I started writing about weird fiction and fantasy magazines two months ago. My aim was to get back around to Robert A.W. Lowndes and the magazines he edited in the 1960s. Now as I do more research, I find that there are more magazines than I thought. Leaving out science fiction titles, British and Canadian magazines, and fanzines, I'm still left with fifty-five titles. It would take me a couple of months to write about all of them. In the meantime I would have to leave biographies by the wayside. The last biography I wrote was the last of a four-part series on Bob Lowndes. That was on July 31. I think it's time to get back to the writers and artists who contributed to Weird Tales. The weird fiction and fantasy magazines will have to wait for another day.
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| Eerie Tales was published by C.K. Publishing of Toronto. It lasted for one whole issue in July 1941. I'm not sure why the main title and the subtitle, "Every Story Original," were hand lettered, while the rest of the front cover copy was typeset. The whole effect is a little amateurish, although the cover art itself isn't bad. The artist signed his or her work. Unfortunately I can't read the signature. Thomas P. Kelley, whose name appears on the cover, also wrote for Weird Tales. He had three serials published in that magazine between 1937 and 1940. |
Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley
Kelley was a well known author in Canada, owing not to his work in the pulps but almost entirely to his books on the "Black Donnellys," a notorious Irish-Canadian criminal family, five of whom were massacred in 1880. His books on the family and their demise were once widely read up here. I read them while in my teens, and many of my friends had as well.
ReplyDeleteHistorians, however, were not enthusiastic about Kelley's efforts, since he often, I gather, used his talents as a pulp-fiction writer to imaginatively enliven the historical record of his subjects, even though the lives of the Donnelly family and their enemies were colourful enough already.
He also wrote a true-crime book on the Rat River Trapper, the mysterious American Albert Johnson, who was the target of a massive manhunt in the Yukon territory during the 1920s. Much of that book was, I'm fairly certain, also enlivened by imaginative additions, though the core of the story is factual.
Hi, Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the information on Thomas P. Kelley. I just wrote about him on my blog. Go to this URL for the article:
http://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com/2013/10/thomas-p-kelley-1910-1982.html
He sounds like an interesting character.
TH