Who Was Arthur Pendragon?

The other day I wrote about C. Hall Thompson, who contributed Lovecraftian pastiches to Weird Tales in the 1940s. I also wrote that there is at least one person who speculates that Thompson was the man behind two stories by a pseudonymous author dubbed Arthur Pendragon, published in Fantastic Stories of Imagination in 1964-1965. I say pseudonymous, but I don't think anyone can say for sure that Pendragon wasn't his real name. It just seems really unlikely that it was. His (or her) two stories in Fantastic were "The Dunstable Horror" from April 1964 and "The Crib of Hell" from May 1965. The story goes that in the 1940s August Derleth threatened C. Hall Thompson with legal action if Thompson didn't stop writing Lovecraftian tales. I don't know the source of the claim of Derleth's threatened action against Thompson, but it doesn't sound out of character for him.

The suggestion that Thompson was Pendragon comes from the website Thomas Ligotti Online. It is made by a user named Druidic (I think). You can read the entire short thread by clicking here. Druidic's evidence isn't strong, but sometimes a gut feeling can get you somewhere. Another user--I guess he's called Ancient History--points out that both of Pendragon's stories were reprinted in Acolytes of Cthulhu, from 2001. "In the introduction," writes Ancient History, "editor Robert M. Price says that Darrell Schweitzer suggests this is a pseudonym for Arthur Porges." Here is the evidence for that claim, straight from the source, Robert M. Price's introduction to the book:

As the learned Darrell Schweitzer points out, Pendragon's secret identity was most likely Arthur Porges, who wrote for the magazine under his own (noticeably similar) name during the same period. Sounds good to me.

In other words, there isn't any good evidence one way or another. There is of course circumstantial evidence that C. Hall Thompson was our man. After having written pulp stories--mostly Westerns but also a few weird tales and crime/detective stories--in the 1940s and '50s, Thompson may have gone looking for other markets in the early 1960s. Could he have dusted off a couple of old Lovecraftian pastiches and submitted them to Cele Goldsmith, editor of Fantastic, either under a pseudonym or insisting on a pseudonym so as to avoid any trouble with Derleth? Maybe so. Ms. Goldsmith and Derleth would seem to have been connected in one way or another. Whether distantly or closely, I can't say, but maybe she would have understood the problem--and looked right past it because of her endless need for new material. Or maybe Derleth's ire against other Lovecraftian authors of the late 1940s had died down by the early 1960s. The circle of Lovecraftian authors, editors, artists, and fans could not have been very big in any case. Artist Lee Brown Coye was working for both Cele Goldsmith and August Derleth during the early 1960s. He in fact illustrated "The Dunstable Horror." Maybe that's connection enough. Nevertheless, Cele Goldsmith bought and published two Lovecraftian stories from a now unknown author, despite any objection Derleth might have had.

There is also circumstantial evidence that Arthur Porges was Arthur Pendragon. The first name and both initials match, and it was a pretty common practice for writers of science fiction and fantasy to write under more than one byline, especially for different kinds of stories. One possible weakness in this argument is this question: Did Porges write other Lovecraftian pastiches? Is he known to have been a fan or reader of Lovecraft's work? If he wasn't, then it's harder to believe that he wrote what some consider to be among the better Lovecraftian tales from after Lovecraft's death. Witness the inclusion of both of Pendragon's stories in Acolytes of Cthulhu and Mr. Price's comment in his introduction that Pendragon's "reputation is narrower than it ought to be." None of that is a problem, of course, when it comes to C. Hall Thompson. He had written Lovecraftian stories before and there isn't any reason to think that he couldn't have done it again in the 1960s, alternatively, that he had been sitting on those stories since the 1940s and got them into print when the opportunity presented itself.

So who was Arthur Porges? Well, he was the son of James and Clara (Kurzin) Porges, two Jewish-Russian immigrants who came to the United States as young children in the period 1888-1890, spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue, and lived in the Chicago area for most of their lives. James Porges was born Israel Podgursky but changed his surname to match that of a relative in Chicago. Arthur was the second youngest of James and Clara Porges' four sons. His older brother Irwin Porges (1909-1998), a college professor and musician, wrote Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (1975). (Burroughs was also a Chicagoan.) The youngest of the Porges boys, Walter Porges (1918-1979), was a teacher of history in Connecticut and at Pierce College in Los Angeles. It seems as though at least three out of the four ended up in California.

Arthur Porges was born in 1915, served in the U.S. Army during World War II, and taught college-level mathematics. According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, his first published story was "The Rats," which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in December 1951. He published dozens more stories until his death in 2006 at age ninety. In looking over their titles, I don't see any that jumps out as a possible Lovecraftian tale, but you never know. I'm not sure that it matters anyway, for the question of who Arthur Pendragon really was will remain until someone finds a telltale typescript or letter or some other piece of evidence among the papers of a deceased author or editor.

By the way, Arthur Porges was born on August 20, 1915, H.P. Lovecraft's twenty-fifth birthday.

Arthur Porges had the cover story, "The Shadowsmith," in the September 1960 issue of Fantastic Science Fiction Stories. The cover artist was John Duillo (1928-2003), later the other Conan artist for Lancer Books. 

Arthur Porges' older brother, Irwin Porges, was also a writer and the author of the book Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Man Who Created Tarzan (1975). He and Arthur also collaborated on a story called "A Touch of Sun" for Fantastic, published in the issue of April 1959. The cover artist here is unknown.

Both Irwin and Arthur Porges were of an age to have grown up reading Burroughs' stories. Irwin Porges reached the Golden Age of Science Fiction (which is twelve) in 1921, Arthur in 1927. Burroughs must have captured their imaginations. But what about H.P. Lovecraft? Would they have had the same reaction to his work, assuming they read it? It's impossible to say. But maybe generations matter when it comes to these things. C. Hall Thompson was younger than the Porges brothers by a decade or more. Born in 1923, he would have lived his formative years in a time when Weird Tales and H.P. Lovecraft (as well as Amazing Stories and other science fiction pulps) were at their peak. Could Lovecraft have been his Burroughs? Again, it's impossible to say.

Both C. Hall Thompson and Arthur Porges have been proposed as the true identity of the (presumably) pseudonymous author Arthur Pendragon. Pendragon has two genre-fiction credits. First came "The Dunstable Horror" in Fantastic Stories of Imagination, in April 1964. The illustrations were by Lee Brown Coye, his last work for the magazine. For the next several years, Coye did illustrations for August Derleth's Arkham House. Like Derleth's 1945 pastiche The Lurker at the Treshold, "The Dunstable Horror" is set in rural New England. Also like Derleth's novel, there is an element of the plot that involves an American Indian of unusual power. If C. Hall Thompson was Arthur Pendragon, and if he wrote "The Dunstable Horror" in the 1940s, he or his editor may have felt that his story was uncomfortably close to The Lurker at the Threshold. (Lovecraft's village of Dunwich makes its appearance in Derleth's book, too.) Maybe he didn't want to risk a lawsuit. On the other hand, maybe Thompson--if he was Pendragon and if Derleth had made legal threats against him in the 1940s--couldn't pass up the chance to stick his finger in Derleth's eye after so many years and so submitted his tale to Fantastic. But that's all a lot of speculation. The mystery remains.

Original text copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

C. Hall Thompson (1923-1991)

Né Charles John Thompson
Author
Born March 17, 1923, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died February 11, 1991, presumably in Pennsylvania

C. Hall Thompson's name came up the other day while I was writing about Viking stories. He didn't write any Viking stories that I know of, but he did write a few Northerns--the Alaskan and Canadian type, not the Viking type--and several Westerns. He also wrote four stories for Weird Tales. While looking into his life and career, I came across an interesting bit of speculation put forth on the Internet. I'll get to that in a minute.

C. Hall Thompson and Weird Tales made their debut in the same month, March 1923. He was born on St. Patrick's Day and was christened almost three months later, on June 10, 1923, at Tabor Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. His baptismal name was Charles John Thompson. The Charles part came from his father. Before he was even out of high school, Thompson, a budding author, had adopted a pseudonym: from at least 1942 until the closing out of his career, he called himself C. Hall Thompson. The Hall part came from his mother, Helen Hall Thompson.

Thompson graduated from South Philadelphia High School for Boys in June 1942. He would have been a year older than his classmates, but I don't have an explanation for his delayed graduation. Even then he was a writer, for Thompson penned the review of his graduating class, calling it "Southern for Service." He may have been the Charles J. Thompson who, as a student at Vare Junior High School in Philadelphia, won second prize (junior group) and the grand sum of $3 for his entry in the National Peace Poster Contest in March 1938. Despite his efforts, war came to Europe a year and a half later. Although Thompson was of an age to serve when America went to war, I don't know that he did. However, he filled out a draft card in 1942 while residing in Philadelphia.

Thompson appears to have lived in Philadelphia and nearby places in Pennsylvania for all or most of his life, but I know almost nothing about him, and neither does anybody else as far as I can tell. Like I said, he had four stories in Weird Tales:

• "Spawn of the Green Abyss" (Nov. 1946)
• "The Will of Claude Ashur" (July 1947)
• "The Pale Criminal" (Sept. 1947)
• "Clay" (May 1948)

All have been reprinted again and again and a couple have even been translated and published in European editions.

Thompson's popularity as a teller of weird tales can be attributed in part to his authorship of some of the first Cthulhu Mythos stories told after the death of H.P. Lovecraft--told, that is, by someone other than members of Lovecraft's circle. (Lovecraft died two days before Thompson's fourteenth birthday.) There is a story on the Internet that August Derleth threatened Thompson with legal action if he did not cease writing tales set in a Lovecraftian universe. That story arrives without citation or attribution, but it would seem to go along with Derleth's reputation. (The more I read about him in regards to Lovecraft, the less I like him: Derleth seems to have been a man who loved something so much that he thought it was his.) Chased away from Weird Tales or not, Thompson sold nearly four dozen stories to Adventure, Argosy, Dime Western Stories, Frontier Stories, North-West Romances, 10 Story Western Magazine, and other titles, mostly Westerns, over the next six years. He also broke into the slicks with stories in Collier's and Esquire.

Thompson's magazine stories were published between 1945 and 1954 when their author was in his twenties and early thirties. Then, in the same year that Weird Tales came to an end, Thompson's magazine credits seem to have dried up. Pulps in general were dying off by the early 1950s, but Westerns were still strong, in paperback, at the movie theater, and on TV. Thompson had a few Westerns published in the 1950s: A Gun for Billy Reo in 1955, Under the Badge in 1957, and Montana! in 1959. Ace Double Editions issued Thompson's Western novel The Killing of Hallie James in 1969. Thompson is also supposed to have written stories for Sunday newspaper sections.

There is speculation online that C. Hall Thompson was the pseudonymous author of "The Dunstable Horror" (Apr. 1964) and "The Crib of Hell" (May 1965), both in Fantastic Stories of Imagination. (That thread appears on the website Thomas Ligotti Online, here.) Not very long ago (in geologic terms) I was working on some research to do with Lee Brown Coye. As it turns out, Coye illustrated "The Dunstable Horror," a serviceable pastiche of Lovecraft (and far superior to Derleth's own novel The Lurker at the Threshold, from 1945). This was Coye's final work for Fantastic. By 1964 he had already begun working for Derleth and Derleth's Arkham House. Coye had previously illustrated "The Will of Claude Ashur" and "Clay" by Thompson in Weird Tales. If Pendragon was indeed a pseudonym of C. Hall Thompson, then Coye would already have been familiar with his work.

In the summer of 1951, Thompson married Italian-born Isabella Elda Pirritano (1924-2009), a recent graduate of Temple University who had studied secondary education. She was also a choral singer. I don't know anything about their lives nor their long years together after 1969. Charles J. Thompson died on February 11, 1991, and was buried at Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. His wife survived him by nearly two decades and was laid to rest beside him in 2009.

C. Hall Thompson's Stories in Weird Tales

"Spawn of the Green Abyss" (Nov. 1946)

"The Will of Claude Ashur" (July 1947)

"The Pale Criminal" (Sept. 1947)

"Clay" (May 1948)

Further Reading

None except to read Thompson's stories.

C. Hall Thompson's first story for Weird Tales, "Spawn of the Green Abyss," from November 1946, was also his first and only cover story. The cover artist was the unfindable Boris Dolgov. His technique was unusual for a pulp cover, as it appears to be a pencil drawing tinted with watercolors.

Lee Brown Coye illustrated Thompson's next story for "The Unique Magazine," "The Will of Claude Ashur," from July 1947. This was also the first issue in which Coye's "Weirdisms" feature began in Weird Tales and the first in which the Damp Man, created by Allison V. Harding, appeared. Despite the eventual popularity of the Damp Man stories, Thompson had the lead story in that July 1947 issue.

I don't know whether "The Crib of Hell" by Arthur Pendragon was the cover story in the May 1965 issue of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, but I wanted to show the cover because I have detected a swipe, unfortunately made by an otherwise great and very admirable artist, Gray Morrow. You can see for yourself how oddly divided this image is. The part on the right is likely original. The part on the left, executed in an entirely different technique, is obviously a swipe. See the two images below. There is at least one person, by the way, who has speculated that Thompson and Pendragon were the same person. More on that in the next posting.

At the left is Jack Thurston's cover for Satan's Disciples by Robert Goldston (1962), and at the right is another artist's swipe done for the summer 1974 issue of Weird Tales. Who knows where the late Mr. Thurston's artwork will show up next? Update (Jan. 22, 2019): I have been thinking about this image, and it occurs to me that all of the artists who created versions of it may have been guilty of swiping it from an original source, Jack Thurston included. But what would the original source have been?

Text and captions copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

True Detective

I guess I'm catching up on my viewing from 2015, the HBO TV series True Detective included.

Few people remember it today, but in its first incarnation, Weird Tales had a companion magazine called Detective Tales, later Real Detective Tales, which began publication in 1922. The publishers of these two magazines got into financial trouble about a year into their venture. One of the publishers, Jacob Clark Henneberger, gave up his interest in Detective Tales and held onto Weird Tales, which has had an on-and-off career in the nine decades since. Detective Tales carried on under a different publisher and became Real Detective Tales, then, in May 1931, simply Real Detective. The similarly titled True Detective, part of Bernarr Macfadden's True series of titles, began publication in 1924 and lasted until 1995. The point of all this is that the makers of the TV series True Detective seem to have intended to evoke pulp fiction and pulp imagery in their show. I think they succeeded. I would add that, despite the title, True Detective has much--maybe more--in common with weird fiction than with detective fiction.

I heard a lot about True Detective in 2015 when it first aired, and I can say after having seen it that the show is compelling. The co-stars, Woody Harrelson as Marty Hart and Matthew McConaughey as Rustin Cohle are excellent. (Note the symbolism in their names.) Matthew McConaughey is, as always, like a chameleon in portraying seemingly real people. A lot of the supporting actors are also good. I'll single out Brad Carter as Charlie Lange, the peckerwood ex-husband of the murdered woman, for his performance.

There is some clunky, inauthentic, and overly literate dialogue in True Detective, but over all, the characters speak in ways that are true to life. Rust is often sophomoric in his pseudo-philosophical musings. Hart registers proper skepticism and disgust at what he says. (I'm not sure that any actor is as good at disgust as is Woody Harrelson.) The main title sequence is very good, and the theme song is perfect for it, one of the best theme songs I've heard in a long time. The settings and scenery are great, as is the cinematography. There are some anachronisms, I think, and places where the screenwriter's politics show through. For instance, he takes unnecessary swipes at private schools, especially parochial schools, and at school choice. In reading about the show, I find that the screenwriter, Nic Pizzolatto, was raised Catholic. A lot of us were, but so what? Get over whatever it is that got your underwear in a knot and move on. To that end, the Rustin Cohle character is evidently an atheist, but at the end of the show he sees the light (literally). I imagine that was a bitter disappointment for any atheists watching and enjoying the show. Significantly, his penultimate vision--the one actually shown on screen rather than the one he describes from his wheelchair--enters the otherwise flat land of Louisiana (see Flatland below) in the form of a spiral (see The King in Yellow below) and through a circular opening in the spherical roof (see The Ring and Flatland below) of a decrepit building (see almost everything below).

I have to admit, the change in tone at the end of True Detective is a little jarring, but if being gored and hatcheted by the worst serial killer in history isn't enough to change your life, I don't know what is. The show also changes in its structure and viewpoint in later episodes. I'm not sure if those were good moves or not. There are also too many convenient developments (the owner of the green house is still living, still lucid, still available for questioning, and has an impeccable memory), too many things left hanging (who called the man who subsequently killed himself in his prison cell?), and too many missed opportunities on the part of the detectives (why didn't they talk to an anthropologist, a folklorist, and a botanist very early on in the case?), but over all, True Detective is a good show, I think, and well worth the viewing.

I said that True Detective seems to want to evoke pulp fiction and pulp imagery. Here are some possible sources of inspiration, or at least examples of creative minds arriving at the same points independently of each other:

From The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (1895): Carcosa (drawn from Ambrose Bierce); the King in Yellow; the viewing of the tape in True Detective vs. the reading of the play in "The Yellow Sign" as an experience that changes people's lives or damages their sanity; the secret symbol, in True Detective, a spiral, in "The Yellow Sign," the eponymous sign.

From H.P. Lovecraft (who drew from Chambers): the decadent and inbred family; the decrepit houses and other buildings; the backwoods setting; the circle or arrangement of stones in the woods at the the site of the cultist's rites; the super-secret and far-reaching cult; the secret and profane rites of the cult; the found object (in True Detective, the videotape).

From "Sticks" by Karl Edward Wagner (1974), The Blair Witch Project (1999) (both of which drew from Lovecraft), and the art of Lee Brown Coye: the found object in the videotape; sticks and stick lattices (there are sticks and lattices everywhere in True Detective; even the Cross can be seen as a stick lattice); drawings or murals on the walls of abandoned buildings; the old, decrepit, backwoods house; the murder of children; the super-secret cult.

From Twin Peaks (1990-1991): the opening sequence in which the body of a woman is found in some backwoods place; the otherwise eccentric storytelling, setting, and characters.

From The Silence of the Lambs (1991): the demented serial killer and his extensive house of horrors (if there is such a thing as the Gothic Baroque, the house and grounds of the serial killer in True Detective is it).

From The Ring (2002): the found object in the videotape; the viewing of the tape, which changes the lives of those who see it; the lone tree in the field; the repeated imagery of the circle or ring; the main title sequence in True Detective as a video montage like the contents of the tape in The Ring; the family with evil secrets; the decaying house of that family.

From Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot (1884): talk of multiple dimensions beyond our own; flatness, circles, spheres, and other geometric or topological concepts (is a spiral merely a track made by a one-dimensional point as it moves in a certain way through a two-dimensional area, or, alternatively, the shadow in a two-dimensional area of a gyre spinning in three-dimensional space?; also, mention is made in the show of a psychosphere; also, sphere is another word for the different levels of the heavens, as in "music of the spheres"); flatness itself in the topography of Louisiana.

and

From the true-to-life Black Dahlia murder case (1947): The murder scene as a tableau for artistic, aesthetic, or personal expression; the ritualization of murder and of the preparation of the murder victim's body; the unsolved nature of the case.

As for philosophizing of Matthew McConaughey's character: I'm not sure where that comes from except from the minds of those who have given up hope or who are angry at and disillusioned by life and the world. It's not especially deep or serious-minded thinking, and though I'm no philosopher, I don't know of any formal source for the character's ideas or words. I'm with Woody Harrelson's character, though: Shut the eff up and let this vehicle we're riding in be an area of silent reflection. (But then the show would be far less interesting.)

One more thing: there is talk among writers and artists of "subverting" this or that. Trying to subvert things is an attempt at rebellion or innovation, very often a childish attempt. I would just say that when people claim that such-and-such "subverts" conventional storytelling, what they are really describing is something far simpler: it's called a twist, and genre writers and pulp writers use twists all the time. If you have never seen a twist before, or if you mistake a twist for a "subverting" of conventions, you haven't read very many stories. Next, I'll say that everyone in art, literature, politics, and society should remember the words of Ecclesiastes: there is nothing new under the sun. Nic Pizzolatto created a very fine piece of art, and he richly deserves the praise he has received, but I can't say that it subverts anything and I can't say that it's like nothing before it. (I don't know that he made those claims, only that viewers and critics tend to be carried away by hyperbole.) True Detective is just a really good piece of storytelling.

Updates, July 12, 2017
1. I see from another website that one of the books read by Rust is the collected poems of Theodore Roethke. Roethke was known for his recurring imagery of stones, bones, blood, sticks, and other natural objects. One of his most famous poems begins: "Sticks in a drowse droop over sugary loam." See "Sticks" and The Blair Witch Project above. Also, Roethke worked in greenhouses when he was young. Does green house (in True Detective) = greenhouse?
2. I see from that same website that flowers, especially in connection with sex, are part of the symbolism of True Detective. I hadn't thought much about that, but I'll add that flower parts--sepals, petals, etc.--are in whorls, a word similar in meaning to spirals.
3. Along those same lines, much of the imagery and many of the themes in True Detective have to do with sex, especially transgressive sex: pedophilia, adultery, sodomy, homosexuality, transvestism, bondage, group sex, pornography, sexting, sexual snuff films (the videotape). Even the spiral symbol can be interpreted as being related to transgressive sex. It's worth noting that all of the sex acts depicted outside of marriage are in one way or another transgressive. If I remember right, only one scene, a loving scene between Hart and his wife, shows a man and a woman in the missionary position (vs. what might be seen as pagan or pre-Christian alternatives). In contrast, the sex scene between Hart's wife and Rust shows her from behind, like the body of the murder victim at the beginning of the show. (By having sex with Hart's wife, Rust cuckolds him, i.e., places horns upon him, also like the body of the murder victim. Hart by the way is another word for an adult male deer.) I take all of that to be symbolic of a supposed moral decay that would have taken place over the years covered by True Detective, 1995 to 2012. Remember, True Detective was written by a Catholic. Remember, too, that 1995 was before cell phones and the Internet really took off.
4. In the climactic (not related to sex) scene, the main characters are on the floor of a domed building with a circular opening at the top of the dome. The building can be seen as analogous to an eyeball--i.e., a hollow sphere with a hole, aperture, or pupil in it--gazing upwards into the heavens (or spheres). (No wonder Rust sees a black hole, i.e., a kind of star but also a kind of spiral, through the aperture.) If the building is an eyeball, then maybe the stick-lattice representation of the Yellow King is at the fovea, a place also occupied for an instant, perhaps, by Rust. Significantly, fovea is Latin for pit, which is another word for abyss (for the Yellow King and his cultists) and trap (for Rust, who says early in the series that he feels like he's in a trap; the spiral symbol can also be taken as a labyrinth or maze, another kind of trap). Remember, Rust continually looks at his own eyeball in a mirror.
5. There is a lot of pagan, pre-Christian, post-Christian, and satanic imagery in True Detective, but other websites have gone into all of that, so I'll leave the analysis to them.
6. Whew!

Copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales Books-Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks

Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks was published in 1966 by Arkham House of Sauk City, Wisconsin, in an edition of 2,000 copies. Arkham House books are typically rare, costly, and prized by readers and fans of weird fiction. I was lucky enough to find recently a reasonably priced copy of Black Medicine. I finished reading it on March 11, 2017, and can report on its contents. I had hoped to find zombies in the stories of Arthur J. Burks. I'll cut to the chase and let you know there aren't any.

Burks was born in Washington State and served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War I. He also served in occupied Hispaniola or Santo Domingo, probably in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Burks served in other places as well, possibly in the Pacific. These locales show up in the stories in Black Medicine, of which there are eleven. The first, "Strange Tales of Santo Domingo," is actually in six parts, so it might be more accurate to say there are sixteen stories in the book.

The sixteen stories in Black Medicine fall into three groups, plus one story that stands alone. One group of stories is set in the Dominican Republic. They include "Strange Tales of Santo Domingo" in its six parts and "Three Coffins." Another group is set in neighboring Haiti. These include "Voodoo," "Luisma's Return," "Thus Spake the Prophetess," and "Black Medicine." The third is a looser group of unrelated stories set in different places: a time-travel fantasy called "When the Graves Were Opened"; a dream-fantasy called "Vale of the Corbies"; an oceangoing ghost story, "Bells of Oceana"; and a ghost story set in Burks' own Washington State, "The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee." I consider "Guatemozin the Visitant" to stand alone for different reasons, first because of its length (72 pages in Black Medicine, or of novelette length); second, because it's the only story in the book not to have appeared in Weird Tales; third, for its setting in Mexico; and fourth for its unusual themes and unusual power.

One very appealing characteristic of Burks' writing is its even-toned and effortless authenticity. As a military man serving on board ship and in exotic locales, he had a rare familiarity with his subjects and settings. He didn't have to do research on what his characters do and where they live and work, for he did those things and lived and worked in those places himself. It's refreshing to read genre fiction of such authenticity and verisimilitude. Burks was given to pulpish and purplish prose at times, but those aspects of his writing are easily outweighed, I think, by his skill at describing real places and real situations.

Arthur J. Burks was one of the first authors--if not the first--to have a story on Voodoo in Weird Tales. His first two stories in "The Unique Magazine," published under the pseudonym Estil Critchie, were "Thus Spake the Prophetess," from November 1924, and "Voodoo," from December 1924. "Thus Spake the Prophetess" is set in Haiti, but there is no explicit mention of Voodoo or any of its practices, figures, or spirits. "Voodoo" is of course a different story (no pun intended). It, too, is set in Haiti and involves the search for a Voodoo priest by an American serviceman. The serviceman, Rodney Davis, infiltrates a Voodoo ceremony, where he sees a Maman Loi, "the priestess of the serpent," a Papa Loi, her male counterpart, and the sacrifice of a "goat without horns," that is, a human being, in this case an adolescent girl. Davis returns to his commanding officer to report, laconically, that justice has been served.

Other tales of Voodoo followed, the longest and most detailed of which is "Black Medicine," the title story of this collection and the cover story for the August 1925 issue of Weird Tales. I had speculated before that the larger figure in that cover illustration might be a zombie. As it turns out, he isn't, for there are no zombies in Black Medicine. As it turns out, the figure is a man, Chal David, "chief Papa Loi of Bois Tombé." The woman in front of him is a Maman Loi, "high priestess of the cult of voodoo." In the background of the cover illustration are the "followers of the Great Green Serpent." If I understand Voodoo (also called Vaudoux and Voudon) correctly, the "Great Green Serpent" of Haiti might also be "Li Grand Zombi" of Louisiana. Nevertheless, zombies appear to be absent from the fiction of Arthur J. Burks, leaving William B. Seabrook as still the father of zombies in America.

One more thing: There are many good and enjoyable stories in Black Medicine, but one of my favorites and one of the most powerful, I think, is "Guatemozin the Visitant," a story of a revenant from the Aztec past who, when his burial place is disturbed, comes back to wreak a terrible vengeance on the Mexico City of 1931. I am reminded of The Plague by Albert Camus, a far more significant work to be sure, but I would not take anything away from Burks except for, again, his occasional pulpish and purplish prose.

Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks

(Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1966), 308 pp.

Contents

"Strange Tales of Santo Domingo"

• "A Broken Lamp-Chimney" (Weird Tales, Feb. 1925)
• "Desert of the Dead" (Weird Tales, Mar. 1925)
• "Daylight Shadows" (Weird Tales, Apr. 1925)
• "The Sorrowful Sisterhood" (Weird Tales, May 1925) 
• "The Phantom Chibo" (Weird Tales, June 1925)
• "Faces"  (Weird Tales, Apr. 1927)

"Three Coffins" (Weird Tales, May 1928)

"When the Graves Were Opened" (Weird Tales, Dec. 1925; reprinted Sept. 1937) 

"Vale of the Corbies" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1925) 

"Voodoo" as by Estil Critchie (Weird Tales, Dec. 1924)

"Luisma's Return" (Weird Tales, Jan. 1925) 

"Thus Spake the Prophetess" as by Estil Critchie (Weird Tales, Nov. 1924) 

"Black Medicine" (Weird Tales, Aug. 1925) 

"Bells of Oceana" (Weird Tales, Dec. 1927; reprinted Apr. 1934)

"The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee" (Weird Tales, May 1926) 

"Guatemozin the Visitant" (Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, Nov. 1931; reprinted in Magazine of Horror, Sept. 1969)

Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks (1966), with cover art by Lee Brown Coye.

Text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Secret Origin of Zombies-Part Three

The Missing Piece: Zombi(e) Stories in Weird Tales

U.S. Marines went into Haiti on July 28, 1915, and came back out again on August 15, 1934. That nineteen-year-long episode is almost forgotten in the United States today. It's probably better remembered in Haiti. The invasion force that Americans remember came from the opposite direction, for sometime during the occupation of Haiti, zombies arrived on our shores. They have never left.

 I have an article from 1932 that asks the question: Do zombies really exist? 

Rumors have been seeping in for years [the article reads] from the island of Haiti about dead bodies being exhumed and, through a process of sorcery, put to work in the fields and mills, but is there any truth in the rumors? (1)

If there were rumors seeping in from Haiti, they must have come from Americans on the island. William B. Seabrook (1884-1945) was one of them. In 1928, he returned dispatches to an American syndicate for publication in the nation's newspapers. These were reports on zombies, men who had been enslaved and put to work in the sugar cane fields of Haiti. Seabrook published his reporting in a book, The Magic Island, in 1929. The book proved a sensation and led to a stage play, Zombie, in early 1932 and a far more successful film, White Zombie, released on July 28, 1932 (the seventeenth anniversary of the marine landing at Port-au-Prince). You might call William Seabrook the father of zombies in America, except that there was another American writer in Haiti in the 1920s who wrote stories of the island nation and its folklore. And he was sent there as an officer in the U.S Marine Corps. So not so fast, William Seabrook.

Arthur J. Burks (1898-1974) was born in Waterville, Washington, and served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1917 to 1927. In the early 1920s, he was stationed in what one newspaper article described as "the unknown fastnesses of Santo Domingo," from which "he mailed story after story to the States." These were returned to him, but after taking a correspondence course in short-story writing and returning to the United States in 1924, "he sold scores of short stories and novelettes" and even a novel. (2) One of those stories was "Thus Spake the Prophetess: A Tale of Haiti," published in Weird Tales in November 1924 under the byline Estil Critchie. It was Burks' first story in "The Unique Magazine" and the first of several set in Haiti and on the island of Santo Domingo or Hispaniola. Many if not all of these stories were reprinted in the book Black Medicine in 1966. (3)

There was yet another American writer in the West Indies during the 1920s. This was Henry S. Whitehead (1882-1932), a native of Elizabeth, New Jersey, a graduate of Harvard University (where Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of his classmates), and an Episcopal priest. From 1921 to 1929, Whitehead was acting archdeacon of the U.S. Virgin Islands. (4) Like Arthur J. Burks, Whitehead collected tales of West Indian folklore, turning them into short stories for the pulp magazine market in America. His first story for Weird Tales was "Tea Leaves" for the triple May/June/July 1924 issue. His story "Jumbee," from the September 1926 issue, is the first in Weird Tales that I know of to use the word zombi. That's only in passing, though. The main part of the story is about a jumbee, a West Indian spirit of another type, although the derivation of the word is almost certainly the same. (5) Sadly, Whitehead died young, at age fifty. His death in 1932 was perhaps the first great loss suffered by readers and fans of Weird Tales. August W. Derleth remembered him with Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales, published by Derleth's Arkham House in 1944.

The key words in the previous paragraph are "that I know of." I don't have access to most of Henry S. Whitehead's stories, and I have never read anything by Arthur J. Burks. My suspicion is that the word zombi, and possibly zombie (William Seabrook's spelling), appeared in Weird Tales between 1923 and 1928 (other than in "Jumbee"). It's also possible that Seabrook's version of the zombie as a mindless, soulless slave--a walking deadman--is in Weird Tales. On the other hand, maybe the Seabrook zombie was not in Weird Tales before 1928. Whatever the case may be, this is something we should know for sure. So with that in mind, I would like to offer a list of stories, poems, and articles about zombi(e)s and voodoo from Weird Tales, and I would like to ask everyone who cares to do it to begin searching for the occurrence of zombi(e)s in those stories. I hope we can meet with some success.

Stories, Poems, and Articles about Zombies and Voodoo in Weird Tales, 1923-1939
Plus a Few Maybes and Probably Including Some Stories That Shouldn't Be Here and Probably Missing Some That Should Be

• "Voodooism" by Bill Nelson (article, July/Aug. 1923)
• "Thus Spake the Prophetess: A Tale of Haiti" by Estil Critchie (Arthur J. Burks) (Nov. 1924)
• "Death-Waters" by Frank Belknap Long (Dec. 1924; reprinted Sept. 1933)--I have read this story, and there are no zombi(e)s. However, there is a black sorcerer who has power over serpents, perhaps like those in the cult of Li Grand Zombi.
• "Voodoo" by Estil Critchie (Arthur J. Burks) (Dec. 1924)
• "Luisma's Return" by Arthur J. Burks (Jan. 1925)
• "Strange Tales from Santo Domingo: 1. A Broken Lamp-Chimney" by Arthur J. Burks (Feb. 1925)
• "Strange Tales from Santo Domingo: 2. Desert of the Dead" by Arthur J. Burks (Mar. 1925)
• "Strange Tales from Santo Domingo: 3. Daylight Shadows" by Arthur J. Burks (Apr. 1925)
• "Strange Tales from Santo Domingo: 4. The Sorrowful Sisterhood" by Arthur J. Burks (May. 1925)
• "Strange Tales from Santo Domingo: 5. The Phantom Chibo" by Arthur J. Burks (June 1925)
• "The Return of the Undead" by Arthur Leeds (Nov. 1925)
• "Ti Michel" by W.J. Stamper (June 1926)
• "Jumbee" by Henry S. Whitehead (Sept. 1926; reprinted Feb. 1938)--Mentions the word zombi, but focuses on the spirit of the title. A weird and creepy tale well worth reading.
• "Strange Tales from Santo Domingo: Faces" by Arthur J. Burks (Apr. 1927)

The Magic Island by William B. Seabrook published, January 1929

• "Le Revenant" by Charles Beaudelaire (poem, May 1929)--This is a poem about a ghost rather than a zombi(e) or the undead.
• "Black Tancrede" by Henry S. Whitehead (June 1929)
• "The Corpse-Master" by Seabury Quinn (July 1929)
• "The Drums of Damballah" by Seabury Quinn (Mar. 1930)
• "Voodoo" by A. Leslie (poem, Apr. 1930)
• "Hill Drums" by Henry S. Whitehead (June/July 1931)
• "The Venus of Azombeii" by Clark Ashton Smith (June/July 1931)--The Azombeii of the title is a fictional place in Africa. The people of Azombeii are described as "a pagan tribe of unusual ferocity, who were still suspected of cannibalism and human sacrifice." I have not read this story all the way through, but the word Azombeii seems to be a combination of Zombie and Pompeii, and is almost certainly meant to evoke images or awareness of zombies.
• "Placide's Wife" by Kirk Mashburn (Nov. 1931)

White Zombie released, July 28, 1932

• "The Last of Placide's Wife" by Kirk Mashburn (Sept. 1932)
• "In Memoriam: Henry St. Clair Whitehead" [by H.P. Lovecraft] (article, Mar. 1933)
• "Voodoo Song" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman (poem, July 1933)
• "Dead Men Walk" by Harold Ward (Aug. 1933)
• "Voodoo Vengeance" by Kirk Mashburn (Nov. 1934)
• "Isle of the Undead" by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach (Oct. 1936)
• "Pigeons from Hell" by Robert E. Howard (May 1938; reprinted Nov. 1951)
• "While Zombies Walked" by Thorp McClusky (Sept. 1939)--This is the first story in Weird Tales with the word zombie(s) in the title. It is set in the South. The zombies are slaves of a white zombie-master who has learned his craft from a black Voodoo man. The zombie-master uses Voodoo dolls to control people.

By the way, the first short story chronologically in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database with the word zombie(s) in the title was "White Zombie" by Vivian Meik from his collection Devils' Drums (1933). The first serial in a magazine was "Z Is for Zombie" by Theodore Roscoe in Argosy, February 6-March 13, 1937. And the first short story in a magazine was "Zombies Never Die" by Richard Tooker in Thrilling Mystery, November 1937.

To be continued . . . 

Notes
(1) From "At the Elwood" in The Call-Leader, Elwood, Indiana, Dec. 23, 1932, p. 6.
(2) From "Marine Officer, Rising Author, Finds Pen Mightier Than the Sword" in the Monroe News-Star, Monroe, Louisiana, July 23, 1925, p. 10.
(3) Black Medicine was issued by August Derleth's Arkham House with a cover design by Lee Brown Coye. See the image below.
(4) The United States acquired the Virgin Islands from Denmark in 1917 during the administration of Woodrow Wilson. If you're still looking for connections between American colonialism/imperialism and zombies, you're right back at Woodrow Wilson. Yeah, a Democrat and a Progressive. Sorry. The date, by the way, was March 31, 1917, so we're nearing the centennial of the U.S. Virgin Islands.
(5) The title in Italian is, tellingly, "Zumbi": the Italian alphabet lacks the letter j.
Finally, the subject of zombies and the U.S. Marine Corps gives new meaning to our most recent ex-president's pronunciation "corpseman." He's the smartest man in the room, you know. Probably one of the smartest presidents ever. Just ask people who speak the Austrian language or who live on the Maldive Islands in the South Atlantic.

Black Medicine by Arthur J. Burks (Arkham House, 1966), a collection of his stories for Weird Tales. Cover art by Lee Brown Coye.

Jumbee and Other Uncanny Tales by Henry S. Whitehead (Arkham House, 1944), a posthumous collection of his stories, including the proto-zombie story "Jumbee." Cover art by Charles Frank Wakefield.

Text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Fiends and Murderers of the 1940s and '50s

There was less murder and fiendishness on the cover of Weird Tales in the 1940s and '50s. That might be because the editor was a woman. Maybe she didn't want any more of that menacing and threatening of women. As you can see, none of the following four covers fits easily into this category, at least at first glance. I have read The Damp Man series, though, and I can tell you that the title character is the very definition of a fiend.

Weird Tales, January 1942. Cover story: None. Cover art by Gretta. This cover, by Joseph C. Gretter, is kind of a throwback to the 1920s or '30s. This was a time of transition in Weird Tales. Gretter, an artist of those decades (though he later assisted on Riley's Believe It or Not!), seems to have been a fill-in artist, and this was his only cover for "The Unique Magazine."

Weird Tales, March 1944, Canadian edition. Cover story [?]: "The Valley of the Assassins" by Edmond Hamilton. Cover art by an unknown artist. I'm not so sure about putting this cover in the category of fiends and murderers. The man on the right kind of looks like one of the undead. Or maybe he's a sorcerer of some kind. Anyway, here it is. You'll see this cover again.

Weird Tales, May 1949. Cover story: "The Damp Man Again" by Allison V. Harding. Cover art by John Giunta. That's the Damp Man himself, a real creep and a fiend.

Weird Tales, March 1950. Cover story: "Home to Mother" by Manly Wade Wellman. Cover art by Lee Brown Coye. The figure on this cover looks like he could be a murderer or fiend, but he could be just another one of Coye's decrepit souls. Note the crescent moon, Coye's trademark.

Now it's on to Human Sacrifice and Executions.

Text and captions copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Pirates on the Cover of Weird Tales

There were two pirate covers for Weird Tales, one near the beginning of its run, the other near its end. The first doesn't have any obviously weird elements. It's one of few covers for the magazine that could just as easily have been the cover for a general story magazine. The second cover is obviously for a weird story and misses my article "Coye's Uncategorizable Covers" by only this much.

Weird Tales, October 1923. Cover story: "The Amazing Adventures of Joe Scranton" by Effie W. Fifield. Cover art by R.M. Mally.

Weird Tales, Sept. 1951. Cover story: "Gimlet Eye Gunn" by H. Bedford Jones. Cover art by Lee Brown Coye. Both story and cover were in Short Stories six and a half years before.

Short Stories, March 25, 1945. This image reminds me of one of my favorite Aurora models . . .

The Forgotten Prisoner of Castelmaré, with cover art by Mort Künstler, whose name, oddly enough, translates as "Death Artist" in French and German.

Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Coye's Uncategorizable Covers

Lee Brown Coye was a singular artist possessed of a singular vision. His cover designs for Weird Tales sometimes approached the conventional, but they were more often strange and hard to categorize. I have fit some of the following covers in other categories, but the fit isn't perfect. Some are so strange as to stand alone, the January 1949 and March 1950 covers for instance. Notice that all show a single figure in the middle of the composition, a man in a cloak or a robe or wearing threadbare clothing. Notice, too, that all all of these men are in a state of advanced age, decrepitude, or decay. One of them has in fact died, leaving only his bones and the bones of his horse. None of these men looks like Lee Brown Coye, but I can't help but think that they could be self-portraits of a soul.

Weird Tales, July 1945. Cover story: None. Coye's first cover for Weird Tales and an illustration for "Count Magnus" by M.R. James from the hardbound anthology Sleep No More (1944), edited by August Derleth. I included this image with haunted houses and graveyards, but it seems to me now that this is not a scene in a graveyard.

Weird Tales, March 1946. Cover story: "Twice Cursed" by Manly Wade Wellman. (I'm not convinced this is an illustration for a story.) You have seen this image before in the categories of surrealism, and haunted houses and graveyards. Update (Mar. 30, 2022): Last night I read "Twice Cursed." Lee Brown Coye's painting is indeed an illustration for that exciting, weird, and creepy story starring the occult detective John Thunstone.

Weird Tales, March 1948. Cover story: None. Coye received the plum assignment of illustrating the twenty-fifth anniversary cover of Weird Tales. I think this is one of his best for the magazine.

Weird Tales, January 1949. Cover story: "Four from Jehlam" by Allison V. Harding. I created this category of "Coye's Uncategorizable Covers" mostly because of this cover. I don't know where else it might go if not here. Note the stick motif and the giant plant motif in Coye's art.

Weird Tales, March 1950. Cover story: "Home to Mother" by Manly Wade Wellman. This is another of Coye's very strange covers, and here is another motif: the crescent moon, a stylized version of the first letter of his last name.

Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley