"The City in the Sea" by Christopher Golden & Mike Mignola-Part Three

The self-references and meta-references continue:

We get a little of Hellboy's backstory in "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story." One sentence stands out to me:

And there had been countless hours reading pulp magazines and comic books on the floor of Professor Bruttenholm's office, or his study at home. [Emphasis added.] (p. 6, col. 2)

I think that sentence describes not Hellboy so much as many of the authors represented in this issue, as well as the editor who recruited them and whatever number of readers Weird Tales #367 might have had in its year (or less) in print. Things in their experience that are left out of Hellboy's are countless hours of watching TV and playing video games. If there is a stepping-down in our culture, it has reached a point where people learn about storytelling not by reading or even watching stories unfold on screen but by playing video games.

* * *

Decades and decades ago, a large part of American literature became not only by writers but, to the point, about writers and for writers. A good example of this is Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, from 1972, a novel by a novelist about a novelist writing a novel, and in which most of the action in the novel takes place in the head of the novelist McMurtry as he writes about his fictional novelist. In other words, it's not set authentically in a fictionalized real world but inauthentically inside a real-world novelist's head. In one sentence, the fictional novelist gets in his car, and in practically the next, he arrives at his destination hundreds of miles away. Didn't anything happen in the in-between? Didn't he do any living or thinking or seeing on his trip? Or did Scotty just beam him to where he was going inside of his car? Actually it was the real-world novelist who did this because he needed his fictional novelist to get from one place to the next as quickly as possible and without event. Things happen this way in novels, less often in real life. I like better what happens in The Charisma Campaigns by Jack Matthews, also from 1972, in which a short car trip--and the protagonist's story--is badly interrupted and the novel takes a drastic turn towards the end. This is more true to life. Matthews' protagonist, by the way, is a used car salesman, even if he writes imaginary newspaper headlines in his head. I guess that makes them literally headlines.

Anyway again, the same thing can be said now of genre fiction, at least in the case of Weird Tales #367. It's one thing to write about writing, writers, and stories in an essay in "The Eyrie." That's what essays are for. (I have just done a little name-dropping myself.) It's quite another to say that your main character reads pulp magazines and comic books and then write your story as if that's all you yourself have ever read, Edgar Allan Poe notwithstanding. Like I said, one thing missing from Hellboy's upbringing is countless hours of watching TV shows and playing video games. Poor Hellboy. Don't worry, though. Authors, editors, readers, and fans of today have more than made up for what he missed, and it all shows in what they create, what they prefer to watch and read, and how they spend their time.

* * *

In addition to Poe, there are references in "The City in the Sea" to:

• Lemuria, a pseudoscientific, pseudo-historical, or pseudo-religious appropriation by Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophists of a previously hypothesized lost continent.

• Pangea, a supercontinent of the distant past, in other words, another lost continent.

• Hyperborea, a place in ancient Greek myth and another that has been appropriated by esoteric thinkers and writers. It isn't supposed to have been a continent (I don't think), but it was and is lost.

• Mu, a mythical lost continent that also has a place in esoteric thought.

• Vril, a type of energy and an overt fiction created by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, taken to be nonfictional by some people who can be described pretty well, I think, as crackpots. Writing like Vril is real drags down your story, I think. If your characters have a brain in their heads, they should know that Vril and things like it are not real, that they exist in the real world only as crackpot ideas and hoaxes.

• Thoth, an ancient Egyptian god used in twentieth- and twenty first-century popular culture. His name is inside of Lovecraft's name for his god Yog-Sothoth and his own name for what is called "the Cthulhu Mythos," that is, Yog-Sothothery.

That's a list. Not a very long one, but still a list. It reminds me of the listing that August Derleth did in The Lurker at the Threshold (1946).

As you can see, some of these references are to cities or civilizations situated on island continents or surrounded by seas, just as in Poe's original poem "The City in the Sea." You could call all of this background information. Alternatively, you could call it name-dropping, a series of meta-references, or a lot of inside information. The problem is that all of these words and concepts have been used and overused to a point where they don't mean very much, if anything, any more. Their use could be an attempt to invoke something larger and more powerful than themselves, or to evoke thoughts and feelings in the reader. Words do of course have that kind of power. But these words have lost their power and their mystique. We don't need grimoires and dusty, buckled tomes at hand in order to read about obscure and esoteric subjects. We all have access to Wikipedia now. The mystique is gone. The balloon has been deflated. And all of it is old, so old, after we were promised new things.

* * *

I don't think name-dropping (or listing) works very well in fiction. When I read something like this:

On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. 

it doesn't mean much to me. (At least the artist's names are euphonic.) I guess those names are supposed to provide a kind of shorthand imagery. They are supposed to move us, or to hint at some esoteric, inside information held by the author in all of his erudition. But what if we are unfamiliar with the artists and their work? I think a better use of the author's limited word count would have been to tell us what he wanted us to envision or imagine rather than relying on name-dropping for his effect. The quote by the way is from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, from Weird Tales, February 1928.

* * *

There are also in "The City in the Sea" indirect references or similarities to other works of weird fiction or fantasy, including She, A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard (1887); "The Girl in the Gem," a Brak the Barbarian story by John Jakes, first in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (Jan. 1965); and "Claimed!" by Francis Stevens in Argosy (three-part serial, March 6-20, 1920). As for the statuette, it reminds me of the Maltese Falcon, which also arrives wrapped as a package. Or maybe it's like the weird obelisk on the cover of the Led Zeppelin album Presence. If they keep gazing at it, those nice people on the cover are going to be transported to that awful City in the Sea.

* * *

You might think that I don't like "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story." Sorry for sounding cranky and complainy. It's actually a story one can enjoy, I think, with a good setup and some vivid imagery. The prose is good and clean, meaning unencumbered and not clunky (there is at least one vulgarity, though), which is often a wonder in our world of today. And I didn't pick up on any twenty-first century inanities. Thank God. I think "The City in the Sea" suffers, though, from being unsustained or not fully developed. It moves too quickly from one thing to the next and then back again without much of an explanation of why they're happening and what it could all mean. But I'm not sure that's the fault of the authors. That lack of full development appears to be a feature of Weird Tales #367. I'm not sure why there couldn't have been more content in this issue. There's room for it, but the whole thing seems to have been cut short for some reason. Also, we know that because Hellboy is a series character, nothing extremely bad or life-changing can happen to him. He has to come through his experience unscathed, with all of his sanity points still on the board and ready for his next adventure.

Finally, being a comic book artist myself, I can't complain about reading a prose story about a comic book character. This kind of thing can actually work. (I have done it myself. I hope it can work.) See for example The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker by Otto Binder, from 1967. It's not great literature, but it works. On the other hand, it has to be handled and developed in just the right way. The appearance of a comic book character in Weird Tales is something new, even if the character is not and the type of story in which he appears is not, even if the inspiration for the story is more than 175 years old. Finally, finally, I'm not sure that a comic book story, which is what this is, should take the lead over real prose fiction that does not resort or refer to any other work or form but instead stands alone.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The City in the Sea" by Christopher Golden & Mike Mignola-Part Two

The authors of "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story" were obviously inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and his works, but they have also drawn from other sources. You will encounter here some very familiar conventions of gothic fiction and weird fiction: the title character arrives at a creaky and dusty old house where something mysterious has happened, and so on. You could call these things tropes or clichés and no one could or should argue with you. Many of these conventions or tropes are indirect, harmless, and not too bothersome or distracting. You might even find them comforting. Conventions and tropes are, after all, an appeal to the child in the reader to whom one reads a story or shows a video, the child who says "Read it again" or "Play it again" after it is finished. Children--and maybe all of us--want what is familiar to us. Repetition is comforting. Like a prayer, a chant, or a mantra, it soothes us and relieves us of our fear and anxiety. Again and again, the story turns out the same. Again and again, all will be well in the end.

But there are also some self-references and meta-references in "The City in the Sea" that are more distracting, and some that are a stepping-down, too. They make it so the story can't stand on its own. The main character is the most obvious example of this lack of stand-alone ability. Hellboy has been in prose before, but he is really just a comic book character. If you want to fully understand this story, you have to know something more about him and his universe, going back decades in another form. Related to that, "The City in the Sea" will never be anthologized because it's basically an issue of a comic book or an episode of a TV series. It uses and relies on what has gone before and what will be used again in future stories. The character and his universe are the important parts, the story itself less so. And what is really at stake here? Hellboy will go on. He has to. He has to appear in the next episode just as if nothing happened in this one.

* * *

On their surface, self-references and meta-references begin in "The City in the Sea" with Poe, but they actually begin on the cover, on the title page, and in the subtitle, for that is where you will find Hellboy. Hellboy is of course the creation of an artist and a fictional character, but he is also a branded product. Don't ask who or what he is. You're supposed to know already. You're supposed to have that inside information in your possession before you begin. If you don't, you won't get much of an explanation inside. You'll have to look elsewhere for what's missing from your experience as a consumer of the pop-cultural products of twenty first-century America. Or twentieth actually, because Hellboy is really that old. Should I point out that Hellboy is as old now as Weird Tales was in 1954 when it reached its end after thirty-one years in print? This after we were promised something new in "The Eyrie." 

* * * 

Again, in addition to being an artistic creation, Hellboy is a recognized brandname and a successful commercial product. That's the dream of every artist, I guess, to create something that proves itself a moneymaker. I wouldn't object if one of my creations took off that way. Anyway, you could say that Weird Tales #367 is just another venue for Hellboy, in addition to those that include comic books, movies, animated cartoons, video games, and I'm sure other kinds of media and merchandise. And you could say that in addition to being branded Cosmic Horror, this issue is branded Hellboy. So a double brand. That's okay I guess. If you're the publisher or editor, you should take into account the readers' tastes and give them what they want or what you think they want. You should also give them things they don't yet know they want. After all, what precedent was there for Lovecraftian horror before there were horror stories written by Lovecraft? Anyway, if you look at things from the publisher's and editor's points of view, this all makes sense, for why take a chance with an unknown quantity when you can use a brandname that has already proved itself a mover of merchandise?

In any case, there is an implication here that these self-references, meta-references, inside information, and use of brands and brandnames are meant for insiders. If you're an outsider, well, too bad for you. Remember that Lovecraft wrote a story called "The Outsider," one that will forever appeal to people who feel themselves to be like his eponymous character. Weird Tales in its original incarnation had the same kind of appeal, and it had broad appeal, too, not only across this great country but also in Canada, Great Britain, and other places far from its big-city American home. That appeal also went from top to bottom, from bankers, composers, theater directors, medical doctors, and university staff and faculty; to teachers, archaeologists, anthropologists, actors, writers, and psychologists; to military men, industrial workers, farmhands, dwellers in shacks, and schoolchildren. Maybe people like these are no longer the target readership. That would be a shame if it were true. Maybe the Cosmic Horror Issue should have been called instead the Insider Issue.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

"The City in the Sea" by Christopher Golden & Mike Mignola-Part One

Born in Berkeley, California, in 1960, Mike Mignola is a comic book artist and writer. He has also worked as an illustrator, designer, and artist in the movie business. His co-author on "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story," Christopher Golden, was born in 1967 in Massachusetts. He is a novelist, editor, and scriptwriter for animated cartoons, comic books, and at least one movie, a Hellboy movie in fact. Among his credits are TV tie-in books and prose adaptations of comic book characters. Mike Mignola is one of his co-authors. So is Tim Lebbon, who also has a story in Weird Tales #367. Already we can see a pattern developing in the Cosmic Horror Issue.

The cover illustration for Weird Tales #367, dated 2022, is by Mike Mignola. The same drawing is in the interior as a full-page illustration on the title page of the story. There are also pieces of it used more or less as spot drawings or filler, and so it does triple duty. Although there have been comic book-like covers before in Weird Tales, I think this is the first that is overtly in that style and that features a comic book character. As far as I know, this is also the first story ever in Weird Tales adapted from a comic book. So already there are new things here, but only to Weird Tales, for Hellboy has been in comic books since 1993. He has also been in movies, animated cartoons, and video games. Maybe these are firsts, too: Hellboy may be the first character from each of these media or forms to appear in the magazine. On the other hand, all are just adaptations from Hellboy's original comic book appearances. Maybe we can expect to see soon a story in Weird Tales adapted directly from a TV show or movie with no other origins and no stops in between.

The inside information in "The City in the Sea" begins with the main character himself. If you have never read Hellboy comic books or seen him on screen, you might not know who or what he is and you probably know nothing at all about his origins or purpose. There isn't even a very good description of him in his own story. If you want to know what he looks like, see the illustration. In this way, Hellboy continues to work as a comic book character in that, in this story, the words and pictures must be taken together if we are to understand fully what's going on. The good thing in reading it is that you can get by without knowing very much about the main character. That's partly because the authors carefully observe the conventions and employ the trappings of genre fiction in their storytelling. The character may be unknown to you, but you have seen everything else here before. Maybe we can call this institutional weird fiction.

There is in "The City in the Sea" a mystery. A man is missing, an old scholar who lives in an old house in an old town somewhere in America at some indeterminate time in the past or present. He has a lone housekeeper, who explains that he has vanished after having received a mysterious package. It's clear that Hellboy is an investigator, like Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and hundreds of other detectives--occult or not--born since then. He finds that the package contains a statuette of a woman. In gazing upon it, Hellboy is transported into an otherworldly vision or experience, an encounter with the missing man, who has preceded him on his journey, and what he calls the Black Goddess, alive but dealing death in the city of the title. There is narration of other, strange times and places, of vast, mysterious, and possibly menacing realms. This is a kind of crossing-over that is almost diagnostic of weird fiction, except that Hellboy is already a supernatural being. There really isn't any crossing-over. He has seen and experienced things like this before. An encounter with the supernatural can mean very little to him, nor can it have much effect. "The City in the Sea" isn't a very long story, and so Hellboy returns soon enough to the real world, alone, to where he was sitting in the old man's study. He may have gained some kind of knowledge or insight, but as proof of the lack of effect upon him, his final thought is of his hunger: he has his eye on a diner down the street.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales, October 1923

The October 1923 issue of Weird Tales has fourteen stories, three features, and five uncredited non-fiction fillers. The features are "The Eyrie," "The Cauldron," and "Weird Crimes." The cover story is the first part of a two-part serial called "The Amazing Adventure of Joe Scranton" by Effie W. Fifield. The cover art was by R.M. Mally and all of the interior illustrations by William F. Heitman. Firsts include the first stories in Weird Tales by Seabury Quinn, H.P. Lovecraft, and Frank Owen, also the first installment of the feature "Weird Crimes" by Quinn.

• "The Amazing Adventure of Joe Scranton," part one of a two-part serial by Effie W. Fifield (1857-1937).

• "Aged Man Kills Wife, Self and 'Other Woman'," uncredited non-fiction filler.

• "World Ice to Wipe Out Continents," uncredited non-fiction filler.

• "The Phantom Farmhouse" by Seabury Quinn (1889-1969). This was Quinn's first story in Weird Tales. He would go on to write more stories and other pieces in Weird Tales than any other author.

• "Sight Without Eyes," uncredited non-fiction filler.

• "Genoese Riviera Damaged by Waterspout," uncredited non-fiction filler.

• "Dagon" by H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). I recently wrote about this story, Lovecraft's first in "The Unique Magazine," and wondered whether William F. Heitman's drawing was the first published illustration of a story by Lovecraft.

• "The Man Who Owned the World" by Frank Owen (1893-1968). This was Frank Owen's first story for Weird Tales. The title is of course in the now familiar form of "The Man Who . . .".

• "Grey Sleep" by Charles Horn (dates unknown).

• "The People of the Comet," part two of a two-part serial by Austin Hall (1880-1933), a native Californian.

• "The Sign from Heaven" by A. Havdal (dates unknown).

• "The Inn of Dread" by Arthur Edwards Chapman (1898-?).

• "The Hairy Monster" by Neil C. Miller (1898-1975) of Sioux City, Iowa.

• "Devil Manor" by E. B. Jordan (dates unknown).

• "The Case of the Golden Lily" by an Irish-Welsh-English author, Francis D. Grierson (1888-1972). Known for his mystery, crime, and detective stories, Grierson wrote in "The Case of the Golden Lily" of his series character Paul Pry.

• "Bluebeard" by Seabury Quinn, the first in a non-fiction series called "Weird Crimes."

• "Weird Snake Dance of Hopis May Be Tabooed," uncredited non-fiction filler.

• "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension" by Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940). "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimesnion" is an alien invasion story. It appears to have been influenced by Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott (1884), also by recent developments in Einsteinian physics. Wright's aliens are depicted (see below) as small and with pointed ears, not very much different from the so-called gray aliens of today. That makes me think that gray aliens are really just an iteration of the elves, brownies, and other little people of European folklore. Of course I'm not the first person to think that way. Reprinted in The Moon Terror in 1927.

• "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). This was the second reprint of a story by Poe in Weird Tales.

• "After the Storm" by Sarah Harbine Weaver (1880-1965), a writer of Ohio, New York, and California.

• "The Cauldron," conducted by Preston Langley Hickey (1900-1962) in its last installment in the magazine.

• "The Eyrie."

Weird Tales, October 1923, with a cover story, "The Amazing Adventure of Joe Scranton" by Effie W. Fifield and cover art by R.M. Mally.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Dr. Dorp by Otis Adelbert Kline

As far as I can tell, Dr. Dorp was the first series character to appear in Weird Tales magazine. Created by Otis Adelbert Kline, Dr. Dorp was in three stories all together, two in Weird Tales and one in Amazing Stories. Those three stories are:

• "The Phantom Wolfhound" in Weird Tales, June 1923

• "The Malignant Entity" in Weird Tales, May/June/July 1924 (Kline was editor of that issue.)

• "The Radio Ghost" in Amazing Stories, September 1927

"The Malignant Entity" was reprinted four times, in Amazing Stories, June 1926; Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1934; Strange Offspring (American Fiction #10), edited by Benson Herbert and published in 1946 by Utopian Publications Ltd.; and Amazing Stories, February 1966. Although it's a little derivative, "The Malignant Entity" is the best in the series, I think. If any one of them was going to be reprinted, this one was it.

Dr. Dorp is an occult detective. His identifying characteristic is his gray van dyke beard. He might have a personality. If he does, it doesn't show very well in the stories, which include a lot of exposition. Kline's investigator was probably based on a combination of Sherlock Holmes and William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder.

* * *

"The Phantom Wolfhound" was in the issue of June 1923. It opens like "The Weaving Shadows" by W.H. Holmes, which was in Weird Tales in March 1923, with the investigator in his home being visited by a detective and the detective's client. The detective is named Hoyne, whereas Holmes' detective is named Rhyne. So Hoyne in Kline and Rhyne in Holmes. The client is named Ritzky. He is an older man who shares his household with his twelve-year-old orphaned niece. In other words, this is something of an Uncle story. And in other words, the girl is of the right age to bring on some poltergeist activity. (There is a girl in "The Weaving Shadows," too.) Dr. Dorp and Detective Hoyne witness ectoplasm, called "psychoplasm," issuing from her mouth as she sleeps. Dorp takes a sample of the stuff, which is an actual material substance, just as in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," Kline's serial from the March and April issues of "The Unique Magazine."

Dr. Dorp is called a "psychologist" in this story. He is the author of a book called Investigations of Materialization Phenomena. Like Carnacki, he uses mechanical equipment to detect ghosts. Again, as in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," ghosts or spirits are treated as material phenomena. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is referred to in the story, as is Baron Von Schrenk, also known as Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing (1862-1929), a real-life investigator and author of Phenomena of Materialization: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics (1923). Dr. Dorp's title is similar to Baron Von Schrenk's. Both "The Phantom Wolfhound" and Von Schrenk's book were published in 1923.

Professor James Braddock, the uncle in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," is Dr. Dorp's friend and colleague, although he doesn't make an appearance in the story. Like that earlier story, "The Phantom Wolfhound" is set in Chicago. ("The Thing of  Thousand Shapes" is also set near Peoria, Illinois.) There are detailed descriptions of a complex physical environment within the Ritzky home. That's okay, I guess, in a detective story, but descriptions of complex environments don't really make for good prose or good storytelling. James Agee was able to pull it off in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, but then that was a documentary work.

"The Phantom Wolfhound" is, like I said, an Uncle story. As it turns out, the uncle was slowly poisoning his niece so that he could get her fortune. She kills him off with her psychoplasmic hound, which Uncle had shot in life. The hound comes back in death and the niece thereby exacts her revenge and defends herself against impending murder at Uncle's hands. The story ends in all italics.

Dr. Dorp is not like Sherlock Holmes in that he doesn't have a discernible personality. Hoyne acts as his Watson, and the dead Russian wolfhound as something like the Hound of the Baskervilles.

* * *

"The Malignant Entity" was in the triple-sized anniversary issue of May/June/July 1924, edited by Otis Adelbert Kline. It's definitely the better of the two stories. And like the first Dr. Dorp story, it's connected to an earlier story, for "The Malignant Entity" is essentially "Ooze" in the city. (As you know by now, "Ooze," by Anthony M. Rud, was the cover story of the first issue of Weird Tales, March 1923.)

Mr. Evans, a writer, is the narrator of the story. ("The Phantom Wolfhound" is told in the third person.) Chief McGraw is a detective, and there are two Irish police officers, Rooney and Burke. Other characters include a fingerprint expert named Hirsch and the coroner, named Haynes. Haynes was in Kline's earlier story "The Corpse on the Third Slab" (Weird Tales, Aug./Sept. 1923). There is also mention of a dead man named Immune Benny, who "is alleged to have committed numerous crimes, among which were several revolting murders, without ever having been convicted." We don't know it yet, but Benny appears to have been a psychopath. His face shows up at the end of "The Malignant Entity," and the story itself ends, once again, in all italics.

There is another dead man. He was Professor Albert Townsend, who, although he was a professor and although he was named Albert, was not the same man as Professor Albert Randall in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes." And his daughter, named Dorothy, is not the same daughter as in Kline's previous story. Her name is Ruth. Both Dorothy's mother and Ruth's mother are missing in action. Note to all women: never marry a scientist or pseudoscientist engaged in research on the fringes. Yes, you will have a beautiful daughter, but then you will die.

Dr. Dorp says of Professor Albert Townsend: "Who hasn’t heard of him and his queer theories about creating life from inert matter?" After a while, Dorp adds, "He has been working day and night in his effort to prove his theory that a living organism can be created from inorganic matter." Townsend's subject was protoplasm, the stuff that was supposed to have been in the primordial ooze from which all life spontaneously arose. In other words, Townsend was pursuing a pseudoscientific idea held by supposed scientists and science-minded people from the 1800s even unto today. Look where it got him.

In "Ooze," the giant amoeba lives in a pond on the grounds of a backwoods Alabama estate. In "The Malignant Entity," it's in a vat of "heavy albuminous or gelatinous solution" in Townsend's laboratory. In a long and interesting passage, Dr. Dorp postulates:

     "What is life? Broadly defined as we recognize it on this earth, it is a temporary union of mind and matter. There may be, and probably is another kind of life which is simply mind without matter, but we of the material world know it not. To us, mind without matter or matter without mind are equally dead. The moneron [sic] has a mind--a soul--a something that makes it a living individual. Call it what you will. The professor's cell of man-made protoplasm has not. Can you conceive of any possible way in which he could, having reached this stage, create an individual mind or soul, an essence of life that, once united with his cell of protoplasm would form an entity?"

     "It seems impossible," I admitted.

     "So it seems," he replied, "yet it is only on such an hypothesis that I can account for the mysterious deaths of the professor and Officer Rooney."

     "But I don't see how a moneron [sic] or a creature remotely resembling one could kill and completely devour a man in less than two hours," I objected.

     "Nor I," agreed the doctor. "In fact I am of the opinion that, if the professor did succeed in creating life, the result was unlike any creature large or small, now inhabiting the earth--a hideous monster, perhaps, with undreamed of powers and possibilities--an alien organism among billions of other organisms, hating them all because it has nothing in common with them--a malignant entity governed solely by the primitive desire for food and growth with only hatred of and envy for the more fortunate natural creatures around it."

I have speculated before that the psychopathic killer is a blank, that is, a man without a soul. In Dr. Dorp's theorizing, maybe that killer is matter without mind, i.e., without spirit or a soul. The psychopath kills, and so does the giant amoeba or murderous cell in "The Malignant Entity." Being without a soul, it envies and hates those beings that have souls, or an animating spirit. (Remember that anima means "soul" or "spirit.") One of my ideas is that the psychopathic killer wants to know what makes us go, and so he cuts us apart in order to get at what he can only believe is the mechanism beneath the skin. Knowing that he lacks something but not knowing what it is, he is murderously envious and full of hatred for the rest of humanity.

There is a memorable sequence in "The Malignant Entity" in which Dorp and his associates chase the nucleus of the cell around the laboratory like in the old sing-along activity of following the bouncing ball. The nucleus escapes but remains within the building. Described as "plasmic jelly," it consumes a mouse in the basement, and that's where it is finally caught. The nucleus is also described as putting out pseudopods, and at one point it is said to look like a cuttlefish, which is of course a tentacled creature. Now we're back to earlier themes in this series on one hundred years of Weird Tales. In his diary, discovered in a hidden safe, Townsend wrote that his giant amoeba was made of "syntheplasm." Townsend finally brought it to life on September 23 of an unknown year. Maybe that was one hundred and one years ago this month.

In "The Malignant Entity," Otis Adelbert Kline continued in his habit of mixing real people and fictional characters in his stories. In this case, the real-life psychic investigator was Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940). That leads to a broader point, namely, that Kline seemed to have been building a universe of interconnected characters, themes, and concepts, drawing from his own stories but also seemingly inspired by other authors published in Weird Tales. He even has his own grimoires in books written by real-life investigators. If this had been Lovecraft, we might call it a mythos.

* * *

Published in Amazing Stories in September 1927, "The Radio Ghost" takes place in the Chicago area, just like its predecessors. Once again, Evans is narrator. There's another niece, Greta Van Loan, and her uncle, the late Gordon Van Loan, who like other uncles in Kline's stories is an investigator of psychic phenomena. Her cousin is Ernest Hegel, who turns out in the end to be a Scooby-Doo-type villain. There is mention of the Society for Psychical Research, also of real-life psychic and medium Eusapia Palladino (1854-1918). (She was real-life. Being a psychic and a medium is of course not real-life.) Fictional characters are Easton, a civil engineer; Brandon, an electrical engineer; and detectives Hogan and Rafferty. Hogan has an Irish accent. Among the words in his vocabulary is shenanigans.

Radio figures pretty prominently in "The Radio Ghost." The title tells you as much. Remember that the last of these Dr. Dorp stories was in a magazine published by radio and television pioneer Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback's book Radio for All, published in 1922, is mentioned in "The Radio Ghost." I would call that an early example of product placement in a work of fiction. In fact, I detect in the whole story a strong odor of commercial promotion of Gernsback, his products, and his ideas. There are detailed descriptions of technology in "The Radio Ghost," as was so common in early science fiction. It's no wonder Gernsback published this story, although you might consider that "The Radio Ghost" is not even really a story but a how-to and a speculation on radio and the uses of radio, then and into the future.

* * *

Otis Adelbert Kline was an interesting case. He wasn't the best or most imaginative author. He was entirely too caught up in the nineteenth-century hoax/fraud of Spiritualism, mediumship, and ectoplasm. And yet he was capable of formulating interesting ideas as a basis for his stories. The passage quoted above about mind and matter suggests an insight into a human problem, that is, of the man who hates his fellow creatures because he cannot understand them, coming as he does from the outside, and lacking as he does a soul or spirit, or what makes a man a human being after all. Sometimes you feel like giving up on a writer after you have read a little of what he wrote. I'm not ready to do that yet with Otis Adelbert Kline. However, if a body of fiction is a coat, a writer should avoid hanging his on the hook of a shabby and pathetic belief system such as Spiritualism, Theosophy, Marxism, or Scientology. It will only end up on the floor, dusty and rumpled, trod upon and ruined.

William F. Heitman's illustration for "The Malignant Entity" by Otis Adelbert Kline in Weird Tales, May/June/July 1924. The character in the middle is Kline's occult detective, Doctor Dorp. That's poor Professor Townsend on the floor.

And an illustration by Frank R. Paul for Hugo Gernsback's Radio for All, published in 1922. The view is of an office worker fifty years into the future. Many of the things in this fanciful illustration have actually come about, though not necessarily by 1972 and not only by way of radio technology.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales, June 1923

Like the first pair of issues of Weird Tales, the second pair--the issues of May and June--go together. Both have the same main title logo and each has 120 interior pages. William F. Heitman was the cover artist on both, and he drew all of the interior art in both. There are twenty-one stories in the May issue of 1923 but only seventeen in the one for June. The staff of the magazine made up for that with thirteen non-fiction fillers (all by an uncredited author or authors), plus a non-fiction article, plus two features, "The Eyrie" and a new feature called "The Cauldron: True Adventures of Terror," conducted by Preston Langley Hickey (1900-1962).

Firsts in Weird Tales for June 1923 include:

• The first story with a series character, Dr. Dorp in Otis Adelbert Kline's short story "The Phantom Wolfhound."

• The first reprint of a story by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," from 1841.

• The first photograph, a picture of an electric chair, taken by Harry Hirschfield and used as an illustration for "The Chair," a non-fiction article by Dr. Harry E. Meerness.

• The first regular feature other than "The Eyrie," the aforementioned "The Cauldron: True Adventures of Terror," conducted by Preston Langley Hickey.

I haven't read most of the stories in that fourth issue. There may be other firsts hiding inside.

I have written before about eleven of the eighteen authors listed below. Click on their names for links.

• Paul Ellsworth Triem (1882-1976)

• Harold Freeman Miners (1890-1928)

• Hamilton Craigie (1880-1956)

• Edwin MacLaren (dates unknown)

• Adam Hull Shirk (1881-1931)

• Julian Kilman (1878-1954)--His story "The Well" was reprinted in The Best of Weird Tales: 1923, edited by John Gregory Betancourt and Marvin Kaye.

• Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946)

• Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1949)

• A. G. Birch (1883-1972)--His story was the second part of the two-part serial "The Moon Terror."

• Walter Noble Burns (1866-1932)--The title of his story "The Man the Law Forgot" is a variation of "The Man Who . . .".

• George Warburton Lewis (1878-1963)

• Loual B. Sugarman (1894-1965)--His story "The Gray Death" was reprinted in The Eighth Green Man and Other Strange Folk, edited by Robert Weinberg (Starmont House, 1989).

• Henry Leverage (1885-1931)

• Hugh Thomason (dates unknown)--This may have been Captain Hugh Thomason, a friend of and correspondent with Edgar Rice Burroughs. Captain Thomason also used the pen names Jack MacLeod and Captain John Graham. Hugh Thomason the author, if he was a different person, also used the pen name Rjinn Van Veldt.

• Helen Rowe Henze (1899-1973)--She was the only woman author in the fourth issue of Weird Tales.

• Tarleton Collier (1888 or 1889-1970)

• Herbert Hipwell (dates unknown)

• Dr. Harry E. Mereness (dates unknown; possibly a pseudonym)

Next: "The Cauldron: True Adventures of Terror."

Weird Tales, June 1923, with cover art by William F. Heitman illustrating Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." This is the first gorilla or ape cover in Weird Tales. Unfortunately, it's terribly inept. Heitman was a better artist than this. I wonder what happened.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Dragoman on the Cover of Oriental Stories

Otis Adelbert Kline wrote or co-wrote seven stories of a character called the Dragoman published in Oriental Stories and The Magic Carpet Magazine. Six of these were his work alone. He wrote a seventh, "The Dragoman's Jest," with his friend and fellow Orientalist E. Hoffman Price. The Dragoman stories are as follows:

• "The Man Who Limped" in Oriental Stories (Oct./Nov. 1930)
• "The Dragoman's Revenge" in Oriental Stories (Feb./Mar. 1931)
• "The Dragoman's Secret" in Oriental Stories (Apr./May/June 1931)
• "The Dragoman's Slave Girl" in Oriental Stories (Summer 1931)
• "The Dragoman's Jest" in Oriental Stories; with E. Hoffman Price (Winter 1932)
• "The Dragoman's Confession" in Oriental Stories (Summer 1932)
• "The Dragoman's Pilgrimage" in The Magic Carpet Magazine (Jan. 1933)

I have never read these stories and don't know anything about them except that the main character is named Hamed the Atar. By the images below, Hamed appears to be young and beardless, possibly a Westerner dressed in Eastern garb.

The word dragoman is new to me, but it's an old word, going back to ancient times, possibly even to the Hittites according to sources cited in Wikipedia. If it goes back to the Hittites, dragoman might be all that we have left from those long-ago people. Atar is also a new word for me. I'm not sure of its meaning. It may mean something like "fire." Anyway, a dragoman is an interpreter, translator, or guide, a sort of go-between in relations between Easterners and Westerners. Kline is supposed to have been fluent in Arabic and to have been well acquainted with individual people and wider cultures from what was then called the Orient. Maybe he fancied himself as a kind of dragoman.

The Dragoman was on the cover of at least three issues of Oriental Stories. I say at least three because a couple of other covers--one for Oriental Stories and one for The Magic Carpet Magazine--are ambiguous. Maybe they're of the Dragoman and maybe they're not. Anyway, these three covers appear below. The first, from Summer 1931, was by Donald von Gelb. The second, from Winter 1932, was by J. Allen St. John. And the third, from Summer 1932, was by Margaret Brundage.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Buccaneers of Venus on the Cover of Weird Tales

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) lists three books in the Venus series written by Otis Adelbert Kline. These are under the name of the main character, Grandon:

First is The Planet of Peril, which was published in hardback in 1929 and in a six-part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly from July 20 to August 24, 1929.

Next is The Prince of Peril, which was published in hardback in 1930 and in a six-part serial in Argosy, from August 2 to September 6, 1930.

The last part of the trilogy was entitled "Buccaneers of Venus" for publication in Weird Tales. It appeared as a six-part serial in that magazine from November 1932 to April 1933. "Buccaneers of Venus" was published in book form as The Port of Peril in 1949.

We should note that the coming of the Great Depression intervened between the publication of the first and second books. That might explain the change in the title of Argosy All-Story Weekly to just Argosy. (And what a great title for a story magazine it is.) The early thirties were the worst years of the Depression. That might explain why Kline's Venus books moved from Argosy to the low-rent pages of Weird Tales between 1930 and 1932.

Anyway, like "Tam, Son of the Tiger" before it, "Buccaneers of Venus" was featured on the cover of four issues of Weird Tales. These were done by J. Allen St. John (1872-1957). Curtis C. Senf (1873-1949) had done the four covers for Kline's "Tam, Son of the Tiger." That was another change during those transition years of the early Depression, for Senf slowly gave way to two new cover artists for Weird Tales, J. Allen St. John and Margaret Brundage (1900-1976). Senf's last cover for the magazine was for the issue of September 1932.

"Buccaneers of Venus" was not only a serial but also the final adventure of a series character. As you can see from the information above, Grandon's previous adventures were in a different magazine.

Here are J. Allen St. John's four covers illustrating the story:

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Otis Adelbert Kline-Three Questions

Three questions have come up in my reading and writing about Otis Adelbert Kline:

Question #1: Which came first, Kline or Burroughs?

When I wrote about Maza of the Moon (1930) on November 13, 2021, I wrote:

It seems clear to me that Kline followed Burroughs' successes by writing in each of the older writer's genres and using all of the same kinds of settings: the Moon, Mars, Venus, the jungles of Earth, and so on.

But is that really true? (I use the words book and story here synonymously.)

The Moon

• Edgar Rice Burroughs' first Moon book was The Moon Maid, published in 1923.
• Otis Adelbert Kline's first Moon book was Maza of the Moon, published in 1929-1930.

Mars

• Edgar Rice Burroughs' first Mars book was Under the Moons of Mars, published in 1912.
• Otis Adelbert Kline's first Mars book was The Swordsman of Mars, published in 1930.

Venus

• Edgar Rice Burroughs' first Venus book was Pirates of Venus, published in 1932.
• Otis Adelbert Kline's first Venus book was The Planet of Peril, published in 1929.
• Ralph Milne Farley (1887-1963) beat them both with his first Venus book, The Radio Man, published in Argosy in four parts, June 28 through July 19, 1924.

Jungle Orphan

• Edgar Rice Burroughs' first Jungle Orphan book was Tarzan of the Apes, published in 1912.
• Otis Adelbert Kline's first Jungle Orphan books were Jan of the Jungle (originally "Call of the Savage," published as a six-part serial in Argosy, April 18 to May 23, 1931) and Tam, Son of the Tiger, published in Weird Tales as a six-part serial in June/July to December 1931.

So, it looks like Burroughs was first in every case except for that of Venus, and there, Farley came before Kline.

Question #2: Is there something amiss in Maza of the Moon when it comes to its length?

Again, when I wrote about Maza of the Moon about a month ago, I wrote:

In many places, too, Maza of the Moon isn't a novel so much as a simple plot summary. Some of John W. Campbell's early stories have the same kind of simplistic structure in which vast and myriad events are summarized in mere sentences or paragraphs. I guess you've got to tell your whole story within the confines of a popular magazine no matter how much skimping is involved. 

The skimping in Kline's book seems obvious. Is there an explanation? There is actually. In a letter dated August 9, 1929, Argosy editor Archie H. Bittner (1897-1966) informed Kline that Maza of the Moon was too long and instructed Kline to cut it down from 60,000 words to 40,000 words. (1) Probably every story can use some cutting, but reducing his story by a third must have been a tall order for Kline. It's no wonder that Maza of the Moon turned out the way it did. I wonder if Kline's story still exists in its original form. I doubt that it does, and so we have to make do with the truncated version.

Question #3: Did Otis Adelbert Kline write the longest serials published in Weird Tales?

From its first issue in March 1923 until mid 1941, Weird Tales published serialized stories. Otis Adelbert Kline wrote the first, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," which appeared in the issues of March and April 1923. H.P. Lovecraft wrote the last, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," which appeared posthumously in May and June 1941. (I'm not counting Lovecraft's series "Herbert West: Reanimator," which was in nonconsecutive issues from March 1942 to November 1943.) Kline had two six-part serials in Weird Tales, "Tam, Son of the Tiger" (June/July through Dec. 1931) and "Buccaneers of Venus" (Nov. 1932 through Apr. 1933). Were there other serials of at least six parts? Well . . .

• "Draconda" by John Martin Leahy was a six-part serial in November 1923 to May-June-July 1924.
• "The Wolf Leader" by Alexandre Dumas was an eight-part "Weird Story Reprint" in August 1931 to March 1932.
• "The Devil's Bride" by Seabury Quinn was a six-part serial in February to July 1932.
• "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley was an eight-part "Weird Story Reprint" in May to December 1932.
• "Golden Blood" by Jack Williamson was a six-part serial in April to September 1933.
• "The Trail of the Cloven Hoof" by Arlton Eadie was a seven-part serial in July to December 1934.

So, no, Otis Adelbert Kline did not write the longest serial in Weird Tales, Arlton Eadie did. But Kline wrote two out of the six longest, for whatever that's worth.

(I will split hairs here: Alexandre Dumas and Mary Shelley did not submit their stories to the magazine, and though they were serialized, they weren't what you would call classic pulp serials. They were in fact nineteenth-century book-length novels or romances cut into parts in order to fit the pulp format.)

Next: More Otis Adelbert Kline

Note

(1) Reprinted in OAK Leaves #6 (Winter 1971-1972), page 3.

The Outlaws of Mars by Otis Adelbert Kline, originally published in Argosy (Nov. 25, 1933-Jan. 6, 1934) and reprinted by Ace Books in 1961 with a cover by an uncredited artist. Note the blurb: "Interplanetary adventure in the best Edgar Rice Burroughs tradition." I haven't read this book, but I can say that Maza of the Moon by Kline is a better book than is "The Moon Maid" by Burroughs. Most of that has to do with Kline's more modern prose style versus Burroughs' archaic Victorian (or pseudo-Victorian) style.

Note, too, the airship on this cover. The artist had the benefit of hindsight, but he or she made his or her airship like those of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imagination. Call it a meta/retro image. Jabba's sail barge from Return of the Jedi (1983) looks a little like this unknown artist's airship.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946)

Laborer, Compositor, Pressman, Salesman, Manufacturing Chemist, Advertising Manager, Songwriter, Music Publisher, Silent Movie Scenarist, Writer of Plots for Skits and Revues, Author, Manuscript Reader, Editor, Literary Agent, Outdoorsman, Orientalist
Born July 1, 1891, Chicago, Illinois
Died October 24, 1946, at home, Short Beach, Connecticut

Otis Adelbert Kline was there at the start. He wrote the first serial published in Weird Tales and worked as a reader of manuscripts for Edwin Baird (1886-1954), the first editor of the magazine. (1) Entitled "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," Kline's serial appeared in the first two issues of Weird Tales, March and April 1923. It was also his first published story. Kline had three more stories in Weird Tales during that first year and two more in the second. Thereafter he was a occasional contributor from 1927 to 1943, twice with one friend, E. Hoffman Price (1898-1988), and once with another, Frank Belknap Long (1901-1994). In that time, too, Kline's writing career outside of "The Unique Magazine" took off. For a time, he was thought of as a rival of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950). There were even rumors of a feud between the two.

Otis Adelbert Kline was born on July 1, 1891, in Chicago, Illinois. His father was Louis A. Kline (1864-1938), a farmer, druggist, violin salesman, and chemical manufacturer. According to the Find A Grave website entry on him, Kline the elder was also a member of the Knights Templar and a writer "[m]ostly in favor of Prohibition." Kline's mother was Ora K. (Sides) Kline (1870-1949). The couple were married in 1888. Otis Kline grew up on his parents' farm, which was located west of Chicago, in Coloma Township, Whiteside County, Illinois, along with his younger brother Allen Sides Kline (1893-1971). Kline remembered that his father had "quite a large, well-chosen library." Louis Kline was interested in astronomy. When he was a boy, Kline and his father talked about the possibility of life on other planets. Both read H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds when it came out in 1898. "Perhaps the greatest thrill of all," Kline wrote, "was when Dad and I went together to look through the big telescope at Northwestern University. We had splendid views of Jupiter and Saturn but Mars, which we had wanted chiefly to see, was too low in the mists to be clear." Just as well. Mars should probably remain in the mists for every young and aspiring author of fantasy and science fiction. (2)

In his youth, Kline knocked about the country doing various jobs. He got his first notice in the nation's newspapers by writing songs. He started writing stories for publication after his thirtieth birthday. Weird Tales came along at just the right time. That first year, 1923-1924, was rough for the magazine. It nearly foundered. Edwin Baird left as editor at the end of the first year. Kline took over and edited the jumbo-sized first anniversary issue, dated May-June-July 1924, and wrote, anonymously, the editorial "Why Weird Tales?", which has been reprinted again and again since then. By the time the next issue was published in November 1924, Farnsworth Wright was at the helm.

In the early 1920s, Kline provided a lot of wordage to Weird Tales and other pulp magazines. His story "The Phantom Wolfhound" (Weird Tales, June 1923) introduced Dr. Dorp, an occult detective, and one of Kline's many series characters. Dr. Dorp was also in "The Malignant Entity" (Weird Tales, May/June/July 1924) and "The Radio Ghost" (Amazing Stories, Sept. 1927). Kline also wrote stories of detective Byrd Wright, nicknamed The Ferret, for Detective Tales and Flynn's Detective Weekly; Two-Gun Bart Leslie for Weird Tales, Real Detective Tales, and Young People's Weekly; and a non-fiction filler, "Curious Crimes," for Detective Tales in 1923.

The years 1925-1926 were drought years for Kline as far as Weird Tales was concerned. In its first year, the magazine had paid a penny per word. That rate dropped to 1/2 cent per word in Wright's first couple of years as editor. Once the rate returned to one cent per word, in 1926 or 1927, Kline returned, too. He soon became a star writer for the magazine and was paid 1-1/2 cents per word. In 1931, as Kline lay in the hospital, Bill Sprenger, the business manager of Weird Tales, fronted him $500 for his unfinished serial "Tam, Son of the Tiger." Kline recalled: "I never knew anyone to shoot squarer with a person, than that." (3)

In 1930, Weird Tales instituted a companion magazine, Oriental Stories. The title was changed to The Magic Carpet Magazine in 1933 and ceased publication in January 1934. Kline was there at the beginning of those two titles, too. In fact, he was the only author to have a story in each of the first issues of Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and The Magic Carpet Magazine. Kline and Hoffman were known as Orientalists. Kline is supposed to have spoken fluent Arabic. Oriental Stories/The Magic Carpet Magazine would have been right up his alley. He contributed eight stories to those titles altogether. 

Kline's series character the Dragoman was in Oriental Stories and The Magic Carpet Magazine. There were seven of these, the first being "The Man Who Limped," from the October/November 1930 issue. The last was "The Dragoman's Pilgrimage," from January 1933. Kline's eighth story for that companion magazine to Weird Tales is "The Vengeance of Sa'ik," from December/January 1931.

Otis Kline began selling stories for Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) in 1933 and continued as Howard's agent even after his death in 1936. Kline's agency, Otis Kline Associates, was sold to Oscar J. Friend (1897-1963) after Kline's death. Friend died in 1963 and the agency was dissolved. Only then did Glenn Lord (1931-2011) take over as the literary executor--and champion--of Robert E. Howard. Kline was also an agent for Carl Jacobi (1908-1997), Otto Binder (1911-1974), and Bertrand L. Shurtleff (1897-1967). Binder worked a year for Kline as an assistant in Kline's literary agency in New York City.

Again and again, those who wrote about Otis Adelbert Kline remarked on his tastes for good food, wine, spirits, and tobacco. If he was ever healthy, Kline had become, before aged forty, stricken with ailments. Nonetheless, he was, like E. Hoffman Price, a man of action. Like Price (and Robert A. Heinlein), Kline was a swordsman. He also enjoyed outdoor activities, including fishing, hunting, hiking, boating, swimming, and clamming. He worked mostly as a literary agent beginning in about 1936. In 1936, he moved from Chicago to New York City, then in 1940 to Short Beach, Connecticut. His wife and daughters helped him out in his work. They seem to have been a happy family. Tending over the years towards portliness, Kline suffered a heart attack and a stroke at home and died on October 24, 1946. He was just fifty-five years old. His friend Eric Frank Russell (1905-1978) wrote of him: "A more likeable [sic] individual it would be hard to find. Plump, jovial, generous, he seemed to have hundreds of friends and no enemies." (4)

Otis Adelbert Kline's Essay, Serials, Stories, and Poems in Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and The Magic Carpet Magazine (All credits listed here are for short stories except where otherwise noted.)

• "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" in Weird Tales (two-part serial, Mar.-Apr. 1923)
• "The Phantom Wolfhound" in Weird Tales (June 1923)-Dr. Dorp
• "The Corpse on the Third Slab" in Weird Tales (July/Aug. 1923)
• "The Cup of Blood" in Weird Tales (Sept. 1923; reprinted June 1935)
• "The Malignant Entity" in Weird Tales (May/June/July 1924; reprinted in Amazing Stories, June 1926)-Dr. Dorp
• "Why Weird Tales?" in Weird Tales (also attributed to Edwin Baird) (essay; May/June/July 1924)
• "The Phantom Rider" in Weird Tales (Nov. 1924)
• "The Bride of Osiris" in Weird Tales (three-part serial, Aug.-Sept.-Oct. 1927)
• "The Demon of Tlaxpam" in Weird Tales (Jan. 1929)-Two-Gun Bart Leslie
• "But Was It?" in Weird Tales (poem; Sept. 1929)
• "The Bird-People" in Weird Tales (Jan. 1930)
• "Thirsty Blades" with E. Hoffman Price in Weird Tales (Feb. 1930)-Ismeddin
• "The Man Who Limped" in Oriental Stories (Oct./Nov. 1930)-The Dragoman
• "The Vengeance of Sa'ik" in Oriental Stories (Dec. 1930/Jan. 1931)
• "The Dragoman's Revenge" in Oriental Stories (Feb./Mar. 1931)-The Dragoman
• "The Dragoman's Secret" in Oriental Stories (Apr./May/June 1931)-The Dragoman
• "The Dragoman's Slave Girl" in Oriental Stories (Summer 1931)-The Dragoman
• "Tam, Son of the Tiger" in Weird Tales (six-part serial, June/July through Dec. 1931)
• "The Dragoman's Jest" in Oriental Stories; with E. Hoffman Price (Winter 1932)-The Dragoman
• "The Dragoman's Confession" in Oriental Stories (Summer 1932)-The Dragoman
• "The Gallows Tree" in Weird Tales (poem; Feb. 1932)
• "Midnight Madness" in Weird Tales (Apr. 1932)
• "Buccaneers of Venus" in Weird Tales (six-part serial, Nov. 1932 through Apr. 1933)
• "The Dragoman's Pilgrimage" in The Magic Carpet Magazine (Jan. 1933)-The Dragoman
• "Lord of the Lamia" in Weird Tales (three-part serial, Mar.-Apr.-May 1935)
• "The Cyclops of Xoatl" with E. Hoffman Price in Weird Tales (Dec. 1936)-Two-Gun Bart Leslie
• "Spotted Satan" with E. Hoffman Price in Weird Tales (Jan. 1940)
• "Return of the Undead" with Frank Belknap Long in Weird Tales (July 1943)

Further Reading

• The Compleat OAK Leaves: The Official Journal of Otis Adelbert Kline and His Works, edited by David Anthony Kraft (Clayton, GA: Fictioneer Books, 1980).
• Book of the Dead: Friends of Yesteryear: Fictioneers & Others by E. Hoffman Price (Arkham House, 2001).

Notes
(1) Farnsworth Wright (1888-1940) was also one of Baird's readers.
(2) From "Reflections" by Otis Adelbert Kline, in OAK Leaves #11 (1975), pp. 3-4.
(3) Kline, in a letter to Dr. I.M. Howard, April 1, 1941, reprinted in OAK Leaves #1 (Fall 1970), p. 7.
(4) Quoted in "Otis A. Kline Dead," originally in The Fantasy Review, reprinted in OAK Leaves #1 (Fall 1970), p. 12.

Next: Otis Adelbert Kline-Three Questions

Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946).

Revised and omissions corrected on December 11, 2021.

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley