The Return of "Ooze"

I have a couple of things left over concerning the first Weird Tales cover story, "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. I also have something new.

The first Weird Tales cover and the only illustration in the first issue was Richard R. Epperly's depiction of the events in "Ooze." Epperly's illustration isn't of just one scene from "Ooze," though. In fact, it combines different characters and different parts of the story into one image.

In the illustration, a young man rushes in from the left, brandishing a rifle and a long knife. In the center of the image is a frightened young women in the grip of a monster, a kind of land-octopus.

However, in the story, Lee Cranmer, the son, is first on the scene. He carries only a rifle.

John Corliss Cranmer, the father, is next to arrive. By the time he is on the scene with his pistol and knife, his son and daughter-in-law have already been engulfed by the giant amoeba.

The wall, shown in the background of the illustration, comes later in the story. John Corliss Cranmer has it built in order to keep the amoeba from escaping.

And of course the creature is not octopoidal (if that's a word) but protoplasmic, an eyeless and limbless colloidal creature made from ooze.

And in the story to ooze it returned.

* * *

After beginning this long series on the origins of ooze and the first issue of Weird Tales, I read "A Song for Lya" by George R.R. Martin. This was part of our weird fiction book club, conducted by my friend Nathaniel Wallace. Thanks always to Nate.

"A Song for Lya" was first published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact in June 1974, forty-nine years ago this month. In other words, Mr. Martin's story came along about halfway between "Ooze" and now. It shows how much things had changed in the time before and how little they seem to have changed in the time since it was published. Anthony M. Rud came of age before the Great War. His story is set in 1913, in the year before the war began, you might say before a long, sad withdrawing of the sea of faith that formerly ringed the world, or, at least at that late date, America. Now we find ourselves high and dry.

In both stories, there is the image of a woman being absorbed by a blob or protoplasmic mass. In "Ooze," that image is horrifying, so much so that it drives the elder Cranmer insane. That shocking and terrible image, though not made so vivid in Rud's prose, is very vivid in my own imagination. It sticks with me even now. It's no wonder that Cranmer's mind went off its hinges, for he had seen what he had wrought in the most terrible of ways.

George R.R. Martin described his own ooze-like creature:

Its color was a dull brownish red, like old blood, not the bright near-translucent crimson of the small creatures that clung to the skulls of the Joined. There were spots of black, too, like burns or soot stains on the vasty body. I could barely see the far side of the cave; the Greeshka was too huge, it towered above us so that there was only a thin crack between it and the roof. But it sloped down abruptly halfway across the chamber, like an immense jellied hill, and ended a good twenty feet from where we stood.

And what it looks like when the creature, called the Greeshka, absorbs one of the natives of his faraway planet, the Shkeen:

     I looked. His beam had thrown a pool of light around one of the dark spots, a blemish on the reddish hulk. I looked closer. There was a head in the blemish. Centered in the dark spot, with just the face showing, and even that covered by a thin reddish film. But the features were unmistakable. An elderly Shkeen, wrinkled and big-eyed, his eyes closed now. But smiling. Smiling.

     I moved closer. A little lower and to the right, a few fingertips hung out of the mass. But that was all. Most of the body was already gone, sunken into the Greeshka, dissolved or dissolving. The old Shkeen was dead, and the parasite was digesting his corpse.

That is soon to be the fate of the title character, who seeks union and in realizing it leaves her lover, named Robb, behind. He's devastated, but maybe only a little and not for long. (Strange devastation.) On his way off of the planet, he hooks up with another woman, who is also seeking union but has failed to achieve it with her now ex-boyfriend, the planetary administrator Valcarenghi. Valcarenghi is an individual, with boundaries he has established around himself like the wall Cranmer has built to keep in the amoeba. He does not seek an individual- or boundary-dissolving union with another person. He also believes in God, though perhaps only in an offhand way. He appears to be an untroubled man, or a man who keeps himself and any troubles he might have very carefully under control.

In "Ooze," union with a colloidal creature is terrible and horrifying. No one wants it. The woman, John Corliss Cranmer's daughter-in-law, goes to her doom involuntarily. She is the prey of the amoeba. In Mr. Martin's story, on the other hand, union is made to seem somehow attractive and desirable. The title character Lya willingly goes to her own dissolution. She wants to lose herself and be joined in love with others within the mass of the Greeshka. Cranmer, creator of the giant amoeba, believes in God. Lya and her lover Robb do not. They are devoutly atheistic. By turning away from God, Lya believes that her only hope for love and union is--to reduce things in the way materialism and reductionism require--to be dissolved in protoplasm. To his credit, Robb doesn't want to go out that way.

In the twentieth century, as in all others, there were those who burned with a desire to lose their identities and their individuality by being taken into a mass of men. This was one of the insights behind The True Believer, subtitled Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, written by Eric Hoffer and published in 1951. Little is known of Hoffer's origins or early life. Call him the Nictzin Dyalhis of a wider American philosophy and culture. He is supposed to have been an atheist, like Lya and Robb, who observes, "The Union is a mass-mind, an immortal mass-mind, many in one, all love." Mr. Martin may be an atheist, too. I can't say for sure. But that seeking after love and union, seemingly so necessary among us, also satisfied by a belief in God and actions based on such a belief, would also seem to be behind the worldly or atheistic drive after the dissolution of the self and of individual identity and autonomy. God offers us one thing. We refuse it and desire to replace it with something of our own making. Like children, we want to do it ourselves. And in the process, we--either gradually or suddenly--destroy ourselves or as much of the rest of humanity as we can. We need look no further than the murderous mass movements of the twentieth century--still alive in our own--as evidence of that. We seek after the eternal, the infinite, and the absolute without seeing that our seeking is in itself evidence of the Creator of all things eternal, infinite, and absolute.

I'll close by saying that being dissolved in protoplasm is in my view horrifying in both "Ooze" and "A Song for Lya." The difference is that it's made to sound not so horrifying and to be actually desirable in "A Song for Lya," at least by some of the characters in that story. I suppose that readers of today prefer the later horror over the earlier one, even if both are essentially the same. What a difference a century--actually only half a century, 1923 to 1974--has made.

"A Song for Lya" by George R.R. Martin was originally in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact in June 1974. The cover art, by Frank Kelly Freas, is for a serial entitled "Stargate." Interior illustrations for "A Song for Lya" were by James Odbert. This is where the connections begin.

The author of "Stargate" was Tak Hallus, a pen name, the meaning of which, in Urdu and Persian, is apparently "pen name." In "A Song for Lya," the title character's lover is named Robb. I can't help but associate his name with the word robot, more distantly with the character Robby the Robot, in other words, with something mechanical, material, and non-human.

"Stargate" is also the title of a television show. The premise of the show seems to be based in an older concept, one example of which is in the novel Gateway (1977) and its sequels, written by Frederik Pohl. The main character in Pohl's Gateway is named Robinette. He is human. His psychoanalyst, a robot named Sigfrid, is not, though, like Pinocchio and Data, he wishes to be.

Anyway, like I said, Tak Hallus is a pen name. (It sounds like a character name in one of Nictzin Dyalhis' stories of Venhez and Aerth.) The author's real name was Robinett, Stephen Robinett to be exact, who also went by the name Stephen Robinette.

Robinett's first genre story was "Minitalent," also in Analog, in March 1969. In "A Song for Lya," the psychics Lya and Robb are called Talents, for their psychic powers. So in 1974, when "A Song for Lya" was published, decades had gone by and yet there were still stories about psychic powers in Analog, which was, before that, called Astounding Science Fiction, and which was, of course, edited by a man who believed he had discovered a scientific basis for such things. We're still waiting for his results.

I haven't read "Stargate" by Stephen Robinett. But I wonder if Frederik Pohl could have been inspired by him and his story in conceiving and writing his own novel Gateway. Or maybe his use of the character name Robinette is just a coincidence.

By the way, Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" (1867) figures very prominently in "A Song for Lya." I sneaked in an allusion to it earlier in this essay. "Dover Beach" is an essential poem. Anyone who reads in English ought to read it and know it and return to it, again and again, like a wave on the beach.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

One Reader Responds to the First Issue

There are thirty-three items in the first issue of Weird Tales. Twenty-six are stories. Six are nonfiction fillers. The last is the letters column, "The Eyrie." I will look only at the twenty-six stories.

First, I'll set aside four of the short short stories. These are:

• "Fear" by David R. Solomon

• "The Closing Hand" by Farnsworth Wright

• "The Sequel" by Walter Scott Story

• "The Gallows" by I.W.D. Peters

These stories are not very well developed. None of them is especially good or interesting. "The Closing Hand" is one of the least interesting stories in the first issue, but it's not really offensive. "The Sequel" on the other hand is a swipe and an attempt to remake Edgar Allan Poe's original "The Cask of Amontillado." In my opinion, "The Sequel" is a story that should never have been written. Then again, maybe I'm taking it too seriously.

Next I'm going to cross out some stories that are either pretty poor or of only middling quality:

• "The Ghost Guard" by Bryan Irvine--An unremarkable and pretty conventional ghost story.

• "The Chain" by Hamilton Craigie--A lot of story to little effect. Craigie's protagonist is not very interesting. He could have been, but he isn't. Worse yet, Craigie's prose is overheated and pretty purple.

• "The Accusing Voice" by Meredith Davis--An entirely implausible tale. In my opinion, the poorest or one of the poorest stories in the first issue.

• "The Scarlet Night" by William Sanford--A short study in psychopathology and another pretty unpleasant story.

I don't like "The Dead Man's Tale" by Willard E. Hawkins. There is real cruelty in it and undertones of misogyny, if only in the narrator. "Hark! The Rattle!" by Joel Townsley Rogers is an interesting story, but it's too idiosyncratic, I think. The thing to do when you're telling a story is to tell your story and not put yourself or your technique on display.

"The Ghoul and the Corpse" by G.A. Wells is based in a good story idea, but it isn't very well done. The two main characters, for example, are basically lunkheads. They're like college chums instead of serious men. I think this was still too early in the evolution of science fiction, science fantasy, and weird fiction for an author of limited imagination and talent to have pulled it off, even if his idea was a good one.

"The Place of Madness" by Merlin Moore Taylor isn't a bad story, but it also isn't very strong or memorable. "Nimba, the Cave Girl" by R.T.M. Scott has the beginnings of a weird-fictional awareness of great scales of time and space, but it's marred by the author's sexual interest in his title character, also by its faintly Theosophical content. Like Scientology and other wacky belief systems, Theosophy makes me uneasy.

"The House of Death" by F. Georgia Stroup is not a bad story, but also not an especially strong one. It's brief and consists of a single episode, in truth a tale rather than a story. It tells of a sad and terrible event, something that's hard for me to take with all of the recent losses in my family. "The House of Death" is remarkable for being the first story by a woman author to appear in Weird Tales.

"The Skull" by Harold Ward is also based on a good and workable idea, but I think as readers we need someone with whom we can sympathize in a story. I remember how unpleasant it was to read Couples by John Updike (1968) because of its lack of sympathetic or likable characters. Only one character of that kind, one of the women, remains as such in my memory. I told myself I would never again read one of Updike's books because of the effect this one had on me and I never have. In getting back to "The Skull," you're kind of glad when the two main characters meet their ends.

"The Ape-Man" by James B. M. Clark, Jr., starts out well and does pretty well until you reach the anticlimax. I'm afraid the ending isn't very satisfying.

Now we come to a special case, that of Otis Adelbert Kline, author of "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" and probably also of "The Young Man Who Wanted to Die." Willard E. Hawkins' story "The Dead Man's Tale," a story outright of the occult and of psychic pseudo-phenomena, came first in Weird Tales. "Ooze," an early science fiction story, came second. Third in order is the first installment of Kline's serial "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes." Whether Kline had read Hawkins' and Rud's stories or not, he seems to have attempted to bridge the gap between them, for his story, which also includes occult and psychic elements, is actually a kind of science fiction or science fantasy story. That's an interesting enough idea. More interesting in both of Kline's stories--I assume that "The Young Man Who Wanted to Die" was his--are the protagonists' travels through vastnesses of time and space. This was still early in the evolution of weird fiction. Kline wasn't there quite yet, and his protagonists' travels are not real or actual. They take place instead only in their own minds as they experience altered states of consciousness. In one case, it's a kind of dream-vision. In the other, it's a near-death experience. These two stories are not especially good. The inclusion of ectoplasm in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" really weakens it. But we can't simply dismiss them, the reason being that they are two of the earliest examples of weird-fictional odysseys and weird-fictional treatments of time and space to appear in Weird Tales. And they were written by a firsttime author.

"Ooze" is the most well-developed of all of the stories in the first issue. Written by a science-minded author--Rud was the son of two medical doctors and studied medicine himself--"Ooze" is fairly strong as an early science fiction story. It's also an early example of the monster made by science, in the mode of Frankenstein's monster. (I think we can call them both lab leak stories. If the coronavirus plandemic has done anything good at all, it has given us a real-world, unifying idea that may lie behind so much of our genre fiction, i.e., the lab leak, or, put another way, hubristic science gone wrong.) Good monsters make good jumping-off points for genre fiction. Swamp monsters are always popular. Beyond that, "Ooze" is probably the only story in the first issue that was capable of carrying it. I'm not sure that any other story could have provided such a strong centerpiece. Few would have made good cover stories.

That leaves what I think are the best or strongest--or maybe only my favorites--in the first issue of Weird Tales. In addition to "Ooze" these are:

• "The Mystery of Black Jean" by Julian Kilman--An out-of-the-ordinary story, almost like a folktale, fairy tale, or fable.

• "The Grave" by Orville R. Emerson--A really terrifying tale if you consider the possibility that it could have been based in fact. One of the most even and sober accounts in the first issue, at least in the voices of the two American soldiers.

• "The Unknown Beast" by Howard Ellis Davis--Yes, it includes the n-word, but I think we have to disregard that as an artifact of early twentieth-century life in the South. Remember that word is used both by a white man and a black man in their everyday conversation. Beyond that, Ellis could have developed his story a little more and to greater effect.

• "The Basket" by Herbert J. Mangham--Sober, concise, insightful, no flab, and no purple prose. I think that Marvin Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt were right to include this story in their anthology of the best of 1923.

• "The Weaving Shadows" by W.H. Holmes--A flawed story to be sure and not fully developed, but interesting nonetheless. Possibly ahead of its time in the development of Weird Tales.

• "The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni" by Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding--A little adolescent--its authors were very young when they wrote it--but still interesting. It could be a plot for a comic book story. Alternatively, it would have fit in with magazine science fiction of the 1920s and '30s.

• "The Return of Paul Slavsky" Captain George Warburton Lewis--Another out-of-the-ordinary story for that first issue. The character Olga Slavsky is memorable, and what she does to one of the detectives is both weird and gruesome.

I think I have one more article on the first issue of Weird Tales. I would like to look at subsequent issues of "The Unique Magazine," but only in summary. In this, its centenary, we're still only partway through a look at that first year.

Vincent Napoli's illustration and the first page of the reprinting of "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud in the January 1952 issue of Weird Tales.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Editors Respond to the First Issue

Out of twenty-six stories published in the first issue of Weird Tales, only four were reprinted in the era before books became something other than books, that is, before the early 2000s. "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud has been reprinted most often, first in The Moon Terror, the first Weird Tales book, published in 1927. Farnsworth Wright was the uncredited editor of that collection. "Ooze" was also reprinted in the January 1952 issue of Weird Tales when Dorothy McIlwraith was editor. And it was reprinted in the expanded and enhanced edition of The Weird Tales Story, originally edited by Robert Weinberg and edited in this version by Bob McLain (2021).

Hamilton Craigie's detective story "The Chain" was also reprinted in Weird Tales, in November 1952, again under Dorothy McIlwraith. "The Mystery of Black Jean" by Julian Kilman was included in Angels of Darkness: Tales of Troubled and Troubling Women, edited by Marvin Kaye and published in 1995. Finally, "The Grave" by Orville R. Emerson and "The Basket" by Herbert J. Mangham were reprinted in The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, edited by the late Mr. Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt and published in 1997. And that's it as far as I know.

In The Weird Tales Story, Robert Weinberg briefly discussed "Ooze" without offering much of an opinion on it. "Less notable," he wrote, "was 'The Dead Man's Tale' by W.E. Hawkins," continuing with the judgment that "[t]he tale was an overtly sentimental muddle [. . .]." I'm not sure that I would call "The Dead Man's Tale" a muddle, but to me it's an unpleasant and cruel story that disregards the seriousness of the narrator's actions and the suffering of the man whose body he possesses, moreover of the man's wife, who is badly wounded in body and spirit by the dead man's actions.

Otis Adelbert Kline earned mention in Mr. Weinberg's essay. Kline's serial "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" was his first professional sale. Unfortunately, according to Mr. Weinberg, "His first story was less than exceptional," indeed, "mediocre." (All quotes are from Chapter 4, page 19.)

Marvin Kaye was a dissenting voice when it came to "Ooze." He considered it to be "poorly written." He said as much in his introduction to The Best of Weird Tales: 1923. He also passed on Joel Townsley Rogers' "Hark! The Rattle!", calling it "a purple exercise." Kaye described "The Mystery of Black Jean" by Julian Kilman as "excellent," but he settled on "The Grave" by Orville R. Emerson and "The Basket" by Herbert J. Mangham for inclusion in his anthology.

An early announcement for the coming publication of Weird Tales called "The Dead Man's Tale" "a masterpiece of gooseflesh fiction," comparing it favorably to "The Murders on the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe. Editor Edwin Baird was the author of that announcement. It appeared in the February 1923 issue of The Student Writer, which, as it so happens, was edited by Willard E. Hawkins, author of "The Dead Man's Tale." Baird's announcement and Hawkins' publishing of it looks like a case of "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." (Source: The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales by John Locke, 2018, p. 31.)

There has been a lot of other opinion on the stories in that first issue. This is the Internet after all and any yahoo can say his piece among all of these electrons. 

Next: A Yahoo says his piece.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Readers Respond to the First Issue-Part Two

More letters came in about the first issue of Weird Tales and were printed in the third, dated May 1923. Charles M. Boone, third officer aboard the ship Yumuri sent a letter, postmarked Veracruz, Mexico. He told of how the captain of the ship was absorbed in "The Dead Man's Tale" by Willard E. Hawkins, while the mess boy stole away to read "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud.

George P. Morgan of Hazelton, Pennsylvania, gave "a breezy digest" of the March issue. His digest is amusing, but there isn't much direct, firsthand commentary in it. Earl L. Bell of Augusta, Georgia, was more helpful. He wrote:

Especially thrilling and well-written were "The Ghoul and the Corpse" [by G.A. Wells] and "The Young Man Who Wanted to Die" [by ? ? ?]. For sheer imagery, word-pictures and mastery of style, both stories reached perihelion.

Earl L. Bell was Earl Leaston Bell (1895-1972), who wrote two stories and four letters in Weird Tales.

George W. Crane (1901-1995) also wrote stories for Weird Tales, including in that May issue. He wrote:

Mr. Rud's tale, "Ooze," is extremely bizarre, and I am recommending it to my colleague in the faculty of the Department of Zoology.

Crane was then a student at Northwestern University in Chicago.

S.A.N., location unknown, wrote:

     You asked us to mention the stories we liked and those we didn't like so well. I enjoyed, in their order, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," which still has me in suspense, "The Place of Madness," "The Weaving Shadows," "The Grave," "The Skull," "The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni."

     "The Basket," I thought rather pointless. The plot of "Ooze" excellent, but just a trifle above the average reader to understand in detail. "The Chain" was too long drawn out [sic].

     And do give us less of unfaithful wives and husbands. I may seem too critical, perhaps, but let me say that I wish the magazine were published twice a month, for how refreshing to find that interesting stories can be written without "love interest." Please leave that to the movies and to the countless other magazines.

A.L. Richard of Chicago also listed his or her favorites and least favorites:

     Most of the stories in your first number are excellent; some few rather indifferent. To my mind the best were "The Dead Man's Tale," "Ooze," "The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni" (although the transferring of a brain from one person to another was done some time ago in another story) and "The Skull." "Hark! the Rattle"  I thought a trifle too rhetorical and exclamatory; "Nimba, the Cave Girl" not properly a weird tale; "The Ghost Guard" not quite convincing; and "The Sequel" no improvement on Poe.

Miss Violet Olive Johnson of Portland, Oregon wrote:

     I think "The Accusing Voice" is of the best, because the denouement is so unexpected, yet so logical. I liked "Hark! the Rattle" on account of its touch of fantasy. "The Dead Man's Tale" was a masterpiece, I thought. And it's right in line with modem spiritualism, too. It conveys quite a definite lesson in regeneration, even if it does deal with a disembodied spirit. 

F.L.K. of Indianapolis made a good point about the titles of stories in that first issue, although I don't think he went far enough, for many of the titles, like more than a few of the stories, lack imagination. He wrote:

But there is one thing I don't favor; the sensational, blood-and-thunder titles of some of the stories. Something like "The Accusing Voice," "The Place of Madness," "The Weaving Shadows," is "wooly" enough for most of us, I should say. "The Skull," "The Ghoul and the Corpse," "The Grave"’ are all too--you see what I mean?

Voting for the readers' favorite story did not commence until Farnsworth Wright took over as editor in 1924, but it looks as though "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud was the winner in the first issue. A lot of readers liked "The Dead Man's Tale," too. We should remember that Hawkins' story was the first in the magazine and would have made a great impression for that alone.

I disagree with S.A.N. on "The Basket." I don't think it's pointless at all. Maybe it was too mainstream for the tastes of the average pulp-fiction reader. I do agree on "The Chain," though, not so much because it's too drawn out but because of its prose style and its lack of punch. In writing "The Chain," Hamilton Craigie went through a lot to get only a little. His comments on stories written by other authors are weakened by his own pretty weak story. I also agree with S.A.N. on the need for fewer tales of "unfaithful wives and husbands," a too-common theme in the first issue. A.L. Richard had one of the best comments, I think, when he wrote, "'The Sequel' [is] no improvement on Poe."

By the issue of June 1923, readers had moved on and were writing about stories published after March 1923. "Ooze" and "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" got one more mention each in the June issue. After that it was up to future editors to take the measure of the stories from that first issue of Weird Tales.

Next: Editors Respond to the First Issue.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Readers Respond to the First Issue-Part One

In the first installment of "The Eyrie," the editor of Weird Tales asked that readers write and let him and everyone else know what they thought of the first issue. Letters in response started arriving right away, in time for them to be printed in the second issue, published in April 1923.

There are twelve letters in the second issue of Weird Tales. They were from:

• H.W. of Sterling, Illinois--This was without a doubt Harold Ward (1879-1950), who had stories in the first and second issues of Weird Tales.

• C.L. Austin of Amsterdam, New York.

• Dr. Vance J. Hoyt of Los Angeles, California--Dr. Vance J. Hoyt (1889-1967), was a physician, naturalist, and pulp fiction writer. He had a story in the September 1923 issue of Weird Tales called "The Devil's Cabin." The movie Sequoia (1934) was based on his novel.

• H.C. of Summit, New Jersey--This was without a doubt Hamilton Craigie (1880-1956), who had a story in the first issue of Weird Tales.

• S.O.B. of Beulah, New Mexico.

• D.L.C. of Denver, Colorado.

• Victor Wilson of Hazen, Pennsylvania--He had another letter in the May 1923 issue of "The Unique Magazine."

• Anthony M. Rud (1893-1942), who had letters and stories in each of the first two issues.

• C.P.O. of Gainesville, Texas.

• J.H.C. of Houston, Texas.

• William S. Waudby (dates unknown) of Washington, D.C.--Born in Ohio, Waudby was a printer, writer, and special agent of the U.S. Bureau of Labor. He had worked for that agency since 1885.

• E.E.L. of Chicago, Illinois.

The first three correspondents wrote in a general way. Hamilton Craigie was the first to comment on specific stories. He liked "The Ghoul and the Corpse" by G.A. Wells and "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. He also liked "The Place of Madness" by Merlin Moore Taylor, with some reservation for its lack of "smoothness." Craigie didn't like "The Unknown Beast" by Howard Ellis Davis, calling it "about the poorest." In his opinion, "The Sequel," by Walter Scott Story, was on about the same level.

D.L.C. called "Ooze" "a thrilling novelette." Victor Wilson liked the following four stories: "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" by Otis Adelbert Kline, "The Place of Madness" by Taylor, "The Grave" by Orville R. Emerson, and "Hark! The Rattle!" by Joel Townsley Rogers.

So nine stories merited mention in that first batch of letters, with "Ooze" at the top in the opinion of two letter writers and "The Unknown Beast" and "The Sequel" at the bottom in Craigie's opinion. I think that "Ooze" is the most fully developed story in the first issue, and it was the right choice for the first cover story. It also helped to set the tone for future stories of weird science and man-made monsters. I agree with Craigie on "The Sequel." He wouldn't be the last with a poor opinion of that story. I disagree with him on "The Unknown Beast," which I would place in the top third of the twenty-six stories in that first issue of Weird Tales.

Next: Letters in the May 1923 issue.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Eyrie in the First Issue

"The Eyrie" was the letters column in Weird Tales and was there from the first issue. The first installment opens with a kind of fanfare. The author of it called himself merely "The Editor." We can assume that Edwin Baird wrote it. I wouldn't rule out, though, that Otis Adelbert Kline or even Farnsworth Wright lent a hand.

The first letter in the first issue of Weird Tales was by Anthony M. Rud. He wrote before the magazine had gone to press. That makes me think that Rud was involved with the magazine at the outset. At the very least, he acted as a kind of talent scout or agent or maybe just a messenger to other writers, especially writers in the South. In the run-up to the publication of the first issue, Rud was in Alabama. Of his intentions on behalf of the new magazine, he wrote:

     It's a corking title, and it will get all the boosting I can give. Herewith a clipping of my last platform appearance. I told 'em of the coming magazine, and that it offered a field of reading unique. At Atlanta and Montgomery, where I speak later in the winter, I'll give the sheet a hand. I have two more dates in Mobile, and I’ll mention your project.

There was a lot of chummy kind of writing in those days, writing that may not be exactly to our tastes, but at least we have something from the men who were there.

The second letter was from Willard E. Hawkins, who wrote the first story to appear in Weird Tales, "The Dead Man's Tale." In his letter, he explained how he had written his story. The letters column closes with a request for comments by readers. Those would surely follow.

In his introduction to "The Eyrie," the editor wrote:

If the letters we have already received, and are still receiving (weeks before the magazine goes to press), are an augury of success, then WEIRD TALES is on the threshold of a tremendously prosperous career. Some of these letters are accompanied by subscriptions, others request advertising rates and specimen copies; all predict great things for us and express enthusiastic anticipation of "something different" in magazine fiction.

We're now at the end of the first one hundred years of Weird Tales. Although "The Unique Magazine" came close to perishing at the end of its first year, it ran for thirty-one years in its first incarnation, was revived several times in the 1970s and '80s, and has now been revived again. Marvin Kaye called it "The Magazine That Never Dies." Lots of other magazines have in the past 100 years, but Weird Tales lives on.

The first heading of "The Eyrie," March 1923.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023)

Cormac McCarthy has died. He was eighty-nine years old. It would not be exactly true to call him a mainstream novelist, but he was more nearly mainstream than an author of genre fiction or of one of the pulp genres. However, like Walker Percy (1916-1990), he wrote a post-apocalyptic novel, his called The Road, from 2006.

Like Percy and so many well-known and well-admired American authors of the twentieth century, the late Mr. McCarthy was a Southerner. However, he was not so by birth, for Cormac McCarthy, whose real name was the same as a ventriloquist's dummy, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 20, 1933. Imagine: for a time, he shared a city with H.P. Lovecraft.

Like Lovecraft, Cormac McCarthy, as a writer, lived in poverty. He did not come from poverty, though. His father was a successful and well-off attorney. Named Charles Joseph McCarthy (1907-1995), he was born in Providence, too. In 1934, the elder McCarthy began work for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The McCarthy family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1937. I imagine they lived somewhere else in the South before that. If so, maybe Cormac McCarthy was a Yankee only for a year.

In 1962, when the childhood home of Knoxville author James Agee (1909-1955) was being demolished, Cormac McCarthy salvaged some of the bricks to build fireplaces in his writer's shack. Like Mr. McCarthy, James Agee was not an especially prolific author. Unlike him, Agee died young. Agee is known for his work from the Great Depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a collaboration with another Walker, Walker Evans.* Agee also wrote the screenplay for The Night of the Hunter (1955), an unforgettable film directed by Charles Laughton and starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish. Agee's screenplay was based on the novel of the same name by West Virginia author Davis Grubb (1919-1980). Writing as Dave Grubb, he had one story in Weird Tales, "One Foot in the Grave," from May 1948. His story "The Horsehair Trunk" (Collier's, May 25, 1946) was adapted to an episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery in 1971.

I said that Cormac McCarthy was not exactly a mainstream author. That's probably not exactly true, either, for he wrote about violence, death, menace, and terror. He also wrote mostly of men. And if there is a setting for the American novel, it might be the road. Cormac McCarthy wrote, of course, the aforementioned novel, The Road. I think that he and his works would have fit easily into Leslie Fiedler's thesis concerning American literature, which Dr. Fiedler explicated in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960, 1966). Not love and hate, as printed on Robert Mitchum's knuckles, but love and death.**

Cormac McCarthy did a lot of wandering in his life. He lived in a lot of places and must surely have spent a lot of time on the road. The wonder is that he lived so long, was married three times, and had two children, one of whom, a then-young son, is one of the subjects of The Road. Mr. McCarthy came from an Irish-Catholic family. We have our ways. I see echoes in my own family of him and his.

He was interested in science and hung out with physicists, biologists, and other scientists. One of these was whale biologist Roger Payne (1935-2023), who died three days before Cormac McCarthy, on June 10, 2023. Dr. Payne's recordings of whale-song are on their way to the stars aboard the Voyager spacecraft. They are also in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), one of the better entries, I think, in that series. We begin our voyages by setting off on the road.

Another way in which Cormac McCarthy is in the mainstream of American literature is that he is essentially an enigma and a kind of solitary voice emanating from his place on the fringes, in the wilderness, from foreign shores, from beyond frontiers. In that way, he is like Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, his fellow Southerners William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor, and countless others.*** I wish we had more of him. But at least we have what we have. At least we shared with him this life and this earth, at least for a while.

-----

*Like The Road, The Walking Dead is post-apocalyptic. In the former, the cannibals are living. In the latter, they are the walking dead, and they are called walkers.

**Cormac McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper, was published in 1965, probably too late for consideration in Leslie Fiedler's book. I once had a copy of The Orchid Keeper. I regret having given it up. I started it but never finished it. Like trying to read Loren Eiseley's book The Invisible Pyramid while I was still a high-schooler, I knew that this was something important and a book that would hold something for me, but I knew also that it was something above me at the time. Instead, since then, I have read Mr. McCarthy's Border Trilogy and The Road, plus No Country for Old Men (2005). I have Suttree and Blood Meridian on my bookshelf. Maybe it's time to read those, too. And, yes, I did go back and read The Invisible Pyramid. Loren Eiseley, a friend of Ray Bradbury, is one of my favorite authors.

***Another on that list might be Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810). Charles Joseph McCarthy, Jr., known as Cormac McCarthy, and Charles Brockden Brown shared a first name. Unfortunately, Mr. McCarthy also shared his first and last names with a ventriloquist's dummy, thus the powerful and evocative assumed name, Cormac. Brown's last novel is entitled Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (1803-1805). A biloquist is a ventriloquist.

Finally, Cormac MacCarthy and Cormac Mac Art were both men in Irish history. Robert E. Howard wrote stories about Cormac Mac Art. Finally, finally, my friend Sarah had a short-tailed cat that she called Cormy, short for Cormac McCarthy. Hello to Sarah wherever you are on this great road and I miss you.

Copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

J.B.M. Clarke, Jr. (1883-1959)-The First British Author and a Second Canadian

James Blyth Macalester Clark, Jr.
Journalist, Author
Born August 26, 1883, Liverpool, England
Died February 5, 1959, Rainhill Hospital, Liverpool, England

James Blyth Macalester Clark, Jr., was born on August 26, 1883, in Liverpool, England. His parents were James Blyth Macalester Clark (1847-1935), a Scottish-born optician and a man in business, and Esther Allan Nichol (1848-1885). Clark, Senior, was married twice, first to Esther Allan Nichol, on May 12, 1879, in Dumfermline, Fife, Scotland; next to Eliza Jane Dobbie (1850-1900), on June 2, 1889, in Toxteth, St. Philemon, Lancashire, England. In 1881, the Clark family was in Toxteth Park in Lancashire. In 1891, they were in Cathcart, Renfrewshire, Scotland.

A James Blyth Macalester Clark was admitted to Gartnavel Royal Asylum, an insane asylum, in 1909. Whether that was the father or the son, I can't say. But in 1911, Clark, Junior, crossed over to Quebec, Canada. His father followed in 1915 and lived in Montreal until the summer of 1935, when he returned to England. James B.M. Clark, Sr., died on July 26, 1935, in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. His children were Esther Marie (Clark) Mitchell, Elizabeth Grieg (Clark) Sawer, J.B.M. Clark, Jr., and Alexander D. Clark.

J.B.M. Clark, Jr., of Montreal visited in Burlington, Vermont, in 1918. His story "The Ape Man" is set in Burlington and in neighboring Winooski. (By looking for Clark in Vermont, I discovered his full name and the facts needed for this biographical sketch.) In 1921, Clark moved to Los Angeles, California. I don't know how long he stayed there. In 1935 when his father died, he was back in Montreal. Like his father before him, he returned to England. Clark died on February 5, 1959, at Rainhill Hospital, Liverpool, England. He was seventy-five years old. His wife may have been A.D. Clark (?-1964).

James B.M. Clark, Jr., wrote nonfiction and fiction. "The Ape-Man," from Weird Tales, March 1923, was his first story listed in The FictionMags Index. That list includes stories from 1923 to 1932. Clark also had brief stories syndicated in American newspapers during the 1920s and '30s. Clark's stories were in Cabaret Stories, Clues, Detective Fiction Weekly, Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories, and a number of boys' magazines. His nonfiction seems to have been exclusively in British magazines.

J.B.M. Clarke, Jr.'s Stories in Weird Tales
"The Ape-Man" (Mar. 1923)
"Windows of Destiny" (Apr. 1927)

Further Reading
None known except for his stories.

J.B.M. Clarke, Jr.'s Story:

"The Ape-Man" is a long short story in six chapters. It takes place in Burlington and Winooski, Vermont, an unusual setting for a story in the first issue of Weird Tales. The author Clark is known to have visited in Burlington. I didn't realize until looking at a map just how close Burlington is to Clark's hometown of Montreal.

There are three main characters in "The Ape-Man," human characters, that is. There are also two simian characters. One of the men, Needham, seems to be halfway between one and the other. Another of the men, Norton, calls him "a throwback--an atavistic specimen." Needham lives a slovenly existence in a closed-up house in Burlington. His companion is a little monkey named Fifi, who wears clothing like a person. Needham has been to Africa and has observed baboons in the wild. From his observations, he has learned something about how baboons communicate. He seems to have formed a bond with one of them, a dominant male.

One night, Norton has a frightening experience while walking through Ethan Allen Park, which is close to Needham's house on North Avenue. He sees Needham gamboling in the park, more like an ape than a man. Needham follows him. He's in a tree and reaches down to grasp Norton by the throat, chuckling, "Aha! You would give me away, would you!" Fortunately Norton escapes.

There is a circus in town. Norton and his friend Meldrum go there. Naturally there are baboons among the circus animals. Needham shows up and gives his curious cry. The smaller baboons are cowed by it. The dominant one is not. Could this be the same animal with whom Needham communicated in Africa?

Norton agrees to go to Needham's house the next day. Call it an idiot-plot device. Meldrum goes later. Instinct tells him to take his pistol. From outside the door, he witnesses a strange tableau: Needham and the baboon are sitting at a table and drinking whiskey. Norton is already unconscious. It looks as though Needham commands the baboon to kill Norton. Meldrum intervenes. Shots are fired. The lights go out. (That little Fifi!) Help comes along, and Norton is saved.

"The Ape-Man" is unusual in its setting. It's also unusual in its diction. It's no surprise to learn that the author was born in England and lived in Canada. Clark's story is well developed. However, the ending isn't very satisfying. It may be that Clark didn't quite know how to bring his story to a close after having set it up pretty well. In any case, we have the last story and the last author in the first issue of Weird Tales.

Ethan Allen Park Tower, a feature mentioned in "The Ape-Man" by J.B.M Clark, Jr.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Harold Ward (1879-1950)-The First Tale of the South Seas

Aka H.W. Starr, Ward Sterling, Zorro
Songwriter, Press Agent/Publicist, Postmaster, City Clerk, National Guardsman, Newspaper Reporter & Editor, Author
Born January 5, 1879, Coleta, Illinois
Died March 1, 1950, Sterling, Illinois

Harold Emmons Ward was born on January 5, 1879, in Coleta, Illinois, a small town located west of Chicago. His parents were Milton and Sarah Ward. The Ward family moved to Mitchell, South Dakota, when Ward was a child. They returned to Sterling, Illinois, which is close to Coleta. Both places are in Whiteside County. Fantasy author Terry Brooks (b. 1944) is also from Sterling.

In his schooling, Harold Ward went only so far as the eighth grade, but he accomplished much and was active all of his adult life. He teamed up with Arthur Gillespie (1860-1914) in writing songs, sketches, and plays. He also traveled as a press agent for theatrical producers Sam (1878-1905) and Lee Shubert (1871-1953). Ward worked for William A. Brady (1863-1950) as a publicist for boxer, actor, and performer James J. "Gentleman Jim" Corbett (1866-1933). He spent much of his career, however, in the newspaper business.

In 1900, Ward was working as a newspaper reporter in Sterling. He was with the Sterling Standard until 1904, when he took a job with Rural Life, a weekly farm paper published in Sterling. In 1906 he was city editor of the Dixon Sun, and at some point editor of the Freeport Standard, both in Illinois. At the time of the 1910 census, Ward was living in Chicago and working as a theatrical press agent. By 1918, he was back in Sterling and employed as that city's first city clerk.

Not many authors in Weird Tales were involved in their hometowns the way Harold Ward was. In addition to being city clerk, he served as postmaster from 1924 to 1930 or after, and he served two terms as president of the Sterling chamber of commerce. Ward spent twenty years with the Illinois National Guard and retired as a major.

Ward returned to the newspaper business in 1934, when he began working for the Sterling Daily Gazette. He was an editor and writer for that paper. On March 1, 1950, he died at his desk, probably from a heart ailment. He had been in poor health for some time. Ward was married twice and had children. Here's an interesting detail for those of us with redheads in the family: Harold Ward had red hair.

Harold Ward had stories in pulp magazines and story magazines beginning with "Ethics" in Snappy Stories, September 2, 1917, and ending with "Bride of the Ape" in Mystery Novels and Short Stories, September 1939. Coincidentally or not, his career as a pulp writer was bracketed by war. He had nearly four dozen stories in The Black Mask from the first issue in April 1920 to April 15, 1923, writing sometimes as himself and sometimes under his pseudonyms Ward Sterling and H.W. Starr. Among other magazines that published his stories were The Argosy, Breezy Stories, Double-Action Gang Magazine, The Dragnet Magazine, Mystery Adventure Magazine, Saucy Stories, Snappy Stories, Spy Stories, Telling Tales, and 10 Story Book. There were more than one hundred in all.

Ward wrote most of his stories on his own, but he also collaborated with John Irving Pearce, Jr. (1860-1941), Ralph Milne Farley (1887-1963), and Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946). (Pearce also collaborated with Joseph Faus, about whom I wrote earlier in this series.) Ward's story with Kline was "The Yellow Killer" in The Detective Magazine #47, August 29, 1924.

Although Otis Adelbert Kline was born in Chicago, he grew up on a farm in Whiteside County, Illinois, the same county in which Coleta and Sterling are located. Like Ward, Kline was a songwriter early in his career. He was also a newspaperman. I don't know when or for how long, but he worked as an advertising man with the Sterling Standard. Kline was twelve years younger than Ward, but they knew each other, possibly well before they worked together on their story "The Yellow Killer." Then or later, Kline worked as Ward's literary agent.

In February 1935, Dell Magazines put out a magazine called Doctor Death, a continuation under a new title of All Detective Magazine. The title character is a villain. His goal, to quote from Wikipedia, is to "restore the earth 'to its original state. Man will dwell upon it again in primitive simplicity. And I [. . .] will be hailed as the savior of mankind'." In other words, a return to Utopia. Doctor Death ran for just three issues, from February to April 1935. Each issue had a full-length novel from a pseudonymous author who called himself Zorro. The illustrator for those three novels was Jay McCardle (1899-1960). To fill out each issue, there were stories by other authors, including one by Arthur J. Burks (1898-1974), who also contributed to Weird Tales. Zorro by the way was Harold Ward. His Doctor Death stories:

• "12 Must Die" in Doctor Death (Feb. 1935)
• "The Gray Creatures" in Doctor Death (Mar. 1935)
• "The Shriveling Murders" in Doctor Death (Apr. 1935)
• "Waves of Madness," which was not published until 2009
• "The Red Mist of Death" in Pulp Vault #5 (1989)

Ward wrote fifteen stories for Weird Tales, beginning with "The Skull" in the first issue, March 1923, and ending with "The Life-Eater" in June 1937. In fact, he and Julian Kilman (1878-1954) were the only writers to have stories in the first issues of both The Black Mask and Weird Tales. There were three stories in a row with the word "house" in their titles. I wonder if they could be in a series. Ward also had four stories in Detective Tales, including one with a variant of "The Man Who . . ." type title, "The Detective Who Never Failed" in July/August 1923.

Harold Ward's Stories in Weird Tales and Detective Tales

Weird Tales

• "The Skull" (Mar. 1923)
• "The Bodymaster" (Apr. 1923)
• "The Killer" (Feb. 1924)
• "The House in the Forest" (Mar. 1924)
• "The House of the Living Dead" (Mar. 1932)
• "House of the Lizard" (July 1932)
• "The Ravening Monster" (Sept. 1932)
• "Germs of Death" (Mar. 1933)
• "The Thing from the Grave" (July 1933)
• "Dead Men Walk" (Aug. 1933)
• "The Closed Door" (Dec. 1933)
• "The Master of Souls" (July 1934)
• "Clutching Hands of Death" (Mar. 1935)
• "The Man with the Blue Beard" (Dec. 1935)
• "The Life-Eater" (June 1937)

Detective Tales

• "Who Killed 'Spot' Bohnett?" (Oct. 16, 1922)
• "Fragments of the Sun" (May/June 1923)
• "The Detective Who Never Failed" (July/Aug. 1923)
• "Secret Service" (Mar. 1924)

I don't think there can be any doubt that H.W., who wrote a letter printed in the second issue of Weird Tales (Apr. 1923), was Harold Ward.

Harold Ward's Story:

"The Skull" is a short story in four parts. It is set on an unnamed island in an unnamed chain of islands. Indications are that this is in the South Seas, and so we have the first South Sea adventure in Weird Tales. As with other stories in the first issue, this one deals with murder and with vengeance delivered from beyond the grave. As in "The Return of Paul Slavsky," there is a case of decapitation.

"The Skull" is a pretty harsh and unpleasant story. It's the second to have the n-word in it. Two white characters speak it, but it's also in the narration, though perhaps in the thoughts of one of those men, thoughts which are of course known to an omniscient narrator. Like I said, "The Skull" is a pretty unpleasant story, but it is probably accurate in its description of relationships between the races in some remote places of the world in the 1920s. (The story is set on a plantation of some kind.) Those wishing to cancel Ward's story will find all of the reason they need in his use of the n-word and the following sentence: "For the supremacy of the white man must be maintained for the common good of all." On the other hand, they should know that the white men, one more horrible than the other, both die by poison in a weird case of murder-accidental suicide. In other words, they both get their comeuppance.

The term beche-de-mer, referring to a type of pidgin English, comes up in the story. That would seem to place it in the area of New Guinea and nearby islands. Bêche-de-mer more commonly refers to the sea cucumber, which figures in a far more well-known story, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838).

Harold Ward worked with Arthur Gillespie. Here is the sheet music for their song "It Makes a Lot of Difference When You Are with the Girl You Love" (1909). Charlotte Blake (1885-1979) wrote the music.

Writing as Zorro, Arthur Ward penned five novels of the pulp character Doctor Death. Three of these appeared in the pulp magazine Doctor Death in 1935. They were reprinted by Corinth Publications in 1966 with cover art by Robert Bonfils (1922-2018).

An article from the Sterling Daily Gazette, September 7, 1929, page 5, regarding two men who at one time or other called both Chicago and Whiteside County, Illinois, home.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

I.W.D. Peters (1870s?-1931)-The Second Woman Author

Née Idella W. Donnally
Aka Ida Donnally Peters, Ida D. Peters
Author, Telephone & Telegraph Operator
Born November 27, 1870s?, Callaghan, Alleghany County, Virginia
Died March 14, 1931, at home, Chastleton Hotel, Washington, D.C.

If you're going to write a biographical sketch of Idella W. Donnally Peters, you'll have to gather and assemble scattered bits of information and not rely on her obituary ("Mrs. Ida D. Peters, Writer, Is Buried" in the Washington, D.C., Evening Star, March 16, 1931, page 7). She was not born on a plantation near Monticello or Oak Hill in Virginia. Instead, she came into the world at Callaghan, a humble place situated in a narrow valley in western Virginia, in the shadows of mountains. Her father was not a doctor. Instead, he was a glovemaker. She is supposed to have attended Powell School in Richmond, Virginia, as well as Women's College of Richmond and what is now called Columbia University in New York City. Some of that can be squared with her work as a telephone and telegraph operator in Richmond. Then again, maybe it can't quite. She was born on November 27. Of that we can be sure. Her obituary doesn't give her age or the year of her birth, but her headstone does, as do census records. She was almost certainly not born in the 1880s, however. More likely, she was born in the early 1870s, possibly in the period 1871 to 1873.

Her father was Allan Donnally (1831-ca. 1905), who, on May 31, 1861, at age thirty, enlisted as a private in Company K, 14th Virginia Cavalry, in service of the Confederate States of America. He served for six months and was discharged on November 22, 1861. Donnally was a farmhand, a glovemaker, and a store clerk. In 1868, he married Margaret E. Dickson. In 1870, they were living in Covington Township, Alleghany County, Virginia. Callaghan, the place of Idella's birth, is in Alleghany County. I suspect she was born in about 1873, possibly a little earlier, possibly in about 1871. I base that on her later employment, in 1889 and after, as a telephone and telegraph operator, a job she could hardly have held at age six. She had an older brother, Charles E. Donnally. He may have been the same Elwood Donnally who died in November 1877 in Alleghany County at age eight.

I haven't found the Donnally family in the 1880 census. In 1888, Allan Donnally was working as a clerk in Richmond. He entered the Old Soldiers Home in Richmond in the 1890s or in 1900. He left that place in April 1900. The last record I have found for Allan Donnally is a census record: in June 1900, he was living in the county poorhouse at Boiling Spring in Alleghany County. He was a widower. An unsupported source on the Internet says that he died in about 1905.

So it may have been that Idella W. Donnally Peters was an only child and that she lost both of her parents when she was still young. There is so much we don't know about her or her family, including something as simple as her middle name. She lost a foot in a childhood accident and walked with a crutch. In 1889, 1891, 1892, and 1900, she was listed in the Richmond city directory as Ida W. Donnally, a telephone operator, with an address at Union Passenger Depot, 320 East Franklin Street. On February 16, 1902, she married (Emmett) Eugene Peters (1880-1933), a druggist, in Baltimore, Maryland. She was employed at the time by Western Union Telegraph Company in the same drugstore where her new husband worked.

In 1912, the Peters moved to Washington, D.C. In the census of 1920, they were enumerated in that city. Ida was employed as a writer for magazines. In 1930, they were in the same city, and she called herself an author of books. Ida D. Peters' obituary says that her early stories were "humorous Chinese sketches." I have no idea what that means. I have found mention of two of her books, Colonial Children and Girls of Long Ago (1930), the latter illustrated by Mabel Pugh (pictured below). She also wrote nonfiction, as well as short stories for children, and her "Sketches of Historic Personages" were broadcast on the radio. She was a member and district auditor of the District of Columbia League of American Pen Women. She died on March 14, 1931, at home in the Chastleton Hotel in Washington, D.C., and was buried at Rock Creek Cemetery, also in the nation's capital. Her husband died exactly two years later, on March 14, 1933, after having fallen out of a barn loft and fracturing his skull. They are at rest now, side by side, as their shared headstone reads, "Until the Glorious Resurrection."

* * *

I discovered the identity of I.D.W. Peters by looking at The FictionMags Index. There is a story--a single story--listed there by Ida Donnally Peters, "A Lover of Freedom," which appeared in Detective Story Magazine in the issue of June 29, 1920. Just two entries above that is the lone story by I.W.D. Peters, "The Gallows," which was in the inaugural issue of Weird Tales, March 1923. That was the connection, and it led after a little research to an answer to the question of "Who Was I.W.D. Peters?" Now we know. Thanks to The FictionMags Index.

* * *

I have a few more credits for her:

• "The Girl of His Dreams" (short story) in the Boston Herald, Aug. 6, 1911, magazine section, p. 9.
• "Woman: The Same Yesterday, Today and Forever" (Bible story) in The Woman's Magazine, St. Louis Star and Times, Jan. 16, 1912, p. 13.
• "The Chinese Language" (nonfiction) in the Belleville (Illinois) News-Democrat, Sept. 7, 1912, p. 22.
• "All on a Summer Night" (short story) in the Nashville Banner, Dec. 9, 1916, p. 17.

These works were probably all syndicated.

* * *

I.W.D. Peters' Story in Weird Tales
"The Gallows" (Mar. 1923)

Further Reading
"Mrs. Ida D. Peters, Writer, Is Buried" in the Washington, D.C., Evening Star, March 16, 1931, page 7.

I.W.D. Peters' Story:

"The Gallows" is yet another prison story, another story of marital infidelity, and another story of murder. It's told in the first person by a man named Traylor, who has killed a man with whom his wife was having an affair. Traylor is waiting to be hanged for his crime, and he wants to die.  He hopes that his wife's efforts to save him will fail. The story closes with a statement made by the prison warden, another example of an introduction or closing to a story that helps to illuminate or explain it.

"The Gallows" is brief, a mere three pages long and the first of what Weird Tales called a "five-minute story." It's a crime story, a love story (love gone wrong), and a confessional. There aren't any weird elements in it at all. The first issue of Weird Tales has several nonfiction fillers. We might as well say that it has several fictional fillers, too, "The Gallows" being one of them. A magazine made leaner would have left them all out.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley