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Friday, April 22, 2022

Mrs. Harry Pugh Smith (1892-1943)

Née Anita Blackmon
Aka Anita Blackmon, Anita Smith
Teacher, Author
Born December 1, 1892, Augusta, Arkansas
Died February 23, 1943, Little Rock, Arkansas

Mrs. Harry Pugh Smith was born Anita Blackmon on December 1, 1892, in Augusta, Arkansas. Her parents were Edwin E. Blackmon (1859-?), mayor and postmaster of Augusta, and Eva Hutchison Blackmon (1866-1939), a schoolteacher and principal. In emulating Beautiful Joe: A Dog's Own Story by Margaret Marshall Saunders (1892), Anita wrote her first line of fiction at age eight: "I am a black and white terror." Her family forever after teased her about the misspelling. Only later would she have an editor to catch such things.

Anita graduated high school at age fourteen, graduated from Ouachita College in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and spent two years at the University of Chicago. She taught Latin, French, German, literature, and languages in Augusta and Little Rock for a number of years. On May 29, 1920, she married Harry Pugh Smith (1900-1942). In her first year of marriage, she wrote and wrote, collecting thirty-seven rejection slips for her efforts. She finally sold her seventh story to All-Story Magazine (possibly All-Story Love Stories). Hundreds more stories flowed from her pen over the next two decades. These appeared in All-Story Love Stories, Breezy Stories, Cupid's Diary, Detective Tales, Four Star Love Magazine, Love Story Magazine, Mystery Magazine, Sweetheart Stories, and other titles. Her byline appeared in Weird Tales just once, for "The Hook of Death," published in January 1924.

Anita Blackmon Smith also wrote novels. They include:
  • Her Private Devil (1934)
  • So Many Worlds (1935)
  • Handmade Rainbows (1936)
  • Hearts Walking (1936)
  • Beau (1937)
  • Peter Pan's Daughter (1937)
  • Happy-Go-Lucky (1938)
  • Murder à la Richelieu (1937)
  • There Is No Return (1938)
The last two are mysteries written in the so-called Had I But Known mode. Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) is considered the founder of the Had I But Known school. Her life story is in fact entitled Had She But Known: A Biography of Mary Roberts Rinehart, written by Charlotte MacLeod (1994). In his study Murder for Pleasure (1941), Howard Haycraft (1905-1991), a scholar and historian of the crime, detective, and mystery genres, listed the subscribers to the Had I But Known school:
  • Margaret N. Armstrong (1867-1944)
  • Anita Blackmon (aka Mrs. Harry Pugh Smith) (1892-1943)
  • Clarissa Fairchild Cushman (1889-1980)
  • Dorothy Cameron Disney (1903-1992)
  • Mignon Eberhart (1899-1996)
  • Medora Field (1892-1960)
  • Leslie Ford (Zenith Jones Brown) (1898-1983)
  • Constance (1899-1980) and Gwenyth Little (1903-1985)
  • Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958)
  • Charlotte Murray Russell (1899-1992)
The school was named after a line from Ogden Nash's poem "Don't Guess, Let Me Tell You," from The New Yorker, April 20, 1940:

Don't Guess, Let Me Tell You
By Ogden Nash

Personally I don't care whether a detective-story writer was educated in night school or day school
So long as they don't belong to the H.I.B.K. school.
The H.I.B.K. being a device to which too many detective-story writers are prone,
Namely the Had I But Known.
Sometimes it is the Had I But Known what grim secret lurked behind that smiling exterior I would never have set foot within the door,
Sometimes the Had I But Known then what I know now I could have saved at least three lives by revealing to the Inspector the conversation I heard through that fortuitous hole in the floor.
Had-I-But-Known narrators are the ones who hear a stealthy creak at midnight in the tower where the body lies, and, instead of locking their door or arousing the drowsy policeman posted outside their room, sneak off by themselves to the tower and suddenly they hear a breath exhaled behind them,
And they have no time to scream, they know nothing else till the men from the D.A.'s office come in next morning and find them.
Had I But Known-ers are quick to assume the prerogatives of the Deity,
For they will suppress evidence that doesn't suit their theories with appalling spontaneity,
And when the killer is finally trapped into a confession by some elaborate device of the Had I But Known-er some hundred pages later than if they hadn't held their knowledge aloof,
Why they say Why Inspector I knew all along it was he but I couldn't tell you, you would have laughed at me unless I had absolute proof.
Would you like a nice detective story for your library which I am sorry to say I didn't rent but owns?
I wouldn't have bought it had I but known it was impregnated with Had I But Knowns.

I'll note that if you want something thoroughly skewered, Ogden Nash is sure to come through for you. And it's remarkable that the theme of a simple satirical poem would be picked up so soon after its publication by a scholar, Howard Haycraft, who fixed it in the critical and analytical imagination so that it survives even to today.

Ogden Nash poked fun at the women who wrote Had I But Known-type stories of crime and suspense. Haycraft seems to have been more kindly towards them. I don't know what people think of this type of story now, but in reading about Had I But Known, I thought of another type of story, one in particular that begins with these words:
     The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
That story of course is "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft (1926, 1928). Lovecraft's words don't exactly equal "Had I But Known." But is his opening really that much different in its theme than these words from Murder à la Richelieu by Mrs. Harry Pugh Smith (1937):
had I suspected the orgy of bloodshed upon which we were about to embark, I should then and there, in spite of my bulk and an arthritic knee, have taken shrieking to my heels.

Or:

there was nothing on this particular morning to indicate the reign of terror into which we were about to be precipitated. Coming events are supposed to cast their shadows before, yet I had no presentiment about the green spectacle case which was to play such a fateful part in the murders [. . .]. 

(And isn't Great Cthulhu also a kind of "green spectacle"?)

Anyway, I wouldn't put "The Call of Cthulhu" in the same category--thematically, structurally, or stylistically--as the Had I But Known-type story. On the other hand, maybe it doesn't have all of the strengths that we might think.

The Smiths moved to St. Louis in 1929. She wrote. He worked for the telephone company. Harry Pugh Smith died prematurely, on August 1, 1942, at age forty-one. Her health declined after that. She returned home to live with her widowed father in Arkansas. Soon she went into a nursing home. Anita Blackmon Smith died on February 23, 1943, at age fifty and lies buried at Augusta Memorial Park in the town of her birth.

Mrs. Harry Pugh Smith's Story in Weird Tales
"The Hook of Death" (Jan. 1924)

 Further Reading
"Outcast!" (not "The Outsider") by Mrs. Harry Pugh Smith in Sweetheart Stories, April 1938[?]. Cover artist unknown.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley
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