Stephen Bagby (1894-1969)

Pseudonym of Charles Meriwether Stephens
Author, Newspaper Editor, Advertising Man
Born August 28, 1890, Atlanta, Georgia
Died December 11, 1969, Little Creek Hospital, Knoxville, Tennessee

In February 1925, one hundred years ago this month, Weird Tales had its fourth issue after the revival of November 1924 and its second of the new year. That year would be full, with twelve issues in all, the first full year of "The Unique Magazine."

The cover story of that February issue is "Whispering Tunnels" by Stephen Bagby. According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The FictionMags Index, Stephen Bagby was a pseudonym of Charles M. Stephens. Bagby, of New York City, wrote a letter to "The Eyrie" published in May 1927. Knowing that leads to a Charles M. Stephens who was born on August 28, 1890, in Atlanta, Georgia, and who worked, in 1942, in Manhattan in the publication division of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. This Charles M. Stephens' parents were James McConnell Stephens (1849-1924) and Zipporah Bagby Stephens (1860-1907), and so I think we have our man.

The Stephens family was a large one. The children included Alice, Nannie B. (B for Bagby), James M., Charles M., Robert G., Grace, and Francis Stephens. In 1933, Francis Stephens (1901-1963), the youngest, married Louis Hasselmans (1878-1957), conductor of the New York Metropolitan Opera orchestra from 1921 to 1936. Nannie Bagby "Nan" Stephens (1883-1946) was a songwriter, playwright, and librettist. She wrote songs and plays based on black music and black southern dialect. Her play Roseanne (1923-1924) was first performed by white actors in blackface, then by black actors, including Paul Robeson. She also wrote the libretto for the opera Cabildo (1932), with music by Amy Beach.

Charles Meriwether Stephens was born on August 28, 1890, in Atlanta, Georgia, making him just eight days younger than H.P. Lovecraft. Presumably he had some college: although he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private, he was appointed as a second lieutenant on June 30, 1917. On September 20, 1917, he was promoted to first lieutenant and afterwards received a temporary promotion to captain. Stephens served in the Panama Canal Zone; at Fort Meyer, Virginia and Camp Merritt, New Jersey; and in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in France, from December 30, 1917, to October 20, 1919. His story, "Whispering Tunnels," is about what was then called the Great War. In it, the main character, Miles Cresson of New Orleans, returns to France in August 1923 to search for a vanished comrade-in-arms. Those fictional events took place in the first year of Weird Tales and in the month that Stephens turned thirty-three years old. On June 17, 1925, four months after his first story appeared in "The Unique Magazine," he married Lillian C. Luther in Port Washington, New York.

Writing as Stephen Bagby, Charles M. Stephens had three stories in Weird Tales: "Whispering Tunnels" (Feb. 1925), "The Witches' Sabbath" (two-part serial; July-Aug. 1928), and "The Rosicrucian Lamp" (June, 1929). The letter that has led me to find him in his true identity was in the May 1927 issue. Writing as Charles M. Stephens, he had two more letters in "The Eyrie," in November 1927 and November 1928. He also had one letter in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror in June 1932. According to a list in The FictionMags Index, that was the sum total of his output published in fiction magazines.

In addition to writing stories and letters published in pulp magazines, Charles M. Stephens was apparently a newspaper editor, for a man of that name was in the right place and at the right time to be managing editor of The Huntington (Long Island) Times, launched on October 13, 1928. He later worked in advertising and the publication division for the Metropolitan Life Company. Maybe those were just one job. Charles M. Stephens, aka Stephen Bagby, died on December 11, 1969, at Little Creek Hospital in Knoxville, Tennessee. His body was returned to New York for burial. His wife survived him, and apparently he died without issue.

Stephen Bagby & Charles M. Stephens' Stories & Letters in Weird Tales
plus one letter in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror
"Whispering Tunnels" (Feb. 1925)
Letter to "The Eyrie" (May 1927)
Letter to "The Eyrie" as by Charles M. Stephens (Nov. 1927)
Letter to "The Eyrie" as by Charles M. Stephens (Nov. 1928)
"The Witches' Sabbath" (two-part serial; July-Aug. 1928)
"The Rosicrucian Lamp" (June, 1929)
Letter in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror as by Charles M. Stephens (June 1932)

Further Reading
"Stephens Brothers, of Atlanta, Do Effective Work Against Huns," Atlanta Constitution, September 10, 1918, page 12 (below)

"A black cloud seemed to fill the center of the red circle. Suddenly, both men saw it. A great, shapeless creature was taking the form of a man, so tall that the head was bent against the ceiling. Two burning, baleful eyes were fixed on the pair, as a snarling issued from its great black mouth, lined with long, jagged teeth. The creature's body was covered with scales; its powerful arms and toes were armed with long, razorlike claws. Littlejohn steeled his will, to prevent the thing's efforts to overcome him with the noxious stench it emitted. It was the beginning of a deadlock of wills, which lasted for minutes in that room of damp stone."

From: "Whispering Tunnels" by Stephen Bagby, Weird Tales, February 1925. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch.

"Whispering Tunnels" is a story of an occult detective, Dr. Arthur Littlejohn of New York, but it is also a story of an exorcism of a demonic spirit, also carried out by Dr. Littlejohn. The scene above happens in tunnels under Fort Vaux, at Verdun. It's a somewhat long story and maybe a little melodramatic, but you might want to have a look.

From the Atlanta Constitution, September 10, 1918, page 12.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Ooze & Abysses

I have been writing for a long time now about Weird Tales in its first year and in its 100th. Weird Tales began in March 1923 with a story called "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. In its current incarnation, the magazine observed its 100th anniversary in 2023. In a series called "Origins of Ooze," from March 2023, I wrote about the concepts of primordial ooze, primordial slime, and primordial soup. These are supposed to be scientific concepts, but they're actually closer to pseudoscience, hoaxes, and frauds. Like overpopulation, though, ooze and slime escaped from the confines of genre literature and got into the general consciousness. And like overpopulation, people in the general public accepted it and internalized it.

Not long ago, I reread Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (1984; Vintage Books, 1987). One of the interesting things about this book is that it was written in the second person. The only other fictional work I can think of written in the second person is Ralph Milne Farley's short story "The House of Ecstasy," originally in Weird Tales in April 1938. Bright Lights, Big City is also written in the present tense, so it's close to unique in two ways. (Two-nique?) Getting back to ooze and slime, here's a brief quote: "The woman looks at you as if you were something that had just crawled out of the ocean trailing ooze and slime." (p. 13) It doesn't seem to me that that was a random choice of words: writers seem to have heard of ooze and slime and it has stuck in their brains.

The imagery in the 100th anniversary issue of Weird Tales has to do with voids and abysses. I have tried to bring into my discussion of that issue, its authors, and its lead characters the image of the worm that swallows its own tail. The other evening I finished reading The Doomsters by Ross Macdonald (1958; Knopf, 1979). That book doesn't start off very well, but it finishes with some power. Here is a passage regarding a human inner darkness or void:

     His eyes were still burning with fierce and unquenched light. I thought it was a light that burned from darkness, a blind arrogance masking fear and despair. Behind his shifting masks, I caught a glimpse of the unknown dispossessed, the hungry operator who sat in Grantland's central darkness and manipulated the shadow play of his life. I struck at the shape in the darkness. (p. 163)

I guess you could say that Dr. Grantland has a heart of darkness. (And again we have a medical doctor who is dark or empty inside.) On its last page, the image of the worm ouroboros shows up: "The circuit of guilty time was too much like a snake with its tale in its mouth, consuming itself." (p. 200) The title, by the way, is from Thomas Hardy's poem "To an Unborn Pauper Child" and these lines:

Sleep the long sleep:
The Doomsters heap
Travails and teens around us here . . . ,

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part Six

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a tale, an old form of which the weird tale is also an example. Heart of Darkness and weird tales have things in common, one of which is the use of intelligible speech as a way of separating men from beasts, civilized men from savages or degenerate men, and men from beings or entities that come from voids before creation or beyond our own normal experiences of space and time. We speak words. They speak gibberish. Kurtz is a man of words, and yet he presided "at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites." (Dell, p. 88) And as Kurtz is carried to the boat that will take him away from his jungle realm, the people over whom he has ruled gather to protest:

"[T]hey shouted periodically together strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language; and the deep murmurs of the crowd, interrupted suddenly, were like the responses of some satanic litany." (p. 111)

Here are some passages from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft on gibberish, unintelligible words, ancient and cryptic rites, and things difficult, if not impossible, to inscribe, copy, or render into any modern tongue:

This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters "Cthulhu" and "R'lyeh."

* * *

The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles.

* * *

Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how.

* * *

Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.

* * *

I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs.

* * * 

Lovecraft read and admired Conrad. I wonder if he could have drawn some of his own imagery and themes from Conrad's novels and stories. Lovecraft supposedly didn't read H. Rider Haggard until 1926, and then, perhaps, only Haggard's most well-known romance, She. I wonder who could have described in fiction the interior of Africa before Conrad and Haggard. And I wonder what influence there might have been on later tellers of weird tales other than those two men.

* * *

There is an old thread of messages and comments on the website SF Chronicles (here) regarding Lovecraft and Conrad. In a letter, Lovecraft wrote:

He [Conrad] feels and expresses as few authors can the prodigious and inhuman tides of a blind, bland universe; at heart indifferent to mankind, but purposefully malignant if measured by the narrow and empirical standard of human teleology. 

That sounds like cosmic horror to me. But I'm not sure that the horror in Heart of Darkness is cosmic. I could be wrong. I invite opinions and comments. In any case, it seems to me that the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023) have conflated their own interior psychological, existential, and spiritual horrors with outer, cosmic horrors. They seem to be saying that the source of their feelings of horror is the immense cosmos rather than their own shrunken, misshapen, neglected, or abused hearts, minds, and souls. In the quote above, Lovecraft referred to a blind universe. I think the blindness is actually in the person who believes the universe to be a cause for horror rather than of feelings of awe and wonder. The authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue seem to be inviting us to join them in their feelings, thereby affirming and validating them. I will say no thank you.

* * *

I have one more quote from Heart of Darkness. At the end, Marlow goes to visit Kurtz's fiancée. He lies to her, a lie to comfort her. He remembers that as he departed her company, "It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head." (Dell, p. 124) When I read that, I was reminded of "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe, the conclusion of which reads:

From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened--there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind-- the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight--my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder--there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters--and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the "House of Usher."

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part Five

Kurtz is mysterious, just as Africa is mysterious. Marlow penetrates into both mysteries. The title of Joseph Conrad's novella first appears in Marlow's description of his journey upriver: "We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness." (Dell, p. 69) In addition to traveling into the interior of tropical Africa, Marlow and his men travel back in time, thereby encountering, perhaps, something of what Kurtz refers to when he cries, "The horror! The horror!":

"We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign--and no memories." (pp. 69-70)

Nietzsche warned us not to peer into the abyss. Characters (and presumably authors) in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (#367, from 2023) fail to heed that warning. But their abysses are within themselves rather than outward in the cosmos. They are empty inside. Inside themselves they have created and nursed and cultivated voids. Kurtz is empty inside, too, and comes from a kind of void. Marlow calls him a "wraith from the back of Nowhere." (p. 88) Referring to human heads on posts outside his abode, Marlow says:

"They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him--some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can't say. I think the knowledge came to him at last--only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude--and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core . . . ." (p. 99; emphasis added, ellipses in the original)

Marlow's assessment is echoed in Caitlín R. Kiernan's short story "Night Fishing," when the narrator says: "That night on the lake, it saw my face [. . . .] It saw something wrong with my soul. It saw an easy mark." So is that an allusion or reference to Heart of Darkness? Or is it a case of one author arriving independently at the same kind of conclusion as another?

In my Dell edition of Heart of Darkness, a previous owner underlined different passages and made notes in the margins. This person's marginalia on the passage above reads:

". . . is horror, horror out there or in here?"

A perceptive question and one that gets to an issue with Weird Tales #367, namely that the horror that many of its characters experience is not actually cosmic because it isn't "out there" but "in here." Their horror is about themselves and their own self-made voids. I would add that their inner voids are not very interesting. Kurtz's problems are more so. Kurtz is obviously the greater man. But in the end, maybe Kurtz, to match his small stature, is also a small man. He need not have descended into Nowhere or dived into his inner emptiness.

(Remember that the meaning of the word utopia is "nowhere" and that Samuel Butler had written a book called Erewhon, its title an anagram for nowhere, published in 1872. Remember the Beatles song "Nowhere Man," too.)

Later on Marlow says of Kurtz:

"But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. I had--for my sins, I suppose--to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity. He struggled with himself, too. I saw it--I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself." (p. 111)

Like the characters in the Cosmic Horror Issue--or they are like he is--Kurtz is a man without faith.

I have one more image of Kurtz, who now lies on his deathbed. Marlow remembers:

"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines." (p. 114)

Kurtz has fallen into an abyss--is it a Nietzschean abyss?--and Marlow peers in after him. Marlow backs away from the abyss, but for Kurtz it's too late. And then Kurtz cries his last words: "'The horror! The horror!'" (p. 114)

To be concluded . . . 

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was first in Blackwood's Magazine No. 1000, a "Special Double Number" published one hundred twenty-six years ago this month, in February 1899, the last February of the nineteenth century. The magazine is also called Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part Four

Kurtz would seem an enigma. Despite all of his words--the great flow of his words, written and spoken, issuing from his heart of darkness--he remains a mystery. His last words--"The horror! The horror!"--are ambiguous. Just what is it that he finds horrific? He would seem a psychopathic god, a forerunner to and prediction of the totalitarian rulers of the twentieth century, set to commence less than a year after part one of Heart of Darkness was published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in February 1899.

Like those future rulers, Kurtz writes and speaks at great length and with great eloquence. Marlow reads from his writings, remembering:

"But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. [. . .] 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc. etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbound eloquence--of words--of burning noble words." (Dell, pp. 88-89)

And like the eloquence and burning intensity and power of twentieth-century totalitarian oratory, Kurtz's "pamphlet" ends with a call to action: "'Exterminate all the brutes!'" As Eric Hoffer observed in his book The True Believer, in every mass-movement revolution the man of words or ideas is succeeded by the man of action--and that's where the mass murder and mass extermination begin. Kurtz, sickly, weak, small in stature, a big fish inhabiting a small pond, is here the man of words but he is unable to carry out fully his prescribed actions. Instead death carries him away.

Kurtz's resorting to "will" made me think of another nineteenth-century author, one who may also have had Polish blood. Before Joseph Conrad wrote, so did Friedrich Nietzsche, specifically on what he called the "will to power." Conrad would seem to have been aware of the writings of Nietzsche. Maybe Kurtz is a kind of Nietzschean hero. Maybe his dissolution replays that of Nietzsche before him.

Nietzsche rears his head in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023) in the form of his warning not to peer into the abyss. So are there abysses--and cosmic horror--in Heart of Darkness? That question comes next in this series.

To be continued . . .

Heart of Darkness & The Secret Sharer in a Signet edition. This is the edition that we read a long, long time ago in one of my English classes. I wish I still had it. Anyway, that's a representation of Kurtz on the cover. He looks harmless enough and not at all diabolical, unlike a real-life bearded and baldheaded totalitarian from the century following his. 

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part Three

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a tale within a tale. It reads like a weird tale, with feelings of foreboding and menace and atmospheres of darkness and the unknown. It has deeper meaning, but it can also be read as a simple adventure story. Heart of Darkness could easily have been in a pulp magazine or a men's magazine of the 1910s through the 1960s. Originally published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in February 1899, one hundred twenty-six years ago this month, Conrad's novella may have made just one more magazine appearance, in The Golden Book Magazine of January through April 1933. (Thanks to The FictionMags Index.)

The teller of the tale within a tale is the seaman Marlow. He journeys first to the Continent to secure his position with a company doing business in Africa. In the company offices, he has an eerie encounter with two silent women. There are only two of them and they are knitters rather than weavers, but they remind me of the Fates, or of their Norse counterparts, one of whom is Wyrd.

I have a collection of books now from a neighbor who died. I'll have more to tell on that shortly. One of these books, which I received just this week, after I had begun writing about Conrad, is Jeffrey Meyers' biography of the writer from 1991. In reading Heart of Darkness, I detected in its pages a possible awareness of what we now call science fiction. On page 28 of Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Mr. Meyers described some of his subject's early reading: "books on distant voyages and exotic exploration," adding, "Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, and adventure novels by Captain Marryat and Fenimore Cooper inspired him to become a sailor." (Boldface added.) There isn't an entry on Jules Verne in the index, but in Heart of Darkness, Marlow recounts that at the outset of his journey to Africa "I felt as though, instead of going to the centre of a continent, I were about to set off for the centre of the earth." (Dell, p. 39) Later in his career, while on shore, Conrad "read extensively in English and French literature." (Meyers, p. 53). It seems almost certain that he would have read Verne. I can only assume that in using the phrase "the centre of the earth," Conrad was referring to Verne's romance of 1864 and 1867.

Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells were acquaintances, though not friends. Conrad first encountered Wells through Wells' early science fiction novels. Ford Madox Ford introduced them in 1899. Conrad called Wells "a very original writer, romancier du fantastique, with [. . .] an astonishing imagination." (Meyers, p. 151) In Heart of Darkness, Marlow, in thinking about the dark heart of Africa, remembers "a Scotch sailmaker who was certain, dead sure there were people in Mars." (Dell, p. 58) He goes on. Again, Conrad seems to have been alluding to the science fiction of his time, specifically to Wells. There is one more possible allusion, or maybe this is an example of Conrad's own science-fictional imagination at work, for in remembering his upriver trip, Marlow says: "We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet." (Dell, p. 69)

Less than a century before, Americans had begun their own explorations into the heart of a continent. But the literature of American exploration and journeying westward is romantic rather than science-fictional: our explorations predated fiction based in science and technology and instead rested within the romantic period of the early to mid nineteenth century. The only science-fictional Western that springs to mind is The Valley of Gwangi, from 1969, which came well after the fact. It's interesting, though, to find what sound like metafictional allusions to science fiction within a literary work of the late 1800s, a work that has such affinities to adventure fiction and weird fiction, two genres older than science fiction. Remember, too, that there were pulp genres drawn from works of this type, including jungle adventures and South Seas adventures.

To be continued . . .

Here is an interesting juxtaposition of images related to Joseph Conrad and his South Seas fiction, above, a paperback cover of An Outcast of the Islands, and below, a movie poster or lobby card of the movie version. In any relationship, sometimes the man is in the superior position and sometimes the woman.

Update (Feb. 2, 2025): The actress who played the native girl in Outcast of the Islands is Kerima, née Miriam Charrière. She was born on February 10, 1925, in Toulouse, France. According to the Internet, she is still living. In a week and a day she will be one hundred years old.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part Two

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899) can be read simply as an adventure story, even if there is more to it than that. Like much of the best literature, it can be read at more than one level. Good genre fiction works that way, too. Merely sensational things are soon forgotten. Things of substance and quality stick.

In Conrad's novella, a seaman named Marlow, beginning in England, sets off for the Continent to secure work, then journeys to the west coast of Africa to carry out his assignment. He soon finds that he is to repair a boat, then to take it upriver to a remote place where a mysterious and intriguing figure named Kurtz resides and appears to reign. Conrad spent nearly twenty years of his life as a seaman. Those years included a monthlong trip up the Congo River and other trips across the world. Many of his works are about men and ships at sea.

Again, not everyone can be Joseph Conrad, nor can everyone be Herman Melville or Jack London, who also went to sea, or Ernest Hemingway or James Jones, who went to war. But a writer ought to be able to draw from some other experience besides reading comic books, watching TV shows, and playing video games, which is how many of the authors in the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales seem to have spent their lives. Their characters follow their lead. Too many of them seem wrapped up in themselves. The lead characters in "A Ghost Story for Christmas" and "Night Fishing" are prime examples. Kurtz is one wrapped up in himself, too--everything to which he refers is his--but Marlow recognizes him as a great man. And he is (possibly), though great in a terrible way. One difference between Kurtz and too many of the characters in the Cosmic Horror Issue (their authors, too) is that he has gone somewhere and done something. They apparently have not. They have remained where they are, wrapped up in themselves, turned inward upon themselves like the worm uroboros. The old saying is that a man wrapped up in himself makes a small package. That is too evident in the pages of Weird Tales #367 and apparently, too, in the lives of its contributors. There are exceptions, but perhaps only barely. I will add that you don't have to look into your own navel and pick at your own little scabs--you don't have to examine your self-made inner voids when there is a whole world out there brimming with mystery and adventure. Even if you are bound to a place and a way of life, you might still turn loose your imagination and let it wander freely in the larger world. Good authors do that.

* * *

Another problem with the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales is that it is shamelessly, perhaps thoughtlessly, commercial. Its authors place the names of commercial products in their stories as if they had been paid to do so. In contrast, there is only one brandname in Heart of Darkness, Martini-Henry, the name of a rifle. That's a concrete detail. It's not product placement. In general, I think using the names of weapons, cars, cigarettes, and alcoholic drinks is probably okay in a work of fiction. The list of acceptable brandnames used after that must be, I think, pretty short, especially in a short story.

Joseph Conrad was conservative in an old-fashioned sense, meaning that he was aristocratic, perhaps reactionary, certainly skeptical of progress, and suspicious of liberal values. People seem to have forgotten that what they call capitalism is a liberal rather than a conservative institution. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow shows his disdain for commercialism and the relentless chasing after money that he witnesses in Africa. Most of the commercial products in his tale are cheap and lousy, or useless, like the pieces of brass wire used to pay African natives. There is one exception: ivory.

"The word 'ivory' rang in the air [Marlow remembers], was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from a corpse." (Dell, 1960, p. 53)

That "imbecile rapacity" is seemingly everywhere in our world of today--even in the pages of fiction. That's just how it is, I guess. We are all human and so necessarily broken, warped, and twisted, at least in our worst moments and by our worst instincts. Art is supposed to rise above these things, though, and when an author of fiction uses a half-dozen or more brandnames in as many pages of his or her story, you can't help but smell the whiff of the commercial corpse. People have forgotten God, yet still they pray to the golden calf of money and material objects. And not just material objects but specific commercial objects, in other words products with brandnames. Many of those branded products have become not material at all--they are called services instead--yet still have the same taint and whiff of the commercial corpse. And now human beings seem to want to transform themselves into branded products, to make of themselves mere objects, to objectify and commodify themselves, a recipe, I should point out, for disquiet and unhappiness in the self-objectifying person. (As my philosophy professor, Mr. Pedtke, pointed out a long time ago, we are not things.) Anyway, I think that authors should cease with the product placement and the thoughtless and shameless deployment of brandnames. And editors should make sure that they do. Let fiction be art rather than advertisement.

To be continued . . .

The Heart of Darkness in a Signet edition, date and cover artist unknown. I have altered this low-resolution image from one I found on line. Whatever you do, don't take this as a true representation of the original book cover. (I wish people would scan their images instead of taking pictures of them.)

This cover illustration is misleading. It doesn't really represent a scene from inside, at least in Heart of Darkness. But when I saw it, I thought of King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard (1885), especially the character Foulata. Once I thought of Rider Haggard's book, I considered the possibility that Heart of Darkness is a kind of inversion of King Solomon's Mines, that it is a story set in a more nearly real world rather than in a fantasy world. Even if that's a worthwhile interpretation, we should remember that H. Rider Haggard lived in Africa, too, and would have had no illusions about the place or its peoples, including its European peoples.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Heart of Darkness-Part One

In thinking and writing about the Cosmic Horror Issue of Weird Tales (2023), my thoughts went pretty soon to Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Published first as a three-part serial in Blackwood's Magazine (Feb.-Mar.-Apr., 1899), Heart of Darkness first appeared in a hardbound edition in November 1902. Even if you haven't read Conrad's novella of an upriver trip made in colonial Africa, you probably know its most famous line of dialogue, Kurtz's last words: "The horror! The horror!" That line and the greater theme of Heart of Darkness are what led me from cosmic horror to Kurtz's horror.

Not everyone can be Joseph Conrad. In fact, only Conrad was Conrad. But it would do for aspiring authors to read as widely as possible and to learn whatever lessons they can by doing so. One of the things lacking in the Cosmic Horror Issue is substance, or weight. As I wrote before, that issue is pretty thin in terms of its content. Some of its stories are very thin. But there is real substance in Heart of Darkness. Although it isn't heavy, it has weight. It's also very well written and stylistically polished. The opening, in which a cruising yawl called the Nellie, bearing five men, comes to rest in the sea-reach of the river Thames, is beautifully done and almost perfect in its depiction of a scene to which I have never been witness and probably never will be. But in reading I was almost there, and so might you be, too.

Heart of Darkness is a tale. It's very much like a weird tale in its structure, theme, plot, and atmosphere. Or maybe the weird tale is like this and other tales in that they are all told in a certain way. This tale is actually a tale within a tale. Marlow is one of the men aboard the Nellie. He tells his tale to the others, including the narrator. You could call this a framing device. It's also in the club-story format, even if the telling isn't done in a club setting. I have a yellowing copy of the Laurel Conrad edition published by Dell in 1960 (cover below). The cover art is by Richard Powers, who created so many science fiction and fantasy covers. On page 32 is the phrase "tellers of tales." The word weird appears four times, twice in describing incantations. There is presaging of weird fiction in the Heart of Darkness, especially of the tales of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. 

Many authors of dark fantasy and other dark sub-genres love their darkness. Marlow's first words are of darkness and of the depths of time. His tale begins in its telling on a river to the sea. The tale itself is about a trip in the opposite direction and on a different continent, from the ocean into the inner darkness of the title. But there was once darkness where the five men have come to in their boat, for this, too, was once the home of what Marlow calls savages. And civilized men--Romans--once came here in their ships, just as Europeans had done and were doing in Africa in his time. Marlow points out to the men hearing his tale, "But darkness was here yesterday." (p. 30) His awareness of time isn't quite cosmic, but it is at least historic, prehistoric, atavistic. Marlow speaks of that long-ago time and place:

"They [the Romans] were men enough to face the darkness. And perhaps he [a Roman] was cheered by keeping his eye on a chance of promotion to the fleet at Ravenna by and by, if he had good friends in Rome and survived the awful climate. Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga--perhaps too much dice, you know--coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."

Darkness--journeying away from civilization and into mystery, savagery, and isolation--fascination with what awaits and what lies along the way--the witnessing of abominations--encounters with the incomprehensible--these are some of the same subjects of weird fiction.

To be continued . . .

Note: I accidentally posted this and the following entry earlier this month. Now I will pick up with them and this series again. I hope you don't mind waiting for their return.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Von Foltz & Frazetta

Speaking of the ancient world, I would like to show two pictures, one of which looks a little like the other. The first is "Pericles' Funeral Oration" by German artist Philipp Von Foltz (1805-1877). The second is Frank Frazetta's wraparound cover illustration for Child of the Sun by Kyle Onstott and Lance Horner (Fawcett, 1972). This could be an example of two artists arriving at the same solution to a similar compositional, dramatic, and narrative problem. On the other hand, there could be a little swiping involved. I'll let you decide for yourself. By the way, the Roman speaker in Frazetta's painting looks like a self-portrait.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Pyramids on the Cover of Weird Tales

I wrote recently of pyramids, and this month I'm writing about the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales. Today I can write about both, for on the cover of that issue is a pyramid, a step pyramid and the only one of its kind to appear on the cover of "The Unique Magazine." There had been pyramids before, on the first-anniversary issue of May/June/July 1924. There would be one more in the original run of the magazine, in February 1929, and one more after that, in Winter 1985.

Weird Tales, May/June/July 1924, the first and only quarterly issue of "The Unique Magazine." Cover story: "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" by Houdini (ghostwritten by H.P. Lovecraft). Cover art by R.M. Mally.

Weird Tales, January 1925. Cover story: "Invaders from the Outside" by J. Schlossel. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. 

"I heard sighs of horror from my two companions beneath me, and for a single moment we hung motionless along the chain's length, swinging along the huge pyramid's glowing side at a height of hundreds of feet above the shining streets below. Then the creature raised one of its tentacles, a metal tool in its grasp, which he brought down in a sharp blow on the chain at the window's edge. Again he repeated the blow, and again.

     "He was cutting the chain!"

Weird Tales, February 1929. Cover story: "The Star-Stealers" by Edmond Hamilton. Cover art by Hugh Rankin.

Weird Tales, Winter 1985. Cover art by Ro H. Kim (Hyang Ro Kim). This cover combines a pyramid with the pyramidal body and tentacles of Rankin's previous design.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Bessie Douglas of Portland, Maine

The January 1925 issue of Weird Tales includes eight letters to the editor, these published in "The Eyrie." We should realize that a "letter" in Weird Tales wasn't necessarily a whole letter. Few writers had the privilege of having a whole letter printed in "The Eyrie." Far more often, a "letter" was an excerpt, sometimes long, more often short, but almost certainly not the whole thing.

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database lists seven writers of letters in that January issue of one hundred years ago. The missing name is that of Bessie Douglas of Portland, Maine. There is an extremely spare passage from her letter in "The Eyrie" of one hundred years ago. It's embedded in a paragraph regarding the type of story Weird Tales should publish:

     Up to date, those who want horror stories have distinctly the advantage, but many of them qualify their demand for thrillers by saying that the horror stories must not be disgusting. Some of our readers want the magazine to drip with gore ("the scarier they are, the better I like them," writes Bessie Douglas, of Portland, Maine); but these are in a small minority. As near as the editor can make out from the expression of opinion so far received, the readers of Weird Tales don't want anything nauseating, and yet they do want to read eery, thrilling and bizarre tales of the Edgar Allan Poe type--tales such as they cannot get in any other magazine. But the question is still open. Weird Tales belongs to you, the readers, and your opinions will be eagerly welcomed. [Boldface added.]

Women can be hard to find in public records and old newspapers, but I found a Miss Bessie Douglas of Portland, Maine, a seamstress and possibly a singer or musician. We might not know her identity, but we can at least add Bessie Douglas' name to the list of people who wrote to "The Eyrie."

By the way, did you notice what Farnsworth Wright wrote?

"Weird Tales belongs to you, the readers [. . .] ."

I wish that were still true.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Lady Anne Bonny (Dates Unknown)

Lady Anne Bonny was the pen name of an unknown author. She had just one story in Weird Tales, a three-part serial called "Wings of Power," published in the issues of January, February, and March of 1925. "Wings of Power" is called a "Pseudo-Scientific Novel" in the table of contents. The pseudonym of the author and the title of the story would seem incongruous, for Anne Bonny was a real person, a lady pirate, active for just a few short months in 1720 when there was no such thing as a "pseudo-scientific story," and almost no science at all. No one knows when or where she was born, nor when or where she died. Lady Anne Bonny the author is unknown, and her namesake lady pirate is very nearly unknown.

"Wings of Power" is a long, melodramatic story with a very full cast of characters. There is a mad-scientist type, Professor Kurt Maquarri, and a damsel in distress, his step-daughter Joan Suffern, who does a lot of sufferin'. The science is nonsense, but pseudoscientific nonsense in a story can be fun sometimes. You just have to give up your knowledge of real science and go along for the ride. I wrote that the author's name and the title of her story would seem incongruous, but the pirate Blackbeard figures in it, though not very prominently. I haven't read the story, only breezed through it, looking for clues as to the author's identity. I didn't find anything conclusive. I also read "The Eyrie" for the months after "Wings of Power" was published. I didn't see any mention of it. I take that to mean that, although no one hated it, also no one loved it. Lady Anne Bonny seems to have come and gone. Did she ever write under her own name?

There's just one thing: in the same issues in which "Wings of Power" was published, there were illustrations by an artist named Jessie Bond, who sometimes used "Bonny" as her nickname, who was also a writer, and who was drawn to the subtropics of Florida and the Bahamas. Anne Bonny the pirate got her start by stealing a ship in the Bahamas. So could Jessie Bond, aka Bonny Bond, have been Lady Anne Bonny? Could she have written in collaboration with someone else, such as Farnsworth Wright?

The heading for part one of "Wings of Power" by Lady Anne Bonny, Weird Tales, January 1925, illustration by Andrew Brosnatch.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Two Poems About Two Crows

Francis Hard, aka Farnsworth Wright, had a poem called "Two Crows" in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales. Just six years earlier, Wright had been a soldier stationed in France. In composing his poem, he must have drawn on memories of the Great War:

Two Crows
By Francis Hard (Weird Tales, Jan. 1925)

Two crows flapped over dismally
(So wearily, so drearily)
To the blackened limb of a blasted tree;
The shells flew screaming overhead,
And the field was covered thick with dead--
The earth reeked with its dead.

One crow lamented to his mate
(So wearily, so drearily):
"How long, how long must we now wait
For the taste of food that was so good
Before the shrapnel shattered the wood
And loaded the ground with dead?

"The odor sweet of dying men"
(Lamented he so drearily),
"How strangely pleasant was it when
I sensed it first with ravished breath!
But I am sated, and sick to death,
And would fain lie yon with the dead."

A shell came moaning through the air
(So drearily, so eerily)
And burst where the crows were plaining there;
It shivered the wreck of the blasted tree,
And bits of crow fell bloodily
Among the tangled dead.

* * *

A year and a month later, in February 1926, in his capacity as editor, Wright placed a traditional ballad called "The Twa Corbies" ("The Two Crows") in Weird Tales:

The Twa Corbies
(Old Ballad)
[By Anonymous]

As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane.
The tane unto the tother say:
Where sail we gang and dine today?

In behint yon auld fail dike
I wot there lies a new-slain knight.
Naebody kens that he lies there
But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.

His hound is to the hunting gone,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.

I'll sit on his white hause-bane,
Ye'll pick out his bonny blue een,
Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair
We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.

Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sail ken where he is gane.
O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.

* * *

"The Twa Corbies" was first in print in 1812. A century later, it was reprinted in Ballads Weird and Wonderful (1912), illustrated by Vernon Hill (1887-1972). It seems to me that Farnsworth Wright had read "The Twa Corbies" and was inspired by it in writing his own poem. The refrain, the repeated "wearily," "drearily," and "eerily," would seem to have been inspired by "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe and its own refrain of "evermore" and "nevermore," also from its opening line:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

I wrote about "The Twa Corbies" on December 19, 2022. You can read what I wrote by clicking here.

Two corvids on the cover of Weird Tales:

Weird Tales, July 1945, cover art by Lee Brown Coye.

Weird Tales, September 1939, cover art by Virgil Finlay.

And what might be a crow but looks more like a myna:

Weird Tales, January 1946, cover art by Albert Roanoke Tilburne.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Francis Hard (1888-1940)

Pseudonym of Farnsworth Wright
Author, Editor, Poet, Journalist, Translator, Soldier
Born July 29, 1888, Santa Barbara, California
Died June 12, 1940, Manhattan, New York, New York

Francis Hard was Farnsworth Wright. He used that pseudonym while writing stories and poems for magazines of which he was the editor. You could call it a conflict of interest for an editor to place his own works in a publication that he edits. I don't see it that way. An editor should have someone else look at his story or poem before putting it into print. He should also accept "No" or "It needs work" in response. But I think it's okay for an editor to publish his own work, even under his own name. Farnsworth Wright wrote as Francis Hard anyway.

Farnsworth Wright was born on July 29, 1888, in Santa Barbara, California, to George Francis Wright (1848-1892), a civil engineer and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, and Genevieve Hard Wright (1850-1914), a soprano singer and music teacher and an instructor in physical culture. And so already we have an origin for Wright's nom de plume, Francis Hard.

According to his World War I draft card, Farnsworth Wright attended the University of Nevada, where he began his military service. Wright also studied journalism at the University of Washington. (See his yearbook picture below.) His father had served before him in the U.S. Navy. They were descended from Samuel Farnsworth of Groton, Massachusetts, a drummer in Captain Joseph Moor's Company, Colonel William Prescott's Regiment of Massachusetts Militia during the Revolutionary War. Samuel Farnsworth enlisted on May 15, 1775, or less than a month after the war had commenced at Lexington and Concord. He was presumably at the Battle of Bunker Hill less than a month later. On November 9, 1910, the Colorado Society of the Sons of the American Revolution approved Farnsworth Wright's application for membership. Less than eight years later, on September 9, 1918, Private Farnsworth Wright of Company H, 342nd Infantry Regiment, 86th Infantry Division--the Blackhawk Division--shipped out from New York to France aboard the Minnekahda, continuing the Farnsworth and Wright families' records of service to their country.

Wright returned to the United States on August 4, 1919. He had been promoted by then to sergeant. During and after the Great War, Wright had served as a translator in France and I believe in occupied Germany. Before, based in Chicago, he had worked as a newspaper reporter for Musical America Company of New York. He was also, oddly enough, an Esperantist. Music, languages, and culture seem to have come naturally to members of the Wright family.

Farnsworth Wright returned stateside in the same year that Jacob C. Henneberger, late of the U.S. Navy, arrived in Indianapolis. Henneberger also had connections in Chicago. In 1922 (or thereabouts), he formed The Rural Publishing Corporation with a former college classmate, John M. Lansinger. In one way or another, Farnsworth Wright met Henneberger and Lansinger. Wright had a short story, "The Closing Hand," in the first issue of their new magazine, Weird Tales, in March 1923. He had other submissions after that and began working as a reader of manuscripts at some point. Weird Tales and the business behind it foundered in mid-1924. When it came back in November of that year, Farnsworth Wright was full editor. It was then that he began using the name Francis Hard. As Hard, he had five poems and a short story in Weird Tales, plus one story each in it companion titles Oriental Stories and The Magic Carpet Magazine, which were really the same magazine with successively different titles.

Francis Hard's career as an author and a poet lasted almost as long as Farnsworth Wright's did as editor. Wright remained in his post until 1940, the year in which he died at age fifty-one. He was buried at Willamette National Cemetery in Oregon. His widow, Marjorie Jeanette Zinkie Wright (1893-1974), joined him there the year after her death.

Francis Hard's Stories & Poems in Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and The Magic Carpet Magazine
(All were in Weird Tales unless otherwise noted.)
"The Great Panjandrum" (short story; Nov. 1924)
"Two Crows" (poem; Jan. 1925)
"The Dark Pool" (poem; Apr. 1925)
"The Death Angel" (poem; Sept. 1925)
"The Evening Star" (poem; Mar. 1926)
"The White Queen" in Oriental Stories (short story; Nov. 1930)
"The Picture of Judas" in The Magic Carpet Magazine (short story; Apr. 1933)
"After Two Nights of the Ear-Ache" (poem; Oct. 1937)

Above, the University of Washington yearbook pictures of Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940) and his future wife, Marjorie Zinkie (1893-1974), from the 1913-1914 school year. Marjorie Zinkie studied to be a librarian and worked in that capacity in Idaho, Michigan, and Washington State. Together the Wrights had a son, Robert Farnsworth Wright (1930-1993). He and his wife, Ruthora Marie McBride Wright (1930-1993), died within five months of each other in 1993. I can't say whether Farnsworth and Marjorie Wright have any living descendants.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Jessie Bond (1894-1991)

Jessie C. Bond Munroe
Aka Bonnie Bee, Bonnie Bond, Bonnie Munroe
Fashion Artist, Illustrator, Poet, Painter
Born January 4, 1894, Decatur, Illinois
Died January 20, 1991, Palm Beach County, Florida

She was born in January, married in January, and died in January, and so in January I will write about artist and poet Jessie Bond. She was born on January 4, 1894, in Decatur, Illinois. Her father, William Branham Bond (1853-1913), was a millwright. Younger than her husband by a generation, Jessie's mother, Flora Etta (Williams) Bond (1871-1949), was a solicitor of public houses and later kept boarders. (Maybe those two things are the same.) Jessie Bond lived in and received her schooling in Decatur, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri. By 1920, she and her mother were in Indianapolis. Flora Bond lived on Massachusetts Avenue in that census year. In 1930, she resided on 30th Street, just west of Meridian Avenue. By then her daughter had gone far from home and would soon be herself a mother.

Jessie Bond is someone new to me. Her last name is in Jaffery & Cook's Collector's Index to Weird Tales. I found her first name in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Jessie Bond had six known illustrations in Weird Tales, from December 1924 to March 1925. These were in Farnsworth Wright's first half-year as editor of the magazine. I pretty quickly found an artist named Jessie Bond who lived in Florida. But was she the same Jessie Bond? What could her connection have been to Weird Tales? Then I found that Jessie Bond had moved to Florida in late 1924 from Indianapolis. I also found that she had studied at the John Herron School of Art in that same city. Remember that the editorial offices of Weird Tales magazine were in Indianapolis from 1923 to 1926. Weird Tales and Farnsworth Wright had addresses in the Circle City during those years, and they found artists among its residents, including William F. Heitman and George O. Olinick. Jessie Bond was one of them, too.

To start again, Jessie Bond went to school in St. Louis. In 1918-1919, she studied at the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. (One of her classmates was Hoosier cartoonist Russell Berg [1901-1966].) Jessie worked as a staff artist at the William H. Block Company department store in Indianapolis. Founded in 1874 by an Austro-Hungarian immigrant, Wilhelm Herman Bloch (1855-1928), the Wm. H. Block Co., or Block's, was a mainstay in downtown Indianapolis for many decades. I remember going there with my mother when we were children. Maybe that was the first time I ever rode in an elevator. I remember full-page, hand-drawn fashion advertisements for Block's clothing in the Indianapolis Star. These were a mainstay, too. The Block's building, located at the corner of Illinois and Market streets, was designed by architects Vonnegut & Bohn, the Vonnegut part for Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. (1884-1957). He was the father of author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007), who found success early on in the pages of slick magazines and probably never had to turn to the pulps for income. I wouldn't rule out that he read Weird Tales as a child. I wonder if he knew that "The Unique Magazine" had originated in the city of his birth.

About the time that October turned into November 1924, Jessie Bond moved from Indianapolis to Miami, Florida. She must have been joyous in her move from a midwestern November to an eternal far southern summer. In a contemporaneous newspaper feature article, she was quoted as saying, "I find that I go at my work here with a different spirit. Miami is a playground, and that spirit seems to unconsciously enter into one, until one ceases to take even work seriously, and one does it more for the joy of accomplishment."

By the time she moved, Jessie must have already established a connection to Farnsworth Wright and Weird Tales. He was brand new as editor in November 1924. She had one or two drawings in each issue from December 1924 until March 1925, including two in the January 1925 issue. One of these was for "The Specter Priestess of Wrightstone" by Herman F. Wright. Herman F. Wright is an unknown author. I wonder now if he was actually Farnsworth Wright--F. Wright--in disguise. Wright had another work, a poem called "Two Crows," in that same issue. This was published under his pseudonym Francis Hard.

For five years Jessie Bond worked as a fashion artist for William M. Burdine's Sons department store in Miami. She also conducted the fashion page at the Miami Herald for one season. On January 11, 1928, she married New York native Robert Morris "Bob" Munroe (1896-1971) in Broward County, Florida. He worked as a newspaper columnist and as the director of advertising and publicity for the city of Coral Gables. Their son, John Macgregor Munroe, Ph.D., born on February 2, 1931, died just three years and three months ago, on November 4, 2021, at age ninety. He was a musician, educator, and choir director. He named one of his own daughters Bonnie, presumably after her grandmother . . .

Bob Munroe was a humorist and poet. His wife was a poet, too. Jessie Bond wrote under a pen name, "Bonnie Bee." She was also called Bonnie Bond and Bonnie Munroe, and she had poems in the New York World, the Tampa Morning Tribune, and Florida Poets--1931, edited by Henry Harrison. Bob and Jessie Munroe were acquainted with Vivian Yeiser Laramore (1892-1975), the first and only female poet laureate of the State of Florida. Vivian wrote about both of them in her column "Miami Muse," about Florida poets, in the Miami Daily News. Imagine a time when there was poetry in newspapers and a newspaper column was devoted every week to poets and their work.

After the birth of her son, Jessie became a portrait painter. She liked to collect seashells, and she loved the subtropics of Florida and the Bahamas. She seems to have lived in Florida for the rest of her blessedly long life. Jessie C. Bond Munroe died on January 20, 1991, in Palm Beach County, Florida. She was ninety-seven years old.

Jessie Bond's Illustrations in Weird Tales
"Fairy Gossamer" by Harry Harrison Kroll (Dec. 1924)
"Phantoms" by Laurence R. D'Orsay (Jan. 1925)
"The Specter Priestess of Wrightstone" by Herman F. Wright (Jan. 1925)
"An Unclaimed Reward" by Strickland Gillilan (Feb. 1925)
"The Magic of Dai Nippon" by J.U. Giesy (Feb. 1925)
"Black Curtains" by G. Frederick Montefiore (Mar. 1925)

(Of the six authors listed above, two--Harry Harrison Kroll and Strickland Gillilan--can be classed as Hoosiers. If Herman F. Wright was Farnsworth Wright, then that would make three. The FictionMags Index lists another credit for Jessie Bond, illustrations for "New Stories of Gilbert and Sullivan," with Rupert D'Oyly Carte, J. M. Gordon, Isabel Jay, Henry A. Lytton, and Courtice Pounds, published in The Strand Magazine in December 1925.)

Further Reading

• "Business Girls Sound Praises of Work and Recreation in Miami" by Isabel Stone, The Herald (Miami, Florida), November 15, 1924, page 4-B.

• "Miami Muse: A Weekly Column Devoted to Florida's Poets" by Vivian Yeiser Laramore, Miami Daily News, March 26, 1933, Society Section, page 11.

• "Miami Muse: A Weekly Column Devoted to Florida's Poets" by Vivian Yeiser Laramore, Miami Daily News, September 22, 1935, page 7, which includes some of her poems.

• "Gables Artist Plays Role of Santa To Give Orphan Long-Sought Lessons" by Judy Whitney Malone, Miami Daily News, December 15, 1939, page 19. 

Jessie Bond Munroe, aka Bonnie Munroe, in a newspaper photo accompanying the feature article "Gables Artist Plays Role of Santa To Give Orphan Long-Sought Lessons" by Judy Whitney Malone, in the Miami Daily News, December 15, 1939, page 19.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley