Newspaper Reporter, Columnist, Editor, Author, Pulp Magazine Editor, Public Speaker
Born May 29, 1887, Pottsville, Pennsylvania
Died June 25, 1930, Dore Sanitarium, Monrovia, California
Meredith Davis, called Tim by his friends, was born on May 29, 1887, in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. His parents were Ezekiel Forman Chambers Davis, who died in 1895, and Joanna Holand Hobart Davis. Meredith Davis attended Pottsville High School, where he was editor of the yearbook, entitled Crimson and White, and president of the debating society. He graduated in 1905 in the Honor or "A" Division of his class.
Davis broke into newspaper reporting at the Pottsville Miners' Journal. He was a cub reporter and a court reporter with that paper until June 1907. He may also have been a member at that time of the Prohibition Party. J.C. Hennberger (1890-1969), later co-founder of Weird Tales, was also a native Pennsylvanian and was also associated with the Prohibition Party, in his case in Indianapolis.
Meredith Davis moved from newspaper to newspaper during his first decade and more in the business. From July 1908 to February 1909, he was with the Philadelphia North American. He worked for the Scranton Truth beginning in February 1909. Later that year, he made the move to the Richmond (Virginia) News-Leader, where he worked as city editor and managing editor. In about 1911, he had an operation and returned home to Pottsville for his convalescence. In late 1912, he testified in the trial of Floyd Allen (1856-1913) for the killing of Judge Thornton Lemmon Massie and others in a gunfight on March 12, 1912, at the Carroll County courthouse in Hillsville, Virginia. While in Virginia, Davis served as a private in the Virginia militia, but only for three months.
Davis worked for the San Antonio (Texas) Light from about 1913 to February 1914, then for the Rocky Mountain News, in Denver, for a few years. On October 14, 1916, he married Willie Ernestine Kendall of Richmond, Virginia. The couple returned to Denver to make their home. By 1923, Davis was in Los Angeles, where he worked for the Los Angeles Times. He wrote columns called "Grin and Bear It" and "Cross Sections." Beginning in about 1923, possibly late 1923, he served as editor of the The Times Illustrated Magazine, a Sunday section of the paper. In October 1925, he became managing editor of a new magazine, Hollywood Life. As late as November 1925, he was still credited as editor of the Sunday Times magazine.
In May 1927, Meredith Davis trekked all the way across country to begin work at Fiction House, publisher of pulp magazines, in New York City. Davis served as editor of Action Stories, North•West Stories, Lariat Story Magazine, and Love Romances from 1927 to 1928. Carson W. Mowre of Billings, Montana, was literary editor.
Davis was never especially healthy. I suspect his ill health forced a retreat to Southern California. On April 4, 1930, he was enumerated in the Federal census while boarding at a home in Glendale, California. He died less than three months later, on June 25, 1930, at Dore Sanitarium, in Monrovia, California, probably of tuberculosis.
Meredith Davis was the author of several stories published from 1920 to 1931. His first was "When Thieves Walk Out" in All-Story Weekly, April 10, 1920. He had other stories in Argosy Allstory Weekly, The Black Mask, The Blue Book Magazine, Brief Stories, Short Stories, Top-Notch Magazine, and other titles. His story "When Smith Meets Smith" (Action Stories, March 1923) was adapted to film as Beyond the Border (1925), with Harry Carey as Bob Smith and Mildred Harris as Molly Smith. March 1923 was also the month in which his only story for Weird Tales, "The Accusing Voice," appeared. Davis' last magazine story, "A Pair of Eights," was published posthumously in Wild West Stories and Complete Novel Magazine #69 in February 1931. A contemporary newspaper article made note of Davis' "dialect stories." His obituary described him as tall and lean and with prematurely gray hair, also as good natured, courteous, and friendly.
Meredith Davis' Story in Weird Tales
"The Accusing Voice" (Mar. 1923)
"Meredith Davis to Head Group of Magazines" in the Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1927, page 27.
"'Tim' Davis Dies in Calif." in the Pottsville Republican, June 28, 1930, page 1, a generic kind of obituary obviously written by someone missing facts about Davis' life.
Meredith Davis' Story:
"The Accusing Voice" is a short story in four chapters. It opens at a court trial in Chicago as a man named Bland, convicted of murder, is sentenced to death. The story is told from the point of view of the foreman of the jury, named Defoe. His name may be a pun. Or maybe not. Defoe may be the main character in the story, but he certainly isn't the protagonist. Remember as you read this story that the author Davis was a court reporter and a witness in a court trial for murder.
"The Accusing Voice" is similar to "The Place of Madness" by Merlin Moore Taylor in that it's another story of an innocent man charged with murder and another case of a guilty conscience getting to the main character. Unlike most of the other stories so far, this one takes place over a long period of time, at least twelve years in all.
I have to say that "The Accusing Voice" is not a very good story. As readers, we agree to suspend our disbelief so that we might enjoy a story. That only goes so far, though, and the writer of the story should likewise take it only so far. We can believe some things, but not what Meredith Davis expected us to believe in "The Accusing Voice." The events of his story don't just strain credulity. They shatter it.
Davis' literary offenses didn't stop there. Here's an example of his prose:
The almost level rays of the western sun diffused a sombre, aureate glow athwart the judge's bench, so that the dark figure of the standing man was in mystic indistinctness beyond the shaft of light from the window. A fly now and then craved the spotlight for a moment and lazily floated from the growing dusk of the room to the avenue of ebbing day, streaming in from the west. And always there was a constant turmoil of dust particles, visible only when they moved into the bright relief of the sun-shaft.
In another paragraph--in less than two sentences--he used three -ly words, jerkily, bodily, and presently. I can take bodily and presently, but jerkily has to go. Davis should have jerkily jerked it from his story. And then along comes gropingly, which is an -ly (non)word too far. And as you're reading, try not to think of Fawlty Towers as Defoe tries to have a conversation with his Cuban valet, named, of course, Manuel.
I hate to be so hard on an individual author. After all, Davis was minor example of a whole literary subculture, if that's what you can call it. Poor writing is one of the factors--probably the main factor--in the continued low status of pulp fiction or genre fiction. We can't lay all of that at the feet of the writers, though. Every pulp title had its editor or editors. Maybe there wasn't enough time or resources for an editor to work with individual authors. And maybe there weren't enough good writers and good stories to fill individual issues with good content. That's what I have sensed so far in this series, as there are repeated--more accurately repetitive or duplicative--themes, plots, settings, and so on in the first half of the first issue of "The Unique Magazine." I hope that will change before I reach the end. Put another way, few authors in the first issue of Weird Tales seem to have made great leaps of the imagination. I guess those would have to come later. After all, they were all just beginning.
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| Hollywood Life: An International Journal of Motion Pictures, Volume 1, Number 1, October 1925. That's Agnes Ayres (1892-1940) on the cover. Meredith Davis was the managing editor. |
Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley
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