Allison V. Harding in Tellers of Weird Tales

If you click on the label on the right, you will see all of the articles I have written on this blog about Allison V. Harding. There are more items to add to the resulting catalog. These will help to bring things up to date and to help fill in some gaps.

In late 2010, I was reading Weird Tales: The Magazine That Never Dies, a hardbound anthology edited by Marvin Kaye, when I came upon a story called "The Damp Man." It was my first encounter with Allison V. Harding. I enjoyed the story. It reminds me of movies from the 1940s. In his very brief introduction to "The Damp Man," the late Mr. Kaye set forth the mystery of Allison V. Harding: she was actually Jean Milligan, an attorney in 1940s New York. I like to solve mysteries. If you turn that around, you could say that unsolved mysteries are troubling, not just to me but maybe to all of us. Witness the current fascination not only with true crime but also with the real or supposed mysteries of history. Conspiracy theories are attempts to solve mysteries, I guess, even where no mystery exists.

For months I thought about the mysterious case of Allison V. Harding. I began this blog in part--a large part in fact--so that I might solve that mystery. My first entry, dated April 22, 2011, was on C.L. Moore. How else could I begin? But my second was on Allison V. Harding. That was on April 26, 2011. I listed the thirty-six stories in the Harding oeuvre in that first article. I naïvely thought that someone out there in this wide world might know something about her and the woman behind the Harding stories. I didn't think that a secret like this one could be so closely guarded. And yet it was. In fact, there may have been just one person in this same wide world who knew the true identity of Allison V. Harding, and he was living, I believe, as a recluse in his New York City apartment.

By the way, the first Harding story in Weird Tales is called "The Unfriendly World" (July 1943). Regardless of its subject matter, I think the title of the story to be fitting, considering what I subsequently found out about Allison V. Harding.

I asked for help in my first entry on Harding. No help came. So I kept going and I solved the mystery: Jean Milligan (1919-2004) was the wife of Lamont Buchanan (1919-2015), the associate editor of Weird Tales magazine during most of the time during which the Harding stories were published. I wrote about my investigations in "Who Was Allison V. Harding?" on May 24, 2011.

On May 26, 2011, I published an entry on Lamont Buchanan. I think everything I wrote then is still valid. The next day, May 27, 2011, I published an article and list called "Lamont Buchanan's Books."  I found a review that stated he had published thirteen books. I found only twelve.

On February 8, 2014, I wrote about John Giunta (1920-1970) and his role as the cover artist for the last Damp Man story, "The Damp Man Again" (Weird Tales, May 1949).

On September 15, 2015, I wrote an entry called "Take the Z-Train," accompanied by a cartoon by Charles Addams. That was the first time that I wrote about my idea of Lamont Buchanan as the actual author of the Harding stories, this based on my reading of the stories themselves and on the circumstances under which they were published. I didn't then and still don't have any evidence that he was the actual author. I would like to think that there is some kind of extant evidence--or proof--one way or another, but I'm not very hopeful of that. I should remind everyone that the sole bit of evidence that Jean Milligan was the author of the Harding stories is Sam Moskowitz's account of seeing her name as the payee in the original files of Weird Tales, which are, of course, no longer in existence.

When I wrote on September 15, 2015, I didn't know that Lamont Buchanan had died. That unhappy event took place on April 21, 2015, almost exactly halfway between his birthday and that of his departed wife. According to the website Find A Grave, his place of death was Connecticut. He was ninety-six years old.

The next day, September 16, 2015, I wrote "Wounds," about Lamont Buchanan but also about parallel events in the life of my own family. (My aunt and uncle lived reclusive lives. Both fell at home within a few weeks of each other and went first to the same hospital, then to the same nursing home. She died before he did.)

On September 17, 2015, I wrote "The Origins of the Damp Man." In that article, I made a comparison between the loathsome and creepy stalker of the story title and the psychopathic killer in I Wake Up Screaming (1941), one of the first film noire movies. (Remember that part where I compared "The Damp Man" to movies of the 1940s?) I also found another case of a frozen ghost (nineteenth-century ghosts gave way to twentieth-century monsters of one kind or another) in "The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall" by John Kendrick Bangs (1891). I think this was the first time I suggested that the Harding stories may have been influenced by--or maybe derivative of--others that had come before them.

On September 18, 2015, came "Allison V. Harding-Revelations and Requests," a brief entry in which I asked people to read the Harding stories and respond with their own ideas about possible inspirations and antecedents for them.

My next entry was, in contrast, a long one. It's called "J.D. Salinger and Lamont Buchanan." The date was September 19, 2015. In it, I wrote about the extraordinary possibility that Buchanan was a model for Holden Caulfield, hero of J.D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951). It was Shirley (Baker) Ardman (ca. 1922-2014), a student at Columbia University in 1940, who made that claim. She was introduced to Salinger by Buchanan so that she might interview him. Shirley told her story to Noel Young, who wrote about it in an article called "Top Tips for Writers from J.D. Salinger--Advice from Beyond the Grave," dated January 26, 2012, and posted on the website The Drum. Unfortunately, the link I provided is no longer live.

I asked many questions in my article of September 19, 2015. One was facetious: Was Allison V. Harding actually J.D. Salinger slumming among the pulps? On September 24, 2015, in "The Undead Past," I cleared that up--I hope--by stating that I don't think Harding was Salinger, but I also asked whether any scholar was up to the task of uncovering further connections between Salinger and Buchanan. I think the answer is the same now as it was then: probably not.

On October 1, 2017, the New York Daily-News published a full-page article called "You Ask Me Rye?" by James Fanelli, regarding the $15.4-million estate of Lamont Buchanan and its possible disposition. (These punning titles have to stop.) It's probably the best and most thorough account of Buchanan's life and situation that I have found, especially his later life. It includes quotes from his last living blood relatives and relatives by marriage, nieces and nephews all. It also includes a photograph of Lamont Buchanan, the first that I have ever seen. I feel certain there are--or were--others, but who knows what has happened to the Buchanans' personal property? Who knows what might be--or might have been--in their possession when they died? Could there have been a solution to the strange and mysterious case of Allison V. Harding? Maybe. Maybe not. The article is about money (Buchanan's) and fame (Salinger's) and not very much about writing or literature. If writing and literature had been the main thing, we would probably have never heard about it. Everything would have gone in the Dumpster, and maybe that's where it all went anyway.

On April 26, 2021, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of this blog, I wrote "A Season of Discovery and Beginning," about C.L. Moore, Allison V. Harding, and other people and things. The spring-season months of March, April, and May seem to have been central in the lives of Lamont Buchanan and Jean Milligan.

Most recently, I wrote "The Strange Case of Allison V. Harding" (Sept. 29, 2022) and "Allison V. Harding: Further Possibilities" (Oct. 1, 2022). Those two entries bring us to today. Other people have written about Allison V. Harding, Lamont Buchanan, and Jean Milligan in the time since I discovered her identity. They include Scott Nicolay, Anya Martin, Mike Barrett, Douglas Anderson, Cora Buhlert, and the seemingly anonymous author behind the website Paperback Warrior.

Since I first wrote, there has been at least one published collection of the Harding stories. I was supposed to write an introduction to another, but that is a project that has gone by the wayside, as so many have these past seven years since the troubles began in my family. Or maybe I should say that troubles that already existed began bubbling up again in that time. I know something now about troubles that exist in families and the lives of family members. I think I understand something about the strange case of Lamont Buchanan, who is, I believe, really at the heart of the Allison V. Harding story. I wish that all of these things could have been otherwise. I wish that maybe only a couple could have been otherwise, but as the Bible verse says, "Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward."

Charles Lamont Buchanan (1919-2015). This photograph was published in the New York Daily News but without attribution. Presumably it was provided to the newspaper by someone else, perhaps an attorney, caretaker, associate, or family member. In republishing it here, I do not make any claims to a copyright to it and express my wish not to infringe on anyone else's copyright. I trust and hope that my use of it here falls under the doctrine of fair use. My use is strictly for informational and educational purposes, as I do not profit materially from writing this blog.

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley