Weird Tales: The Houdini Issues-Part Six

"The Hoax of the Spirit Lover"

"The Hoax of the Spirit Lover" by Houdini is the cover story and the lead story in the April 1924 issue of Weird Tales. At just three pages, it's the shortest of Houdini's three stories in "The Unique Magazine" and the one most like a non-fiction article rather than a work of fiction. It reads almost like a transcription of a spoken narrative. Maybe it's the one closest to Houdini's actual and original words.

The story is set in Montana but has a Chicago connection. It involves a séance and all of the trappings of Spiritualism. Approached by three men suspecting a hoax, Houdini exposes a fake medium and his helper. As it turns out, the helper is the fiancé of one of the attendees of the séance. He is supposed to have died. In actuality, it was his twin brother who had died, and the surviving twin had pulled off an insurance fraud to claim his money. As the legal saying goes, Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

As in "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt," the theme in "The Hoax of the Spirit Lover" is the exposure of fake and fraudulent mediums, the topic of Houdini's lecture tour during that spring of 1924, one hundred years ago as I write. Part two of "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" appears later in the April 1924 issue of Weird Tales, as does the first installment of the letters column "Ask Houdini," with letters ostensibly written by readers and answers ostensibly written by Houdini.

If "The Hoax of the Spirit Lover" was actually the work of a ghostwriter, I take that to indicate that the ghostwriter also had a Chicago connection. Otis Adelbert Kline is an obvious candidate for true author of the story. Farnsworth Wright, not yet editor of the magazine, is another. Author John Locke has suggested Harold Ward as the man behind "The Hoax of the Spirit Lover." (1) Kline and Ward, both of whom hailed from the Chicago area, were friends or acquaintances. I suspect that if you were in contact with one, you were in contact with the other, at least when it came to writing jobs or assignments. Both were close at hand for the publisher and editor of Weird Tales. Both were also workhorses. If Baird and Henneberger needed content in a hurry, which would have been the case with the Houdini issues, Kline and Ward (Wright, too) were there, ready and waiting.

Evidence in favor of Ward as the true author of "The Hoax of the Spirit Lover" appears in the "Ask Houdini" letters column published in that same issue of April 1924. There are seven letters and seven replies in the first installment of "Ask Houdini." Letter number three is from an H.W. of Peoria, Illinois, while letter number four is from an H.W. of Springfield, Illinois. I don't think there can be any doubt that one or both letters were written by Harold Ward. In fact, six of the seven letters have the letter H in the initials of the letter writers: H.L. of Terre Haute, Indiana; J.H. of Detroit, Michigan; H.W. of Peoria; H.W. of Springfield; H.M. of Louisville, Kentucky; and K.H. of Buffalo, New York. Only letter number seven, by S.T. of Evanston, Illinois, lacks the H in the initials of its author. Ward's mother was named Sarah. If he was the author, did he use her first initial in letter number seven? On the other hand, the seventh letter is probably least deferential or most challenging towards Houdini. It even defends Arthur Conan Doyle as a "learned and sincere" man. So maybe Ward was not its author after all. In any case, it's clear in that letter that by the spring of 1924, Houdini and Doyle had indeed had a falling out and that the former had taken a "decided stand" against the latter. (Weird Tales, Apr. 1924, p. 92.)

Note
(1) See The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales by John Locke (Off-Trail Publications, 2018), page 142.

Weird Tales, April 1924. Cover story" The Hoax of the Spirit Lover" by Houdini. Cover art by R.M. Mally. That appears to be Houdini left of center, in which case this was the second successive cover to show his image.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Houdini Issues-Part Five

The Séance at Castle D---

"The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" was Houdini's second story for Weird Tales. It came in the form of a two-part serial. Part one was in the issue of March 1924. In part two, having escaped from the oubliette in the lower recesses of Castle D---, Houdini returns to the castle so as to rescue the Countess D--- and her sister Rosicka from the clutches of the villainous Popkens. As he explores the castle, Houdini hears the sound of a weird voice and finds that a séance is underway. Popkens is acting as medium. He's trying to convince Rosicka to reveal secrets that the Countess would not. "The voice droned on," Houdini recounts, "and I soon realized that Popkens was trying to make Rosicka think that it was her mother's voice commanding her to reveal the secrets." (Weird Tales, Apr. 1924, p. 54, col. 2). Popkens is of course the leader of a group of spirit-fakers, "unscrupulous charlatans," Houdini calls them. He drips with disdain for Popkens and his ways, remarking on Popkens' "audacity" and "effrontery" in carrying out this supposed communication with the dead.

Houdini intervenes, silently strangling Popkens into unconsciousness and then taking his place at the head of the table. In the darkened room, speaking in Magyar, he impersonates Popkens, now in the voice of Count D---, the deceased father of the Countess and Rosicka. Houdini feels his way in the dark and locates the two sisters, cutting their bonds. Then a tussle begins and the lights come on. Oh, no! Another crisis! Another fight! But don't worry, Houdini comes out on top and the sisters are saved.

It's my guess that "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" was composed not by Houdini but by a ghostwriter. I have nominated Otis Adelbert Kline as the possible true author of the story. There are other candidates, too, including Harold Ward. In any case, the purpose behind "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" was of course to tell a story, but it was also likely to have been part of Houdini's ongoing campaign against frauds and fake mediums. He was on a lecture tour that spring with those kind of people as his subjects and targets. That summer he engaged himself in on-site and in-person investigations of their activities, exposing at least one well-known medium--Mrs. Mina Crandon of Boston--as a fraud. You have to admire the Great Houdini for being so hard and steadfast against the whole business. We could use somebody like him today, a true skeptic and debunker to go after similar fakes and frauds in any number of fields of endeavor. But then there is no end to deception and human folly, nor to human depravity. The liars, fakes, and frauds, moreover the people who believe in lies and in fake and fraudulent things, are numberless. Skilled truth-tellers, skeptics, and debunkers are comparatively few. And now when they say unpopular things, they're silenced, cancelled, censored, or even imprisoned for their offenses.

* * *

I quoted from Houdini's story above for a reason. I'll repeat part of the quote and add some emphasis:

". . . I soon realized that Popkens was trying to make Rosicka think that it was her mother's voice commanding her to reveal the secrets."

Those words stood out to me for a reason, and it has to do with what I have read of Houdini's life and his relationship with another teller of weird tales.

Four years before "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" was published in Weird Tales, Houdini traveled to England, looking for mediums and possibly for the specific purpose of meeting Arthur Conan Doyle, whom he knew to be involved in Spiritualism. Houdini sent one of his books to Doyle as an introduction. On or about April 11, 1920, they met for the first time at Doyle's home. A friendship--or was it an acquaintanceship?--grew from there. Doyle and Houdini wrote back and forth and visited with each other, apparently more than once. Then, on June 18, 1922, in a hotel room in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Houdini attended a séance conducted by Doyle and his wife, Lady Jean Doyle. Lady Doyle would act as medium in an attempt to communicate with Houdini's mother, Cecelia or Cecilia (Steiner) Weisz, who had died on July 17, 1913, in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Lady Doyle went into her trance and began writing messages, supposedly from the dear departed. Houdini was cooperative and polite, but the whole thing was obviously a fraud. Houdini recognized as much, either on the spot or after some time spent in thought:

First, Lady Doyle began by making the sign of the cross on her pad of paper. Houdini and his mother were Jewish. (Or I believe she was Jewish.) In fact, his father and her husband was a rabbi.

Second, Lady Doyle's messages were written in English. Cecelia or Cecilia Weisz, a native of Hungary, spoke and wrote five languages. According to Houdini, English was not one of them.

Third, June 16, two days before the séance, was her birthday.* Lady Doyle's messages made no mention of a day that would have been very special to a man who was so close to his loving and doting mother. (Although he was Jewish, Houdini referred to her as a saint.)

Fourth, the messages were written in Lady Doyle's own style of expression. Doyle admitted as much. (See the book by Randi & Sugar referenced below, after the asterisk.)

And fifth, on the night before the séance, Lady Doyle had pumped Houdini's wife Bess for information on the relationship the great escapist had had with his mother.

That hotel séance marked the beginning of Houdini's falling out with Doyle. In reading about their relationship, I have the impression that Doyle was more or less a fanatic when it came to Spiritualism. He seems to have been more interested in using Houdini for his own purposes than in forming any real friendship with him. He seems to have wanted to recruit Houdini into his own belief system, as fanatics do. And yet he acted like the injured party in their falling out. Imagine: Doyle and his wife not only lied and misrepresented themselves--they not only tried to trick and use and defraud Houdini--they also tried to exploit his relationship with his mother, his love for and memories of her, to manipulate him into coming over to their side in the debate over Spiritualism. I'm not sure that they were exactly malicious in what they were trying to do. Nonetheless, it was pretty rotten. What poor taste. How inconsiderate and hurtful. As Houdini (or his ghostwriter) wrote in "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt," what audacity, what effrontery. What a lot of charlatans they and people like them were (and are). Either that or delusional. Or gullible in the extreme.

* * *

According to Houdini, his mother spoke five languages, one of which was Hungarian. In "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt," Houdini speaks Magyar, albeit with an American accent. So did he also know Hungarian, or Magyar? I don't know. Maybe that's a bit of evidence that his ghostwriter knew that Houdini was born in Hungary rather than the United States. Maybe the ghostwriter assumed that because he was born in Hungary, Houdini spoke Magyar, without thinking that German, or maybe even Yiddish, was more likely Houdini's native language.

So did that ghostwriter also know about the séance of June 18, 1922? Did Houdini, through his ghostwriter, strike against the fake medium who claimed to speak in his dead mother's voice? Was that the ghostwriter's reason for including the séance scene in his story? I don't know, but it makes you think. Of course we'll never know the answers to these questions unless we can dial up the Great Houdini (or one of the other Weird Tales authors) using some clunky old séance machine.

* * *

*Some sources give her birthday, June 16, as the day of the séance. Another gives the date as July 17, erroneously calling it "the day after Mama's birthday." (Source: Houdini: His Life and Art by The Amazing Randi and Bert Randolph Sugar, Grosset & Dunlap, 1976.)

Weird Tales, March 1924. Cover story: "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" by Houdini. Cover art by R.M. Mally.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Houdini Issues-Part Four

"The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt"

So what about Houdini's other two stories in Weird Tales? Well, "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" came first. It's a two-part serial that appeared in the issues of March and April 1924. Although it was in two parts, I'll call it one story.

"The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" is the lead story in the March issue of 1924. On page 3 is an illustration by William F. Heitman of Houdini facing a turbaned medium. He is Popkens, a schemer, faker, blackmailer, kidnapper, and scoundrel. On the tabletop separating the two men is a crystal ball and a display of cards. Houdini is flanked by two women, the Countess D--- and her sister Rosicka (a Bohemian place name), both wearing ornate 1920s dress and headbands. On the following page is an introduction to the story, attributed to "The Editor." I take that to mean Edwin Baird, but the prose is clunky, old-fashioned, boosterish, and journalistic. Maybe J.C. Henneberger was its true author.

Houdini was renowned for his private library. "Houdini is a lover of books," The Editor wrote in his introduction, "and has the finest collection of psychic, spiritualistic and dramatic works of any man in America." Awhile back, I speculated that Otis Adelbert Kline had found The Terrific Register in a public or private library in Chicago and drew from it his non-fiction fillers in the anniversary number of May/June/July 1924 (probably earlier, too). Maybe his source copy actually came to him on loan from the great library of the Great Houdini.

Told in the first person, "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" is supposed to be a nonfictional account of one of Houdini's adventures, in this case in Transylvania and from before the Great War. Within the story--and it's clearly a a work of fiction--is nested a first-person account told by the Countess D---, daughter of a depraved (and deceased) inhabitant of Castle D---, located on the banks of the Maros River. Approached by the Countess D--- and once in her service at Castle D---, Houdini is, in pretty short order, bound by the henchmen of the fake medium Popkens and thrown into an oubliette. (1)

In part two, published in April 1924, Houdini escapes the oubliette and Castle D---. (2) He returns to the castle to rescue the Countess D--- and Rosicka from the spirit fakers. Part of his scheme is to take Popkens' place at a séance. In the dark, Houdini renders Popkens unconscious and begins imitating Popkens' voice. Houdini's ghostwriter--and we can be certain that "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" was written by a ghost--mentions in his narrative Houdini's own clearly recognizable "American accent." That made me wonder if there are any recordings of Houdini's voice, and there are. You can hear one for yourself on a megacorporate video website. You know the one. Just go there and have a listen.

Houdini is discovered and held at gunpoint by the henchmen. He and the two sisters are saved by the intervention of "a dozen peasants [. . .] armed with clubs, pitchforks, and axes." These are probably the same peasants, the same stock actors, who appear in every Dracula and Frankenstein movie. They are also in "The Thing of  Thousand Shapes" by Otis Adelbert Kline, the first serial in Weird Tales, published exactly a year before in March and April 1923. I'll have more on Kline and his work in a minute, but first I should let you know that one of the spirit fakers, Houdini learns, is a Russian named Ileanadorff. "I have reason to believe," wrote the narrator, "that Ileanadorff was in reality the false monk Ileador, known as Rasputin, who became the most sinister figure in Russian history." In writing that, the narrator accidentally conflated Rasputin with his onetime associate, then enemy, Sergei Michailovich Trufanov, aka Hieromonk Iliodor or Hieromonk Heliodorus (1880-1952). Like Houdini, Iliodor was an author and actor. Unlike Houdini, he was an anti-Semite, at least at first. Strangely, Iliodor lived out his later years in New York City, working as a janitor.

Two more things. First, I'm pretty sure that we're supposed to associate the Countess D---'s depraved father with Count Dracula and the Castle D--- with Dracula's castle. The setting isn't quite right, though. In Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula's castle is in the Carpathian Mountains. In Houdini's story, Castle D--- is along the river Maros, a real river, also called Mureș and by other names, too. Second, Hermannstadt is the German name for the Romanian-Transylvanian city of Sibiu. So, the story is set in real places and there is an attempt at verisimilitude instead of the typical weird-fictional settings and sequences of events. In fact, you might call "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" a thriller or a crime or detective story rather than a work of weird fiction. It also has elements of the Ruritanian romance.

I don't think there can be any doubt that "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" was ghostwritten. The question is, who was the ghostwriter? (3) I would like to nominate Otis Adelbert Kline for that title. Whoever wrote the story was well versed (or mostly well versed) in the history, language, and geography of fantasy, adventure, historical, and weird fiction. Kline fit the bill in that way. Kline was also a manuscript reader, workhorse writer, sometime editor, and partway agent for Weird Tales. He seems to have been a real go-to guy for Henneberger and Baird. In early 1924, the two men at the head of Weird Tales would have needed ghostwriters for Houdini's coming stories. Kline would have been an obvious choice for the first. Lovecraft of course came last. That leaves the middle story, a topic for a future entry in this series. Next, though, I would like to write about the séance at Castle D---.

Notes

(1) Oubliette is the actual word used in the story. Another is gyves, an archaic word for shackles or manacles. Whoever wrote Houdini's story knew the lingo.

(2) More than once in these two parts of his story, the narrator mentions escapes made by Houdini, both real and fictional, the latter made, specifically, in his motion picture Terror Island. (See Weird Tales, Apr. 1924, p. 53.)

(3) A ghost rider had appeared on the cover of Weird Tales in January 1924. Maybe that was a bit of foreshadowing that we would soon have ghostwriters in the pages of "The Unique Magazine."

Weird Tales, March 1924. Cover story: "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt" by Houdini. Cover art by R.M. Mally. This was the first Houdini issue and the first cover of Weird Tales to depict an author. The scene here is from near the end of part one of a two-part serial, in which Houdini is thrown, bound and naked, into an oubliette.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Houdini Issues-Part Three

"Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"

In January and February of 1924, Weird Tales magazine played cowboys and Indians on its covers. In the first illustration, a hatless cowboy wearing thick, furry chaps is seen fleeing on horseback from a ghostly rider twirling a ghostly lariat. In the second, an Indian seems to be summoning lightning from the night sky. With his straight arms raised and his hands open before him, he looks like the symbol of the Lone Scouts. With his flashing red cloak, he looks like the ape in Frank Frazetta's illustration for the Conan story "Rogues in the House." Both covers were by R.M. Mally.

Then the Houdini issues began.

There were three in all, in March, April, and May/June/July 1924. Although Houdini signed his agreement with Weird Tales in February 1924, the issue with the Indian cover was already on the nation's newsstands by then. The March issue was the earliest in which his byline could appear. 

R.M. Mally was again the creator of the three Houdini covers. Houdini was supposed to have been the author of all three cover stories. They were:

• March 1924: "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt"

• April 1924: "The Hoax of the Spirit Lover"

• May/June/July 1924: "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"

So there were three stories published under Houdini's byline in Weird Tales. But does that mean that Houdini was actually their author? The answer is obviously no in the case of "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," as H.P. Lovecraft is known to have ghostwritten that story. There was some drama attached to that, for Lovecraft wrote it in a hurry, lost his first version in an even quicker hurry, then rewrote it on his honeymoon, again in a hurry. (Most people are in a hurry on their honeymoons, though not to retype lost manuscripts.) Maybe the briefcase or satchel containing his typescript is in the same place as Hemingway's stolen suitcase. Maybe they're both at the dead letter office where Bartleby the Scrivener used to work. Wherever it went, Lovecraft was well compensated for his work, Houdini liked the result, and his story is still admired by fans of weird fiction. It also became the cover story of the only quarterly issue of Weird Tales, May/June/July 1924. (1, 2)

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) According to Wikipedia, "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" is supposed to have been an influence upon a young Robert Bloch. Wikipedia of course doesn't say how. Robert Price, though, has identified an Egyptian Cycle of stories written by Bloch. These were published in Weird Tales in 1936-1938. Bloch's Milwaukee friend Earl Peirce, Jr., wrote a story, "The Archer" (Weird Tales, Mar. 1937), that seems to be connected to the Egyptian Cycle as well. Bloch didn't encounter Weird Tales until 1927. If "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" was an influence upon him, that happened after the initial publication of Lovecraft's story.

(2) Houdini's fictional guide in "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" is Abdul Reis el Drogman. I assume that the Reis part of his name is from Piri Reis. El Drogman would seem to refer to Abdul Reis' service as a guide. Otis Adelbert Kline would later write stories about a man employed in the same way. These were in his Dragoman series for Oriental Stories and The Magic Carpet Magazine of 1930-1933.

William F. Heitman's illustration for "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," in Weird Tales, May/June/July 1924. The byline was Houdini's, but the story was written by H.P. Lovecraft. The scene here reminds me of one from Raiders of the Lost Ark in which Indiana Jones descends into a pit full of snakes. Indy's friend Sallah is there. Played by John Rhys-Davies (Rhys, not Reis), Sallah would appear to be a drogman- or dragoman-type character. Every Western adventurer in the Middle East or Near East needs one.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Houdini Issues-Part Two

Spirits & Sphinxes

Weird Tales magazine was apparently already in trouble when Harry Houdini (1874-1926) met J.C. Henneberger (1890-1969) in his Chicago office in February 1924. Henneberger must have seen a chance to capitalize on Houdini's name and fame by having him and it associated with his magazine. Maybe that would increase sales. And maybe Houdini saw an agreement between them as a chance to publicize his upcoming lecture tour of America. He wanted to talk about spiritualism, séances, and mediums. He wanted people to know that these things were (and still are) a scam, a hoax, and a great fraud.

What followed were three cover stories for Weird Tales written under Houdini's byline. Houdini also conducted a letters column called "Ask Houdini," which took the place of "The Eyrie" and ran in two installments, April and May/June/July 1924. I haven't checked this, but I believe "The Eyrie" was in every other issue of Weird Tales from March 1923 to September 1954. Only those two issues had something different. In any case, things didn't work out so well for Henneberger. Weird Tales foundered in mid-1924, and although he officially retained ownership of the magazine, he became indebted to others, including the men at the head of Cornelius Printing Company of Indianapolis. (I always like to point out that Weird Tales originated in my native city.) The quarterly issue of May/June/July was the last to appear until November 1924. By then, Edwin Baird, the first editor, had left, being replaced by Farnsworth Wright. Meanwhile, Houdini seemingly vanished, having moved on to another--apparently very successful--phase of his career.

* * *

The FictionMags Index provides a list of Harry Houdini's magazine credits. I have adapted it as follows:

• Letter in The Sphinx: The Official Organ of the Society of American Magicians, Sept. 15, 1916.
• "The Thrills in the Life of a Magician" in The American Magazine, Sept. 1918.
• "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt," a two-part serial in Weird Tales, Mar.-Apr. 1924.
• "The Hoax of the Spirit Lover" in Weird Tales, Apr. 1924.
• "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" in Weird Tales, May/June/July 1924, ghostwritten by H.P. Lovecraft. Reprinted in Weird Tales in June/July 1939 as part of a series entitled "Weird Story Reprint." Houdini still got the byline, but an introduction to the story identifies Lovecraft as its true author. It's ironic that a man who exposed ghosts also had a ghost behind his story.
• "When Magic Didn’t Work" in Collier's, Apr. 18, 1925.
• "Tricks of Fake Mediums" in Liberty, Nov. 28, 1925.

Thanks to The FictionMags Index for compiling these credits and making this and so much more information available for the rest of us. (Houdini had other credits in The Sphinx. There is a website with indices to The Sphinx, but it's a commercial website, so I won't provide a link. You can find it on your own easily enough.)

Here are two more magazine credits, from Wikipedia:

• "How I Unmask the Spirit Fakers" in Popular Science, Nov. 1925.
• "How I Do My 'Spirit Tricks'" in Popular Science, Dec. 1925.

If you detect an air of skepticism and debunkery in these titles, you could be on to something.

Houdini had a famous difference of opinion with Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), who, like the Cowardly Lion, believed in spooks, and yet, like Edgar Allan Poe, wrote great tales of ratiocination. Houdini and Doyle had first corresponded in 1920 while Houdini was touring in Great Britain. (It isn't clear to me when they actually met, although there is an extant photograph of them standing together like a Mutt-and-Jeff pair.) They became friendly, but that turned sour as Houdini continued in his work investigating and exposing frauds, mediums, hoaxers, and fakers. Doyle was well known for his belief in ghosts and fairies. You could call him gullible, perhaps in the extreme, while Houdini resided at the opposite end of the spectrum, for he was in fact powerfully skeptical of the whole business of spiritualism. Doyle saw Houdini's film The Man from Beyond (1921), though, liked it, praised it, and was mollified by it, for Houdini apparently had attempted an onscreen reconciliation of a sorts through his second-to-last picture. Good for Houdini.

To be continued . . .

In 1924, Houdini went on a twenty-four-date lecture tour of America booked by Coit-Albee Lyceum. His subjects were spiritualism, mediums, and séances. He also investigated mediums as a member of the Committee for Psychical Investigations organized by Scientific American. The poster or lobby card shown here is from 1924. It advertised something or other but I haven't found out what. But it was 1924, Houdini's name was still in the news and in American popular culture, and it shows the Great Sphinx of Egypt . . .

The Sphinx was "The Official Organ of the Society of American Magicians." Here is the cover for the March 15, 1924, issue, showing Houdini's picture flanked by hieroglyphics and the volume (XXIII) and number (One) enclosed in what you might call cartouches. By mid-March, Houdini was already on tour. (He had lectured in Birmingham, Alabama, on March 7 and 8, 1924.) Also by then, the first of three Houdini issues of Weird Tales had come out. His story, or article, "The Spirit Fakers of Hermannstadt," first of a two-part serial, was the cover story that month.

The Society of American Magicians held its 20th annual dinner at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City on June 6, 1924. Houdini was on the cover of the program along with the Great Sphinx of Egypt. The cover artist was Grant Wright. At about that same time, Houdini's book A Magician Among the Spirits (Harper & Brothers, 1924) came out. The subject was the same as in his lecture tour, that is, spirit fakers. According to Wikipedia, the uncredited co-author of A Magician Among the Spirits was C.M. Eddy, Jr., of Weird Tales fame. Like Houdini, Eddy had stories in the March, April, and May/June/July issues. Eddy's story for the triple-issue (cover shown below) was "The Loved Dead."

The theme and motif of the Sphinx returned in the May/June/July issue of Weird Tales and in Houdini's cover story, "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs," actually by H.P. Lovecraft, a friend and sometime collaborator of Eddy. The cover art was by R.M. Mally, his or her last for "The Unique Magazine." (In fact, all three of the Houdini covers were by Mally.) After reading about Houdini's activities in 1924 and seeing all of these images, I think it pretty likely that Weird Tales was still seeking to capitalize on its association with Houdini, thus the Sphinx on the cover. Ancient Egypt and the pharaohs of Egypt were still in the public consciousness, too, after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in November 1922. In looking over the first thirteen issues of Weird Tales, I see that there were several stories and non-fiction fillers on those subjects. In this space, those will have to be subjects for another day.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Houdini Issues-Part One

Harry Houdini
Né Erik Weisz
Aka Eric or Erich Weiss, Harry Weiss
Performer, Magician, Illusionist, Escape Artist, Actor, Author, Aviator, Technical Advisor, Movie Producer & Director, Public Speaker, Psychic Investigator, Skeptic, & Debunker
Born March 24, 1874 (O.S.), Pest (Budapest), Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire
Died October 31, 1926, Detroit, Michigan

A lot has been written about Harry Houdini. I'm not sure that I can add to it. Instead I'll just write about him in his connections to genre fiction, genre films, and of course Weird Tales.

Born in Hungary to a rabbi and his wife, Houdini grew up in Appleton and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, then in New York City. He began performing--on a trapeze--at age nine and became a professional magician in 1891. He performed on the vaudeville stage, in circuses and museums, at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and--off and on from 1906 to 1923--in films. He was supposed to have played Captain Nemo in an adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but that deal fell though. Instead, he appeared in a number of other genre films:

• The Master Mystery (1918), a fifteen-part thriller/mystery/science fiction serial on which Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) of all people served as a consultant.

• The Grim Game (1919), a crime thriller and aviation picture.

• Terror Island (1920), a South Seas adventure.

• The Man from Beyond (1922), a time-travel adventure with the ever-popular man-frozen-in-the-ice-then-thawed-out-and-reawakened plot device. There is also a depiction of reincarnation in The Man from Beyond, now interpreted as an attempt at reconciliation with Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), whom had been alienated by Houdini's skepticism and debunking of spiritualism, mediums, and séances. (1)

• Haldane of the Secret Service (1923), a crime/detective story. Released on September 30, 1923, it was Houdini's last film. Weird Tales was halfway through its first year when Haldane arrived in theaters.

Although his name was known the world over, Houdini began slipping in his career by the time the 1920s rolled around. His last movies weren't very successful and so he put that business behind him. In February 1924, he announced that he was leaving the vaudeville stage and going on a twenty-four-date lecture tour to talk about "his experience with fraud medium." (2) He also announced that he had signed a contract to write a series of articles on the same subject for none other than Weird Tales magazine.

Maybe it was a step down for Houdini to get involved in pulp fiction, but that's what he did, meeting Weird Tales publisher J.C. Henneberger in his Chicago office in early 1924. (3) The two men swung a deal, and that's how the Houdini issues of Weird Tales came about. I won't go into the particulars here. You can read about the people, places, and events involved in John Locke's history, The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales (2018), pages 136-156. Suffice it to say, Houdini had the cover story in three straight issues of the magazine, March, April, and the quarterly issue of May/June/July 1924. His likeness, by R.M. Mally, appeared on the first of the three, making Houdini the first author to be depicted on the cover of "The Unique Magazine."

To be continued  . . .

Notes
(1) In his biography, Houdini: The Man Who Walked Through Walls (MacFadden, 1961), William Lindsay Gresham wrote: "The idea [behind The Man from Beyond] was probably suggested to Houdini by a story which appeared in The American Weekly about the body of a viking, complete with winged helmet and flaxen beard, which had been discovered in the Arctic, perfectly preserved after a thousand years." (p. 196) If we had the title of that story, we could add it to the Internet Polar Fiction Database and the Internet Viking Adventure Database. Was it one of A. Merritt's works? (My paperback edition of Gresham's Houdini lacks an index. Mention of Weird Tales and H.P. Lovecraft--"the late, great H.P. Lovecraft"--is on page 236.)
(2) "Houdini Leaving Stage," Minneapolis Star, February 23, 1924, page 8.
(3) John Locke suggests the week of February 11, 1924, as the period during which they met. See The Thing's Incredible!: The Secret Origins of Weird Tales (2018), page 138.

A still from The Master Mystery (1918), starring Harry Houdini. I believe the actress here is Marguerite Marsh (1888-1925). Inside the robot suit is Floyd Buckley (1877-1956), later the voice of Popeye the Sailor on radio and in animated cartoons. The robot is called Q the Automaton. You might think Q was one of the first robots in cinema, but there were robots on film as early as 1897. From The Secrets of Houdini by J.C. Cannell (Dover, 1973), facing page 244.

Here's a French-language version of the movie poster for The Master Mystery. The artist was E.G. I'm not sure why a robot needs a knife in order to carry out its mayhem. Maybe robots were different then.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Robert Bloch in Peril!

The circle keeps turning . . .

In July 1951, Fantastic Adventures published Robert Bloch's story "The Dead Don't Die!" The cover illustration (below) by Robert Gibson Jones (1889-1969) shows a woman in peril. If you want to see a man in peril, you have to look inside. That's where you'll find Virgil Finlay's illustration and a likeness of the author:

Twenty years later, in its summer issue of 1971, Weird Mystery magazine reprinted Bloch's story and part of Jones' cover illustration. The whole issue, I think, is made up of reprints. After all, the dead don't die.

Artists sometimes insert themselves or people they know into their works. Authors do it, too. H.G. Wells did it, but I can't say that he was the first. Maybe he provided the inspiration for his countryman Alfred Hitchcock, who made cameo appearances in most of his own films. Robert Bloch inserted H.P. Lovecraft into "The Shambler from the Stars" (Weird Tales, Sept. 1935). Lovecraft did it back to him in "The Haunter of the Dark" (Weird Tales, Dec. 1936). Anyway, I have created a new label for entries like this one. It's called Authors Depicted in Art.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales #364

There is a new issue of Weird Tales available. There isn't any date on the cover, but I think it came out in October 2020. Real print-on-paper magazines are supposed to have been sent out in December. That's according to the Weird Tales website.

For some reason, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database does not yet have a listing for this issue. I'm sure there will be one soon. Until that happens, here is a list of credits for Weird Tales #364:

• "Too Late Now" by Seanan McGuire, a California native and a very prolific author.
• "Ellende" by Gregory Frost, an instructor of English at Swarthmore College.
• "Hats" by Joe R. Lansdale, a well-known author from Texas.
• "Lightning Lizzie" by Marie Whittaker, who writes children's books and darker things
• "Last Days" by Dacre Stoker, a Canadian-American author, athlete, and conservationist, also great-grand nephew of Bram Stoker, and Leverett Butts, who teaches at the University of North Georgia.
• "The Beguiled Grave" by Marguerite Reed, a native Kansan.
• "The Last War" by Linda Addison (poem), a Philadelphian who writes verse, fiction, and non-fiction.
• "To the Marrow" by Rena Mason, a Thai-Chinese-American author.
• "Feathers" by Tim Waggoner, an author and teacher of writing at Sinclair College in Dayton, Ohio.
• "Trailer Park Nightmare" by Gabrielle Faust, a writer and artist.
• "No One Survives the Beach" by Weston Ochse, a Westerner and an author of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and comic book scripts.
• "The Good Wife" by Lee Murray, a New Zealander about whom I have written before.   
• "The Canal" by Alessandro Manzetti (poem), an Italian author and poet.

The cover art is by Lynne Hansen, an artist, writer, and filmmaker from Illinois. If I had to give a piece of advice to the editors and publishers of the new Weird Tales, it would be this: Don't make us hunt for the name of the cover artist! She's helping to sell your magazine. Give her some credit. Anyway, I don't know whether there is any interior art, but as an artist, all I can say is that there ought to be. Why else would anyone buy a print magazine?

Anyway again, congratulations to the new Weird Tales for a second issue.

The cover of Weird Tales #364 shows a woman turning into a crow. Her transformation reminds me of what happened to David Hedison's character in The Fly (1958) (same head, same left hand) and Sharlto Copley's in District 9 (2009). All suggest a body horror that must be, I think, deep-seated in us. By the way, there have been corvids on the cover of "The Unique Magazine" before. This one is from September 1939. The cover artist was Virgil Finlay.

Original text and caption copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Man and Animal

I have placed seven covers in the category of man and animal. Surprisingly, four of the animals are birds, two corvids (a crow and a raven) and two vultures. Otherwise there doesn't seem to be much of a pattern. Sometimes the animals are helpers and sometimes adversaries.

As far as I know, the image of a whip-poor-will, the calls of which figure prominently in several weird tales, never appeared on the cover of the magazine. I'm not sure why whip-poor-wills should be associated with the supernatural. Is that from folklore? In any case, I don't find anything strange or eerie in the sound of whip-poor-wills calling. On the contrary, the call of the whip-poor-will in the evening woods is to me the sound of a kind of wildness, of something that has been lost in the irretrievable past. Seeing a whip-poor-will float through the woods might remind you of a kind of ghost. To me, it's more like the flight of a kite or like a weightless wooden toy with moving parts. The association of the whip-poor-will with the supernatural or paranormal continues. A whip-poor-will is a goatsucker, in Spanish, chupacabra.

Weird Tales, July 1925. Cover story: "The Werewolf of Ponkert" by H. Warner Munn. Cover art by Andrew Brosnatch. If you didn't know better than by the title of the cover story, you would think the creatures attacking the man are wolves rather than werewolves. By the image alone, they appear to be animals, so I have put Andrew Brosnatch's cover in this category. It's also in the category of man and monster.

Weird Tales, July 1930. Cover story: "The Bride of Dewer" by Seabury Quinn. Cover art by Curtis C. Senf. A little green guy may not be quite a man, but in what other category does he belong? In other words, in terms of telling a story, a character of this type functions as a man, so I think he has to go into the category of a man. So the first two covers show horses, but they're the last horses you'll see for awhile.

Weird Tales first appeared in the 1920s, but it wasn't exactly a creature of the Jazz Age. Fantasy, weird fiction, and ghost stories look to the past. Science fiction is about the future. It shouldn't come as any surprise that Weird Tales had a somewhat old-fashioned look to it, even into the 1940s. That look was exemplified in the cover art of Curtis C. Senf, an artist of Old World sensibilities whose art often looked more like a nineteenth-century lithograph than an illustration from the pulp fiction era.

Weird Tales, February 1939. Cover story: "Death Is an Elephant" by Nathan Hindin, a pseudonym of Robert Bloch. Cover art by Virgil Finlay. When I think of weird fiction, the image of a rogue elephant doesn't leap into my head. Maybe in 1939 a cover with a circus theme would have helped sell magazines. God knows there were enough men wearing turbans. In any case, there is more than just a man and an animal in this picture, but the essential relationship is between the two. I guess the elephant is supposed to be the bad guy and deserves to be stuck with a knife. We in the twenty-first century might see things differently. As an artist, I see that Virgil Finlay made a mistake in aligning the man's left hand with the elephant's knee. Learning not to do things like that is a beginning lesson in drawing. Otherwise it's a perfectly fine cover, although the faces in the foreground seem to have been drawn from stock photos in the artist's morgue. The one in the middle looks really familiar to me.

Weird Tales, September 1939. Cover poem: "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe. Cover art by Virgil Finlay. To me, this is one of the most memorable and iconic covers for Weird Tales. Finlay kept it simple as a magazine cover probably should be for maximum impact. Note that Poe is looking not at the bird but to its right. I don't know why. This is one of only two Weird Tales covers that I have found showing the image of an author. (The other is of Harry Houdini from March 1924.) It may be alone in illustrating a poem rather than a story. By the way, this is the 205th anniversary of Poe's birth month. (He was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston.) Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe!

Weird Tales, September 1944. Cover story: None. Cover art by A.R. Tilburne. The website Yankee Classic has identified this cover as a swipe from the artist Jose Segrelles from an image published in American Weekly Magazine in October 1931. It's a shame that Tilburne resorted to that, but his is a fine version and well executed. If you look at the regular Weird Tales artists of the 1940s--A.R. Tilburne, Hannes Bok, Matt Fox, Lee Brown Coye, Boris Dolgov--they stack up pretty well against the artists of the 1920s. The 1930s of course were dominated by J. Allen St. John, Margaret Brundage, and Virgil Finlay. This drawing reminds me of a cartoon by Shaw in The New Yorker from last year (June 3, 2013). The cartoon shows a man crawling through the desert. On his back is a vulture. The man is saying to the vulture, with some annoyance, "If I can crawl, you can circle."

Weird Tales, January 1946. Covers story: None. Cover art by A.R. Tilburne. Many of those 1940s covers didn't illustrate any particular story. Here is another in that category. I don't think this picture is as striking or as well executed as the previous one, but that's not because Tilburne wasn't capable of such a thing on his own. He was in fact a very accomplished and interesting artist. I'll have more on him as time goes by.

Weird Tales, May 1946. Cover story: "The Valley of the Gods" by Edmond Hamilton. Cover art by Ronald Clyne. It's our loss that Ronald Clyne illustrated only one cover for Weird Tales. Fortunately he created a number of covers for hardbound editions issued by Arkham House. He was a very fine designer as this cover shows. His work also has a kind of precision approaching the technique of the lithographer or woodblock engraver. Here, man and vulture lack pupils--their eyes are lit as the lantern is lit.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Eternal Triangle: Man, Woman, Monster

First I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I hope this year offers health and happiness to all.

Second, I would like to begin a new series in which I attempt to classify the covers of Weird Tales magazine. I'll begin with the cover of the first issue from March 1923 and the pattern it set for many covers to follow. The pattern is one of the eternal triangle of man, woman, and monster--not an animal, not another man, but a monster.

Every boy wishes to be a hero, to rescue the beautiful damsel in distress, to slay the horrible monster that threatens not only her but also perhaps his own happiness. (After all, if he is to go on living, he must have her and be loved by her.) I suppose every woman in her heart wishes to be a damsel, in distress or not. There may be something else at work in the eternal triangle though. A boy may wish to be a hero. An adolescent or man on the other hand may see himself as more monster than man. The eternal triangle in fantasy allows a man to identify with the hero rather than with the monster--to escape the real or imagined facts of his own existence. I think that's one of the appeals of the TV show Beauty and the Beast: the man who sees himself as a beast can believe that he might win the love and affection of a beautiful woman.

Pulp magazines abounded with images of the eternal triangle. In science fiction, the monster was often of the bug-eyed alien variety, a creature so common that it earned an acronym: BEM. In weird fiction and fantasy fiction, the monster was of other types, some of which you'll see below. With its illustration of Anthony M. Rud's "Ooze," Weird Tales began with a cover showing the eternal triangle. The man and woman are the subjects of a search by the narrator of "Ooze." The monster is the reason they are missing. Richard R. Epperly's depiction of the monster isn't quite accurate, for in the story the monster is not an octopoid (or Cthuloid) creature but an outsized amoeba. In any case, let the menacing and the rescuing begin.

Weird Tales, March 1923, the first issue of "The Unique Magazine." The cover story is "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud.  The artist was Richard Ruh Epperly. There is also supposed to have been a variant cover in which the black and orange plates were reversed.

In the eternal triangle, the woman is menaced by a monster while the man comes to her rescue. The woman may be in the clutches of the creature as in this illustration. In other variations, she is threatened by the monster (see July 1926, immediately below), or she is shielded from the monster by the man (see Feb. 1928, below that). The man sometimes has only his bare hands with which to fend off the monster's advances. More often he has a weapon, either a gun or a blade. The man in the illustration above isn't taking any chances: he has both gun and knife.

Note the somewhat childlike or primitive aspect of the drawing. Rather than face the monster as they would in three dimensions (thus facing away from the viewer), both man and woman are shown in profile and are looking at the monster as if they and it exist only in two dimensions. I doubt that any readers of the first issue of Weird Tales quibbled with the art: for the first time, they had before them an American magazine title devoted exclusively to weird and fantastic fiction.

Weird Tales, July 1926. The cover story is "Through the Vortex" by Donald Edward Keyhoe, later of flying saucer fame. The artist was E.M. Stevenson. The cover is now in full color, but there is still a somewhat primitive aspect to the art, especially in the dragon. The woman is being threatened by the monster, but the man--a classic pulp hero--intervenes. His weapon of choice: a pistol.

Weird Tales, February 1928. The cover story is "The Ghost Table" by Elliot O'Donnell. The artist was C.C. Senf. Once again, the man intervenes between the woman and the monster, in this case a scary table, so scary that the woman swoons. The weapon is again a pistol. This is the same issue in which "The Call of Cthulhu" appeared for the first time, yet the editorial staff of Weird Tales chose "The Ghost Table" as their cover story. That might not be as bad as giving Milli Vanilli a Grammy for best new artist, but you get the idea.

Weird Tales, September 1928. The cover story is "The Devil-Plant" by John Murray Reynolds. The cover artist was C.C. Senf. The monster this time is a plant. The man seems to be in no great hurry to chop at it with his knife, which--for some reason--has blood on it. Sexual imagery is probably unavoidable in depictions of the eternal triangle. Often the woman is wrapped in snakes or tendrils or threatened by long-necked dragons as in the cover from 1926. Here she is being engulfed in flora, more symbolic of the female than of the male, especially when the parts of the plant are vertically bifurcated. So this cover is unusual in that the monster is more feminine than masculine. There will be more monstrous plants in a later category of cover illustrations.

Weird Tales, February 1929. The cover story is "The Star-Stealers" by Edmond Hamilton. The cover artist was Hugh Rankin. C.C. Senf was a competent artist and occasionally produced a really fine cover. But for true weirdness, none of the early Weird Tales cover artists could match Hugh Rankin. And speaking of triangles, get a load of that monster. Note the influence of art deco, especially in the female figure, her clothing (such as it is), the bird-like motifs, and the lettering, no doubt done by hand by the artist himself.    

Weird Tales, September 1931. The cover story is the third installment of "Tam, Son of the Tiger" by Otis Adelbert Kline. The cover artist was once again C.C. Senf. The monster in this example is humanoid. The hero's weapon is a sword. I haven't read "Tam, Son of the Tiger," but I suspect it was inspired by the tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs. By the way, four of the six installments of "Tam" were cover stories. All four of those covers were by Senf. "Buccaneers of Venus" (following) also earned four cover spots.

Like some weird alien camel-like creature, sexual imagery rears its head again in Senf's illustration, nowhere more obviously than in the woman's skirt. The question is this: Does an artist purposely inject (no pun intended) symbolism into his work? Or is symbolism unconscious? I would suggest that symbolism is by definition unconscious. That's why the artist often shrinks (no pun intended) from showing his work: he knows that it reveals something about him, something that he may not know himself on a conscious level, yet is immediately obvious to the viewer. Did C.C. Senf mean to lay the staff of the monster's trident (perhaps as an extension of the monster's arm and hand) so neatly across the woman's breasts? Probably not. What about the club? The sword? Or the camel's neck and head? Did the artist mean to show them as sexual symbols? My guess is probably not, probably not, and probably not.

Weird Tales, December 1932. The cover story is the second installment of "Buccaneers of Venus" by Otis Adelbert Kline. The cover artist was J. Allen St. John. Here's a variation on the man-woman-monster triad. This time there are two monsters. The snake will reappear in a later category of covers. The man's weapon: a sword. Kline was back at it with "Buccaneers of Venus." The resemblance to the tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs is even stronger here. Weird Tales even used Burroughs' artist in J. Allen St. John for this cover.

Weird Tales, February 1933. Another month, another monster. The cover story (installment number four) and cover artist are the same as in the previous example. The monster, apparently a sort of spider-scorpion, is vastly different. Critics of Margaret Brundage might object to her floating figures, yet if she was guilty, so was J. Allen St. John on occasion. St. John's influence on Frank Frazetta, moreover on Roy Krenkel, can be traced back to illustrations like this one.

Weird Tales, May 1934. The cover story is "Queen of the Black Coast" by Robert E. Howard. The cover artist was the aforementioned Margaret Brundage. Again, the monster (enter stage left) is humanoid. Again, the weapon is a knife. But in this case, the man seems more vulnerable than the woman. She almost seems to be protecting him. Margaret Brundage was a big, tall woman and no shrinking violet. Her female figures by contrast are usually small and dainty. But perhaps only a female artist could have depicted Robert E. Howard's mighty barbarian in this way. (See also her cover for "The Hour of the Dragon," Dec. 1935).

Weird Tales, February 1937. The cover story is "The Globe of Memories" by Seabury Quinn. The cover art was by Virgil Finlay. The undead are monsters, even if they were once people. The hero must always overcome the prohibition against killing another human being if he is to survive among them. The hero in this illustration could be a self-portrait of the artist. The woman doesn't seem very involved in what's going on. She is clearly a posed model, more likely a photograph of a posed model from Finlay's morgue--no pun intended.

A photograph of Virgil Finlay from almost the same angle. I'd say yeah, that's him. 

Weird Tales, May 1940, the first issue with Dorothy McIlwraith as the editor. According to Jaffery and Cook, the cover art, created by Hannes Bok, does not illustrate a story in the magazine, despite the fact that Edmond Hamilton's byline and the title "The City from the Sea" are pretty prominent here. I haven't read the story, so I can't say one way or another. In any case, a little naked elf is still a man, and a woman in the clutches of a giant, green, furry bat-creature is still a woman in need of rescuing.

Weird Tales, January 1941. The cover story is "Dragon Moon" by Henry Kuttner. The cover artist was Harold S. De Lay. By 1941, Robert E. Howard was gone. Readers would have to make do with Henry Kuttner. The cover illustration is another iteration of the hero, damsel, and dragon image. Later readers of fantasy looked for the drama, action, and mystery of a Frazetta painting. De Lay's illustration is more subdued, but if you look closely, you can see foreshadowing of Frazetta in the horsemen in the background, in the technique in the dragon's scales and the hero's armor, and in his cloak, sword, shield, scabbard, and leggings.

By comparison, here is a painting by Frank Frazetta from 1972.  The man and the monster are somewhat similar to the figures in De Lay's painting. Unfortunately the woman is missing. Frazetta's work is entitled "Monster Out of Time." The double meaning may not have been intentional.

Weird Tales, July 1941. The cover story is "The Robot God" by Ray Cummings. The cover artist was newcomer Hannes Bok. (The male figure looks like a self-portrait of the artist.) What a change: the monster is a new type, the science-fictional monster, in this case a robot. H.P. Lovecraft, long dead, is relegated to a tiny blurb at the top of the cover. Ray Cummings, still kicking at fifty-three, gets the cover spot with a science fiction story. Note also the confessional and very topical title "I Killed Hitler." Not quite the Weird Tales of old.

A photograph of Hannes Bok, the artist and undoubtedly the model for the male figure in the illustration above.

There were 279 issues of Weird Tales, not counting variants published in Canada. I count thirteen covers in the category I have called The Eternal Triangle of Man, Woman, and Monster. Next, a variation: woman and monster.

Updated on January 23, 2014.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley