Spear and Fang

100 Years of Robert E. Howard in Weird Tales

No discussion of the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales would be complete without mentioning "Spear and Fang," the first story by Robert E. Howard published in "The Unique Magazine."

Howard was nineteen and a half years old when "Spear and Fang" was published. Because my books are in storage, I will have to rely on online sources of information on Howard and his career to write this. Those sources indicate that "Spear and Fang" was not Howard's first published story but suggest that it was his first professional sale. According to one source, which is always suspect, even on the most well-documented of facts, Howard submitted "Spear and Fang" to Weird Tales in 1924, when he was just eighteen. The new editor of the magazine, Farnsworth Wright, accepted it and informed Howard as much at Thanksgiving time in 1924. I wonder if that means that Howard submitted his story while Weird Tales was still in hiatus, from about June or July to November 1924. If so, that would make for the most serendipitous of developments for Howard, Wright, and Weird Tales, all three, for the then teen-aged author would prove to be one of the most popular and prolific of those who contributed to a magazine that had almost disappeared in 1924. For his efforts, Howard was paid $16, a nice sum for a beginning pulp author of the 1920s.

"Spear and Fang" is a caveman story, though not the first to appear in Weird Tales. That honor goes to R.T.M. Scott and his "Nimba the Cave Girl" from March 1923. It's not very long, five printed pages in all, but it tells a complete story, essentially of a love triangle, if you can call it that, or the eternal triangle, and the rescuing of a damsel in distress.

"Spear and Fang" is, on its surface, a conventional story, but I noticed some things in my reading of it that I think are worth writing about. First, Howard was well known in his later writings for his identification with barbarians and what some people would call savages. That isn't the case with "Spear and Fang," for the hero is a more advanced Cro-Magnon man, while the villain is a primitive, even bestial, Neanderthal man. It's clear that the Cro-Magnon man, called Ga-Nor, is more civilized. He is, after all, an artist. (More on that in a minute.) He is the man of the future. Both he and A-aea, the woman he rescues, are referred to as "mark[s] of progress." The Neanderthal man, on the other hand, is the man of the past. His days are numbered, even if he still has the power to terrify his enemies. It seems to me that at age eighteen Howard still believed in the idea of progress. This was, after all, a progressive era, even if that era was nearing its end and even if Calvin Coolidge, a conservative, was then president. We should remember, too, that, even if weird fiction is at its heart a conservative or anti-progressive genre, Weird Tales was co-founded by a man, J.C. Henneberger, who had worked for a progressive and prohibitionist newspaper. I would guess that many of the magazine's authors held progressive views, too, including unsavory ones such as eugenics.

Second, there is a racial aspect in "Spear and Fang," though not in the way people now talk about race. The idea expressed in Howard's story seems older and broader, maybe more like an old Anglo-Saxon or even biblical view, expressed pretty well in this sentence:

     Both the girl and the youth were perfect specimens of the great Cro-Magnon race which came from no man knows where and announced and enforced their supremacy over beast and beast-man.

Just as we shouldn't interpret "race" in our contemporary terms, we also shouldn't interpret "supremacy" in those terms. I wonder if Howard thought of the original Cro-Magnon men as being racially pure and that only afterwards was there some kind of degradation or descent: in our pre-civilized state, we were "perfect," or at least near perfection, and only later did decadence set in. I wonder if ideas like those were related in any way to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Maybe those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau are at work here, too.

Third, Howard probably catches a lot of flak now for his depictions of women. I don't have anything to say about that. I'll just point out that, although A-aea needs rescuing, she is not a passive character. In fact, she risks disapproval and punishment for going after what she wants, which is to draw the attention of Ga-Nor, the man she loves.

Finally, Ga-Nor, like I said, is an artist, even if he is tall and well built. (That's not a knock at artists. I'm one after all.) I take him to be a stand-in for the author of the story. He seems oblivious to A-aea at first. He's more caught up in his creation of a cave painting. But when she needs rescuing, he's there, and he succeeds where his taller and stronger rival, the reckless, cruel, and proud Ka-nanu, fails. Call it a revenge of the nerds and the fantasy of creative, gentle, or less than adept men when it comes to winning the hearts of beautiful women. This is what so much pulp fiction is about.

Although "Spear and Fang" was written by a teen-aged author (before teenager was a word), it shows some unusual depth and complexity, I think, and is more than a mere tale. It shows that there were larger things behind Howard's writing, larger than just a desire to tell a story or to earn some income. Howard seems to have begun forming a worldview and a foundation for his later writings. And he was just seven years away from "Worms of the Earth" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1932), which can be called one of his masterpieces, if there is such a thing as a masterpiece in pulp fiction.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

John Lee Mahin, Jr. (1902-1984)-Part Two

John Lee Mahin, Jr., had one story in Weird Tales. Entitled "The Red Lily," it appeared one hundred years ago last month, in July 1925, when its author was just twenty-two years old. The FictionMags Index has two more credits for him, the short stories "Yo-Ho-Ho, and a Bottle" in Ladies' Home Journal (Feb. 1928) and "Back to Glory" in Liberty (Feb. 7, 1931).* By the time that second story appeared, Mahin was moving towards a date with destiny as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Mahin wrote newspaper reviews of movies and plays during his two years at Harvard University. He worked two more years as a journalist in New York City before switching to the advertising business. Maybe that was in his father's business, but Mahin's father died in late 1930. Maybe Mahin Junior needed a new line of work as 1931 rolled around. Luckily for him, he became acquainted with Ben Hecht, a former Chicago newspaperman who was rapidly becoming one of the most accomplished and successful of Hollywood screenwriters. According to his obituary in the New York Times (Apr. 21, 1984), Mahin "was brought to Hollywood by the screenwriter Ben Hecht, who had read one of Mr. Mahin's short stories." Mahin assisted Hecht in writing the screenplay for The Unholy Garden, which was released in October 1931. That suggests that Mahin began working as a movie scenarist in 1931. The New York Times doesn't say which story by Mahin that Ben Hecht had read. Maybe it was "The Red Lily," a bitterly ironic tale that would easily have lent itself to a treatment for the screen. We know that Hecht was interested in genre fiction, including weird fiction.

I won't list Mahin's screenwriting credits except for a few near the beginning of his career. They include: The Beast of the City (1932), Scarface (1932), Red Dust (1932), and Bombshell (1933). The Beast of the City is a memorable crime drama with a very memorable ending. The male lead was played by Walter Huston. A quarter of a century later, Mahin was nominated, along with Huston's son, John Huston, for an academy award for best screenplay for Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957). He had previously won a Christopher Award for his screenplay for Quo Vadis (1951). Mahin was friends with Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, among other actors and actresses, and was a favorite writer among Hollywood directors. He wrote screenplays for several crime dramas but only one for a fantasy or horror movie as far as I know, this one for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941). In this month of anniversaries regarding the atomic bomb, I can say that Mahin was brought in early on in the making of The Beginning of the End (1947), about the Manhattan Project. However, he was not credited for any work he might have done on that film.

In 1937, Mahin married Patsy Ruth Miller (1904-1995), who years before had played Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). They had a son, Timothy Miller Mahin (b. 1941), who appeared as a baby in the movie Thoroughbreds in 1944. In addition to being a movie and stage actress, Patsy Ruth Miller wrote radio scripts, short stories, and books.

From the Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1937, page 3.

The Mahins' marriage must have ended in divorce by 1948, for Mahin remarried on June 16, 1948, in California. His new wife was named Barbara A. Bonnett, and if I have all of this right, they had a daughter named Margaret Lee "Maggi" Mahin (b. 1949). Mahin's fourth wife--and widow--was Muriel M. "Micca" McKinnon Mahin (1914-1984), whom he had married on October 16, 1954, also in California. She had previously been married to Argentinian swimmer and actor Justo José Caraballo (1914-2003). But maybe that's enough Hollywood gossip and name-dropping for now.

By the way, Mahin served in the U.S. Army Air Force from September 14, 1942, to August 13, 1945. I believe he was stationed in Los Angeles, where he wrote scripts for training films and rose to the rank of captain.

John Lee Mahin, Jr., died on April 18, 1984, in Santa Monica, California, at age eighty-one. He was survived by his fourth wife, but only for a few months. Mahin was also survived by three of his four children. His remains were cremated and his ashes scattered at sea.

-----

*I also found a poem by Mahin called "The Song of the Bridge and the River," published in the Twin City Sentinel of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and dated September 27, 1922 (page 10). Mahin's poem was undoubtedly syndicated. 

John Lee Mahin, Jr.'s Story in Weird Tales
"The Red Lily" (July 1925)

Further Reading

There is a lot of reading on John Lee Mahin, Jr., in newspapers alone. Maybe he is in books about the Golden Age of Hollywood, too.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

John Lee Mahin, Jr. (1902-1984)-Part One

Author, Poet, Journalist, Reviewer, Screenwriter, Movie Producer, Stage Actor, Performer, & Director
Born August 23, 1902, Evanston, Illinois
Died April 18, 1984, Santa Monica, California

I have been writing about lesser-known writers who contributed to Weird Tales. John Lee Mahin, Jr., isn't one of them. He was in fact very well known in Hollywood for his dozens of screenplays. Even so, there aren't any biographical facts for him in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb). The ISFDb could link to Wikipedia, for there is an entry on Mahin on that website, but they don't. I don't blame them, for the entry on Mahin is typical Wikipedia. When Wikipedia doesn't lie, by omission or commission, or spout left-wing propaganda, its information is often incomplete, erroneous, or self-contradictory. So I guess I'll write about Mahin here.

John Lee Mahin, Jr., was born on August 23, 1902, in Evanston, Illinois, to John Lee Mahin, Sr. (1869–1930) and Julia Graham (Snitzler) Mahin (1867-1934). A native of Muscatine, Iowa, Mahin Senior got his start in the newspaper business but made a name for himself in advertising. He had his own advertising firms in Chicago and New York and wrote books on advertising and sales. His father had been a newspaperman before him. If you go searching for Mahins and related families, you won't lack for newspaper accounts of their activities.

John Lee Mahin, Jr., got his name and face in the newspaper at age eleven when his picture and a boosterish but vague profile of him appeared in the Chicago Tribune along with those of a dozen other children, all of whom were candidates for future fame. This thing--I'm not sure whether to call it a feature article, contest, promotion, publicity campaign, or what--is so foreign to me that I have a hard time understanding its purpose. In any case, it appeared as a full-page spread in the Chicago Tribune on June 14, 1914. There at the bottom of the page is a portrait photograph of John Lee Mahin, Jr., No. 12, dressed in a suit and tie, posed and serious, sitting, as a child, below a possible pinnacle of future fame. I haven't checked out the other candidates, but his candidacy for fame proved to be a good one, for he became well known for his work in Hollywood.

Mahin graduated from Middlesex School in Massachusetts in 1921, giving the valedictory address for his class. One of his classmates was Finley Peter Dunne, Jr., another future screenwriter and son of the famed humorist and author. Mahin was in the Harvard University class of 1925, but I don't know that he ever graduated. His life began taking another turn during that roaring decade.

In his early career, Mahin was a poet and a stage actor. He was with the Clark Street Players in Brooklyn, New York; the Provincetown Players; and the Fenimore Players, of which he was also director. He was also an actor with MacGowan, O'Neill and Jones, a firm that may or may not have been the same as the Provincetown Players. (Macgowan was Kenneth Macgowan, O'Neill was Eugene O'Neill, and Jones was Robert Edmond Jones.) Mahin played on Broadway in Bad Habits of 1926, a revue that ran for only nineteen performances in April and May 1926. He was in other revues and played with stock companies in the East during the 1920s.

Mahin married Hume Nancy Derr, also known during her life as Hume Dixon (1903-1955), on June 25, 1926, in Greenwich, Connecticut. She also performed on the Broadway stage, also in Bad Habits of 1926 with Mahin and Robert Montgomery. Later she wrote radio scripts for Robert Ripley's radio show, called Ripley's Believe It or Not!, just like his syndicated comic panel. She was involved in promotions for Karo syrup and other products. Hume Derr had her own radio show in later years. After her divorce from Mahin, she married Alfred Dixon. She and Mahin had two sons, future editor and screenwriter Graham Lee Mahin (1927-2008) and Michael John Mahin (1928-1965). Hume Derr Dixon died entirely too young in 1955.

To be concluded . . .

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

R.G. Macready (1905-1977)-Part Two

R.G. Macready contributed to student publications at all of the schools he attended. He also contributed to the Volta Review, a publication for the deaf and hard of hearing that is still being published today. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1945, he went to work as a teacher of English, history, and journalism at the Oklahoma School for the Deaf. He planned to write in his spare time.

Macready contributed just one story to Weird Tales. Entitled "The Plant Thing," it was published in July 1925 when its author was just twenty years old. "The Plant Thing" is a brief tale of a large, carnivorous plant, bred by a scientist who lives in a walled estate with his daughter and a Malay servant. The narrator of the story is a newspaper reporter. "The Plant Thing" has similarities to "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud (Weird Tales, Mar. 1923), as well as to "The Hand" by Guy de Maupassant (1883). Stories of murderous or carnivorous plants are common in weird fiction, horror fiction, and science fiction. I have written before about plants like these that appeared on the cover of Weird Tales. Click here to find your way. And of course there is in "The Plant Thing" the scientist and his beautiful daughter, with his wife and her mother nowhere to be found. Women in popular culture should know better than to marry scientists and to give them beautiful daughters. They're likely to end up like Dr. Morbius' wife in Forbidden Planet (1956) or Dr. Medford's wife in Them! (1957).

"The Plant Thing" has been reprinted several times since its original publication, as early as 1925 in Not at Night, edited by Christine Campbell Thomson, and as late as 2022. In a newspaper article from 1946 ("Deaf Man Receives M.A. in Journalism," in The Deaf Mississippian, Feb. 1, 1946, p. 1), Macready was described as having written "two horror novels and numerous short stories and novelettes, as yet unsold." I wish that these novels and stories were still in existence, but I fear they have been lost, for Macready never married and died without issue. He was survived only by two brothers and several nieces and nephews.

Macready had two letters in "The Eyrie." Here is the text of his first, from June 1925:

You are to be commended on the determined stand you, as well as the great majority of WEIRD TALES readers, have taken against those who protest at the weird quality of the stories printed in your periodical. Why do not these people, who are trying to wipe out of existence the only magazine of its kind, turn their artillery upon the sex-exploiting magazines that are crowding the best magazines out of place on our news stands? Anyway, a mind that can go undiseased through that so-called literature should be able to survive the pleasantly exhilarating 'kick' of a good horror tale. There can be no question as to the literary status of WEIRD TALES. In it have appeared stories worthy of Kipling himself, to say nothing of Poe.

Macready worked as telegraph editor at the Galveston Daily News in 1948 and at the Big Spring Daily Herald in 1949 and after. I don't have anything on his career after 1950. Reginald G. Macready died on May 10, 1977, in Arlington, Texas, at age seventy-two and was buried at Southland Memorial Park in Grand Prairie, Texas.

R.G. Macready's Story & Letters in Weird Tales
Letter to "The Eyrie" (June 1925)
"The Plant Thing" (July 1925)
Letter to "The Eyrie" (July 1925)

Further Reading

Many interesting and detailed newspaper articles about him and his career as a student and journalist. You might start at the website of the Oklahoma Historical Society and its archive of newspapers.

 Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

R.G. Macready (1905-1977)-Part One

Reginald Goode Macready
Author, Linotype Operator, Newspaper Writer & Editor, Teacher
Born April 18, 1905, Silo, Oklahoma
Died May 10, 1977, Arlington, Texas

Reginald Goode Macready was born on April 18, 1905, in Silo, Oklahoma, to Edward Daniel Macready (1849-1927) and Sallie Mattie (Goode) Macready. Born in New York State of an English immigrant father and an American mother, Edward D. Macready was an Oklahoma pioneer, arriving in the territory in the 1890s. He taught school for many years and was a newspaper editor and publisher. He also wrote poetry. His poem "Dream Valley," from 1912, was described as illustrative of "the weird, brooding spell of the Sonora Desert." (Source: "Necrology," in Chronicles of Oklahoma, Vol. 5, No. 3, Sept. 1927, pp. 354-355.) My source for this poem is too faint in parts for me to read, but I can say that "Dream Valley" is in the genre of hidden valleys and lost worlds.

Reginald Goode Macready, called Goode in his youth, grew up in Bryan County, Oklahoma, where his father taught school. When he was seven, Macready contracted meningitis and as a result was made completely deaf. He studied at the Oklahoma School for the Deaf in Sulphur, where he was president and valedictorian of his graduating class of 1922. For his high honors, he was awarded a scholarship of $500 per year to attend Gallaudet College in Washington, D.C., where he began in the fall of 1922. His course of study was to be for five years.

Upon his father's death in 1927, Macready went to work in the newspaper business in order to support himself. He worked as a linotype operator at the Durant Daily Democrat, Madill Record, and Holdenville Tribune, all in Oklahoma, and at the Denver Post. In 1939, he matriculated at the University of Oklahoma, where he studied journalism, English, and psychology. His ambition was to become a writer and teacher. Macready supported himself by working as associate editor and linotype operator for the Oklahoma Daily student newspaper. For his journalistic work, he received a Citation for Professional Achievement from Sigma Delta Chi. His studies were interrupted by injuries sustained when he was hit by a car in June 1942. Macready returned to school in 1943 and graduated with a bachelor of arts in journalism on June 26, 1944. He continued with graduate work and received his master of arts in journalism from the University of Oklahoma on July 31, 1945.

To be concluded . . .

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Harold E. Somerville (1885-1935)

Author, Newspaperman, Editor, Amateur Astronomer & Mathematician

Born March 1, 1885, Vermont
Died April 26, 1935, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I will assume that the Harold E. Somerville who contributed to Weird Tales in July 1925 was the same Harold E. Somerville who worked as a newspaperman and editor in New England and Philadelphia from the early 1900s to his death in 1935.

Harold Ernest Somerville was born on March 1, 1885, in Vermont, possibly in Waterbury. His parents were Josiah Somerville and Florence L. (Brown) Somerville. He had two older brothers, Charles Edward Somerville (1866-1929), a telegraph operator, and Frederick Holland Somerville (1872-1937), a schoolteacher. The younger boys were apparently orphaned. In 1900, they were enumerated in the U.S. Census in the household of their aunt, Louisa S. Watts, in Waterbury, Vermont.

Harold E. Somerville was something of a prodigy. In 1901, he had letters in the Boston Globe regarding astronomy. These included a letter of March 11, 1901, about the planet Venus. He graduated from Waterbury High School in June 1901 at age sixteen. In 1902, he provided solutions to mathematical problems posed in a column called "Puzzle Problems" in the Boston Globe.

Somerville began working in the field of journalism as a young man. His first newspaper job was with the Waterbury Record. He matriculated at the University of Vermont in 1904, winning honorable mention in his freshman entrance examination in mathematics. While at the university, Somerville served as treasurer of the Green and Gold Debating Club (1906); associate editor of The Vermont Cynic, a weekly journal (1906-1908); and editor of The Vermont Handbook, yearbook published by the university Y.M.C.A. (1908). He graduated in 1908.

In 1908, Somerville secured a position as a teacher in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, where his brother Fred had taught before him. By 1910, he was back in Waterbury, in the household of his aunt, and working as a window sign painter.

Somerville's newspaper career began in earnest on January 1, 1914, when he became night editor of the Burlington Free Press. He resigned in July 1915 to take a job with the New Bedford Evening Standard in Massachusetts. In 1918 and 1920, he was working in Boston as a journalist and editor. This must have been with the Boston Herald. By 1930, he was living in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and working as a newspaper editor. Somerville was night editor for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. At the time of his death, in 1935, he was an editor with the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin.

As a New Englander, a writer, and an amateur astronomer, Somerville would seem to have been in the right time and the right place, and interested in the right things, to have come in contact with H.P. Lovecraft and others of his circle. But I haven't found any connections between them. Somerville contributed one story, "The Sudden Death of Luke A. Lucas," to Weird Tales. This was in July 1925. His story is very short and lightly humorous. It's about life in a small town and includes a visit to a newspaper office. Maybe it's an episode from Somerville's youth or from the town in which he grew up. The FictionMags Index has two other credits for Somerville, "Coming!--a Lunar Eclipse," in The Scrap Book (May 1909) and "Wreck at Clay," a short story in Overland Monthly (Aug. 1919).

Harold E. Somerville died on April 26, 1935, at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital and was interred at Northfield, Vermont. He was at the time of his death just fifty years old.

Harold E. Somerville's Story in Weird Tales
"The Death of Luke A. Lucas" (July 1925)

Further Reading
Only a few newspaper items.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Adrian Pordelorrar (?-?)

I would like to start out writing about the July 1925 issue of Weird Tales by writing about the last author listed in its table of contents. He or she was Adrian Pordelorrar.

Adrian Pordelorrar was almost certainly a pseudonym. I haven't found anyone by that name or surname in my searches of newspapers and public records. The last name Pordelorrar is unusual to say the least. Nothing comes back for it in an Internet search, either. That makes me think that there is meaning in the name, and so I have tried breaking it apart and entering its parts in an online translator. I had thought that the name could be from the Esperanto, but I didn't get very far in that. Por and del are easy enough. They are prefixes in Spanish. That leaves -orrar as the main part of the name. Orrar isn't a word in Spanish, but llorar is. It means "to cry."

If the last name Pordelorrar has significant meaning, then maybe the given name Adrian does, too. It's an ancient Latin name, a variation of Hadrian or Hadrianus. The root word seems to be adur, meaning "sea" or "water." Together, maybe the poet's name means something like "water of the crying" or "water for the crying." Maybe someone who knows Spanish can propose a better meaning or translation. As an alternative, maybe Adrian refers to the Roman emperor Hadrian as a conqueror as Time seems the conqueror in the poem.

The next step in all of this would seem to be: read the poem. And so here it is, a sonnet:

The Conqueror
By Adrian Pordelorrar 

Dark, even in the sunset's crimson glare,
     There grows, unknown, an ancient forest grove; --
A voice of myst'ry murmurs in its air
     Where Night for centuries has whispered love!
Dim mirrored in a crystal pool, found there,
     Lie strange, forgotten worlds, and things, whereof
One dares not dream. Dark eyes, through matted hair,
     Laugh from its depths, to mock at Life above.

Soft words, from unseen lips, make known their thought--
     The uselessness of lab'ring through the years,
While worlds and men and kingdoms they have wrought,
     Their efforts, and their loves, and secret fears,
Crumble before the sweep of Time, as nought,
     Despite their anguish, and unnoticed tears!

If -lorrar is a play on llorar, referring to crying, and Adrian refers to water also, then the imagery of crying and water in the name of the pseudonymous poet is also in the poem.

We will probably never know who was the author of "The Conqueror," but why not consider Farnsworth Wright as a possibility?

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Leavenworth MacNab (1872-1933)

Archibald Leavenworth MacNab
Author, Poet, Newspaperman
Born December 21, 1872, Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada
Died June 25, 1933, Illinois Masonic Hospital, Sullivan, Illinois

Archibald Leavenworth MacNab was born on December 21, 1872, in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada. His parents were Alexander MacNab and Margaret (McArthur) MacNab. MacNab was educated at the University of Toronto. He came to the United States in June 1895 and was naturalized as an American citizen on May 25, 1923, at the age of fifty.

MacNab dropped his first name, sometimes or often, and went by Leavenworth MacNab. He worked as a newspaper reporter in San Francisco for ten years or more. He reported on the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906. MacNab also worked for the St. Louis Globe Democrat, the Chicago Chronicle, and The Music Trades. He also contributed to The Argonaut.

MacNab had stories in National Magazine and Sunset in the period 1902 to 1904. More than two decades passed before he had his next magazine credits, this according to the list in The FictionMags Index. These were four poems and a short story in Weird Tales, beginning in June 1925.

MacNab's story, "The Hanging of Aspara," isn't a short story so much as a slightly fictionalized piece of reporting. A footnote to the story tells us as much. The reporter in the story is named MacTavish, or Mac, a pretty transparent disguise made by the author. Mac works for a newspaper called only "the News." The subject of the story is Sam Aspara, also known as Sam Sparo or Sam Asparo. Or maybe "Aspara" was just another alias. In any case, he was hanged on April 28, 1905, in New Orleans for the murder of a mafioso named Antonio "Tony" Luciano. You can read more about the whole thing on a website called Mafia Genealogy, published by Justin Cascio, by clicking here. I take all of that to indicate that MacNab worked as a newspaperman in New Orleans, circa 1905.

Archibald L. MacNab died on June 25, 1933, at Illinois Masonic Hospital in Sullivan, Illinois. He was buried at Prospect Cemetery in Toronto, Canada.  

Leavenworth MacNab's Short Story & Poems in Weird Tales
"The Hanging of Aspara" (short story, June 1925)
"Lake Desolation" (poem, Aug. 1927)
"Despair and the Soul" (poem, Nov. 1927)
"Dirge" (poem, Aug. 1928)
"Let Night Have Sway" (poem, Jan. 1929)

Further Reading
A few newspaper articles.

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley 

Junius B. Smith (1883-1945)

Author, Magazine Columnist, Stenographer, Attorney, Poultry Farmer, Builder and Contractor
Born  September 29, 1883, Salt Lake City, Utah Territory
Died  April 3, 1945, Mapleton, Utah

Junius Bailey Smith was born on September 29, 1883, in Salt Lake City, Utah Territory. I believe he is the first native-born Utahan I have written about in this blog and the first Mormon. His father was Samuel Harrison Bailey Smith (1838-1914), born two days before Mormons were driven from Nauvoo, Illinois, and carried thirty miles in a snowstorm to a place of refuge. Samuel H.B. Smith was a son of Samuel Harrison Smith (1808-1844) and a grand-nephew of Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805-1844), founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Junius B. Smith's mother was Mary Catherine (Bailey) Smith (1842-1916). He had nineteen siblings and half-siblings. Smith was married at least three times. His daughter Mary Kay Smith was also a writer and won an award from Seventeen magazine for her poetry.

Junius B. Smith attended school in Salt Lake City and studied law at the University of Utah. He was admitted to the bar on April 9, 1914, and practiced law until 1939. He was the author of dozens of stories published in fiction magazines from 1910 to 1936 and by his own estimate 8,000,000 words in all. Titles included All-Story Weekly, The Argosy, Breezy Stories, The Cavalier, Hot Stories, Love Story Magazine, Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories, Thrilling Western, Top Notch Magazine, and of course Weird Tales. According to one obituary (below), he was a columnist for Street & Smith magazines.

Bailey is best known and had real success with his stories of the occult detective Prince Abdul Omar of Persia, better known as Semi-Dual. The first of these was "The Occult Detector," part one of which was published in The Cavalier on February 17, 1912. Smith collaborated with another teller of weird tales, J.U. Giesy (1877-1947), on the Semi-Dual stories and on other stories, too, including their serial "Ebenezer's Casket," which appeared in Weird Tales in April-May/June/July 1924. (The two earned mention in the June 7, 1924, Deseret News for their efforts [p. 7].) Smith also wrote two stories and a letter published in Weird Tales. One of these was of "The Man Who . . ." type. Following is the text of Smith's lone letter to "The Eyrie":

Junius B. Smith, author of An Arc of Direction in the June issue, writes: "I wish to congratulate you on the perfect typesetting of this story. It so frequently happens in all-fiction magazines that errors creep in which mutilate the story, that it is a pleasure to find a story set so well that not even a minor defect greets the eye as it is read. I think the magazine is improving in appearance all the time. The cover on the June number easily catches the eye of one interested in things that are weird."

After his retirement, Smith lived in Springville, Utah, and on a ranch in Hobble Creek Canyon before moving to Mapleton, Utah. Junius B. Smith died on April 3, 1945, in Mapleton, and was buried at Salt Lake City Cemetery. He was just sixty-one years old. By the way, Smith was a champion checker player.

Junius B. Smith's Stories & Letter in Weird Tales
"Ebenezer's Casket" with J.U. Giesy (two-part serial, Apr.-May/June/July 1924)
"The Man Who Dared to Know" (Apr. 1924)
"An Arc of Direction" (June 1925)
Letter to "The Eyrie" (Aug. 1925)

 

Further Reading

• "Our Home Writers" in The Deseret News, June 19, 1926, section 3, page VI.
• "In Our Town . . . Junius Smith" in the Springville (Utah) Herald, June 1, 1944, page 1+.
• Numerous obituaries and other articles.

From the Salt Lake Tribune, April 5, 1945, page 9.

Correction (Aug. 18, 2025): Thanks to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database for pointing out that when Smith was born, Utah was still a territory. I have made the correction.

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

PulpFest This Week

PulpFest, the annual pulp-fiction and pulp magazine convention, happens this week, from Thursday, August 7, to Sunday, August 10, 2025, in the Pittsburgh area. This year, PulpFest celebrates the sesquicentennial of the births of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), Edgar Wallace (1875-1932), and Rafael Sabatini (1875-1950). There will be programming on all three of those authors as well as on Doc Savage and Philip José Farmer. And there will be film screenings. PulpFest will be held at DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Pittsburgh--Cranberry, located north of Pittsburgh. You can read more about PulpFest by going to their website. Click here for a link.

Strange Rays & Weird Waves in Weird Tales

Weird Tales was a different kind of magazine when it came back in November 1924 than during its first year-and-a-third in print. There was a new look and a different format. Although some of the previous authors had returned, the cover artist, Andrew Brosnatch, was new. And of course there was a new editor in Farnsworth Wright. Weird fiction wasn't fully developed in the early days of "The Unique Magazine." You could say that the development of weird fiction as a genre actually happened in its pages from 1923 onward. Nevertheless, the stories published in Weird Tales between March 1923 and May/June/July 1924 tended to be weird-fictional. Things changed a little when Wright came on.

Farnsworth Wright contributed to Weird Tales in its first incarnation. His first story, "The Closing Hand" (Mar. 1923), is pretty conventional. His second to last, "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" (Oct. 1923), is far less so, for it treats the concept of a fourth dimension and touches on Einsteinian or relativistic physics. It's clear that Wright had an interest in stories of that type, which were called at the time pseudo-scientific stories or scientific romances. When he became editor, he set out to publish more in the pages of Weird Tales.

As I have been going through the issues published in 1925, I have noticed a recurring word: rays. I figured I had better make a search for that word and related words and concepts. Radio was big and new in the 1920s. Radium and radioactivity were in the news and in our culture, too. (Radium was discovered in 1898, X-rays in 1896.) We think of "Radium Girls" as a name for the young women of the 1920s who painted glow-in-the-dark watch dials and fell ill--and died--as a result. But in the early twentieth century, "Radium Girls" were performers on stage, their bodies literally highlighted by phosphorescent paint. Phosphorescence isn't the same as radioactivity. I can't say that Radium Girls on stage or in ballrooms were painted with radium-paint (despite the newspaper article shown below). Radium silk, of the same vintage, was not radioactive at all. But there seems to have been a fad for radium and a wider craze for radio. Maybe that's where all of the strange rays and weird waves in Weird Tales came from.

I can't say that this is a comprehensive list, but here are some ray and wave stories in Weird Tales from 1924 to 1926: 

• "The Purple Light" by Ralph Parker Anderson (Nov. 1924) 

• "Radio V-Rays" by Jan Dirk (Mar. 1925) 

• "The Electronic Plague" by Edward Hades (Apr. 1925) 

• "Under the N-Ray" by Will Smith & R.J. Robbins (May 1925)--Cover story. 

• "The Ether Ray" by H.L. Maxson (Sept. 1925) 

• "Red Ether" by Pettersen Marzoni (two-part serial, Feb.-Mar. 1926)--Cover story.

• "The Devil Ray" by Joel Martin Nichols, Jr. (May 1925)--The title doesn't refer to a type of fish but to a devastating form of radioactivity.

• "Queen of the Vortex" by F. Williams Sarles (May 1926)--This story had a sequel in "The Foe from Beyond" (Dec. 1926).

Stories of vortices lead into another category of proto-science fiction, one related to multiple dimensions of space and what we would call space warps. But that's a topic for another time.

 

Weird Tales, May 1925, with a cover story, "Under the N-Ray," by Will Smith and R.J. Robbins and cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. There aren't any rays shown here, but there are waves.

 

Weird Tales, February 1926. The cover story was "Red Ether" by Pettersen Marzoni. The cover artist was C. Barker Petrie, Jr. Here again, there aren't any rays and the only waves are in the distance. Maybe artists of the 1920s had trouble depicting rays, waves, and radioactivity.

 

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

 

And because I have messed up the formatting of this article and can't figure out how to fix it, a picture after the copyright notice: 

 

"Will Dance in a Glow of Radium," from the San Francisco Examiner, May 25, 1905, page 4. "Radium Girls" were in burlesque and vaudeville shows in America and Great Britain from 1904 into the 1920s. By 1930, "Radium Girls" were the young women poisoned by their use in industry of radium-paint. If there was a fad for radium, maybe it reached its end with the well-publicized lawsuit filed by and the deaths of the "Radium Girls" in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This illustration shows two "Radium Girls" in the original sense of the phrase. (The Margaret Hamilton shown here was not the same actress who played the Wicked Witch.) It also hints at "Radium Girls" in the second sense, showing as it does a young woman with a paint brush. By the way, there was revue called "The Radium Girl" performed in Britain in the early 1900s. The girl of the title is dosed with radium by the villain Zigani and "she becomes a girl fond of a butterfly existence." (Source: "The Hippodrome Visit from 'The Radium Girl'," in The Derby Daily Telegraph, May 2, 1916, page 2.)