Hamilton Craigie (1880-1956)-The First Detective Story

Henry Hamilton Edmund Craigie
Author, Editor, Poet, Teacher, Amateur Historian
Born July 22, 1880, Round Hill, Greenwich, Connecticut
Died August 9, 1956, Brooksville, Florida

Henry Hamilton Edmund Craigie, known as Hamilton Craigie, was born on July 22, 1880, in Round Hill, Greenwich, Connecticut. I haven't found anything on Craigie from before 1918, when he was already on the cusp of middle age. It was in 1918 that his career as a professional writer began, if the list of his stories in The FictionMags Index has captured his first credits. That career was bracketed by Aprils: from April 6, 1918 (in The Argosy), to April 1956 (in Famous Detective Stories), Craigie had scores of stories in Action Stories, Adventure Novels and Short Stories, The Argosy and its successors, The Black Cat, Detective Story Magazine, Jungle Stories, Mystery Magazine, Short Stories, Western Novels and Short Stories, Western Story Magazine, and other genre titles. In addition, Craigie had stories in Collier's, The International, Metropolitan, and Woman's Home Companion. He also wrote nonfiction articles and items about writing and the writing business.

Hamilton Craigie had five stories in Weird Tales, beginning with his crime/detective story "The Chain" in the first issue, March 1923. He also had three stories in the Weird Tales companion magazine Detective Tales in its first year, culminating with "Derring-Do," also in March 1923. Craigie continued to have stories in the successors to Detective Tales after it had gone to another publisher. He and Otis Adelbert Kline were the only authors to have a story in each of the first four issues of Weird Tales.

Craigie's five stories for Weird Tales include one called "The Jailer of Souls" (June 1923). It's a story of the American West, perhaps an early weird Western. There is mention of Java and other places in the Far East, but it is not set in the jungle and there aren't any flashbacks to a jungle setting. Nonetheless, Craigie had a story called "Jailer of Souls" in Jungle Stories in the Winter issue, 1952/1953. I can't say that these were the same story, as I have not read the Jungle Stories version. As for the Weird Tales version, it looks as though Craigie was working towards a fictional milieu inhabited by smart, able, and powerful heroes, almost like superheroes. In both "The Chain" and "The Jailer of Souls," he used an expression, Criminopolis, as a kind of shorthand to represent the world of crime against which his heroes operated. By the way, there is a book called Criminopolis, written by the French author Paul Mimande (1847-1913) and published in Paris in 1897.

"The Chain" is a crime/detective story, while "The Jailer of Souls" is a Western. It looks as though most of Hamilton Craigie's output was in those two genres. I have found ten books by Hamilton Craigie, all of which, judging by their titles, are Westerns:

• The Longhorn Trail (1931)
• Southwest of the Law (1932)
• Nevada Jones (1935)
• Hair-Trigger Hombre (1946)
• Trigger Trails (1946)
• Feudal Range (British edition, 1948)
• Thunder in the Dust (1952)
• The Longride (1954)
• Rim Rock Range (1955)
• The Ranch of the Raven (British edition, date unknown)

In addition to being an author, Hamilton Craigie also worked as a magazine editor. In 1918, when he filled out his draft card, Craigie was living in Summit, New Jersey, and working as an associate editor for the Frank A. Munsey Company, publisher of The Argosy. He was also on the editorial staff of The Black Cat and Metropolitan.

Hamilton Craigie was born in Connecticut and lived for a time in New York City. I suspect this was in the 1910s and/or 1920s. He appears to have spent most of the 1930s in Chatham, New Jersey. In 1942, when he filled out his second draft card, Craigie was in Essex, New Jersey.

I believe Craigie was married twice, first to Mary A. Melia (1884-1938), after her death, to Edith Fulton Martini (1893-1978). They were married in Hernando County, Florida, on December 12, 1944. It looks as though Craigie lived in Florida from the early to mid 1940s until his death in 1956. He taught short story writing at the University of Tampa Adult Education Center as early as 1948.

Craigie's daughter by his first marriage, (Mary) Virginia Craigie, was also a writer. She graduated from Eden Hall Convent of the Sacred Heart Boarding School in Torresdale, Pennsylvania, in 1933, having won the Louise Imogen Cuiney prize for highest average in literary work during her high school career. She had already by that time contributed articles to children's magazines. Afterwards she studied at the College of the Sacred Heart in Manhattan. She married John V.E. Zink.

His second wife, Edith Fulton, was a writer, too. She had poems in Bozart, Florida Magazine of Verse, Kaleidograph, The Literary Digest, the Tampa Tribune, and other publications. These were collected in Disturbing the Stars, published in 1949. Edith Fulton was also a columnist for the Brooksville Sun newspaper.

Hamilton Craigie died on August 9, 1956, in Brooksville, Florida. He was seventy-six years old.

Hamilton Craigie's Stories in Weird Tales and Detective Tales

Weird Tales

• "The Chain" (1923; reprinted Nov. 1952)
• "The Incubus" (Apr. 1923)
• "Midnight Black" (May 1923)
• "The Jailer of Souls" (June 1923)
• "The Man-Trap" (Nov. 1925)

Detective Tales

• "The Mirror" (Nov. 16/Dec. 15, 1922)
• "The Symbol of Authority" (Feb. 1923)
• "Derring-Do" (Mar. 1923)

Hamilton Craigie's Other Stories Listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

• "The Vengeance of Hanuman" in Strange Stories (June 1940)
• "Swamp of Dread Mist" in Jungle Stories (Spring 1950)
• "Jailer of Souls" in Jungle Stories (Winter 1952/1953)

Craigie also had a story called "The House Without a Door" in Real Detective Tales in June 1924, as well as stories in Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories. Finally, I found a story by Craigie called "Roundup of Reno Red," which was syndicated in newspapers in 1930.

Further Reading
"Today in Tampa" by Leo Stalnaker in the Tampa Times, November 22, 1948, page 2.

Hamilton Craigie's Story:

"The Chain" is a short story in six chapters. It tells of one harrowing evening in the life of a private detective named Quarrier. Although a quarrier is a man who works in a quarry, you can also look at the name as a pun on the word quarry as an animal that is hunted. In other words, a quarrier might be a man who hunts other men.

I was hoping for a more sustained work in "The Chain." After all, it's fairly long. Instead, all of the events in the story take place in a single evening, beginning with a ride in a New York taxicab and ending at Quarrier's very elaborately made offices. Although Quarrier and all of his attributes are described in detail, Craigie's tale hinges on a physical place and the minute details of that place. Describing a complex physical environment can be a challenge for a writer. I would advise against it if that's at all possible. Fortunately for the reader, Craigie included in his story a map, a floor plan of Quarrier's offices. Even so, it's not quite enough. You still have to read closely if you're going to understand just what has happened and in what way. In any event, that floor plan is the first drawing (not counting decorations) to appear in Weird Tales. I'm not sure that we can call it an illustration, though, as it does not depict a scene from "The Chain." It's there just so that we can understand better what is happening. Call it a graphic version of Craigie's prose, an example of the adage a picture is worth a thousand words.

There aren't any elements of horror, fantasy, or pseudo-science (i.e., science fiction) in "The Chain." Quarrier has a weird experience, though, when he senses an invisible presence in his office, or recently departed from his office. Craigie's story would seem out of place in Weird Tales. However, I detect a nascent genre or sub-genre here, namely, the weird-hero genre of the pulps, later the superhero genre of comic books. Quarrier is obviously a superior man, almost like a Conan of the city. Nothing can stop him, including a mob of gangsters who attacks him in the street, or an armed guard, whom Quarrier knocks out and disarms, even though he's bound by a kind of Gordian's knot. Nothing eludes him, either, including the lightly swinging electrolier chain of the title. It is by that swinging chain that his enemy the Big Gun's scheme is undone. (That's the Big Gun, not the Big Guy. The Big Guy's crime career began much later.)

I can't say that "The Chain" is a very good story. My main complaint is against Craigie's prose, that awful purple prose so common in pulp magazines. Here is but one egregious example:

Now Quarrier, his mouth a grim line, was reaching with the butt of his automatic to break that glass when, with a grinding of brakes the taxi whirled suddenly to a groaning halt.

I don't know about you, but that reads like an entry in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Fortunately we have to endure only one -ly word in that awful sentence. Pulp fiction authors loved their -ly words, non-words, too, such as "blackly" and "oilily." And this is my continuing complaint against pulp fiction and pulp magazines, both old and new: it and they can never be taken seriously (except by fanboys) and will never gain any purchase in the wider realms of literature (except with fanboys) for as long as the prose is so bad. Quarrier has the makings of an interesting character, but he's mostly two-dimensional. And that gets to a second complaint I have against pulp fiction, one that lies with bad characters, especially with characters who are not recognizably human. Edgar Rice Burroughs' characters, for example, are not human, and so his stories will never rise to the level of literature. In contrast, characters created by Raymond Chandler, who also wrote for pulp magazines, are recognizably human, and so Chandler's stories have attained a higher level of both quality and art.

From the Tampa Times, 1948.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley