W.H. Holmes (?-?)-An Unusual Ghost Story

It seems that for decades a lot of men and even many women used only their initials in everything they did. That habit confounds the people who in later years might look for them, especially when they had common surnames. W.H. Holmes is a case in point. I know nothing about him and have found nothing about him, although there were: a well-known American paleontologist named William H. Holmes (1846-1933) (he was a member of the Hayden Survey of the Rocky Mountains in the 1870s); a school superintendent, Dr. William H. Holmes, of Mount Vernon, New York, who died in 1934; and a newspaper editor and publisher by those initials and that name in Kansas during the early 1900s. I'm not sure any of these men makes a good candidate for our W.H. Holmes. Another possibility is that "W.H. Holmes" was a pseudonym, "Holmes" being the operative word.

W.H. Holmes was the author of six stories published in The Black Mask and Weird Tales in 1922-1923. The following credits are from The FictionMags Index:

• "A Deep Sea Dog" in The Black Cat (Jan. 25, 1922)
• "The Matrimonial Reef" in The Black Cat (Oct. 1922)
• "Creeping Death" in The Black Mask (Feb. 1923)
• "The Weaving Shadows" in Weird Tales (Mar. 1923)
• "Scrambled Motives" in The Black Mask (June 15, 1923)
• "The House in Boney Hollow" in The Black Mask (Sept. 15, 1923)

Who can say why he or she stopped writing after 1923? Or maybe he or she started writing under a different name. In any case, W.H. Holmes appears lost to us.

W.H. Holmes' Story:

"The Weaving Shadows" is a short story of about eight pages. It is set in New York State, with an opening and a closing in New York City and the main action taking place above the city, in the Highlands of the Hudson, more specifically at Sunken Mine. Sunken Mine or Sunk Mine is a real place. I'll have more on that in a while.

Chet Burke and his unnamed sister live in an apartment in New York City. Burke is a Sherlock Holmes-type character. The story itself is constructed like a classic Holmes story. Burke is sitting in his favorite easy chair, "absorbed in a rare book on alchemy and black magic," when his cipher of a sister lets in two visitors. (She's the Mrs. Hudson character I guess.) Burke knows Chief Rhyne of the Rhyne Detective Agency. Evidently he's the Inspector Lestrade character. With him is a Mr. Hayden, a carpenter late of New Orleans and now living with his sister and her daughter in a backwoods house at Sunken Mine. The troubled Mr. Hayden tells his story, just as Sherlock Holmes' clients do. Burke agrees to take the case and goes afield with Hayden. Chief Rhyne is left behind. It would have been better if he had gone with them. Maybe a lot of death could have been avoided.

"The Weaving Shadows" is an unusual story. It has many of the conventions of the ghost story or a story of a haunting. It also has Spiritualism, that hoary holdover from the nineteenth century, as well as suggestions of vampirism. The setting is an old and decaying house in a place long-since abandoned of most human habitation. The ghosts first appear as the ectoplasm-like "weaving shadows" of the title. Hayden is lying in bed at night when he first sees them. He feels constricted in his chest, then paralyzed. The shadows coalesce and Hayden is confronted with two terrible visages. Then blood drips from the air above him. Slowly, then, "The Weaving Shadows" becomes a different kind of story, and though Burke finds some background to the haunting at Sunken Mine, he is not able to explain what happened there. The gist of what I write is that "The Weaving Shadows" appears to be a story at the beginning of a transition from the conventional ghost story of a previous era towards real weird fiction of the twentieth century. That makes me think that Weird Tales was necessary for the evolution of weird fiction into its truest form. How would it have gone otherwise without the advent of "The Unique Magazine"? 

W.H. Holmes wrote five stories published in The Black Mask. I wonder if  Rhyne or Burke were characters in those stories. Rhyne seems to be a conventional kind of detective. Maybe he turns to Burke when he has more outré cases, for Burke is obviously an occult detective, the most fully developed character of that type so far in the first issue. I wonder if W.H. Holmes planned to write more stories featuring Chet Burke.

One difference between Chet Burke and many of the other protagonists in the first issue of Weird Tales is that he fails. He is defeated in his quest to explain the events at Sunken Mine. What is implicit in the story is that the deaths--at least one of the deaths--there may be attributable to his failure. Failure, defeat, humiliation, insanity, and even death are the lot of the weird-fictional protagonist. Contrast that with the triumphant or victorious science-fictional hero.

Although there is Spiritualism in "The Weaving Shadows," there are also more sophisticated concepts, some of which may resonate with us more now than they would have in 1923. One is night paralysis, a phenomenon that is sometimes related to visions, apparitions, or hallucinations of dark forms standing at a person's bed at night. There are also hints of psychopathology in the Hayden family, of schizophrenia, terrible depression, or other psychological and emotional disorders. Long before the Haydens lived in their backwoods saltbox house, it was inhabited by another tragic family with its own unique problems. All of this leads to disaster for the Haydens.

Now we come to H.P. Lovecraft.

There are echoes of Lovecraft in "The Weaving Shadows." Or maybe I should call them pre-echoes. First is its setting in a remote and depopulated place, one obviously in decay. This is the standard setting for a Gothic story. So no Lovecraft in that alone. There is also a theme of decadence and degeneration in families and whole cultures or societies. That's also a theme in Gothic fiction. Still not necessarily Lovecraftian. And then you read about the five-mile journey Burke and Hayden make on foot from the train station to the lonely house--a description that reads like a descent--and you start to be reminded of Lovecraft's version of these places and things.

In "The Weaving Shadows," blood drips from the air above the bed onto the floor. Again, not from the ceiling but from the air. In other words, it seemingly materializes, as if it were coming through what we might call a wormhole into the room. Could it be drawn from Hayden's sister and niece, who are sleeping downstairs and who are showing signs every day of a further wasting away? I remember a similar occurrence in "The Picture in the House" by H.P. Lovecraft (written in 1920; printed in 1921, 1923, and 1937), except that the blood drips from the ceiling and is issuing from the room above, where a ghastly tableau is sure to be taking place, even as the protagonist sits unawares below, at least until that moment.

If you want to read "The Weaving Shadows" but don't yet want to know about its climactic events, you should stop reading this entry right now.

As it turns out, there are two ancient skeletons in the attic of the house. Burke and the local sheriff discover them after the tragedy of the Hayden family has played out. The skeletons show signs of violence. They have been encased in a crypt-like space, lined with plaster, for generations. Skeletons inside of a secret and enclosed space in an old house make me think of Lovecraft's later story "The Dreams in the Witch House" (written in 1932; printed in 1933). In "The Dunwich Horror" (written in 1928; printed in 1929), there is a terrible creature kept in an enclosed space in an isolated farmhouse. 

Burke fails to solve the mystery of the events at Sunken Mine. He confesses as much to Chief Rhyne. The stepbrother of the two women whose skeletons were found in the attic presumably killed them and hid their bodies in a specially prepared place. So was he a murderer and a fiend? Or did he do what he believed was necessary under the circumstances? In other words, were the two women helpless victims, or were they in some way evil, an evil recognized and headed off by the stepbrother when he killed them? And why did Hayden's sister find and choose that remote house for her new home? Was she called there somehow? To liberate the spirits of the two dead women? Hayden's sister and her daughter are Spiritualists. Did they call up the spirits of the dead women? Were those spirits unable to escape until summoned by acts of Spiritualism? These questions are only suggested by the events of the story and never addressed or answered.

I have one note on Holmes' prose, which is mostly okay but includes this horrible clause: "the chairs squatted grimly."

Sunken Mine or Sunk Mine is a real place. You can still go there, for it is located on public land at Clarence Fahnestock State Park in New York. The Appalachian Trail passes through the area, but you might want to go the way Burke and Hayden presumably went. The New York Central and Hudson River Railroad presumably delivered them to Cold Spring, on the east bank of the Hudson River. There they got off the train and began their trek. If you walk east from Cold Spring, in the direction of Dennytown, you will probably be walking in their footsteps.

A little northeast of Dennytown is Sunk Mine, named, no doubt, after Sunk Brook. There is still a Sunken Mine Road east of Dennytown. At one time, it was the main street of a nineteenth-century mining town called Odletown or Odeltown, formerly Odelltown. Men began mining iron ore there before or around the time of the American Revolution. During the Civil War, the ore they mined was used to feed the forges across the river at West Point. Most of the mines in the area were shut down by about 1876. The Sunk Mine was in operation until the mid 1880s. There are still ruins and remnants of mining and habitation in that part of the state. Be careful all around, but be especially careful if you come upon an ancient saltbox house lost in the backwoods. Whatever you do, don't spend the night there.

Finally, in thinking, writing, and researching all of this, I wonder if the author of "The Weaving Shadows" was a New Yorker (maybe Dr. William H. Holmes, the school superintendent at nearby Mount Vernon, is a good candidate after all), alternatively, whether he was in the U.S. Army at West Point and explored the local area during his tenure there.

Putnam County, New York, 1854. The details are too small to see here, but you can view a larger version of this image on the website of the Library of Congress by clicking here. Look for the bridge over Sunk Brook along Eastern Turnpike, which separates two political divisions called Phillipstown (in yellow) and Putnamville (in pink), in the western part of the county. (Coming from the Midwest, I don't know whether these divisions are called towns, districts, townships, or what.) It's a very thorough and beautifully made map and gives you a real sense of the place as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. H.P. Lovecraft made much of the geography, history, and culture of his native New England. Another writer could easily have done the same kind of thing for this part of New York. In fact, it's not too late. Someone should give it a go.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946)-The First Serial

Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) was a man of a dozen talents, a hundred friends, and a million words. He was an old-fashioned wordsmith who cranked out story after story over the years. As a manuscript reader, editor, and literary agent, he also helped other writers in their work. According to what I have found in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The FictionMags Index, Kline's two-part serial "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" was his first published genre work. It was likely his first published story of any kind. It was also the first serial in Weird Tales, even if its two parts, taken together, still come out at only short-story length.

Along with Farnsworth Wright, who was also represented in the first issue of Weird Tales, Kline acted as a manuscript reader, helping editor Edwin Baird wade through myriads of submissions during that first year in print. After Baird's departure, Kline edited the first-anniversary, jumbo-sized issue of May-June-July 1924. He also wrote, anonymously, the Weird Tales manifesto in that issue, called "Why Weird Tales?" The first-anniversary issue of Weird Tales was the only one edited by Kline.

Kline's output declined in his later years, no doubt in part because of his work as a literary agent, including for Robert E. Howard. Like Howard and Lovecraft, he died prematurely, in his case at age fifty-five. I have written about Otis Adelbert Kline before. For his biography, click here. For that and other articles about him and his family, click on the label "Otis Adelbert Kline" on the right. (1)

Otis Adelbert Kline's Story:

"The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" begins with a letter summoning young William Ansley, the narrator of the story, to his uncle's farm outside of Peoria, Illinois. The summons, whether it be a letter, a telephone call, or some other kind of message, is a good and common way to kick off a story, especially a weird fiction story. In Kline's story, it gets the narrator out of the city and into an isolated rural setting, very often a necessity if weird events are going to unfold properly. Peoria might not be Arkham or Innsmouth, but at least it's not Chicago.

The setting is made definite not only by the mention of Peoria but also by the narrator's letting us know that he works as a bookkeeper on South Water Street in Chicago, also that his parents were killed in the Iroquois Theatre fire when he was twelve years old. That fire was a real and terrible event that took place in Chicago on December 30, 1903. My own family has a connection to the fire, as do many, I'm sure, in Illinois and Indiana. Like his protagonist, Kline was twelve years old at the time that it happened. At the time the events in the story take place, the protagonist Ansley is a young man. Presumably, then, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is set in the 1910s or early 1920s.

Ansley travels to Peoria where his uncle and benefactor, James Braddock, lived and died on his 320-acre farm. That's a sizable piece of land, half a square mile, or half a section. Maybe the idea is that this is the equivalent of an English estate. Anyway, Ansley lets us know that Braddock was "a scientist and dreamer," adding: "His hobby was psychic phenomena." So maybe he was the equivalent of an eccentric English gentleman, too. The story takes place when scary stories should, in October. (October is the month in which Edgar Allan Poe died mysteriously.) Once at his uncle's house, Ansley begins experiencing and witnessing occult occurrences. He resolves to investigate these occurrences in a scientific manner. When a Professor Albert Randall and his beautiful daughter show up (what do genre fiction writers have against the mothers of beautiful daughters?), Ansley becomes assistant investigator. It is Professor Randall who solves the mystery at hand.

In its two parts, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" becomes a potpourri of psychic phenomena, complete with ectoplasmic manifestations, mental telepathy, automatic writing, mediums, trances, and hypnosis. There is talk of vampires and an onset of mass hysteria because of it. (Because this is America, the locals arm themselves with rifles, pistols, and shotguns rather than pitchforks and torches as they would in a European setting. Thank God for America.) There are also dream-visions and dream-regressions through time.

"The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is not an especially good story, although I think we should give Kline a break. After all, this was his first published story. There's no real problem with his prose, nor with his plot or the mechanics of his story, although the scheme at the climax is convoluted beyond necessity. There's also a fair amount of melodrama and a pat, everything-turned-out-okay and they-lived-happily-ever-after Hollywood-scenario-type ending. I think the real problem with "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is that it came at the beginning of one hundred years of weird fiction. Its only material had come before it either by way of ancient folklore--i.e., the vampire myth--or from the nineteenth-century, mostly American hoax/pseudoscience of Spiritualism. In its sentimentality and somewhat melodramatic events, the story is also more or less from the nineteenth century. In short, Kline had only worn-out conventions with which to work. He wasn't ready yet for innovation and not yet developed well enough as a writer to come up with something very new. Put another way, Kline and writers like him had not yet figured out what weird fiction is, and there were not yet powerful, convincing, and vibrant substitutes for those old and worn-out conventions that came before it, Spiritualism of course being the most obvious example. Kline may have been onto something by taking a science-fictional approach to his story. He simply went down the wrong path in chasing after ectoplasm.

In "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud, the previous story in that first issue of Weird Tales, there is a short discussion of what the author called "the pseudo-scientific story," what we now call science fiction. That passage acts in part, I think, as a guide to the reader, or as an explanation as to what the story and the magazine are all about. Call it the beginnings of a literary theory, or perhaps to an editorial approach that Weird Tales would take in this and its many issues to come. Well, there is a similar passage in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes." In this case, Kline wrote in regards to the supernatural:

     "It is but a step," I reflected, "from the natural to the supernatural."
     This observation started a new line of thought. After all, could anything be supernatural--above nature? Nature, according to my belief, was only another name for God, eternal mind, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient ruler of the universe. If He were omnipotent, could anything take place contrary to His laws? Obviously not.
     The word "supernatural" was, after all, only an expression invented by man, in his finite ignorance, to define those things which he did not understand. Telegraphy, telephony, the phonograph, the moving picture--all would have been regarded with superstition by an age less advanced than ours. Man had only to become familiar with the laws governing them, in order to discard the word "supernatural" as applied to their manifestation. (2)
     What right, then, had I to term the phenomena, which I had just witnessed, supernatural? I might call them supernormal, but to think of them as supernatural would be to believe the impossible: namely, that that which is all-powerful had been overpowered.
     I resolved, then and there, that if further phenomena manifested themselves that night. I would, as far as it were possible, curb my superstition and fear, regard them with the eye of a philosopher, and endeavor to learn their cause, which must necessarily be governed by natural law.

With that passage, Kline placed the supernatural back under nature, thereby making it explicable by way of scientific investigation. The effect seems to be that this story of the supernatural, at the very least, can actually be seen as a kind of "pseudo-scientific story," similar in its way to "Ooze." In "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," hypnosis and mental telepathy are accepted as valid, presumably scientific phenomena. There is also a scientific explanation offered for the existence of ectoplasm. As for the current state of Braddock in his casket and the tragedies that have befallen the local people, prompting their vampire hysteria, there is a medical, i.e., scientific, explanation for that, too. These events aren't so weird after all, meaning, they all have a scientific explanation, as long as you can accept Spiritualism as being based in science.

Unfortunately, Kline's transformation of one type of story--the supernatural story or ghost story--into another--the pseudo-scientific story--isn't very convincing, the reason being that he threw into "The Thing of  a Thousand Shapes" so many of the ragged and decrepit remains of nineteenth-century Spiritualism that it isn't able to take off very well. By 1923, discerning readers, writers, and thinkers would have known that there is nothing to Spiritualism. Harry Houdini was famously skeptical, but he wasn't alone. (Ambrose Bierce was also a skeptic.) Writing about Spiritualism at such a late date was like writing about the luminiferous ether after Albert Einstein had proposed his special theory of relativity in 1905, except that the existence of the ether was proposed in earnest, while séances, knocking, and ectoplasm are all frauds. You can differ with me if you'd like, but Kline was right when he wrote that there isn't anything above God. There is plenty worth exploring under God in his and our very mysterious universe, it's just that ectoplasm isn't one of them. What's missing from "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is an awareness of and apprehension of weird.

Speaking of God, both "Ooze" and "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" mention him. If I had to guess, I would say that these things were offered in assurance to observers, readers, and critics that Weird Tales was not and would not be profane, godless, atheistic, or otherwise a bad influence on anybody. These stories are offered for fun, entertainment, and momentary distraction and not at all to subvert or corrupt anyone or anything.

"The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is like Willard E. Hawkins' story "The Dead Man's Tale" in that automatic writing and the psychic or occult investigator make their appearance. The text of "The Dead Man's Tale" is presumed to have been composed entirely from automatic writing. The psychic investigator is mentioned only in the introduction to the story. In Kline's story, there is less automatic writing, but it comes at a turning point in the story. The role of the psychic investigator is far more prominent, and it is that investigator, Professor Randall, who figures it all out. By the way, Randall is dean of the local college. He and his daughter had gone to Indianapolis, only to return to Peoria when they heard of Braddock's death. So the two cities where Weird Tales was born, Chicago and Indianapolis, receive mention here. 

Again, "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" is like "Ooze" in that it lets the reader know that the writer and editor know that God is still above everything. Both are also pseudo-scientific stories, although "Ooze" is far more convincing in that respect. Kline's story is unlike "Ooze" in that the scientist (the elder Cranmer in "Ooze") and the dreamer (the younger Cranmer) are combined in the same person, James Braddock in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes." The narrators in both stories take on the role of investigator, Rud's narrator well after the fact, Ansley in the middle of things. Both take a scientific approach to their investigations.

By Charles Fort's theorizing, all phenomena are continuous, even if science has excluded and damned certain kinds. In his own theorizing on things natural versus supernatural, Kline seems to have followed Fort's lead. It seems likely that Kline, like many well-known and prominent tellers of weird tales, had read and would continue to read the works of Charles Fort. Fort himself wrote about psychic and paranormal phenomena in his last book, Wild Talents (1932), which you might say issued from his grave.

The "Thing" in Kline's title is ectoplasm, a kind of ooze that issues from Braddock's inert body in every shape and form. Ectoplasm is equated in the story with protoplasm. (There's even an amoeba!) In his investigations and theorizing, Professor Randall has postulated the existence of what he calls psychoplasm, a material substance that emanates from the bodies of people in a state of catalepsy. Ansley has unwittingly secured a residue of psychoplasm from a book he used to crush an ectoplasmic bat. (Could the book have been by Ernest Lawrence Thayer?) It is Randall's first sample of this substance. He examines it, concluding, "While it is undoubtedly organic, it is nevertheless remarkably different, in structure and composition, from anything heretofore classified, either by biologists or chemists." (From Part II of "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," Weird Tales, April 1923, page 146.) Again, in "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," supernatural things are reduced to merely natural ones, and all is explained by science.

Two more things about ectoplasm. First, it is sometimes supposed to be a fabric-like or fibrous substance. That's what made me think of cotton candy and Barbapapa. In Kline's story, it's more gelatinous. Second, in ufology, there is a substance called "angel hair." Its resemblance to ectoplasm is undeniable. UFOs or flying saucers are like the ghosts of the twentieth century, a technological manifestation of what was previously supposedly supernatural. Every encounter with a ghost and every sighting of a flying saucer turns out the same: "I saw something and then it went away (without leaving any evidence)."

I have covered both parts of "The Thing of  Thousand Shapes" here. Most of the action takes place in Part II, including a sequence in which Ansley dreams himself into the prehistoric past. He rushes from his dream into the path of a car. Professor Randall and his daughter Ruth are in the car, returning from Indianapolis (where Weird Tales came about and where C.L. Moore had just turned, in January 1923, the Golden Age of Twelve). It is Ruth that nurses him after he has been struck, and the three of them together save poor Uncle Jim.

One last thing: a distinction is made in Kline's story between urbane and well-educated people versus local farmers and other bucolic types. As always, there is an awareness of and a resorting to class distinctions in the popular fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Arthur Conan Doyle did it in his Sherlock Holmes stories. So did George Barr McCutcheon in Graustark. Anthony M. Rud and Otis Adelbert Kline did it in Weird Tales. (Rud's bucolic character is a backwoods Cajun.) And of course H.P. Lovecraft did it in so much of what he wrote. In these stories, main characters are high characters and they speak in perfect, unaccented English. Low characters can never be main characters. They speak in imperfect, accented English, for example, in Kline's story, a German man named Glitch, who sounds like the Captain from The Katzenjammer Kids, and another local yokel who talks like Jed Clampett. It's an annoying characteristic of fiction from that period. You wish that writers had had more imagination.

Notes
(1) Otis Adelbert Kline was the author of several non-fiction fillers published in Detective Tales in September and October 1923. The first many issues of Weird Tales also had non-fiction fillers. I wonder if Kline was also the author of at least some of those short features.
(2) This anticipates Arthur C. Clarke's famous adage, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Other authors have written variations on the idea. More wondering: was Kline first among them?

Holmes, Houdini, and ectoplasm, all in the same book. What more can you ask for? The Adventure of the Ectoplasmic Man by Daniel Stashower (1986).

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Frances Garfield (1908-2000)

Née Frances Marita Obrist
Aka Frances Wellman
Singer, Musician, Teacher, Author
Born December 1, 1908, Kansas, or Deaf Smith County, Texas
Died May 7, 2000, at home, "Dogwood Acres," Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Frances Marita Obrist was born on December 1, 1908, either in Kansas (by census records) or Deaf Smith County, Texas (by an entry on Find A Grave). Her father, Frank H. Obrist, worked for the U.S. Post Office. Frances received her middle name from her mother, Marita "Mettie" Burke Obrist. Her older brother, William "Bill" Obrist (1904-1981), was a ham radio operator.

Frances Obrist graduated from East High School in Wichita, Kansas, and from the University of Wichita, I believe in 1927. As a student, she was a singer and a musician, president of Epsilon Kappa Rho and secretary of the Woman's Pan-Hellenic Association. After graduating, she became director of piano at Reed Studios of Dancing, Dramatic Art & Music in Wichita. In about 1928, she became an assistant to Mrs. Thurlow Lieurance in the department of voice at the University of Wichita, where she taught voice and piano.

On June 14, 1930, at Fairmount Church in Wichita, Frances Obrist married Manly Wade Wellman (1903-1986), who had also graduated from the University of Wichita (when it was still called Fairmount College) and who, at the time, was editor of the Sunday magazine section of the Wichita Beacon. The Wellmans lived together in Wichita for four or five years. In 1934 or 1935, Wellman went to New York to try his hand at professional writing. Frances remained in Wichita with her parents, though only long enough for her husband to sell some stories and earn enough of a living for the two of them. He sent for her and they lived together in New York, New Jersey, and, from 1951 onward, in North Carolina. Their son, Manly Wade Wellman, Jr., was born on November 13, 1939. Known as Wade Wellman, he was also a writer and a collaborator with his father on, among other things, the paperback novel Sherlock Holmes's War of the Worlds (1975). Wade Wellman died on January 25, 2018, in Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Frances Wellman had her own career as a writer, actually two careers separated by nearly four decades. Using the nom de plume Frances Garfield, she had stories in Weird Tales and Amazing Stories in 1939-1940, then in Fantasy Tales, Whispers, and other titles from 1979 to 1988. Many have been reprinted. From the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The FictionMags Index:

Frances Garfield's Stories & Essays in Weird Tales & Other Publications

• "The High Places" in Weird Tales (Apr. 1939)
• "'Not Both!'" in Weird Tales (May 1939)
• "Gulpers versus Earthmen" in Amazing Stories (Dec. 1939)
• "Meet the Authors" in Amazing Stories (Dec. 1939) with Manly Wade Wellman and Don Wilcox
• "Forbidden Cupboard" in Weird Tales (Jan. 1940)
• "Don't Open That Door" in Fantasy Tales (Winter 1979)
• "The Elementals" also called "Jimmy and the Elementals" in Fantasy Tales (Summer 1980)
• "Sweet Grapes of Autumn" in Kadath (July 1981)
• "The House at Evening" in Whispers #15-16 (March 1982)
• "Come to the Party" in Whispers IV (1983)
• "Amorous of the Far" in Fantasy Tales (Winter 1985)
• "A Dream of Castles" in The 1987 World Fantasy Convention Program Book (1987)
• "Plaza Cosmetica" in The Tome #6 (1990)
• Review of Worse Things Waiting by Manly Wade Wellman in Horror: 100 Best Books (1988)

Many of these were published in association with her husband's work.

Manly Wade Wellman died on April 5, 1986, at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His wife survived him by more than fourteen years. She also died at home, on May 7, 2000. Like him, she was cremated and her ashes scattered on the grounds of their home, called "Dogwood Acres," in Chapel Hill.

Frances Marita Obrist (spelled O'brist), from the Wichita Beacon, January 16, 1929, page 6.

Thanks to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The FictionMags Index for Frances Garfield's compiled story titles.

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Denis Plimmer (1914-1981)-Part One

Author, Poet, Actor, Playwright, Newspaperman, Travel Writer, Radio Commentator, Political Campaign Worker

Born September 27, 1914, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Died September 1981, Westminster, Middlesex, England

Blue of eye and fair of skin, Denis Harcus Plimmer was born on September 27, 1914, in Melbourne, Australia, to two actors, Harry John Plimmer (1867-1947) and Josephine "Ena" Shanahan Plimmer (1892-1940). Before getting to Denis Plimmer, the son and author, I'll write about Harry Plimmer, the father and actor.

Born in 1867 in Wellington, New Zealand, John Henry "Harry" Plimmer was a stage and screen actor who did a lot of traveling, including in troupes across early twentieth-century America. I might as well list his known acting credits because nobody else has done it to completion, or at least close to completion. There are links embedded in each heading, so be on the lookout for those.

Harry Plimmer on Stage in Australia:

• The Trumpet Call (1892)
• Harry Rickards' New Tivoli Minstrels (1894)
• The Sign of the Cross (1898-1899)
• The King's Musketeer (1899)
• Elizabeth, Queen of England (1900)
• Fedora (1900)
• La Tosca (1900)
• Ingomar, the Barbarian (1900)
• Sherlock Holmes (1902)
• Monsieur Beaucaire (1904)
• Inconstant George (1911)
• A Woman of No Importance (1912)
• The Monk and the Woman (1917)

Harry Plimmer on Film in Australia:

• The Monk and the Woman (1917)

The Monk and the Woman might sound familiar to fans of Ambrose Bierce, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't the same as Bierce's tale The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter (1892). The Monk and the Woman is considered a lost film.

Harry Plimmer (1867-1947), Australia's First Sherlock Holmes. Plimmer played Holmes in Perth and Adelaide in 1902 in a production by J.C. Williamson.

Harry Plimmer on Stage in the United States:

• The Off Chance (1918) with Ethel Barrymore
• Déclassée (1919-1920)
• The Blue Lagoon (1921)
• The Laughing Lady (1923)
• Antonia (1925)
• Shall We Join the Ladies (1925)
• Pickwick (1927)
• The Kingdom of God (1928-1929)
• Topaze (1930)
• The School for Scandal (1931) with Ethel Barrymore and Arthur Treacher
• Firebird (1932)
• Victoria Regina (1935-1936, 1936-1937, 1938) with Helen Hayes
• Billy Draws a Horse (1939)

Harry Plimmer (center) on the cover of Theatre Arts Magazine, September 1950, with Charles Francis and Ethel Barrymore. Plimmer acted in Ethel Barrymore's company for ten years, beginning in 1918. 

Harry Plimmer crossed an ocean to the United States at least once, in 1891, before arriving for good (I think for good) in January 1918, debarking in San Francisco from Sydney, Australia, from on board the Ventura. He had with him his young wife and their only child, the future writer Denis Plimmer, aged three years and a few months.

The Plimmer family lived in New York City in 1920, 1930, and 1940 when the enumerator of the census came around. Denis Plimmer made his declaration of intention to become a citizen on January 9, 1941, at age twenty-six and was naturalized in 1949. As of that date in 1941, he had four years of college, possibly at Columbia University. On January 31, 1941, the same month in which he declared his intention, he married Margaret Eva Partello (1920-?) in New York City. Maybe one thing was necessary for the other.

Denis Plimmer enlisted in the U.S. Army in June 1943, also in New York City. He was at Camp Rucker, Arkansas, from August to September 1943 before being discharged for strabismus. (That means he was crosseyed.) Plimmer went back and forth between the United States and England in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I believe he was in England pretty much after 1947 or 1948 and until his death in 1981. His father, Harry John Plimmer, retired from acting in 1946 and died in Paddington, London, in late 1947. He was around eighty years old.

In July 1950, Denis Plimmer married again. His second wife was Charlotte (Fingerhut) Straus (1916-1991). Like him, she was a writer, and the two spent the rest of their time together collaborating on fiction and non-fiction, as well as on scripts for radio and television. Their credits will have to wait until the next part of this series. There are some interesting items in the list and some things fantasy fans will want to know about.

To be continued . . .

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Joseph Payne Brennan (1918-1990)-Part Six

Brennan & Derleth

Joseph Payne Brennan was younger than August W. Derleth (1909-1971) by a little more than eight years. Derleth had his first story in Weird Tales in 1926 when he was just seventeen years old. Brennan waited until 1952 when he was nearly twice that age. Although both men were Roman Catholics, both were also admirers and followers of H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), a strict (on the surface at least) materialist. Brennan seems to have been solitary, possibly unhappy or even morose. He worked for most of his life in a library, that inner sanctum of the introvert. By all accounts, Derleth was his opposite--big and burly and outgoing, an energetic man and one full of appetites. Brennan and Derleth had some things in common. Both were not only authors and poets but also editors and publishers. And though Brennan was apparently never in touch with Lovecraft, he and Derleth corresponded. Derleth did for Brennan what he had also done for Lovecraft: under his Arkham House and other imprints, Derleth published Brennan's works.

I guess Derleth would have first approached Brennan rather than the other way around. If that's how it happened, I can imagine Derleth's reading "The Green Parrot" in the July 1952 issue of Weird Tales, Brennan's first story for the magazine. By then, Derleth had spent more than half of his life as a published author and more than a dozen years as publisher of Arkham House books. Maybe he was a leading figure in weird fiction, certainly in the publishing of weird fiction. Here in front of him, then, was a new and promising author in the field. Maybe he first wrote to Brennan. Maybe Brennan was happy to receive a letter and to write back. However it happened, I suspect that the two men began corresponding around 1952. Unfortunately, I don't have any direct sources or information on that. I hope that someone can lead the way.

In 1958, under his Arkham House imprint, Derleth issued Nine Horrors and a Dream by Joseph Payne Brennan in an edition of 1,336 copies. The cover art was by Frank Utpatel (1905-1980) (see below). Nine Horrors and a Dream collects four of Brennan's five stories for Weird Tales, plus five others. I recently came across a copy of this book in the collection of the late Margaret B. Nicholas of Bartlett and Marietta, Ohio. Mrs. Nicholas was a wallpaper hanger. She had a fine eye and good taste, not only for books and magazine fiction but also for decorative items. I thank her for what she did in her life, which lasted all of ninety-seven years.

August Derleth published Brennan's poetry as well. Brennan had fourteen poems in Fire and Sleet and Candlelight: New Poems of the Macabre, issued by Arkham House in 1961. Under his Hawk & Whippoorwill Press imprint, Derleth also published The Wind of Time (1961), a slim volume of Brennan's verse. Nightmare Need, again with cover art by Utpatel, followed in 1964, again under Arkham House. Brennan returned the favor in his own journal, entitled Macabre. For example, Derleth's poem "Revenants" was in the Summer 1959 issue of that small magazine.

Of course Brennan and Derleth were also writers of prose. Both wrote weird fiction. Both also created their own occult detectives modeled after Sherlock Holmes. Derleth's detective is Solar Pons. Brennan's goes by the more mundane appellation Lucius Leffing. (Both given names refer to light or sources of light.) Derleth cast his characters and situations into a place he had never been when he began writing. This was London. Brennan kept his detective close to home, in his own native Connecticut. Brennan himself is Leffing's sidekick and Dr. Watson. Brennan and Derleth had stories together in just one issue of Weird Tales before its demise in 1954. That was in July 1953.

August Derleth died suddenly in 1971. We can only imagine what another loss would have meant to Joseph Payne Brennan. Although both men had endured ill health in the previous few years, Brennan survived Derleth by almost two decades. Fortunately for us, Brennan and Derleth put their own works and those of so many other authors into print. Again, we can say thank you to them both.

To be concluded . . .

Further Reading

"Hawk & Whippoorwill: Derleth’s Overlooked Imprint" by Allied Authors, on the blog Allied Authors at the following URL:

https://allied-authors.org/2016/11/01/hawk-whippoorwill-derleths-overlooked-imprint/

In addition to his many other duties, August Derleth was a newspaper columnist. He wrote "Wisconsin Diary" for The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin. On January 31, 1963, Joseph Payne Brennan wrote to Derleth on the death of fellow poet Robert Frost (1874-1963). Derleth quoted Brennan's letter in his own column of February 11, 1963 (page 2).

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Marx, Holmes, and Lovecraft

It's the start of a new week and time to be done with old things and begin with new. (I write this on Monday for posting on Tuesday.) This will be the last in my series referencing To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson (Doubleday Anchor, 1953). Quotes from the book from Marx himself:

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money . . . .

I must follow my goal through thick and thin and I shall not allow bourgeois society to turn me into a money-making machine. (p. 209)

When I read those words, I thought immediately of H.P. Lovecraft, who I believe thought of himself as an amateur (in the good sense) and who failed to do the things that a professional writer does, who wrote slowly and carefully rather than being a hack (a label placed on him by Edmund Wilson by the way), and who, like Marx, declined to work and as a consequence lived very often in dire poverty. It was this poverty in fact that killed Lovecraft. If only he had lived as long as Marx . . .

Like Marx, H.P. Lovecraft was an unsentimental materialist. Lovecraft, who came from a cold northern European culture and who left his wife and died childless, may in fact have been less sentimental than the Jewish Marx, who loved his wife and children, even if he subjected them to poverty, disease, and starvation. (Strange love.) Unlike Marx, Lovecraft was conservative, a twentieth-century Tory. His view was not that History would be crowned by the advent of worldwide socialism--in other words, a supreme human society--but that humanity matters not and will be crushed under the big, green, slimy foot of Cthulhu. (It seems to me that atheists and materialists of today have more in common with Lovecraft than with Marx.) That is at least the conventional view--that Marx was progressive rather than conservative. I have a different view, for I believe that Marx and all of his acolytes right down to the present day were and are in fact hardened conservatives of the reactionary type in that they wish to restore the élite--of which they see themselves a part--to a position they lost with the end of feudalism. The usurpers of course were the middle class, Marx's bourgeoisie, who, in their exercise of their economic rights, reduced the power, prestige, and position of their supposed superiors to nothing, hence all the envy, hatred, and vitriol directed at them even today. Here is an illustrative quote from To the Finland Station:

From time to time, with telling effect, Marx will light up for a moment the memory of other societies which have been fired by other ideals. The disgrace of the institution of slavery on which the Greek system had been founded had at least, in debasing one set of persons, made possible the development of an aristocracy of marvelous taste and many-sided accomplishment, whereas the masses of the people in the industrial world had been enslaved to no more impressive purpose than "to transform a few vulgar and half-educated upstarts into 'eminent cotton spinners,' 'extensive sausage makers' and 'influential blacking dealers.'" (pp. 293-294; emphasis added)

Note the arrogance, the condescension, the contempt for the middle class. Note also the bitter resentment at the loss of position among the aristocracy. (Lovecraft also came from a fallen society and fancied himself an aristocrat.) Finally, note the phrase "a few vulgar and half-educated upstarts." Now we're at the heart of the complaint made by Marx and men like him against the middle class. It's the same complaint made against our current president, and it explains the extreme hatred of him by so many leftists, who seem to have lost their minds in contemplating his ascendancy: How did he get to where he is when he is so obviously inferior to us? What kind of unjust world are we living in? And how can we set it aright? (2)

I'll just add two things: One, in the end, the leftist/socialist/statist program is conservative in the extreme, a kind of reactionary belief system that wishes to restore feudal relationships among men. The real innovation, one of the most radical ideas in history and one enshrined in our founding documents, is that human beings are and by rights free. Two, Lovecraft, a lowly American pulp writer, out-Marxed Marx in his materialism and in his consequent placement of human beings at the bottom of the ladder of history instead of at the top. Although there are way too many Marxists in the world, especially among academia, the masses have made their judgment: they prefer Lovecraft--Edmund Wilson's hack--to Marx--Edmund Wilson's hero.

* * *

A few months ago, I went to a Sherlock Holmes event at the local library. It has been awhile since I read the Sherlock Holmes stories, so when the presenter started to talk about Holmes, his career, and his lifestyle, a lightbulb came on over my head. Again, I thought of H.P. Lovecraft, who, like Holmes (and Marx): was an avowed and enthusiastic amateur; lived by simple means, alone or in the household of a woman (or women) but who more or less eschewed the company of women (unlike Marx); entertained visitors to his apartment but seems to have been more or less a loner and one who lived mostly within his own thoughts and imagination; pursued his amateur studies in the extreme; and had specialized knowledge of obscure or esoteric subjects. (1) My next question was this: Did Lovecraft read the Sherlock Holmes stories? The answer appears to be yes. My final question was this: Did Lovecraft model himself at all on Sherlock Holmes? That's one for people who know more about Lovecraft than I do.

Notes

(1) The one woman in Holmes' life is Irene Adler. The one woman in Lovecraft's life was Sonia Greene. Both disappeared in a hurry. Sonia was a Russian-born Jew. Irene Adler is a native of New Jersey and not obviously Jewish. But what of her surname? We have already had one Adler in this series, the Austrian--and Jewish--socialist Victor Adler. There was also a famous Jewish psychologist named Alfred Adler, who, significantly in a discussion of Lovecraft and leftists, postulated the existence of an inferiority complex among us. Anyway, I'm not the first person to ask the question, Is Irene Adler Jewish? Look for it on the Internet.

(2) A last quote from To the Finland Station:

But with his [Lenin's] hard sense of social realities, he is quite clear about the intellectual inequalities between the intelligentsia and the masses. He quotes in What Is to Be Done? as "profoundly true and important" a statement by Karl Kautsky to the effect that the proletariat, left to itself, can never arrive at socialism; socialism must be brought to them from above: "the vehicles of science are not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia." (pp. 393-394)

Hence the arrogance and condescension of our current leftist ruling class, all of whom have come from the middle class, all of whom enjoy a middle class lifestyle, all of whom fancy themselves intellectually superior not only to the masses but also to the vulgar, moneymaking middle class, and all of whom wish to impose from above a program in which they will attain and hold power, all, they claim, for the sake of "the people."

Original text copyright 2017, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Two Belgian Authors

John Flanders

Né Raymundus Joannes de Kremer or Raymond Jean Marie De Kremer

Aka Jean Ray, King Ray, Alix R. Bantam, John Sailor, and other names
Author, Editor, Journalist, Comic Book Scriptwriter
Born July 8, 1887, Ghent, Belgium
Died September 17, 1964, Ghent, Belgium

Weird Tales published four stories by the pseudonymous author John Flanders, all in 1934-1935. That was only the smallest part of his staggering output of about 9,000 stories and 5,000 articles, essays, reviews, and so on written from the 1920s until his death in 1964.

John Flanders was born Raymundus Joannes de Kremer or Raymond Jean Marie De Kremer, in Ghent, Belgium, on July 8, 1887. He was educated in his home city and worked as a city clerk from 1910 to 1919 before joining the staff of Journal de Gand. He later worked for the monthly L'Ami du Livre. De Kremer's first book was a collection of weird stories called Les Contes du Whisky, published in 1925. He continued writing while serving jail time for "breech of trust" and began using the pseudonym John Flanders in 1928. In February 1929, he was released from prison and continued in his writing career. From 1929 to 1938, he wrote more than one hundred adventures of Harry Dickson, "the American Sherlock Holmes." De Kremer's novel Malpertuis (1943) was filmed in 1971 with Orson Welles in a starring role. After the war, de Kremer wrote comic book scripts for Les Aventures d'Harry Dickson and Les Aventures d'Edmund Bell. A native of Flanders, de Kremer wrote in Dutch as John Flanders and in French as Jean Ray; his known pseudonyms number more than four dozen. De Kremer died on September 17, 1964, in Ghent.

John Flanders' Stories in Weird Tales
"Nude with a Dagger" (Nov. 1934)
"The Graveyard Duchess" (Dec. 1934)
"The Aztec Ring" (Apr. 1935)
"The Mystery of the Last Guest" (Oct. 1935)

Further Reading
"Jean Ray (écrivain)" in the French-language Wikipedia, here.

Oscar Schisgall
Aka Stuart Hardy
Author, Corporate Historian
Born February 23, 1901, Antwerp, Belgium, or Russia
Died May 20, 1984, Manhattan, New York, New York

According to the Internet Movie Database and the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Oscar Schisgall was born in Russia. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database has his birthplace as Antwerp, Belgium, a bit of information that seems to have come from the U.S. Census. Whether Schisgall was born in Russia or Belgium, he was in the United States by September 19, 1926, when he married Lillian Gelberg. A newspaper item from 1947 reported that "Schisgall once toured the capitals of Europe, making his way by writing and selling mystery novels about each great city he lived in." Maybe he considered the Continent as a whole his home.

Like John Flanders, Oscar Schisgall was a very prolific author. He wrote 4,000 short stories and articles for Collier's, Liberty, The New York Times Magazine, Reader's Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, and other mainstream publications. He had a series character, Baron Ixell, in Clues from 1927 to 1932 and wrote two stories for Weird Tales and two more for Jungle Stories (1931, 1939). Other pulps that printed his stories included Blue-Ribbon Western, Cowboy Stories, Dime Detective Magazine, Frontier, The Masked Rider, and others. One of his thirty-five novels, Swastika (1939), was adapted to the silver screen as The Man I Married, also known as I Married a Nazi (1940).

In 1943, Oscar Schisgall became head of the Office of War Information (OWI) Magazine Bureau, taking the place of Dorothy Ducas. In addition to writing stories and novels, Schisgall authored corporate histories, including for Procter & Gamble, Bowery Savings Bank, Xerox, and Greyhound Bus, the last of which was published posthumously. Oscar Schisgall died in Manhattan on May 20, 1984.

Oscar Schisgall's Stories in Weird Tales
"The Death Pit" (Nov. 1923)
"In Kashla's Garden" (May 1927)

Further Reading
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, here.
Internet Movie Database, here.
Internet Speculative Fiction Database, here.
New York Times obituary, here.

1936

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Was the Son of the Black Dahlia Murderer in Weird Tales?

Michael P. Hodel
Author, Essayist, Editor, Radio Host
Born July 12, 1939
Died May 6, 1986

Who killed Elizabeth Short has been a mystery for nearly seventy years. One of the suspects was Dr. George Hill Hodel, Jr. (1907-1999). Hodel's son, Steve Hodel, has been investigating the case for more than a decade. He believes that his father killed the woman called the Black Dahlia and deposited the parts of her mutilated body in a vacant lot in Los Angeles early in the morning of January 15, 1947. In their book Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder (2006), Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss suggest that the murder was connected to the art movement of their title. Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) is probably the most well-known surrealist. Though primarily a painter, Dalí was also a moviemaker. His film Un Chien Andalou (1929) is filled with images of mutilation and death. Man Ray (1890-1976) and Denise Bellon (1902-1999) were also surrealists, primarily photographers. They, too, employed imagery of death, dismemberment, mutilation, and, in their use of manikins, lifelessness. There are indications that Elizabeth Short's murderer intended to make of her body and the scene where it was found a kind of artistic tableau. Dr. Hodel, one of the suspects in the killing, then and now, knew Man Ray and had an interest in surrealist photography.

George Hodel fathered eleven children by five women. He had four sons with Dorothy Harvey Huston, ex-wife of movie director John Huston. Steve Hodel was born in November 1941. (He had a twin brother who died in infancy.) Kelvin Hodel, born in October 1942, is the youngest. The oldest boy was Michael P. Hodel, born on July 12, 1939. According to Steve Hodel, his father and John Huston had questions about Michael's parentage. Finally, Dorothy Harvey Huston told her ex-husband, "Forget it, John, he's not your son." (1)

Tamar Hodel, an older half-sister of the Hodel boys, remembered her father's cruelty towards them. "Michael got it the worst," she said, speaking to Steve Hodel. "It broke my heart to see how he treated you three. Especially how he was with Mike." Steve went in the Navy and became a Los Angeles police detective. In contrast, Michael turned to "his beloved books" (2) and, like his mother, "a script and radio writer," became a writer. (3) 

Throughout his working life, Michael Hodel read fantasy and science fiction, wrote about fantasy and science fiction, and talked about fantasy and science fiction. He had a radio show called Hour 25, and it ran on station KPFK in Los Angeles for twenty-eight years. Mitchell Harding (né Eugene Loring Ware), Katherine Calkin, Mike Hodel, and Michael's wife, Terry Hodel (1937-1999), created the show. It went on the air in January 1972 with Ms. Calkin as host. Michael Hodel came on a few months later and served as host from 1972 to 1986. His co-hosts were Katherine Calkin (1972-1976), Mitchell Harding (1972-1981), and Mel Gilden (1981-1986). Late in his tenure, Hodel became ill and was unable to continue. He was succeeded by Harlan Ellison.

In addition to spending more than a decade on the air and interviewing such luminaries as Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Harlan Ellison, Michael Hodel wrote for fantasy and science fiction magazines and fanzines. His credits from The Internet Speculative Fiction Database:

• "Change of Hobbit Benefit" (essay) in Locus #151 (Dec. 1, 1973)
• "The Group Mind" (essay) in Transmission (Summer 1980)
• "Second Chance" (short story) in Fantasy Book (Feb. 1982)
• "Negotiations at a Lower Level" (short story) in Fantasy Book (Nov. 1982)
• "Native Tongue" by Suzette Haden Elgin (book review) in Weird Tales (Fall 1984)
• "The Businessman: A Tale of Terror" by Thomas M. Disch (book review) in Weird Tales (Fall 1984)
• "The Ghost Light" by Fritz Leiber (book review) in Weird Tales (Fall 1984)
• "The Mainstream That Through the Ghetto Flows: An Interview with Philip K. Dick" (1976) in Missouri Review (Winter 1984)

The version of Weird Tales to which he contributed was published by The Bellerophon Network and edited by Gordon M.D. Garb in 1984-1985. There were only two issues in that incarnation of the magazine. They are exceedingly rare.

In 1979, Hawthorn Books published Enter the Lion: A Posthumous Memoir of Mycroft Holmes "edited" by Michael P. Hodel and Sean M. Wright. It was one of a number of books about Arthur Conan Doyle's characters issued in the 1970s and beyond, including The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974) and The West End Horror (1976) by Nicholas Meyer and The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1979) by Michael Dibdin. The Last Sherlock Holmes Story involves Jack the Ripper, who, like the Black Dahlia killer, mutilated and dismembered his victims.

Enter the Lion was well received. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar read it and liked it. Moreover, he "realised [sic] more could be done with this 'older, smarter'" brother of Sherlock Holmes. (4) In collaboration with screenwriter Anna Whitehouse, Mr. Abdul-Jabbar wrote a new novel of Mycroft Holmes called Mycroft Holmes. The book was released in late 2015 to good reviews.

"Mike died unexpectedly in May, 1986 at the relatively young age of 47," writes Steve Hodel. "His death from lung cancer, followed hard upon the death of our mother, just a few years prior." (5) In 1925, Ted Le Berthon interviewed Michael and Steve's father for a Los Angeles newspaper. In 1932, Le Berthon contributed "Demons of the Film Colony," an unrelated piece, to Weird Tales. In 1947, someone killed Elizabeth Short and left her body in an empty lot in Los Angeles. She had hoped to be in movies. Instead she was mutilated and murdered by a man who might best be described as a demon and who may very well have had connections to the "film colony" of southern California. In 1963, Steve Hodel joined the Los Angeles Police Department. In 1972, Michael Hodel began hosting a radio show about fantasy and science fiction. Probably because of that, he was in a position to review books for Weird Tales in 1984. Michael Hodel died in 1986, George Hodel in 1999. After his father's death, Steve Hodel put his experience with the LAPD to use in investigating his father's role in the Black Dahlia case. He believes he has solved it.

I tell you, this is a strange world we live in. (6)

Notes

(1, 2) Quotes from Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story, unpaginated online version.

(3) "Social Activities: Palm Valley," Desert Sun, Palm Springs, October 6, 1950, page 7, here.

(4) Quoted in "Basketball Veteran Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Pens Story of Sherlock Homes's [sic] Brother" by Alison Flood in The Guardian, September 24, 2015, here. By the way, that's a British paper that misspelled Holmes' last name.

(5) From Steve Hodel's blog, here.

(6) Two final connections: First, Tony "The Hat" Cornero is in Steve Hodel's book. He also had a connection to Volney G. Mathison, who also contributed to Weird Tales and through his association with L. Ron Hubbard was connected to other strange happenings in Pasadena, George Hodel's home city. Second, George Hodel was tried for a crime against his daughter, essentially incest. In Chinatown (1974), Hodel's friend John Huston famously played a man who also had an incestuous relationship with his daughter.

From the very day Elizabeth Short's body was discovered, the Black Dahlia case has fascinated the reading public. Writers and publishers have continued to exploit it at every opportunity. (You could say I'm doing the same thing now.) Here is an example, the cover of True Detective from October 1948, with the blurb "The Black Dahlia Murders"--not just one, but more than one.

Michael P. Hodel collaborated with Sean M. Wright on Enter the Lion, published in 1979 and after. Their book inspired Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to write his own novel on Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes.

Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley