cosmic aberration"
• "cosmic fright"
• "the . . . cosmic"

It's clear that Lovecraft took what he thought of as a cosmic view of things and that he did it pretty early on in the history of pulp fiction. I guess that's why cosmic horror is now also called Lovecraftian horror and is so closely associated with him. I'm not sure how much cosmic horror as a sub-genre has changed in the one hundred and one years since Lovecraft first sat down to write. It seems like many authors still compose under a Lovecraftian spell.

"Supernatural Horror in Literature" was first reprinted in book form in The Outsider and Others (1939). Lovecraft's first book, published posthumously, was also the first volume issued by Arkham House, then owned and run by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei. Derleth was an acolyte of Lovecraft. As I have written before, Derleth seems to have loved what Lovecraft did so much that he wanted to make it his own, even if that meant altering it from its original form. Maybe a wise thing to do is to be suspect of everything that Derleth wrote about his master until you can confirm that his words were indeed Lovecraft's own.

It was August Derleth who coined the phrase "Cthulhu mythos." That phrase does not appear in Lovecraft's oeuvre as far as I know. Derleth, a devout Catholic, also tried to turn Lovecraft's material, amoral, indifferent, and even malignant cosmos (and its opposite, chaos) into a battleground between good and evil. At least that's how I understand it. I don't know the exact location of that idea. Maybe there isn't just one location. In any case, Lovecraft scholar S.T. Joshi put a torch to that and other ideas by and about Derleth in his review of A Look Behind the Derleth Mythos: Origins of the Cthulhu Mythos by John B. Haeffle (Odense, Denmark: H. Harksen Productions, 2012). You can read what Mr. Joshi wrote on his own website by clicking here.

One of Derleth's ideas came from a supposed quotation of Lovecraft's words in a letter from Lovecraft to Los Angeles-based musician, composer, and teacher Harold Farnese. Farnese had lost track of Lovecraft's letter to him, and so when Derleth wrote to Farnese after Lovecraft's death, Farnese attempted a paraphrase. That paraphrase, the infamous "black magic quotation" or BMQ, originated with Farnese. (The phrase "black magic quotation" and acronym BMQ are in Mr. Haeffle's book and Mr. Joshi's review.) Derleth wasn't responsible for it as far as anyone knows. But he propagated the "black magic quotation" to a point that we still have it today. Some people may even still believe it. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that the "black magic quotation" should never have been put into print unless it had come with a disclaimer. Harold Farnese was after all legitimately a correspondent of Lovecraft, and we should know something about him, including that the BMQ was in his words and not in Lovecraft's. Anyway, if Mr. Joshi is correct in his analysis, then Derleth's propagation of the "black magic quotation" seems to have a been a sin of commission instead of omission, for it would seem to have served his purposes by way of his passing it off as a direct quotation from Lovecraft. It would seem to impute a moral dimension--and to apply Derleth's interpretation--to Lovecraft's cosmic vision.

I have found another misquote of Lovecraft's words, made by Derleth. This one, about Clark Ashton Smith, may be unknown today, but we should know about it now if only because it helps to confirm a pattern. By the way, if you want to read what I wrote previously on Harold Farnese and the "black magic quotation," click here.

To be concluded . . .

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley