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

G.G. Pendarves (1885-1938)

Née Gladys Gordon Trenery
Aka Marjory E. Lambe (See the comment below.)
Author, Pianist, Music Teacher
Born January 1885, Stonycroft, Liverpool, Merseyside; or Cornwall, or West Derby, Lancashire, England
Died August 1, 1938, Sunset House, Parkgate, Cheshire, England

Five years ago, I wrote an entry called "Women Writers in Weird Tales" in which I gave some figures from Eric Leif Davin's book Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965 (2006). Among those figures is a list of the most prolific women writers of fiction in the pages of Weird Tales. Third on that list, after Allison V. Harding and Mary Elizabeth Counselman, is G.G. Pendarves. I believe that Allison V. Harding was actually a man, actually the associate editor of Weird Tales, Lamont Buchanan. If that's true, then G.G. Pendarves had the second-most stories in Weird Tales among women. And yet very little to nothing is known of her. [Update: That has changed, and so I have updated what I have written about G.G. Pendarves. My update is dated January 26, 2025. I have stricken some of what I wrote before and have removed a few other things completely.]

G.G. Pendarves was the nom de plume of Gladys Gordon Trenery. I hesitate to call it a pseudonym as it could easily have been her married name. No one seems to know. She was called a spinster in a public record of her will. If that was true about her, then Pendarves was not her married name. It is however a Cornish surname, also a place name in Cornwall. I believe the place name came first, and so the Pendarves were the people of that place. Gladys Trenery's use of the Pendarves surname may have been to tie her to a place that meant something in her life and in the lives of her family.

Gladys Trenery was the daughter of Captain John Trenery (1844-1916), a master mariner, and Elizabeth E. Blaney Phillips Trenery (1848-1927). Captain Trenery was, according to his obituary, "a prominent figure in shipping circles." (The Cornishman, Apr. 20, 1916) Among his other accomplishments and activities, he was a commodore of the fleet for the Johnstone Line. He wasn't very often counted in censuses with his family. Maybe he was at sea when the census taker came around. Captain Trenery died at home in New Brighton, in Merseyside, in April 1916.

According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, Gladys Gordon Trenery was born in Cornwall. An index of births in England and Wales gives a Gladys Gordon Trenery as having been born in Lancashire in January 1885. The 1901 Census has her living in Birkenhead, Cheshire, with a birthplace in Stonycroft, Liverpool. Later records also show a birthplace of Stonycroft. Gladys Gordon Trenery was sixteen years old in 1901 and at the time living in a large household that included Grace H. Trenery, age fifty-five, and Elizabeth B. Trenery, age fifty-three. We now know that Elizabeth B. Trenery was her mother and Grace her aunt. There were Trenerys in Cornwall to be sure. Maybe that was where the family originated before moving to Merseyside or its adjoining counties. It seems safe to assume that either Grace H. or Elizabeth B. Trenery was her mother.

Gladys Trennery had two older brothers, Walter J.P. Trennery and David N. Trennery, who emigrated to New Zealand, worked in insurance, and had a keen interest in art. His avocation was painting. Her younger sister was Grace Robartes Trenery (1886-1950). Grace R. Trenery graduated from the University of Liverpool in 1913 with a masters degree in arts. She lectured in literature at the university for many years before being appointed warden of women students at the University College of North Wales in 1943. She also edited the Arden annotated edition of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, published in April 1924, 360 years to the month after the great playwright's birth.

Gladys Gordon Trenery attended Wallasey High School in Merseyside. At Christmastime 1907, she passed her examination to become a teacher in the playing of pianoforte, this at the Royal Academy of Music. She would then have been just short of her twenty-third birthday. Writing as G.G. Pendarves, she had her first known published story, "The Kabbalist," in Hutchinson's Mystery Story Magazine in November 1923. Eight more followed in that magazine over the next two years. She broke into the pages of Weird Tales magazine in August 1926 with "The Devil's Graveyard."

G.G. Pendarves contributed "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" to The Horn Book for November 1931. Otherwise, all of her known stories in the period 1926 to 1939 were in Argosy All-Story Magazine, The Magic Carpet Magazine, Oriental Stories, and Weird Tales. Her last three stories in "The Unique Magazine" were published posthumously, for Gladys G. Trenery died on August 1, 1938. That sad event is lost among the deaths of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft during the previous two years.

Gladys traveled to the United States in April 1927, April 1930, and November 1932. At least two of those visits were with her cousin, Christine (Bickle) Banbury, or Mrs. Fernley H. Banbury, who lived in Connecticut. Fernley Hope Banbury (1881-1963) was an engineer and inventor. He graduated from Purdue University in 1906 and worked for the Farrell Corporation in Ansonia, Connecticut. When Gladys Trenery traveled in November 1932, she gave an address of 15 Linnet Lane in Liverpool, a fitting name for a musician, for a linnet is a songbird of Britain and Europe. If her house was the same house with that address today, then I find it a charming brick house set away from the street.

Gladys Gordon Trennery died on August 1, 1938, at Sunset House, Parkgate, Cheshire, England. She was buried two days later at Rake Lane Cemetery in Wallasey, Merseyside. Incredibly, author Ramsey Campbell, who was born in Liverpool on January 4, 1946, had a neighbor named Gladys Trenery. She looked after him when his mother was taken to the hospital after cutting her hand on broken glass. You can read about that event in "An Interview with Ramsey Campbell" from July 23, 2013, here. That makes me wonder whether the death date of G.G. Pendarves is correct or if the name Galdys Trenery was really common enough for it to have been given to one teller of weird tales and to the babysitter of another. Update: As it turns out, her death date is correct. See the note, marked with an asterisk *, below.

G.G. Pendarves' Stories in Oriental Stories, The Magic Carpet Magazine, and Weird Tales (plus one from Argosy All-Story Magazine)
Note: All are from Weird Tales unless otherwise noted.
"The Devil's Graveyard" (Aug. 1926)
"The Return" (Apr. 1927)
"The Power of the Dog" (Aug. 1927)
"The Lord of the Tarn" (Nov. 1927)
"The Eighth Green Man" (Mar. 1928; reprinted Jan. 1937 and May 1952)
"The Ruler of Zem-Zem" in Argosy All-Story Weekly (Apr. 28, 1928)
"The Doomed Treveans" (May 1928)
"The Laughing Thing" (May 1929)
"The Grave at Goonhilly" (Oct. 1930; reprinted Mar. 1954)
"The Footprint" (May 1930)
"The Black Camel" in Oriental Stories (Oct./Nov. 1930)
"The Veiled Leopard" in Oriental Stories (Dec. 1930/Jan. 1931)
"The Secret Trail" in Oriental Stories (Feb./Mar. 1931)
"Thirty Pieces of Silver" in Oriental Stories (Summer 1931)
"El Hamel, the Lost One" in Oriental Stories (Winter 1932)
"From the Dark Halls of Hell" (Jan. 1932)
"The Djinnee of El Sheyb" in Oriental Stories (Spring 1932)
"The Altar of Melek Taos" (Sept. 1932)
"Abd Dhulma, Lord of Fire (Dec. 1933)
"Passport to the Desert" in The Magic Carpet Magazine (Jan. 1934)
"Werewolf of the Sahara" (Aug./Sept. 1936)
"The Dark Star" (Mar. 1937)
"The Whistling Corpse" (July 1937)
"Thing of Darkness" (Aug. 1937; reprinted Nov. 1953)
"The Black Monk" (Oct. 1938)
"The Sin-Eater" (Dec. 1938; reprinted Sept. 1952 and July 1954)
"The Withered Heart (Nov. 1939)

Further Reading

Look for reprints of G.G. Pendarves' stories in various anthologies and reprint editions, including in The Eighth Green Man (and Other Strange Folk) (1989). The title story was one of only five stories reprinted twice in Weird Tales. "The Sin-Eater," also by G.G Pendarves, was another.

*Revision (Oct. 17, 2017): The death date for Gladys Gordon Trenery as given here is in fact correct. I have from R. Alain Everts a document that confirms it. Thanks to RAE.

Updated on January 26, 2025.

Thanks also to The FictionMags Index and to commenters below.

Text copyright 2016, 2023, 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Violet M. Methley (1882-1953)

Author, Playwright
Born January 1882, Seal, Sevenoaks, Kent, England
Died 1953, London, England

Violet Mary Methley was a prolific author of short stories and novels for children and adults. She specialized in stories for girls, and she may have spent time in Australia, as many of her books are set on that continent. She was born in January 1882 in Seal, Sevenoaks, Kent, England. Little is known of her life except for her credits. A list of her genre stories from The Internet Speculative Fiction Database leads to an interesting discovery. First the list:

Genre Short Stories by Violet M. Methley

• "The Damned Spot" in Truth (July, 21, 1921)
• "'Dusty Death'" in Truth (Nov. 16, 1921)
• "Dread at Darracombe" in Weird Tales (Apr. 1930)
• "The Milk Carts" in Weird Tales (Mar. 1932)

The first two stories on that list originally appeared in the British magazine Truth. They were reprinted in 2004 in an anthology called The Last "Queer Stories from Truth", issued by Ash-Tree Press. According to the website of that press:

For most of its life, the weekly publication Truth--which was more generally concerned with politics, finance, and general muck-raking [sic]--ran, in each issue, a short fiction feature called 'Queer Story.' After publication of a number of stories, they were gathered and published as anthologies titled Queer Stories from 'Truth.' The short stories were odd, peculiar, strange, macabre, weird, and at times outright supernatural, and some illustrious names contributed weird tales to the forum, including H. R. Wakefield (whose 'Annyversry' is an early version of the tale later published as 'The Fire-Watcher's Story'), A. B. Cox, and Rosemary Timperley.

Truth was founded in 1877 by Henry (also called Henri) Labouchère (1831-1912). (1) The website Metapedia describes it as a "nationalist" magazine, but that seems to have been true only in later years. Truth ceased publication in 1957. In between, as the website of Ash-Tree Press points out, Truth published anthologies of its "queer stories," what we would call, I suppose, weird stories or weird fiction. What may have been the first anthology was announced in 1886. The twenty-first series was published in 1915. So the series wasn't annual. In any case, the "queer story," a term that would never be used in that context today, would appear to have been a common type in the late 1800s and may very well have been somewhere in the family tree of weird fiction in general and Weird Tales in particular. If that's true, then I think there is some call for further research.

Getting back to Violet M. Methley, her books include the following:

Books by Violet M. Methley
An Incomplete List

• Camille Desmoulins: A Biography (1914)
• Miss Quixote (1916)
• The Lodestone (1914)
• The Padre of the Movies (1925)
• The Bunyip Patrol: The Story of an Australian Girls' School (1926)
• The Husband-Woman (1926)
• The Girls at Sandilands (1934)
• The Queer Island (1934)
• Seeing the Empire: The Adventurous Tour of Steven and Sallie (1935)
• The Last Enemy (1936)
• Cockie & Co. and Their Adventures (1937)
• Dragon Island: An Adventure Story for Girls (1938)
• Vackies (1941)
• Great Galleon (1942)
• Georgie and the Dragon (1950)
• Armada, Ahoy! (1953)
• Fourteen Fourteens (1954)
• A Daughter of the Legion
• Mystery Camp
• Spectre Jungle
• Three for Luck

She also wrote at least one work for the stage, "Freckles: A Sketch for Four Girls" (1922). And that is all I know of her.

Violet Methley died in London in 1953.

Violet M. Methley's Stories in Weird Tales
"Dread at Darracombe" (Apr. 1930)
"The Milk Carts" (Mar. 1932)

Further Reading

There isn't much on Violet M. Methley on the Internet. I have assembled the information I have here from many different sources, none of which offers very much about her. 

Note

(1) Cynic, misanthrope, radical contrarian, wealthy banker (he left an estate of £2,000,000 or $10,000,000), wide-ranging diplomat, and anti-imperialist Member of Parliament, Henry or Henri Labouchère, nicknamed "Labby," was described thusly: "He has always been in the opposition, is there still, and will doubtless die with a protest on his lips." (Current Opinion, 1892, Vol. 11, p. 227.) His live-in paramour was the actress Henrietta Hodson, also erroneously called Henrietta Hobson or Hodgson, whom he married in 1880 after her husband, the aptly named Mr. Pigeon, died. Labouchère treated her well after her husband had treated her so badly. In later years they lived in Labouchère's Florentine "Villa Christina." Henrietta died on October 30, 1910, in Florence. Labouchère followed her to the grave on January 15, 1912. By the way, Henrietta's sister, Georgiana Hodson, was also an actress. By the way also, Labouchère was responsible for the law under which Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was prosecuted. I'll avoid the obvious pun about queer stories.

Queer Stories of the War and Others from Truth, the twenty-first in the series and published in 1915.

Original text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Alicia Ramsey (1864-1933)

Née Alice Joanna Royston
Aka Alice Ramsey
Author, Playwright, Screenwriter
Born August 31, 1864, Chelsea, London, England
Died May 7, 1933, London, England

Alice Joanna Royston was born on August 31, 1864, in Chelsea, London, England, the daughter of hotelkeeper William Haylett Royston and Isabel Morgan Harris Royston. Mrs. Royston was a writer like her daughter after her and the author of a comedy called No Irish Need Apply. Alice was educated at Oxford College and in Paris. In addition, she studied music in Leipzig with the intention of becoming a pianist. In 1891, in Kensington, she married actor Cecil Ramsey (1866-1914), born Sanderson Henry Walker. Their son, Guy Haylett Walker (1900-1959), later known as Guy Ramsey, was also an author.

Cecil Ramsey died in 1914. On September 14, 1916, at her sister-in-law's home in New York City, Alice, then calling herself Alicia Ramsey, married Jamaican-born writer and actor Rudolph de Cordova (1859-1941). The two had been collaborating in their writing for the previous twenty years. Rudolph de Cordova, by the way, was the brother of actor and director Leander de Cordova (1877-1969).

Alicia Ramsey got her start writing for the stage with a work called Only a Model, produced in 1892. She and de Cordova began working together in or about 1896. As movies came into their own, Alicia began writing screenplays, in the United States for Famous Players-Lasky Corporation and Vitagraph and in Britain for Gaumont British and Stoll Picture Productions. She also wrote a number of books, plus short stories for Ainslee's, Argosy, Novel Magazine, The Smart Set, Snappy Stories, and Young's. Her lone story for Weird Tales was "The Black Crusader," from January 1926.

Alicia Ramsey died on May 7, 1933, in London, at age sixty-eight.

Novels

• The Adventures of Mortimer Dixon (1913)
• Miss Elizabeth Gibbs (1915)
• The Three Cocktails and Other Stories (posthumous, 1933)

Plays-A Partial List

• Only a Model (1892)
• The Executioner's Daughter with Rudolph de Cordova (1896)
• Gaffer Jarge (1896)
• Monsieur de Paris with Rudolph de Cordova (1896)
• As a Man Sows with Rudolph de Cordova (1898)
• Honor with Rudolph de Cordova (1896)
• Byron (1908)
• Bridge
• The Earthquake with Rudolph de Cordova
• The Guardian Angel
• The Hand of Vengeance with Rudolph de Cordova
• Isla the Chosen
• The Mandarin with Rudolph de Cordova
• The Password with Rudolph de Cordova
• The Vigil of Sieur Ercildoune
• Whom the Gods Love with Rudolph de Cordova

Screenplays

• Eve's Daughter (1918)
• The Two Brides (1919)
• The Spark Divine (1919)
• The Prince of Lovers (1922)
• Rob Roy (1922)
• Guy Fawkes (1923)
• Young Lochinvar (1924)
• The Money Habit (1924)
• The Desert Sheik (1924)
• The Love Story of Aliette Brunton (1924)
• The Presumption of Stanley Hay, MP (1925)
• King of the Castle (1925)
• One Colombo Night (1926)

Alicia Ramsey's Story in Weird Tales

"The Black Crusader" (Jan. 1926)

Further Reading

• Who's Who in the Theater, Volume 3, page 505, here.
• For the best biography you're likely to find on any of the principals in this entry, see "Guy Ramsey" by Steve at the blog Bear Alley Books, dated January 14, 2010, here.

Alicia Ramsey and her husband Rudolph de Cordova in a photograph from the Library of Congress.

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Six Women from Britain-Introduction

As I wrote the other day, I have given some organization to the remaining tellers of weird tales. In so doing, I have come up with six British women writers. These are in addition to four about whom I have already written. (Click on their names for links.) Here is an alphabetical list of all ten. The names in bold are of the authors about whom I will write in the next few days. I will take them in chronological order by birth.

• Marguerite Lynch Addis (1880-1948)
• Edith M. Almedingen (1898-1971)
• Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865)
• Dorothea Gibbons (1902-1989)
• Violet M. Methley (1882-1953)
• G.G. Pendarves (1885-1938)
• Alicia Ramsey (1864-1933)
• Flavia Richardson (1897-1985)
• Mary W. Shelley (1797-1851)
• Lady Eleanor Smith (1902-1945)

I can't say that this list is complete, as there are dozens of tellers of weird tales about whom I know nothing. Most of these have either very common names and no fame as authors, or they used only their first and middle initials and, again, are otherwise unknown.

After I have finished this series, I plan to write about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her Gothic romance/proto-science fiction novel, Frankenstein. I have been reading this book and going to a book-club discussion of it. I also recently found an article of interest regarding the author and her book. All together, these things have helped me puzzle out a mystery concerning Mary Shelley and Frankenstein.

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Two Victorian British Authors

T.W. Speight
Thomas Wilkinson Speight
Railroad Man, Author
Born 1830, Liverpool, England
Died 1915

Thomas Wilkinson Speight, better known as T.W. Speight, was born in Liverpool in 1830. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989) states that he "was probably illegitimate," continuing, "[h]e was educated at a foundation school at Kendal in the Lake District" of northwestern England. Speight worked for the Midland Railway Company from 1847 to 1887. Even before reaching the end of the line as a railroad man, Speight had begun writing for publication. He contributed to All the Year Round, Belgravia, Cassell's Magazine, Gentleman's Annual, and other periodicals. From 1867 to 1912, he published more than four dozen short stories, serials, and novels, some of which are listed below. These were mostly thrillers, mysteries, historical romances, and sensation novels, what we might call, I think, suspense, crime, or even exploitation novels. Speight died in 1915. His only story for Weird Tales, "Mrs. Penleath's Strategem," was reprinted from Cassell's Magazine nearly forty years after his death.

T.W. Speight's Books-A Partial List

Brought to Light: A Story (1867)
Under Lock and Key (1869)
In the Dead of Night: A Novel (1874)
A Secret of the Sea: A Novel (1876)
The Mysteries of Heron Dyke: A Novel of Incident (1880)
For Himself Alone: A Tale of Reversed Identities (1884)
A Barren Title: A Novel (1885)
The Sandycroft Mystery (1890)
Burgo's Romance, complete in The Gentleman's Annual (Christmas 1893)
The Grey Monk (1895)
A Husband from the Sea (1895)
The Heart of a Mystery: A Novel (1896)
The Master of Trenance: A Mid-Century Romance (1896)
A Minion of the Moon: A Romance of the King's Highway (1896)
The Crime in the Wood (1899)
The Chains of Circumstance: A Novel (1900)
Juggling Fortune: An Everyday Romance (1900)
The Celestial Ruby (1904)
Ursula Lenorme, Lady Companion: Being a Record of Certain Experiences (1909)
A Bootless Crime
By Fortune's Whim
The Golden Hoop
A Late Repentance
A Match in the Dark
The Sport of Chance
The Web of Fate
Wife or No Wife?

T.W. Speight's Story in Weird Tales

"Mrs. Penleath's Stratagem" (Mar. 1953; reprinted in Weird Tales British edition #23, 1953; originally in Cassell's Magazine, July 1905)

* * *

Richard Marsh
Pseudonym of Richard Bernard Heldmann
Author, Editor
Born October 12, 1857, North London, England
Died August 9, 1915, Haywards Heath, Sussex, England

Richard Bernard Heldmann was born on October 12, 1857, in North London and was the son and grandson of men in the lace business. He began publishing adventure stories and boys' school stories in 1880. From October 1882 to June 1883, Heldmann was co-editor of the boys' weekly Union Jack. His employment ended abruptly. Only recently was it discovered that he passed forged checks in 1883. In April 1884, he began serving a sentence of hard labor because of it. Upon his release, Heldmann adopted the pseudonym Richard Marsh. (See the entry on John Flanders, from April 28, 2016, for a similar situation in the life of a writer in Weird Tales.) Marsh wrote prolifically in the same genres as T.W. Speight, including the sensation novel, a type pioneered by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. His most well-known book is The Beetle, from 1897. (Wikipedia has a list of his books. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database has a list of his genre works.) Marsh also contributed to Belgravia, Cornhill Magazine, Household Words, and The Strand Magazine. His work appears to have been neglected by American anthologists, but it is deserving of a second look. Richard Bernard Heldmann died on August 9, 1915, at age fifty-seven. Heldmann's grandson was author Robert Aickman (1914-1981).

Richard Marsh's Story in Weird Tales

"The Adventure of the Pipe" (Sept. 1927; originally in Cornhill Magazine, Mar. 1891)

The Beetle in a British edition from 1959 with cover art by R.W. Smethurst.

Text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley