Willard E. Hawkins (1887-1970)-The First Author, The First Story

Willard E. Hawkins was born on September 27, 1887, in Fairplay, Colorado. He was an author, editor, publisher, and public speaker with stories in Amazing Stories, Astounding Science-Fiction, The Blue Book Magazine, Breezy Stories, The Cavalier, Chicago Ledger, Fantastic Adventures, The Green Book Magazine, Imagination, The Red Book Magazine, Science Fiction, Super Science Novels, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Western Outlaws, Western Rangers, and Western Trails. Hawkins also worked as an editor with the Loveland Reporter (at age nineteen), Denver Times, Rocky Mountain News, Rocky Mountain Hotel Bulletin, and American Greeter.

Hawkins established The Student Writer magazine in 1916. He was also an editor, with David Raffelock, of The Author and Journalist, which may have been an outgrowth of The Student Writer. Among those who read and benefitted from The Author and Journalist was Erle Stanley Gardner (1889-1970), later creator of Perry Mason. Hawkins died on April 17, 1970, presumably in Craig, Colorado. The current National Writers Association is descended from The Writers Colony in the Rocky Mountains, founded by Raffelock in 1929.

According to a newspaper article from 1924, Hawkins and Raffelock conducted "a simplified training course in short story writing, that has hundreds of students all over America enrolled." (1) That leads me to think that the new Weird Tales magazine was in touch with editors, authors, and instructors in short-story writing in different parts of the country, and that it derived some of its early content from young people, students, and budding authors through those connections. There is reason to believe that Anthony M. Rud was a connection to tellers of weird tales in Alabama. (I'll have more on that soon.) Maybe Willard E. Hawkins served the same kind of function for writers in Colorado.

I have already written about Hawkins. You can read what I posted on November 11, 2014, by clicking here. He had just one story in Weird Tales. As it so happens, his was the first to appear in "The Unique Magazine." It was first printed in March 1923, one hundred years ago this month. "The Dead Man's Tale" was reprinted in Weird Tales in July 1934 under the heading "Weird Story Reprint."

Willard E. Hawkins' Story:

In the table of contents in that first issue of Weird Tales, "The Dead Man's Tale" is called a novelette. There are eight brief chapters, plus an introduction explaining that the narrative to follow was discovered in the papers of a Dr. John Pedric, "psychical investigator and author of occult works." So, we have the first occult or psychic detective in Weird Tales and the first occurrence of a very commonly used element in weird fiction, the framing device that attempts to lend some kind of credence to the framed story.

"The Dead Man's Tale" is exactly that: it is a tale told in the first person by a soldier who was killed at the Second Battle of the Marne, July 24, 1918. So here was another first: "The Dead Man's Tale" was the first story in Weird Tales involving what was then known as the Great War, a war that had ended less than five years before the magazine began. We should always keep in mind just how immediate was World War I during those early days of Weird Tales.

"The Dead Man's Tale" is a ghost story, a life-after-death story, a story of one soldier's attempt in his hatred to frag another before that was even a term. The dead soldier works on the man he has taken as his enemy like Iago on Othello. Eventually he possesses his body. What is the reason behind his efforts? As the French say, cherchez la femme. In actuality, though, it is his own madness and cruelty and lust that drives him to these things. We read this story now and the suggestion of what we call post-traumatic stress disorder, what men then called shell shock, arises. That gives Hawkins' tale an interesting angle that readers of 1923 might have missed. "The Dead Man's Tale" is otherwise, in my opinion, an unpleasant account of a murderous insanity, something like a story by Edgar Allan Poe but lacking in the fineness and skill of Poe's writing. The dead man's redeeming action at the end of the story is hardly redemptive for the trouble he has caused.

By the way, "The Dead Man's Tale" includes the first mention of (more accurately the first allusion to) a work of weird fiction occurring in a story published in Weird Tales. That story, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886), was actually Hawkins' inspiration in writing his own story for Weird Tales. He explained as much in his letter to "The Eyrie," also published in the first issue of the magazine, on page 181.

Here's another by-the-way: there is a minor character named Hawkins in "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, written in 1926 and published in Weird Tales just five years after that first issue, in February 1928.

Note
(1) From "Short Story Writers," Fort Collins Coloradoan, February 20, 1924, page 4.

Willard E. Hawkins (1887-1970)
(I have recolored this picture, green for envy.)

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley