Weird Tales, April 1923-Part Two

Authors in the April 1923 issue of Weird Tales about whom I have not written before:

Carl Ramus, M.D. (1872-1963)--Carl Ramus' name is misspelled in the table of contents of that first issue as Carl Rasmus. His story "The Scar" was the first by a medical doctor to appear in Weird Tales. It's also the first involving the Mafia, referred to in the story as "black handers."

There aren't any supernatural elements in "The Scar." Instead it's a crime story. I'm beginning to sense that many of the stories published in early issues of Weird Tales could also have been in its companion magazine Detective Tales. Maybe they were submitted to the former but were printed in the latter as a kind of surplus or overflow. Then again, maybe they were a little too outré for Detective Tales and so ended up in Weird Tales, although that seems unlikely to me.

In any case, "The Scar" was written by a medical doctor, and a young medical doctor is its protagonist and ultimately its hero. Ramus' story reads in fact like a young, real-life doctor's fantasy of heroic action and the rescuing of a damsel in distress. There is mention in "The Scar" of an International Journal of Surgery, a title similar to that of Surgical Monthly in "The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni" by Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding. There is also mention of Rush Medical College in Chicago, where Ramus went to school, also where Anthony M. Rud studied medicine.

By the way, Carl Ramus was the brother of Sybla Ramus (1874-1963), who wrote one story for Weird Tales, the three-part serial "Coils of Darkness" in the issues of February, March, and April 1924. I never associated the two because of my reliance on Jaffery and Cook's index of Weird Tales, which, again, misspells Ramus' surname. I previously thought of him as Carl Rasmus. You can read about and see a photograph of Dr. Carl Ramus on the National Park Service website on Ellis Island by clicking here.

Paul Suter (1884-1970)--Joseph Paul Suter was a prolific author of pulp fiction. By day he worked as an accountant and in other jobs in Youngstown, Ohio. His story "Beyond the Door" is the first in Weird Tales to rely heavily on diary entries to advance the plot and our understanding of its events. Only "The Grave" by Orville R. Emerson before it has a similar kind of approach in its storytelling. However, in that story, the written narrative is more of a manuscript than a conventional diary, which has dated entries and and is usually written in a diary book. In any case, call it another case of a found object--a letter, a note, a diary, a newspaper article--used in the telling of a weird tale. There would be another diary story in "The Bodymaster" by Harold Ward.

"Beyond the Door" is an uncle story, too. Maybe we should start thinking of that as a subtype of genre fiction. Uncle Godfrey's diary begins on June 15, for us, an anniversary just passed. After a space in the diary of removed pages, it picks up again on July 16, an anniversary as of today. There is a well in the cellar of Uncle's house, its opening covered by a large stone. That makes me think of "Pickman's Model" by H.P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, Oct. 1927), also the movie The Ring (2002), which is already two decades old, believe it or not. Readers liked "Beyond the Door." It was reprinted in Weird Tales in May 1954.

You can read more about J. Paul Suter on a blog called Pulp Flakes, in an entry called "Author profile: J Paul Suter (Newspaper article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1951)," posted on May 17, 2013, here. You will find a newspaper photograph of him there as well.

Roylston Markham (1885-1950)--Roylston Miller "Roy" Markham was the author of just one story in Weird Tales and, it appears, in all of the science fiction/fantasy/weird fiction genres. Born in Michigan, he grew up in South Dakota and worked as a newspaperman in Sioux Falls and in Chicago. In later years, he called Florida home. His story "The Tortoise Shell Comb" is brief and has many of the same elements as the stories in the first issue: a first-person narrative; suggestions of a haunting or supernatural events; infidelity, murder, revenge, and insanity; a final explanation provided by someone in the know; finally, a setting where murderers are kept, though in this case it's an insane asylum rather than a prison. I wonder what Culpeper Chunn thought of that. (Tune in to the next episode of this blog for an explanation.) Markham's tale is another of American servicemen in France during the Great War.

Paul Crumpler, M.D. (1883-1966)--"A Photographic Phantasm" is the first non-fiction item with a byline to appear in Weird Tales. It was written by another medical doctor, Paul Crumpler, M.D. (1883-1966), who practiced medicine and served as coroner in Sampson County, North Carolina, for many years. His account of a ghost-photograph is just one page long. You can read more about him and see a very small photograph of him on the website Find A Grave, here.

To be continued . . .

The obituary of Roylston Miller "Roy" Markham in the Tampa Bay Times (St. Petersburg, Florida), February 7, 1950, page 7.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley