Joseph Payne Brennan (1918-1990)-Part Four

Brennan Works, 1950-1990

Joseph Payne Brennan wrote mostly for pulp magazines and small magazines. Something of an anachronism, he arrived almost too late to play the pulp game. Most of his early stories were for Western titles. Brennan made his way into the pages of Weird Tales only after 1950. That magazine came to a much-lamented end not long after, in September 1954, having by then shrunken away to digest-size. The same thing had happened to other pulp titles, those that had survived anyway. Shrunken or not, most gave up the ghost by the late 1950s or early 1960s. (The last true pulp magazine is supposed to have been Ranch Romances, which rode off into the sunset in 1971.) It looks as though Brennan had just one story in a mainstream slick magazine, "I'm Murdering Mr. Massington," published in Esquire sixty-eight years ago this month, in February 1954.

Brennan started his own small magazine, entitled Macabre, in 1957, not as a replacement for Weird Tales but "to work for the revival of that unique magazine [and to] serve as a rallying place for all those devoted to horror and the supernatural." (1) The first issue was dated June 1957. Every issue after that was named for a season, Summer or Winter, twice a year until 1966, once a year--but not every year--after that until 1976. There were twenty-two issues in all. Most included at least one of Brennan's works. The author also contributed to The Arkham Collector, Weirdbook, Whispers, Nyctalops, Myrddin, Cross Plains, Fantasy Crossroads, Borderland, and others--hundreds of stories and poems in all. And yet he considered himself a failure, at least during a period--long or short, but probably long--when he engulfed himself in a cloud of typical Irish gloom, in 1985 when he was interviewed by Etchings & Odysseys. In his high school yearbook he had given his ambition: "Intend to write." Write he did, very successfully, and yet he believed that he had failed. So sad, so unnecessary--and maybe self-indulgent, too.

Like William Hope Hodgson and August Derleth before him, Brennan penned tales of an occult detective (although I think Brennan's detective investigated more conventional cases, too). The detective's name is Lucius Leffing. As far as I can tell, Leffing's first published adventure was "The Haunted Housewife" in Macabre #12, Winter 1962/1963. Brennan chronicled Leffing's investigations in more than three dozen stories published not only in Macabre but also in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, from 1965 until 1984. These and other stories were collected in four volumes, The Casebook of Lucius Leffing (1973), The Chronicles of Lucius Leffing (1977), Act of Providence (1979) with Donald M. Grant, and The Adventures of Lucius Leffing (1990). One unusual feature of the Leffing stories is that they are set in Brennan's hometown of New Haven, Connecticut, with the author himself as narrator and sidekick, a kind of Watson to Leffing's Holmes. Brennan had other non-Leffing stories in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine as well. His short story "Junk," from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine for June 1990, may have been one of the last stories Brennan sold in his lifetime. 

To be continued . . . 

Note

(1) From "Recollections of Weird Tales: Joseph Payne Brennan," in The Weird Tales Story, edited by Robert Weinberg (West Linn, OR: Fax Collector's Editions, 1977), page 61.

Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, July 1975, with Joseph Payne Brennan's byline on the cover for his novelet "The Apple Orchard Murder Case." Cover artist unknown.

Updated on February 22, 2022.
Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley