Oscar Cook (1888-1952)

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

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

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

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

Short Stories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oscar Cook's Stories in Weird Tales

See the list of short stories above.

Further Reading

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

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Flavia Richardson (1897-1985)

Pseudonym of Christine Campbell Thomson
Aka Christine Hartley
Author, Editor, Anthologist, Literary Agent, Occultist
Born May 31, 1897, London, England
Died September 29, 1985

Christine Campbell Thomson was the editor of eleven collections of weird tales and the author of at least eleven weird tales of her own. She was married more than once, but her name at birth seems to have been Christine Mary Campbell Thomson. (Her husbands were named Cook and Hartley.) If Christine Mary Campbell Thomson was indeed the later editor of weird tales, then she was the daughter of Herbert Campbell Thomson and Constance Emily Temple Thomson, and she was born in Marylebone in London. In 1911, that same girl lived with her family at 34 Queen Anne Street, not far from Sherlock Holmes' residence at 221B Baker Street, also in Marylebone.

Christine Mary Campbell Thomson was born on May 31, 1897, in London. She was educated at Queen's College and by age thirty was a published author and the editor of a series called Not at Night, named after the first volume in the series, from 1925. There were eleven books in the Not at Night series, plus an omnibus edition (published in 1937), an American edition (1928), and four (or six) reprint editions from many years later. The lists that follow are from The Speculative Fiction Database. Any transcription errors are my own.

Not at Night Series

• Not at Night (1925)
• More Not at Night (1926)
• You'll Need a Nightlight (1927)
• Gruesome Cargoes (1928)
• By Daylight Only (1929)
• Switch on the Light (1931)
• At Dead of Night (1931)
• Grim Death (1932)
• Keep on the Light (1933)
• Terror by Night (1934)
• Nightmare By Daylight (1936)
• Not at Night Omnibus (1937)

In 1928, Macy-Macius of New York reprinted some of the stories from those British editions for American readers. The title was Not at Night: Creepy Tales!, and the editor was Herbert Asbury. In the 1960s, of course, there was a wave of nostalgia for fantasy and horror of the pulp-fiction era (as well as for Universal monsters and other movies from the same era). Arrow Books, a British publishing house, brought back the Not at Night series in its own series of paperback editions, two of which were reprinted with different titles:

Not at Night Arrow Books Reprints

• Not at Night (1960)
• More Not at Night (1961; reprinted as Never at Night, 1972)
• Still Not at Night (1962; reprinted as Only By Daylight, 1972)
• Terror by Night (1976)

The odd thing about all this is that the stories from the series were drawn for the most part from an American magazine, none other than Weird Tales. Mike Ashley is a historian of science fiction. By his count, there were 170 stories in the Not at Night series, of which 100 (or 59 percent) came from Weird Tales. So in the 1960s, readers could catch up on reprints from a British series from the 1920s and '30s, which were in turn reprints from an American magazine of that same period, and at least one of which, "Out of the Earth" by Christine Campbell Thomson (writing under a pseudonym), was originally in a British magazine. You'll understand why I'm not going to catalogue the stories from the Not at Night series.

If a sketchy website is a reliable source of information, then Christine Campbell Thomson registered her firm, Campbell Thomson and McLaughlin Limited, on March 19, 1932, with offices in Arsenal, London--if I interpret the thing correctly. Campbell Thomson and McLaughlin was a literary agency and its founder a literary agent. The firm was subsumed by The Marsh Agency Limited, also of London, a firm still in existence.

Even before she established her own firm, Christine worked as a literary agent. Among her clients was Richard Martin Oscar Cook (1888-1952), who went by the truncated name of Oscar Cook. Just back from Borneo in the early 1920s, he went to Christine Campbell Thomson for help with his memoir of the Orient. She retitled it and the book was published as Borneo: The Stealer of Hearts in  August 1924. On the last day of the following month, she and Cook were married. It was his firm (he was a part owner, I think), Selwyn & Blount Limited, that published the books in the Not at Night series, as well as Christine's novel, His Excellency (1927). She also wrote the novels The Incredible Island (1924), Port of Call: Love and Murder in Algeria (1936), Hawk of the Sahara (1939), and In a Far Corner. And she contributed to the Daily Herald, Evening News, Glasgow Herald, Newcastle Sunday Sun, Star, and other papers. You can find out more about the writing couple on Douglas A. Anderson's blog, Lesser-Known Writers, here. There you will read that Oscar Cook and Christine Campbell Thomson had one child, a son named Gervis Hugh Frere Cook (later Frere-Cook), born on July 12, 1928. He was also a writer, but his career was cut short with his death late in 1974.

Oscar Cook and his wife were divorced in 1937 or 1938. He died on February 23, 1952, in London. In 1945, she married a man name Hartley, and that was her surname at her death in 1985. So, there is a lot about names in the story of Christine Campbell Thomson. Here's another: Flavia Richardson. That was her nom de plume, and the one she used for all but the last of the following short stories:

Short Stories

• "Out of the Earth" in Hutchinson's Mystery Story Magazine (Jan. 1925; reprinted in Weird Tales, Apr. 1925)
• "When Hell Laughed" in Hutchinson's Mystery Story Magazine (Jan. 1926; reprinted in Gruesome Cargoes, 1928; You'll Need a Nightlight, 1927; More Not at Night, 1961; et al.)
• "At Number Eleven" in By Daylight Only (1929)
• "The Gray Lady" in Weird Tales (Oct. 1929)
• "Pussy" in At Dead of Night (1931; reprinted in Not At Night, 1960)
• "The Red Turret" in Switch on the Light (1931; reprinted in A Century of Creepy Stories, 1934; et al.)
• "Behind the Blinds" in Grim Death (1932; reprinted Still Not at Night, 1962; Only By Daylight, 1972)
• "The Black Hare" in Keep on the Light (1933; reprinted in Not at Night Omnibus, 1937)
• "Behind the Yellow Door" in Terror by Night (1934, reprinted in Not at Night Omnibus, 1937; et al.)
• "Empty Stockings" in Nightmare By Daylight (1936)
• "Message for Margie" in The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories (1964; et al.)

As mentioned, Christine was also a novelist, and she wrote non-fiction, including:

• The Right Way to Write Successful Fiction (to which she may have been only a contributor)
• Murder and Sudden Death with John C. Woodiwiss (1939)
• I Am A Literary Agent (1951)
• The Western Mystery Tradition: The Esoteric Heritage of the West (1968)
• A Case For Reincarnation (1972) 

Finally, Christine Campbell Thomson Cook Hartley was an occultist, a friend of Dion Fortune (1890-1946), and a member of the Society of the Inner Light. She died on September 29, 1985, at age eighty-eight.

Flavia Richardson's Stories in Weird Tales

"Out of the Earth" (Apr. 1927; previously in Hutchinson's Mystery Story Magazine, Jan. 1925)

"The Gray Lady" (Oct. 1929)

Further Reading
You can read about Christine Campbell Thomson and her husband Oscar Cook on Douglas A. Anderson's blog, Lesser-Known Writers, here, and on the website Vault of Evil: Brit Horror Pulp Plus!, here. Otherwise, the pickings seem to be pretty slim for such a significant figure in the history of weird fiction in Great Britain.

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Demon Barbers

I have wondered about the first psychopathic killer and the first totalitarian in literature. I have candidates for both now. First the killer.

A story has come out that the identity of Jack the Ripper is now revealed. The suspect was named Aaron Kosminski, and he was a Polish-Jewish émigré to London. (1) Forensic evidence unavailable at the time supposedly places him at the scene of the murder of Catherine Eddowes, on September 30, 1888. Kosminski was a prime suspect at the time, so today's allegations aren't new. I'm not a Ripperologist, so I can't say how sound the case against Kosminski might be. He was without a doubt mentally ill and died in an insane asylum on March 24, 1919. Whether he was in fact Jack the Ripper is another story.

Aaron Kosminski worked as a barber, but he wasn't the first tonsorial specialist to terrorize London. That honor is reserved for Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Sweeney Todd as we know him today is a fictional character, but he was supposedly based on a real person. According to Wikipedia, "Sweeney Todd first appeared in a story titled The String of Pearls: A Romance," a penny dreadful published in serialized form in eighteen issues of The People's Periodical and Family Library, from November 21, 1846, to March 20, 1847 (numbers 7 through 24). The murderer's modus operandi is to drop his victims through a trap door into the basement of his shop. If the fall doesn't kill them, Sweeney does so by slitting their throats with a razor. Once relieved of their valuables, victims are cut apart and baked into meat pies by Sweeney's associate, Mrs. Lovett. The story of a murderous barber and cannibal pie-making goes back before 1847, but Sweeney's story is the one everyone knows. It has been adapted to stage and song, as well as to books, movies, radio, television, and comic books over the last 167 years.

Sweeney Todd has all the makings of a psychopathic serial killer. Although he appeared forty years before Jack the Ripper and forty-five before H.H. Holmes, he is still of the nineteenth century and still of the city. He is the earliest psychopath that I have found in literature. I can't rule out that there was an earlier example, but if there was, it could not have been very much earlier. For one, the psychopath is a character of popular fiction, and popular fiction isn't very much older than the nineteenth century. For another, the psychopath as we know him is an inhabitant of the modern city, which also isn't very much older than the nineteenth century.

***

It's worth noting that the barber was traditionally not only a person who cut hair and beards, but also a surgeon, a dentist, and--by our terms--a quack doctor. The barber pole, a seemingly innocuous symbol, represents a wrapping of a doctor's bloody bandages. (2) There are those who believe Jack the Ripper to have been a physician or surgeon. H.H. Holmes passed himself off as a doctor. Josef Mengele was in fact a medical doctor. In my posting of May 12, 2014, I quoted Ivan Turgenev and his book Fathers and Sons (1862):

"For what do you want frogs, barin?" asked one of the lads. 

"To make them useful," replied Bazarov. . . . "You see, I like to open them, and then to observe what their insides are doing. You and I are frogs too, except that we walk upon our hind legs. Thus the operation helps me to understand what is taking place in ourselves." 

"And what good will that do you?" 

"This. That if you should fall sick, and I should have to treat you, I might avoid some mistakes." 

"Then you are a doctor?" 

"I am." (3)

One way of thinking about the psychopath is that he is essentially a materialist, a person who sees human beings as machines and wishes to open us up to see what makes us tick. Every time, the ghost in the machine eludes him, and so he goes on killing. (4)

Notes

(1) If Kosminski was in fact the Ripper, he would have fit the role of the outsider, being a Pole--in other words, an Easterner--and a Jew at a time when both would have been suspect. We should remember that Dracula, from Bram Stoker's novel (1897), was also an Easterner and a killer who moved from the country to the city. In her book Blood Will Tell: Vampires as Political Metaphors (2011), Sara Libby Robinson links fears of vampires to fears of Jews, especially Eastern Jews. One of those links has to do with the accusation that Jews are bloodthirsty, the notorious blood libel that is as old as time and as new as the events of this summer. Mrs. Lovett, Sweeney Todd's associate, is not obviously Jewish; nonetheless, she bakes blood (and meat) into her wares, as Jews have been accused of doing throughout history. Like Mrs. Lovett, some psychopaths of the twentieth century also sold human flesh as meat to their customers. Others consumed that flesh themselves.
(2) The pattern on the barber pole is also a helix, like the caduceus and the Rod of Asclepius, but also like the double helix of the DNA molecule. The men who claim to have identified Aaron Kosminski as Jack the Ripper have used DNA evidence against him. So, live by the helix, die by the helix.

(3) Quoted in Lenin by Michael Morgan (1971), p. 12.

(4) People who believe that aliens are mutilating livestock point to the "surgical" precision of the wounds in question. Maybe aliens don't know what animates life on Earth, either, and are engaged in the same activity as earthly psychopaths.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Happy Halloween

HAPPY HALLOWEEN

FROM

TELLERS OF WEIRD TALES!

Cover art by Virgil Finlay

Rivals of Weird Tales-Strange Tales of the Mysterious and Supernatural

In my previous article, I wrote about the American magazine Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror. Today I will write about the similarly titled British magazine Strange Tales of the Mysterious and Supernatural. Like its predecessor, the British Strange Tales was shortlived, lasting only two issues.

I don't know what connection the American magazine Weird Tales might have had to a British magazine of weird fiction and fantasy, but Weird Tales would not have been unfamiliar to British readers. The American version of the magazine would easily have made the crossing to Great Britain by mail. Over the years, many British writers contributed to Weird Tales. More to the point, Weird Tales was printed in a British edition on three occasions, once prior to the publication of Strange Tales, once roughly contemporary with it, and once afterwards:

1. Weird Tales war edition--G.G. Swan of London printed three issues of Weird Tales, one each in February, March, and June of 1942. The first American servicemen arrived in the British Isles at about that time. The British wartime edition may have been printed for their reading pleasure, but I don't know that anyone has addressed that as a possibility. (Those three issues were reprints of the September 1940, November 1940, and January 1941 issues of Weird Tales, respectively.)
2. Weird Tales ca. 1946 edition--William C. Merrett of London printed one unnumbered, undated issue in about 1946. That issue reprinted selections from the October 1937 issue of Weird Tales.
3. Weird Tales 1953-1954 edition--Thorpe & Porter of Leicester printed twenty-eight issues of Weird Tales with roughly the same contents of selected American issues from July 1949 to May 1954.

In addition, British readers would have seen Christine Campbell Thomson's Not At Night series. Printed in a dozen volumes between 1925 and 1937, the stories from the Not At Night series numbered 170 in all. One hundred of those stories came from Weird Tales. (1) The upshot of all this is that Weird Tales and a taste for weird fiction had, by 1946, made the crossing to the United Kingdom.

As I said, Strange Tales of the Mysterious and Supernatural lasted all of two issues dated six months apart. That suggests either a semi-annual schedule or real trouble. We should remember that Britain underwent a period of severe austerity after the war ended. (2) The British Strange Tales would have suffered from economic hard times just as its American predecessor had. In any case, the publisher was--ironically--Utopian Publications of London. The editor is unknown. 

Here is the complete list of contents from the first published issue, called the "First Selection", provided by Susanne V. Paradis:

• "Non-Stop to Mars" by Jack Williamson (originally as "Nonstop to Mars" in Argosy, Feb. 25, 1939)
• "Pink Elephants" by Tarleton Fiske (originally in Strange Stories, Aug. 1939, as by Robert Bloch)
• "The Brain of Ali Khan" by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach (originally in Wonder Stories, Oct. 1934)
• "The Hunters from Beyond" by Clark Ashton Smith (originally in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, Oct. 1932)
• "Experiment in Murder" by John Russell Fearn (originally as "Portrait of a Murderer" in Weird Tales, Dec. 1936) 
• "The Tombstone" by Ray Bradbury (originally in Weird Tales, Mar. 1945)
• Cover art by Alva Rogers; interior illustrations by Fredric

Here are the contents of the second published issue, called the "Second Selection." I believe this to be a complete list:

• "The Moon Devils" by John Beynon Harris, pseudonym of John Wyndham (originally in Wonder Stories, Apr. 1934)
• "The Nameless Offspring" by Clark Ashton Smith (originally in the American Strange Tales, June 1932)
• "The Sorcerer's Jewel" by Tarleton Fiske, pseudonym of Robert Bloch (originally in Strange Stories, Feb. 1939)
• "The Song of the Dark Star" by Richard Presley Tooker (originally as "The Song from the Dark Star" in Astounding Stories, Sept. 1936)
• "Cool Air" by H.P. Lovecraft (originally in Tales of Magic and Mystery, Mar. 1928; reprinted in Weird Tales, Sept. 1939)
• "The Manikin" by Robert Bloch (originally as "The Mannikin" in Weird Tales, Apr. 1937)
• Cover art by Alva Rogers; interior illustrations by Fredric

According to a vague listing on an Internet book sale site, the First Selection was actually the second issue. The first issue was withdrawn either from publication or from distribution because the cover art showed a woman with bare breasts. The website doesn't say what happened to that first issue or what its contents might have been. I wonder if the First Selection was just a reprinting of the first issue with a different cover. In any case, with the Second Selection, the whole magazine went the way of the first issue. Luckily for us, Thomas G. Cockcroft indexed the contents of the magazine in the 1960s.

Strange Tales of the Mysterious and Supernatural

Apr. 1946 to Oct. 1946

2 Issues

Published by: Utopian Publications, London, England

Edited by: Unknown

Format: A little less than digest size (4-3/4 x 7-1/4 inches); 64 pages

Notes

(1) Christine Campbell Thomson also contributed to Weird Tales under the pen name Flavia Richardson in 1927 and 1929.

(2) George Orwell composed 1984 during this period (1947-1948). I have read that apologists for totalitarianism (they don't call themselves that, but that is their function) consider Orwell's novel to be merely a satire of postwar British austerity. The rest of us know better.

A poor reproduction of the cover of the first issue of Strange Tales of the Mysterious and Supernatural. There may not be a good reproduction of this image, as the magazine was withdrawn because of the offending naked breasts of the woman on the cover. It isn't clear to me whether the contents were repackaged with a different cover or not. Postscript (Sept. 3, 2013): In looking over Index to the Weird Fiction Magazines by T.G.L. Cockcroft, I found this note: "Copies of the first issue of the British Strange Tales exist which, like the second, have a cover picture by Alva Rogers rather than by H.W. Perl." I assume, then, that this cover is the work of Alva Rogers and there were at least a few copies that made their way into the marketplace. Presumably the contents of the magazine shown here and of the one shown below were the same. Second postscript (July 8, 2015): Information provided by Susanne V. Paradis confirms that Alva Rogers was the cover artist.

Here's the much less offensive cover of the "First Selection" (instead of first issue) of the magazine. I'm not sure what this illustration has to do with weird fiction or fantasy, but at least it made its way to the newsstand. The artist was H.W. Perl.

Here's the cover of the "Second Selection" with art by American artist Alva Rogers (b. 1923). Note that this is a three-color cover or even a two-color cover vs. a four-color cover for the First Selection--a sign of a tightened budget.

As a bonus, here's an interior illustration by an artist named Fredric for "Cool Air" by H.P. Lovecraft, reprinted in Strange Tales in October 1946.

Postscript (July 8, 2015): Here is a much better image of Strange Tales number one, kindly provided by Susanne V. Paradis, who has a copy of the magazine offered for bid on Ebay. Thank you, Susanne. You can find her listing by clicking here.

Revised and updated on July 8, 2015.
Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley