Clyde Irvine (1899-1948)

John Clyde Irvine
Aka Lindsay Nisbet
Author, Playwright, Newspaper Drama Critic/Reviewer and Feature Editor
Born April 15, 1899, Glasgow, Scotland
Died June 21, 1948, Los Angeles, California

John Clyde Irvine was born on April 15, 1899, in Glasgow, Scotland. His name echoes those of geographic features in his native land: the River Clyde flows through Glasgow and into the Firth of Clyde north of Irvine. Knowing something about his life as a Scotsman transplanted to America and Canada makes me wonder whether he could have been the pseudonymous author Abrach in Weird Tales.

Clyde Irvine was the son of John Irvine, an agricultural worker and gamekeeper, and Jessie Easton Evans. Irvine attended school in Glasgow and served in the British army. In the census of 1921, he was counted in Maymyo, Burma, where he was a private in the Second Battalion of the King's Own Royal Regiment. A far more well-known writer was also at Maymyo. His name was Eric Arthur Blair, but we know him as George Orwell (1903-1950). Blair was at Maymyo in about 1923. I can't say whether these two men ever met, but crossed paths and the possibility of crossed paths are always fascinating to consider.

Eric Blair was a police officer in Burma. John C. Irvine seems to have been a police officer in Mashonaland, a region of what was at that time called Rhodesia. I base that supposition on a piece published in Short Stories magazine in its issue of October 25, 1939, credited to Clyde Irvine. Co-written with a Major Desmond, "I Was a Cop in Mashonaland" was Irvine's first known credit in an American pulp magazine, and it seems to establish his connection to Rhodesia. That connection will come into play shortly.

On February 28, 1921, Irvine married Kate Doreen "Scotty" Nisbet (1900-1980) in Glasgow. She was a pianist and, after her husband's death, a musician in a nightclub in Southern California. The couple had four children, Noreen Nisbet Easton Irvine Wilson (1922-2009), Rex John Irvine (1924-1996), Mona Hay Irvine Warren (1928-2001), and Clyde Irvine, Jr. (1933-2003), three of whom lived into the current century. According to The FictionMags Index, Irvine wrote as Lindsay Nisbet in Weird Tales magazine, March 1940. Nisbet was of course his wife's maiden name. There are other Nisbets listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, but I can't say whether any was related to her. Irvine had a short story under his own name in that same issue of Weird Tales.

Irvine was an author, playwright, newspaper drama critic/reviewer, and feature editor of The Daily Record, then and now based in Glasgow. Irvine's plays include "So Free We Seem" (performed at the Arran Drama Festival in 1938), "Scrap" (1938), "Yet They Endure" (1940), "The Last Cavalier," "Death Chair", and "Saltire in Crimson." He was also a member of International P.E.N.

All of that was in his first career in Scotland.

In late 1938 or early 1939, Irvine came to the United States as a representative of the Southern Rhodesia Government in its exhibit of a replica of Victoria Falls, put on display at the World's Fair in New York City. Irvine handled publicity around the exhibit and gave talks to clubs, groups, and organizations in the area of the city. He also returned dispatches to The Daily Record in Glasgow about his stay in New York.

When the enumerator of the U.S. Census came around in 1940, she found Irvine living in Queens Village, Queens, New York. He gave his occupation as freelance writer. I wonder if Irvine encountered pulp magazines for the first time when he came to the United States, for all of his credits in that type of magazine were published in 1939 and after. Here's a list from The FictionMags Index from before and after 1939:

• "Some Kind Letters and Cross Words" (with The Duke), column, in Ziffs Magazine, Nov. 1925
• "I Was a Cop in Mashonaland" (with Major Desmond) in Short Stories, Oct. 25 1939
• "Bush Devil" in Jungle Stories, Spring 1940
• "The Centurion’s Prisoner," in Weird Tales, Mar. 1940, as by Lindsay Nisbet--First installment of "It Happened To Me"
• "The Horror in the Glen," in Weird Tales, Mar. 1940
• "Second Chance Booter," in 12 Sports Aces, Mar. 1940
• "Bride of the Dragon," in Mystery Tales, May 1940
• "Idol of Death," in Jungle Stories, Fall 1940
• "The Eye of Death," in Action Stories, Oct. 1940
• "The Devil’s Bodyguard," in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Dec. 1940
• "Satan on Safari," in Jungle Stories, Winter 1940
• "Code of the Veldt," in Jungle Stories, Summer 1941
• "The Singing Skull, " in Jungle Stories, Fall 1941
• "Bush Gamble," in Jungle Stories, Winter 1941
• "The Crocodile’s Bride," in Jungle Stories, Spring 1942
• "White Man’s Voodoo," in Jungle Stories, Summer 1942
• "Kraal of Blood-Miracles," in Jungle Stories, Fall 1942
• "The Juju of N'Jola," in Jungle Stories, Winter 1942
• "Diamonds of Death," in Jungle Stories, Apr. 1943

There is also a credit for a John Irvine, a poem called "Mairi," published in The Cornhill Magazine in February 1938. There are enough stories there to make a collection. I would like to read them.

Irvine's credits in the list above ended in 1943. I think there's an easy explanation for that, for he relocated to Canada during World War II. There he appears to have served once again in the military, and he continued to write. I have as evidence one credit for him in that part of his career, a feature article called "Two-Time Winner--The Story of a Guy With Courage Plus!," by Sgt. J. Clyde Irvine, in the Canadian military newspaper Khaki, in its issue of February 16, 1944. Irvine's story is about Sgt. George Alfred Hickson (1915-1979) of Kitchener, Ontario, a Canadian war hero.

[Update (Apr. 4, 2026): Tracy Irvine Cracraft, comment below, has let us know that her father's "role in the army while in Canada was to teach soldiers jiu-jitsu." Maybe that was a skill he learned in Burma. Thank you, Tracy.]

After the war, Clyde Irvine moved with his family to Southern California. He died on June 21, 1948, in Los Angeles at age forty-nine and was buried at Inglewood Park Cemetery, Inglewood, California.

Clyde Irvine's Story in Weird Tales
"The Horror in the Glen," (Mar. 1940)

Lindsay Nisbet's Story in Weird Tales
"The Centurion’s Prisoner" (Mar. 1940)--First installment of "It Happened To Me"

The list from The FictionMags Index is the work of that website and its compilers, and I thank them for it. I also thank them for the image shown below.

Jungle Stories, Summer 1942. "White Man's Voodoo" by Clyde Irvine is inside. His name is on the cover.

Original text copyright 2026 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

Lady Gwendolen Cecil (1860-1945)

Lady Gwendolen Georgiana Gascoyne-Cecil
Author, Biographer
Born July 28, 1860, London, England
Died September 28, 1945, Hertfordshire, Hertford, England

Gwendolen Georgiana Gascoyne-Cecil was born on July 28, 1860, in London, England. She was the daughter of Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903), and the former Georgina Charlotte Alderson (1827-1899). Gwendolen's father, the Marquess of Salisbury, also known as Lord Robert Cecil and Lord Salisbury, was a member of Parliament, secretary of state for India, British foreign secretary, and three-time prime minister of the United Kingdom. His wife was his literary assistant and the mother of his eight children. She also wrote political articles for publication in the Saturday Review and the Quarterly Review.

Lady Gwendolen Cecil was an author and her father's biographer. She wrote a short story called "The Little Ray," published in The Pall Mall Magazine in August 1894. She was also the anonymous author of "The Closed Cabinet," which was in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Vol. CLVII, No. DCCCLI) in January 1895. Her major work was her four-volume biography of her father, entitled Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury (1921, 1932). "The Closed Cabinet" was her lone story in Weird Tales, and it was reprinted anonymously.

Lady Gwendolen died on September 28, 1945, in Hertfordshire, Hertford, England. She was eighty-five years old. She has a cultivar of the peony named after her, a distinction no doubt unique among contributors to "The Unique Magazine."

Lady Gwendolen Cecil's Story in Weird Tales
"The Closed Cabinet" as by _____ _____ (May 1923)

Further Reading
Not much that I have found or of note except in old newspaper articles, including a number that describe her being in an automobile accident in 1908. She was run over by her own electric vehicle after having gotten out to open a gate.

Gwendolen Gascoyne-Cecil (1860-1945) in a portrait drawn in 1895 by Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898).

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

"The Closed Cabinet" by _____ _____ & Sunday Swipes No. 3

"The Moon Terror" by A.G. Birch was the first story in the May 1923 issue of Weird Tales. "The Closed Cabinet" by _____ _____ was the last. _____ _____ was an anonymous author in the pages of "The Unique Magazine" and in the original. The original was Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (Vol. CLVII, No. DCCCLI), published in January 1895. The publication of "The Closed Cabinet" was announced in newspapers in December 1894. In its issue of January 21, 1895, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called it "an old time Scotch story." (p. 12)

In an item called "Literary Gossip," the Bowling Green, Ohio, Daily Sentinel-Tribune (Mar. 7, 1895, p. 2) attributed authorship of the story to Lady Gwendolen Cecil, daughter of the Marquess of Salisbury. There isn't any source given for that bit of information. This was gossip after all. Her authorship was previously confirmed in The Author, Playwright and Composer, Volumes 5 and 6, page 246, also from 1895. Maybe that's the source of the item out of Bowling Green. By the way, The Collector's Index to Weird Tales by Sheldon R. Jaffery and Fred Cook, an indispensable source in my writing of this blog, was also published in Bowling Green.

I'm not the first person to track down authorship of "The Closed Cabinet" to Lady Gwendolen. Scottish editor Johnny Mains (b. 1976) did that before me for his collection A Suggestion of Ghosts: Supernatural Fiction by Women, 1854-1900 (2018). More than a hundred years before Mr. Mains published his book, Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934) included "The Closed Cabinet" in his series Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories (1907-1909?). It looks like this series was also called and/or reprinted as The Lock and Key Library. Lady Gwendolen's story is in the volume Old-Time English Stories (1909), the contents of which are as follows:

• "The Haunted House" by Charles Dickens (1859)
• "No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-Man" by Charles Dickens (1866)
• "The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1859)
• "The Incantation" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (date unknown)
• "The Avenger" by Thomas De Quincey (1838)
• "Melmoth the Wanderer" by Charles Maturin (1821)
• "A Mystery with a Moral" by Laurence Sterne (date unknown)
• "On Being Found Out" by William Makepeace Thackeray (1861)
• "The Notch on the Ax" by William Makepeace Thackeray (1862)
• "Bourgonef" by unknown
• "The Closed Cabinet" by unknown (Lady Gwendolen Cecil)

Only some of these are considered fantasy, ghost stories, or weird fiction. Not all are included in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

"The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton was the first reprint in Weird Tales, "The Closed Cabinet" now the second. It looks as though both came from the same source, namely, Julian Hawthorne's collection from earlier in the century. Charles Dickens' story "The Signal-Man" was also reprinted in Weird Tales, in the issue of April 1930. A second by-the-way: Julian Hawthorne was the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and the father of Hildegarde Hawthorne (1871-1952), both of whom also had stories in Weird Tales, though both posthumously.

Next: Lady Gwendolen Cecil (1860-1945)

"Her Countenance Grew Fierce," an illustration by an unknown artist for "The Incantation" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and the frontispiece for The Lock and Key Library: The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations, Old Time English, edited by Julian Hawthorne (New York: The Review of Reviews Co., 1915). I have altered this image from a photograph taken of the original.

The image shown above may seem familiar to you. Have a look at the cover illustration for the May 1923 issue of Weird Tales, made by William F. Heitman:

Now here they are side by side, with the Weird Tales cover flipped:

No wonder Heitman's cover was so uncharacteristic of his regular work, and no wonder that the male figure on the right doesn't match very well the female on the left in its treatment or technique.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Twa Corbies by Anonymous

"The Twa Corbies" ("The Two Crows") is an old and anonymous poem, anonymous in the truest sense of the word, meaning that its author was not trying to hide his or her identity. Instead, the author's name was never recorded and will simply never be known. It seems likely to me that, being a traditional ballad, "The Twa Corbies" is not in its present form the work of just one person but the result of being passed on from one to another. Call it a case of transcription error except that no one knows what was the best version of the poem. Maybe we have the best version after all.

From the Wikipedia article "The Three Ravens":

Written in the Scots language, there is no record of how early "The Twa Corbies" [was] first performed. [Francis James] Child (I, 253) quotes [sic] a letter from Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe to Walter Scott (August 8, 1802): "The song of 'The Twa Corbies' was given to me by Miss Erskine of Alva (now Mrs Kerr), who, I think, said that she had written it down from the recitation of an old woman at Alva." [W]hich [evidence] indicates it was already known in Scotland at that date. It was first published in Walter Scott's Minstrelsy in 1812.

(Boldface added.)

"The Twa Corbies" was reprinted a century later in Ballads Weird and Wonderful (1912), illustrated by Vernon Hill (1887-1972). Maybe that was the source for its reprinting in Weird Tales in February 1926.

Below is an illustration for "The Twa Corbies," made by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). Below that is a reproduction of the original page from the February 1926 issue of Weird Tales.

It's a grim and bitter and ironic poem. It appears to have been based on an earlier ballad, "The Three Ravens," from 1611 or before.

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

William F. Temple (1914-1989)

Author, Science Fiction Fan, Fanzine Editor, Clerk, Soldier
Born March 9, 1914, Woolwich, Royal Borough of Greenwich, England
Died July 15, 1989, Folkestone, Kent, England

William F.J. Temple was of or close to the same generation as British science fiction authors and fans Stafford Aylmer (1907-1965), A. Bertram Chandler (1912-1984), H.S.W. Chibbett (1900-1978), Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), Rex Dolphin (1915-1990), Leslie J. Johnson (1914-?), Eric A. Leyland (1911-2001), Eric Frank Russell (1905-1978), E.C. Tubb (1919-2010), and John Wyndham (1903-1969). All but Arthur C. Clarke were also in Weird Tales, and almost all had their stories published in that magazine after World War II. I sense a pattern.

William Frederick Joseph Temple, called "Bill," was born on March 9, 1914, in Woolwich, England. He became a clerk on the London Stock Exchange at age sixteen. During the 1930s, he was involved with science fiction fandom in his native country as a member of the Science Fiction Association (SFA) and the British Interplanetary Society. He served as chair of the Writer's Circle for SFA and on the editorial staff of its publication Novae Terrae. He was also editor of the Bulletin of the British Interplanetary Society. Living in London, Temple shared an apartment (or flat) with fellow fans Arthur C. Clarke and Maurice K. Hanson (1918-1981). He wrote about his experience in Bachelor Flat, which was finally published in 2000 as 88 Gray's Inn Road: A Living-Space Odyssey, and Other Stories.

Temple's first professional story was "The Kosso," published in the book Thrills: A Collection of Uneasy Tales (1935). He had dozens more stories and letters in science fiction magazines and fanzines from 1937 to 1978, though his output dropped off considerably after about 1959. Temple is probably most well known for his novel Four-Sided Triangle (1949), originally the short story "The 4-Sided Triangle" in Amazing Stories, November 1949, and adapted to a British film in 1953. Temple's lone story for Weird Tales was the somewhat similarly titled "The Triangle of Terror" from May 1950 and reprinted in the Winter issue, 1985. By the way, Four-Sided Triangle had a twisted road to publication. Temple worked on the novel version of his story while serving in the British army during World War II. His manuscript was lost or destroyed not once but twice in battle, the first time at Takrouna, Tunisia, the second at the Battle of Anzio. Temple finished his novel in the Alps after the war and submitted it to four different publishers before it was finally accepted.

Temple married Joan Gertrude Nellie Streeton (1917-?) in September 1939. They had three children, Peter Temple, who died as a child, Anne Katherine Temple Patrizio (1940-2019), and Cliff Temple (1947-1994), who died by suicide after being unjustifiably smeared. William F.J. Temple died on July 15, 1989, in Folkestone, England, at age seventy-five.

William F. Temple's Story in Weird Tales
"The Triangle of Terror" (May 1950; reprinted Winter 1985)

Further Reading
There are entries on William F. Temple in:

• The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
• The FictionMags Index
• The Internet Movie Database
• The Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Wikipedia

"The 4-Sided Triangle" was originally in Amazing Stories in November 1939. The theme of the illustration is the ever-popular Woman-in-a-Test-Tube. The artist was H.W. McCauley.

Temple's story/novel has been reprinted again and again, as in this Italian edition with cover art by C. Caesar. Richard Shaver might have had something to say about the tero in the title.

I like to show foreign-language editions of works originally in English. Here is a Spanish edition of The Three Suns of Amara by William F. Temple, originally from 1962. I don't know the name of the artist.

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Brandon Fleming (1889-1970)

Charles Brandon Raincock Fleming

Journalist, Author, Playwright, Screenwriter, Producer
Born April 27, 1889, Streatham, Surrey, England
Died October 1970, Kensington, Greater London, England

Charles Brandon Raincock Fleming, known as Brandon Fleming, was born on April 27, 1889, in Streatham, Surrey, England. In the census of 1911 he was head of his household, which included his widowed mother, and employed as a freelance journalist. He had already begun by then signing his name as Brandon Fleming.

Fleming wrote dozens of short stories published from 1910 to 1941 in The Blue Magazine, The Corner Magazine, Detective Fiction Weekly, The Novel Magazine, Pearson's Magazine, The Red Magazine, The Story-Teller, The Strand Magazine, and other titles. He had just one story in Weird Tales, "The Ruby," from January 1933. That story had previously been printed in The Grand Magazine #332, dated October 1932. "The Ruby" is the only story by Brandon Fleming listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. He may have written others, but it would take a reading of many British pulp magazines and story magazines to find out. This might be a job for someone located closer to the source.

Brandon Fleming was also a playwright, screenwriter, and film producer. He wrote the source material and/or screenplays for thirteen movies, from The Eleventh Commandment (1924) to Music and Millions (1936). The Internet Movie Database has more than one Brandon Fleming in its lists of credits. A second of these Brandons wrote and produced movies that were released between 1954 and 1963, including a horror movie called The Woman Eater (1958), which might be added to the Botanical Fiction Database. I'm pretty sure these were the same Brandon because Brandon Fleming the magazine writer had a story called "The Flaw" in Detective Fiction Weekly (Mar. 19, 1932), and Brandon Fleming the screenwriter wrote the scenario for a crime film called The Flaw, released in 1955.

The fact that Brandon Fleming's credits ended in 1941 and didn't pick up again until 1954 makes me think he was engaged in the war effort, possibly afterwards in government service or journalism. In any case, Brandon Fleming lived a long life and died fifty-one years ago this month, in October 1970, in Kensington, Greater London, England. He was eighty-one years old.

Brandon Fleming's Story in Weird Tales
"The Ruby" (Jan. 1933; originally in The Grand Magazine #332, Oct. 1932)

Further Reading
None that I can find, although a search for back issues posted to the Internet might yield some of his stories. Also, Fleming's stories are listed on The FictionMags Index, an invaluable source for fans of pulp fiction.

The Story-Teller, a British magazine, with Brandon Fleming's name on the cover, September 1927.

A poster or lobby card for The Woman Eater, released in 1958 with a screenplay by Brandon Fleming. The coconut-half claws of the tree-monster remind me of the claws of the creatures created by H.P. Lovecraft for "The Shadow Out of Time," the cover story of Astounding Stories, June 1936. You can see similar images in my blog entry called "Trees and Other Plants on the Cover of Weird Tales," dated February 11, 2014, by clicking here.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Roberto Quaglia (b. 1962)

Author, Photographer, Politician, Science Fiction Fan
Born 1962, Italy

Late last year, a reader named Simone Fazzi let me know that there was another Italian writer published in Weird Tales after Giovanni Magherini Graziani. I have stayed away from the Weird Tales issued after the Bellerophon issues of 1984-1985, but I'll make an exception here for an author from a paese meraviglioso. I would like to say grazie to Signor Fazzi for bringing him to my attention.

Roberto Quaglia was born in Italy in 1962. I don't know the particular date or place, but from 1995 to 1997, he was a councilor in Genova. His stories and other works are listed on The Internet Speculative Fiction Database, while a brief, incomplete, wholly inadequate, and typically Wikipedian biography is shown on Wikipedia. With British science fiction writer Ian Watson (b. 1943), Signor Quaglia contributed one story, "The Grave of My Beloved," to Weird Tales, to the March-April issue of 2006. That story is part of the "My Beloved" series, which were collected in The Beloved of My Beloved (2009, with Ian Watson). Signor Quaglia is also the author of the novel Paradoxine: The Adventures of James Vagabond (2009) and a number of works of non-fiction. He has been active in science fiction circles in Europe.

Roberto Quaglia's Story in Weird Tales

"The Grave of My Beloved" with Ian Watson (Mar.-Apr. 2006)

Further Reading
Roberto Quaglia's website: http://www.robertoquaglia.com/
And his biography on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Quaglia

Roberto Quaglia

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Charles Henry Mackintosh (1885-?)

Author, Poet, Editor, Advertising Man, Public Speaker
Born March 4, 1885, England
Died February 16, 1947, Daytona Beach, Florida

A man named Charles Henry Mackintosh wrote for Weird Tales and another man named Charles Henry Mackintosh was an Anglo-Irish preacher of the nineteenth century. They were two and not one, though the second (chronologically) was likely named for the first. The first Charles Henry Mackintosh was born in Ireland in 1820 and died in England in 1896. The second was born on March 4, 1885, in England and died on February 16, 1947, in Daytona Beach, Florida. That Charles Henry Mackintosh arrived in the United States in 1907 and lived in Duluth, Minnesota, from about 1909 to about 1917. When he filled out his draft card in September 1918, he was living in Washington, D.C., and working as an editor for the Federal government. (A contemporary article says that he came from the "northwest" to work in the nation's capitol. I guess if you live on the eastern edge of the continent, Duluth is in the northwest.) I believe Mackintosh's work was for a publication called Four Minute Men News, of which he is known to have been editor. He was also chairman of the Four Minute Men organization. 

The Four Minute Men is new to me. I had never heard of it before and I had to read up on it in order to write about it here. And I had to translate a German-language Wikipedia page to do it. (Sometimes the Internet reminds me of the pterodactyls on The Flintstones, chiseling out words on stone tablets. That's how primitive the thing is.) Anyway, the Four Minute Men was a volunteer organization of speakers who worked for the Committee on Public Information, more or less a propaganda arm of the U.S. government, and who spoke on the war effort during the four minutes it took to change reels in the nation's movie houses. Charlie Chaplin was probably the most famous four-minute man. Mackintosh's work for the organization probably lasted for as long as the Four Minute Men lasted. If I read the German Wikipedia page correctly, the last talk took place on Christmas Eve 1918 with a tribute to the Allies who had prevailed in the Great War.

Charles Henry Mackintosh did all that work for a country not yet his own: he became a naturalized citizen on September 21, 1920, in Illinois. He lived in Chicago in the 1920s, and in Daytona Beach, Florida, in the 1930s and '40s. He seems to have called Honolulu home for a while as well. While in Duluth, he was chairman of the Stewart-Mackintosh Company. Upon returning to civilian life after the war, he served as president of the Direct Mail Advertising Association, president of the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World, and general sales and advertising counsel for Lasalle Extension University. In those capacities, he toured the country giving public addresses. He seems to have been a man made for the go-get-'em attitude of the 1920s.

Mackintosh was also a writer. In addition to four stories and letter in Weird Tales, he wrote the following (I assume these all to have been the work of the same man):

• "Beauty Must Be Seen to Be Qualified" (poem) in Munsey’s Magazine (July 1911)
• " 'Little Laughter-Wrinkles' " (poem) in Munsey’s Magazine (Nov. 1911)
• "Roses" (poem) in The Cavalier (May 4, 1912)
• "The Greater Love" (poem) in Munsey’s Magazine (Aug. 1912)
• "To My Typewriter" (poem) in Munsey’s Magazine (Dec. 1911)
• "Trade" (poem) in the Atlanta Constitution (Jan. 29, 1922)
• "I Looked on Life" (poem) in Argosy All-Story Weekly (July 14, 1923)
• On Human Egoism (non-fiction book) (1935)
• "Men on the Morning Star" (short story) in Super Science Stories (Sept. 1940)

His story "Guardians of the Guavas," from Weird Tales, September 1930, was reprinted in At Dead of Night, edited by Christine Campbell Thomson (aka Flavia Richardson) and published in 1931.

Charles Henry MacKintosh died on February 16, 1947, in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Charles Henry Mackintosh's Stories and Letter in Weird Tales
"Malchior Makes Magic" (May 1928)
"Guardians of the Guavas" (Sept. 1930)
"Death in Twenty Minutes" (Jan. 1935)
Letter to "The Eyrie" (Feb. 1937)
"The Eyes of Ustad Isa" (Sept. 1938)

Further Reading

I didn't find much on Mackintosh except for lots of articles about his public appearances, but keep looking. Maybe you'll find more than I did.

Updated on November 14, 2018.
Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Lady Eleanor Smith (1902-1945)

Eleanor Furneaux Smith
Author, Reporter, Reviewer, Publicist, Circus Fan
Born August 7, 1902, Birkenhead, Merseyside, England
Died October 20, 1945, Westminster, England

In the classic screwball comedy of the 1930s and '40s, a wild or headstrong young woman, often an upper-class young woman, takes everything and everybody around her by storm. I don't know the origins of the screwball comedy heroine, but it seems likely that she was the younger sister of the 1920s Flapper, who was probably, in turn, the daughter of the more subdued Gibson Girl from the previous generation. The Gibson Girl, the Flapper, the heroine of the screwball comedy--all were from what is perhaps a unique breed, the liberated American woman.

Britain had its own breed of wild and liberated women, and for a while they ran with wild (though often feminized) men. Observers of the British cultural scene of the 1920s called them "Bright Young Things," and writer Ben Johnson describes them with a string of epithets:

Attention-seeking, flamboyant, decadent, rebellious, promiscuous, irresponsible, outrageous and glamorous . . . . (1)

For a decade or more, from the end of the Great War to the beginning years of the Great Depression, they held wild parties, drank like fish, tooled around town and country in their roadsters, went on scavenger hunts, engaged in drug use, and carried on sexual affairs with abandon. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay, they burned their candles at both ends. But then, according to Mr. Johnson (no pun intended), it all gave out with the excesses of a Masque-of-the-Red-Death-type party called the Red and White Ball, held in November 1931. Maybe, too, the Bright Young Things weren't so young anymore. And maybe their brightness came from a fast-burning and all-consuming flame.

Lady Eleanor Smith was one of them. Born Eleanor Furneaux Smith on August 7, 1902, she was the daughter of Frederick Edwin Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (1872-1930), and Margaret Eleanor Furneaux, daughter of a classical scholar. Like his daughter after him, F.E. Smith was a hard liver--and it proved hard on his liver, for he died of the effects of cirrhosis at age fifty-eight after many decades of heavy imbibing. Two pieces of trivia about him: First, he successfully defended Ethel le Neve, mistress of bug-eyed murderer Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, whose story was a weird tale if ever there was one. Second, F.E. Smith published a utopian novel, The World in 2030 A.D., in 1930, the year of his death.

Lady Eleanor Smith attended day school in Queen's Gate with two other Bright Young Things, Zita and Teresa, the Jungman Sisters. She didn't like school and in fact didn't seem to like strictures of any kind. The whole mess of them, all the Bright Young Things, inspired Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies, published in the same year as The World in 2030 A.D. and only a year short of the Red and White Ball. By that time, Lady Eleanor Smith had already begun delving into her twin obsessions, both of which are about performers and outsiders, this in a woman who was--as an early celebrity--something of a performer and--as an aristocrat--an insider. I wonder now whether that first generation of postwar upper crust would have seen themselves as insiders, or if they, as aristocrats tend to do, sought to escape from their insular and bored lives by literal and figurative slumming, of descending into the low life of the common people.

So what were Lady Eleanor's obsessions? Well, like the early John Irving with his bears, wrestling, and Vienna, she wrote again and again of Gypsies and circuses. Eleanor believed she had Gypsy blood and she went into the field to be among the people with whom she identified. She also worked as a publicist for circus companies. In 1934, she became the first president of the Circus Fans Association (later the Circus Friends Association). Even by then, Lady Eleanor Smith had been writing about Gypsies and circuses--dancers, too--for several years, perhaps by no coincidence at all as she approached age thirty and as her father approached his end. Her books and articles include the following:

• Red Wagon (1930)
• Flamenco (1931)
• Ballerina (1932)
• Satan's Circus and Other Stories (1932)
• "The Gypsies of Roumania" in The Spectator (Dec. 2, 1932)
• Christmas Tree (1933 or 1934)
• Romany (1935)
• Tzigane (1935)
• Portrait of a Lady (1936)
• The Spanish House (1938)
• Life's a Circus: The Reminiscences of Lady Eleanor Smith (1939)
• Lovers' Meeting (1940)
• The Man in Grey (1941 or 1942)
• Caravan: A Romantic Novel (1942 or 1943)
• The Magic Lantern (1944 or 1945)
• British Circus Life (1948)

Many of those books were adapted to the silver screen. Look for Lady Eleanor in The Internet Movie Database.

In 1932, Gollancz published her collection Satan's Circus and Other Stories. The stories from that book:

• "Candlelight"
• "Lyceum"
• "Mrs. Raeburn's Waxwork"
• "One O'Clock"
• "Portrait of a Strong Man"
• "Satan's Circus"
• "Sweet Spanish Ladies"
• "Tamar"
• "The Brothers"
• "The Hurdy-Gurdy"

In 1934, Bobbs-Merrill reprinted Satan's Circus for American readers and included a new story, "Whittington's Cat." The title story, "Satan's Circus," was printed in Weird Tales in October 1931. Lady Eleanor had another genre story, "No Ships Pass," in the 1947 collection Travelers in Time, and a fairy tale, "The Little Mermaid," in The Fairies Return, or, New Tales for Old by Several Hands (1934).

In the end, time and death do us all in, even Bright Young Things. Lady Eleanor Furneaux Smith, barely into middle age, died on October 20, 1945, in Westminster, England. She was only forty-three years old.

Lady Eleanor Smith's Story in Weird Tales
"Satan's Circus" (Oct. 1931)

Further Reading
There is plenty to read about Lady Eleanor Smith on line and in print. You might start with:

• "A Good Turn," review of Life's a Circus: The Reminiscences of Lady Eleanor Smith in The Tablet: The International Catholic News Weekly, August 5, 1939, here.
• Lady Eleanor Smith: A Memoir by Lord Birkenhead (1953)

Note

(1) Quote from "Bright Young Things" by Ben Johnson on the website Historic UK (undated), here.

Lady Eleanor Furneaux Smith (1920), from the National Portrait Gallery.

Update (Mar. 22, 2019): "No Ships Pass" by Lady Eleanor Smith was also in The Haunted Dancers, edited by Charles Birkin and published by Paperback Library in 1967. The cover artist was Victor Kalin. The Haunted Dancers was a reprint of a British edition, The Tandem Book of Ghost Stories, published in 1965 with a far less lurid, thus less fun, cover. Thanks to the anonymous commenter (below) for the additional information.

Updated January 5, 2021.

Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Dorothea Gibbons (1902-1989)

Stella Dorothea Gibbons
Author, Journalist, Poet
Born January 5, 1902, London, England
Died December 19, 1989, London, England

I assume that Dorothea Gibbons was the well-known British author Stella Dorothea Gibbons, in which case I'll offer a few facts and then refer you to her biography on other websites, including Wikipedia. Stella was born on January 5, 1902, in London and was educated at home, at the North London Collegiate School, and at University College, London. After receiving her diploma in 1923, she went to work for British United Press, later for the London Evening Standard and The Lady. She wrote verse, short stories, book reviews, novels, and a children's book. (Some of her stories have supernatural elements.) Her 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm won Stella Gibbons her fame, which remains today, after more than a quarter-century after her death.

So here's the part that doesn't fit: By the early 1950s, Stella Gibbons was the renowned author of more than a dozen books. Why would she write for a low-budget and rapidly declining American pulp (or digest-sized) magazine like Weird Tales? I have two suppositions and one slight bit of evidence. First, suppose that Dorothea Gibbons' three stories for Weird Tales were reprints of earlier works by Stella Gibbons or extracts from her novels and not original to the magazine at all. Second, suppose that she and Dorothy McIlwraith, the editor of the magazine, were in contact, Dorothy being a Canadian of Scottish extraction who had an interest in the literature of her family's homeland, especially literature by women. Third, as evidence, consider that the British author and artist Reggie Oliver (b. 1952) wrote an essay called "Stella Gibbons, a Writer and the Supernatural," published in his book Madder Mysteries in 2009. I don't know what that essay holds, as I have not read it, but maybe the mystery of Dorothea Gibbons can easily be solved by consulting it. I hope someone will do that and let us all know.

Dorothea Gibbons' Stories in Weird Tales
"The Crying Child" (Nov. 1953)
"The Lily Maid" (Mar. 1954)
"The Green Huntsman" (July 1954)

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Oscar Cook (1888-1952)

Richard Martin Oscar Cook
Civil Servant, Author, Editor, Publisher, Actor, Playwright, Businessman
Born March 17, 1888, Tollington Park, Islington, Middlesex, England
Died February 23, 1952, Kensington, London, England

On May 14, 2016, I wrote about Christine Campbell Thomson, editor of the Not at Night series of weird tales in hardback. Today I'll write a little on her first husband. He was born Richard Martin Oscar Cook on March 17, 1888, in Tollington Park, Islington, England. From 1911 to 1919, Cook served in the British civil service in North Borneo. By 1920, he was back in his home country. In the early 1920s, he wrote about his experiences in Borneo. In the process of having his book published, Cook met Christine Campbell Thomson (1897-1985), a literary agent and editor. She had the book placed with the house of Hurst & Blackett, and it was published in August 1924 as Borneo: The Stealer of Hearts. Cook had still more stories of Borneo published in The Blue Magazine, Hutchinson’s Adventure-Story Magazine, Hutchinson’s Mystery-Story Magazine, and The Novel Magazine. He and Christine were married on September 30, 1924, in London and divorced more than a decade later, in 1937 or 1938.

I don't suppose that anyone now knows what relationship Christine Campbell Thomson had with Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940. Suffice it to say that of the 170 stories published in the Not at Night series, 100 came from Weird Tales; that the Not at Night series (1925-1937) was published during the years that Wright was still editor and Weird Tales was still based either in Indianapolis or Chicago (1924-1938) and had not been sold to Short Stories, Inc., or had moved to New York City; and that Christine secured for Wright a number of stories by British authors--including herself and her husband--for publication in Weird Tales. I wonder if she was on the lookout for stories by Continental authors as well and whether that's how certain stories by such authors ended up in the pages of the American magazine. I wonder, too, if she ever traveled to the United States, and if so, if she ever met her American counterpart.

Speaking of Oscar Cook's short stories, here's a list:

Short Stories

• "Golden Lilies" in Hutchinson's Adventure-Story Magazine (Sept. 1922; reprinted in Keep On The Light, 1933; More Not At Night, 1961, 1963; Never at Night, 1972).

• "Si Urag of the Tail" in Hutchinson's Adventure-Story Magazine (Jan. 1923; reprinted in Weird Tales, July 1926; You'll Need a Night Light, 1927; A Century of Creepy Stories, 1934; 50 Strangest Stories Ever Told, 1937; Still Not At Night, 1962; Startling Mystery Stories, Spring 1967; Only By Daylight, 1972).

• "On the Highway" in Weird Tales, Jan. 1925.

• "The Creature of Man" in Hutchinson's Mystery-Story Magazine (Apr. 1925; reprinted in Weird Tales, Nov. 1926; reprinted as "Dog Death" in Terror By Night, 1934).

• "The Great White Fear" in Hutchinson's Adventure-Story Magazine (June 1925; reprinted in Grim Death, 1932; A Century of Creepy Stories, 1934).

• "The Sacred Jars" in Weird Tales (Mar. 1927; reprinted as "When Glister Walks" in Gruesome Cargoes, July 1928; A Century of Creepy Stories, 1934; 50 Strangest Stories Ever Told, 1937; Not At Night: Tales That Freeze The Blood, 1960, 1962).

• "Piecemeal" in By Daylight Only (Oct. 1929; reprinted in Weird Tales, Feb. 1930; Not At Night Omnibus, 1937; The Second Pan Book of Horror Stories, 1960).

• "Boomerang" in Switch on the Light (1931; reprinted in A Century of Creepy Stories, 1934; The Second Pan Book of Horror Stories, 1960).

• "His Beautiful Hands" in At Dead of Night (1931; reprinted in Not At Night Omnibus, 1937; The Pan Book of Horror Stories, 1959).

• "The Crimson Head-Dress" in Nightmare By Daylight (1936).

His story "Boomerang," retitled "The Caterpillar," was adapted to television in Rod Serling's Night Gallery and broadcast on March 1, 1972. Cook was also author of the novel The Seventh Wave (1926) translated into Dutch as Gij zult niet.

Oscar Cook died on February 23, 1952, in Kensington, England, at age sixty-three.

Oscar Cook's Stories in Weird Tales

See the list of short stories above.

Further Reading

See Douglas A. Anderson's blog Lesser-Known Writers for April 3, 2012, here.

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley