Jack Kytle (1906-1971)

Journalist, Editor, Photographer, and Author

Born October 22, 1906, Wilsonville, Alabama

Died March 5, 1971, Birmingham, Alabama

In its March 1940 issue, the last under the editorship of Farnsworth Wright, Weird Tales began a new feature called "It Happened To Me." According to T.G.L. Cockcroft's Index to the Weird Fiction Magazines (1962), there were eleven installments in the series, each written by a different author and each an ostensibly true account of a psychic or supernatural experience. Dorothy McIlwraith's detractors point to "It Happened To Me" as evidence of "The Unique Magazine's" decline following Wright's departure. After all, the new series could be considered not much more than a confessional, the hallmark of the "true" magazine. Whatever the case, "It Happened To Me" lasted just a year and a half and its eleven installments appeared in just seven issues of Weird Tales (March 1940 to November 1941). As a "true" feature, it was overlapped and succeeded by Irwin J. Weill's "Superstitions and Taboos" (November 1940 to May 1947).

Jack Kytle wrote one installment in the series "It Happened To Me." Entitled "They Lynched Him, and Then--" it appeared in the September 1940 issue of the magazine as the eighth in the series. Whereas the previous two issues had carried three installments each, Kytle's story stood alone. Kytle may have known something about lynching. As a journalist covering events in his native Alabama, he may even have witnessed or reported on the crime. "They Lynched Him, and Then--" was published at a time when lynching in America was still commonplace and just one year after Billie Holiday's version of "Strange Fruit" reached its highest point on the pop music charts.

Elvyn Jackson Kytle was born on October 22, 1906, in Wilsonville, Alabama. As a child, he lived with his family in Talladega, Alabama, and Tallapoosa, Georgia. He was a sportswriter in Atlanta and a writer and copy editor for the Birmingham Age-Herald, Birmingham Post, and Birmingham Post-Herald. Kytle also wrote a column, "Byways of Birmingham," for five years for the Post. In fact, he was a jack-of-all-trades as a writer. His work appeared in the Milwaukee Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, The Message Magazine, and several western pulp titles, including Texas Rangers, Giant Western, Ranch Romances, and Triple Western between 1953 and 1960.

During the 1930s, Kytle was on the editorial staff of the Alabama Writers' Project under the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Kytle and his co-editor, Luther Clark, were responsible for Alabama: A Guide to the Deep South (1941), part of the renowned American Guide Series. Kytle also wrote Fish Are Fighters in Alabama, illustrated by William H. Bunce and published by the Alabama Department of Conservation in 1941.

In the course of his work for the WPA, Kytle interviewed workmen, river men, convicts, former slaves, and other denizens of the pre-war South. His work has been published most recently in Up Before Daylight: Life Histories from the Alabama Writers' Project, 1938-1939 by James Seay Brown (1997) and The Food of a Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky (2009). Mr. Kurlansky's book is available on Google Books.

Kytle served in the U.S. Army in New Guinea and the Philippines during World War II. For more than twenty years, he worked for Alabama newspapers, and he was a freelance writer. His last residence was in Homewood, Alabama, adjacent to Birmingham. Jack Kytle died on March 5, 1971. He was just sixty-four years old.

Jack Kytle's Story in Weird Tales

"They Lynched Him, and Then--"

Further Reading

Books by James Seay Brown and Mark Kurlansky, mentioned above, include some of Kytle's work.

"Lucindy Jurdon, former slave from Georgia," with her mother's spinning wheel. Photograph possibly by Preston Klein and Jack Kytle, ca. 1938, from the website of George Washington University. Jack Kytle worked for the WPA during the Great Depression, traveling in the South and interviewing former slaves, laborers, and others.

One result of his work for the WPA was the book Alabama: A Guide to the Deep South, co-edited by Luther Clark.

Thanks to Jiemin Fan at the Birmingham Public Library, Birmingham, Alabama, for finding Jack Kytle's obituary. Thanks also to Randal A. Everts for providing Kytle's full middle name.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Wilma Dorothy Vermilyea (1915-1995)

Aka Millen Cooke, Millen Belknap, Millen le Poer Trench, Millen Trench
Poet, Author, Occultist

Born March 17, 1915, Dilley, Oregon

Died May 21, 1995, Mill Park, Victoria, Australia

Born on March 17, 1915, in Dilley, Oregon, Wilma Dorothy Millen Vermilyea lived in Multnomah and Washington counties as a child and attended Forest Grove High School outside Portland. From an early age, she was interested in theology and philosophy and later became a follower of Tibetan Buddhism.  I know nothing else about her early life except that her poem, "Fear: A Fantasy," was published in the February 1936 issue of Weird Tales under her own name. Wilma, who preferred to be called Millen, also wrote a number of letters to The American Theosophist magazine during the early 1940s. More importantly for science fiction and fantasy fans, she began submitting stories to pulp magazines.

Pen names and house names were common among writers of the pulp fiction era. Wilma Vermilyea used at least two names in her career as a science fiction writer. Her pen name, "Millen Cooke," was a combination of her preferred first name and her husband's last name. "Alexander Blade," used by a number of writers (including Millen), was a house name for Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, both of which were published by Ziff-Davis and edited by Raymond A. Palmer. A blog called "Dark Worlds" by G.W. Thomas lists the men and women who shared the name "Alexander Blade." Unfortunately, Mr. Thomas' list does not indicate which of "Blade's" stories were the work of Millen Cooke. In any case, she was in good company, for Edmond Hamilton, Robert Silverberg, and John Jakes were among the many authors who masqueraded as Alexander Blade in the years 1941 to 1958.

According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB), Millen Cooke's science fiction was limited to three magazines of the 1940s and '50s: Amazing Stories, Fantastic Fiction (as by Alexander Blade), and Other Worlds Science Stories. ISFDB's list of her work is short enough to repeat here. All stories and essays are as by Millen Cooke unless otherwise indicated:

Stories

• "The Affair of Matthew Eldon" (Amazing Stories, May 1946)
• "M-m-m-m-m-m!" (Amazing Stories, Oct. 1946, reprinted in Science Fiction Adventure Yearbook, 1970)
• "I, John Cotter" (Amazing Stories, Apr. 1947, available as a download on the Internet)
• "The Egg of Time" (Amazing Stories, Mar. 1948)
• "Descent from Mera" (Other Worlds Science Stories, Jan. 1950)
• "Edmund Latimer's Milking Machine" (Other Worlds Science Stories, May 1950)

Essays

• "A Champion for Tibet" (Amazing Stories, May 1946)
• "The Truth About Tibet" (Amazing Stories, Nov. 1946)
• "Son of the Sun" as by Alexander Blade (Fantastic Adventures, Nov. 1947)

If the list is complete, then Millen Cooke's entire body of published science fiction appeared in four short years, between May 1946 and May 1950. Her first marriage, to a man deeply interested in the occult, was inclusive of those years. Also during that period, two new real-world beliefs, Dianetics and flying saucers, began to evolve out of the work of science fiction writers. Millen Cooke would be involved in both.

Millen Cooke's first husband, John Starr Cooke, was born into a wealthy and prominent family in Honolulu, Hawaii, on March 9, 1920. He became interested in the occult early in life and used a Ouija board to make important decisions, including the decision to marry. Cooke and Wilma Dorothy Vermilyea married in 1943 and divorced in 1951. In the course of their marriage, Millen Cooke had a series of visions which formed the basis of her husband's "Atlantean Tarot," one of three original Tarot decks he created. (Cooke pronounced Tarot to rhyme with carrot.) She also wrote science fiction, which remains as a large part of her legacy today. An actor and dancer, Cooke appeared on stage and in movies (as an extra) during the early 1940s and was involved in theosophy, Scientology, and the Bahai faith. He also claimed to own Aleister Crowley's own crystal ball.

Cooke lived in North Africa for many years before returning to the United States in the late 1950s. According to a blog called "Doctrine Wars" (doctrinewars.blogspot.com), he was revered by members of the Sufi sect, claimed he could activate "shakti" and "Kundalini" energies, and made an additional claim that he could induce a spinal seizure by touching people on the forehead. (Maybe he was the inspiration for the character of Professor Robert Orwell Sutwell in Beach Party (1963). Played by Bob Cummings, Professor Sutwell is a master of "The Himalayan Suspender," otherwise known as "The Finger," frequently used to render Eric Von Zipper helpless.) Cooke became involved in the counter-culture movement in the San Francisco area during the tumultuous '60s. After many years living in Mexico, John Starr Cooke died of cancer on August 21, 1976.

Millen's second husband was William Burke Belknap, Jr., a friend and associate of her first. Like Cooke, Belknap was the scion of a prominent family. Born on December 30, 1923, in Goshen, Kentucky, he graduated from Yale University and worked as a chemical engineer.  He became interested in L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics and served as president of the Freudian Foundation of America, Inc., a Scientological organization dating from the early 1950s. He and Millen were married for a brief period during which she was also involved in Scientology. Their marriage ended in divorce, after which he remarried, in 1960. Burke Belknap lived and worked in Oceanside, California, and died on November 26, 2010.

On June 16, 1961, Millen topped off her marriages to fringe figures when she walked down the aisle with (take a deep breath) The Right Honourable William Francis Brinsley Le Poer Trench, 8th Earl of Clancarty, 7th Marquess of Heusden. Le Poer Trench (1911-1995) was an Irish peer, a member of Dutch nobility, and a member of the House of Lords. He was also a believer in ancient astronauts, a hollow earth, and flying saucers. Editor of the Flying Saucer Review from 1956 to 1959, Le Poer Trench wrote several books on the subject, including The Sky People (1960), The Flying Saucer Story (1966), Operation Earth (1969), and Secret of the Ages (1974). Millen, who had been investigating aliens and UFOs for a quarter century, provided some of the concepts and content for Le Poer Trench's first book. Unfortunately, he did not give her credit when The Sky People was published. According to an anonymous source, part of his second book, Men Among Mankind (1962), was hers as well.

Wilma Dorothy Millen Vermilyea lived in many places the world over during her long life. Her marriage to Brinsley Le Poer Trench ended in divorce in 1969, but by an almost occult coincidence, they died in 1995 within days of each other, though half the globe and many years apart separated them.

Wilma Dorothy Vermilyea's Poem in Weird Tales

"Fear: A Fantasy" (Feb. 1936)

Further Reading

Biographical information on Wilma Dorothy Vermilyea and her husbands is relatively easy to find. If you want to read more about John Starr Cooke, you might start with a website called "The Royal Maze," here.

A page from The Optimist, the yearbook of Forest Grove High School, 1929. Wilma Dorothy Vermilyea is there, second from the right in the third row from the bottom, looking very boyish.

Millen and John Starr Cooke, 1943, the year in which they were married. Photograph courtesy of an anonymous source.

John Starr Cooke (1920-1976), actor, occultist, artist, and the first husband of Wilma Dorothy Vermilyea. Photo from the website, "The Royal Maze."

In Beach Party, Bob Cummings played Professor Robert Orwell Sutwell. . .

And here he is (in the seersucker suit) as Eric Von Zipper gives himself "The Finger." Could Cummings' character (or at least his talent) have been inspired by John Starr Cooke?

The Flying Saucer Story from 1966, a peak year for popular culture in America. Written by Brinsley Le Poer Trench, the book was one of hundreds concerning visitors from outer space published during the 1950s and '60s. Le Poer Trench was Wilma Dorothy Vermilyea's third husband.

A photograph of a UFO, taken by Millen Belknap, April 10, 1958, in Vista, California.

Note: This is a revised version of the original posting. Thanks to an anonymous source for confirmation of certain information, and for corrections and clarifications.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Preston Langley Hickey Update

I read an obituary today for Preston Langley Hickey, a teller of weird tales and--as it turns out--a publicist for the studio that made everyone's favorite monster movies from the 1950s. You can read more on the original posting for him, here, now updated. Thanks to Andrea Fisher at the Lakewood Public Library, Lakewood, Ohio, for locating the obituary.

Preston Langley "Duke" Hickey (1900-1962). Photograph from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Copyright 2011 Terence E. Hanley

Stella G.S. Perry (1877-1956)

Author, Businesswoman, Social Reformer

Born December 8, 1877, New Orleans, Louisiana

Died November 7, 1956, Brooklyn, New York

Stella George Stern was born on December 8, 1877, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and attended the Southern Academic Institute, Newcomb College, and Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City, where she was class poet and a founding member of a sorority, Alpha Omicron Pi. Stella graduated from Barnard in 1898 and went directly into advertising, working for the John Wanamaker department store in New York City. Eventually she ran her own advertising agency with local and national accounts. She married George Hough Perry on September 19, 1906, and lived most of her adult life in New Jersey, New York, and San Francisco.

Stella G.S. Perry wrote poems, stories, articles, novels, and non-fiction. Her books are many, from Go to Sleep (1911), Melindy (1912), and When Mother Lets Us Act (1913) to several works of non-fiction published late in her life. Her native Louisiana was the setting of a couple of her novels, Palmetto, The Romance of a Louisiana Girl (1920) and Come Home, A Romance of the Louisiana Rice-Lands (1923). She wrote just one story for Weird Tales, "Old Roses," published in the August 1931 issue.

A suffragist, socialist, and Unitarian, Stella worked on behalf of women and children's welfare in her adopted home state of New Jersey. Her husband was appointed Director of Exploitation (yes, that was his title) at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. Stella wrote two books on the art and sculpture of the expo, one with the sculptor Alexander Calder.

Stella G.S. Perry died in Brooklyn, New York, on November 7, 1956, a month and a day short of her seventy-ninth birthday.

Stella G.S. Perry's Story in Weird Tales

"Old Roses" (Aug. 1931)

Further Reading

An Internet search for Stella G.S. Perry's name and "Alpha Omicron Pi" will result in several brief biographies of her. The Louisiana Historical Association has a lengthier biography of her at its website, here.

Author and social reformer Stella G.S. Perry (1877-1956).

A postcard for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Stella G.S. Perry compiled two books on the art of the exposition, The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition (1915) and The Sculpture of the Exposition (1915, with A. Sterling Calder).

Thanks to Randal A. Everts for providing Stella G.S. Perry's place of death.
Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Ramòn de las Cuevas (1882-1971)

Pseudonym of Mark R. Harrington
Anthropologist, Archaeologist, Author, Museum Curator
Born July 6, 1882, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Died June 30, 1971

By sheer coincidence, I heard from Weird Tales researcher Randal Everts within just a few minutes of posting my entry on Johns Harrington the other day. Mr. Everts, who has been looking into Weird Tales for many years, once wrote an article on four anthropologists who had work published in "The Unique Magazine." I had already posted an article about the anthropologist Alanson B. Skinner (here), but I had also written about another anthropologist without realizing that he, too, was a teller of weird tales. The anthropologist was Johns Harrington's father, Mark R. Harrington. His story was called "Teoquitla the Golden," and it appeared in the November 1924 issue of Weird Tales under the name Ramòn de las Cuevas.

Mark Raymond Harrington was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on July 6, 1882. His father, Mark W. Harrington, was something of a Renaissance man, teaching geology, mathematics, botany, and French, as well as serving as curator of the University of Michigan museum. The younger Harrington was fascinated by Indians and their culture even from a young age and began learning their languages and their ways. His family moved to Mount Vernon, New York, where Harrington began collecting Indian artifacts, a hobby that earned him an introduction to Frederic W. Putnam and the American Museum in New York. Putnam took Harrington under his wing, and so a career in anthropology, archaeology, and museum curation began. Harrington received his master's degree in anthropology from Columbia University in 1908 and began field work in the United States and Cuba that would culminate in his monumental discoveries in Nevada during the 1920s and '30s. There is an excellent account of this phase of Harrington's career at the website of the Las Vegas Review-Journal's "First 100," here.

In 1928, Harrington became director of research and soon after curator of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles. He would spend the rest of his career with the museum, eventually being named curator emeritus. He was also a historical preservationist and consultant on restoring historic buildings. He himself restored an old adobe home in which he raised a family during the 1930s and '40s.

Harrington also preserved names from the past. In the course of his research, Harrington ran across a historic name, "Ramòn de las Cuevas," and adopted it as his nom de plume for Weird Tales. Harrington's only known story for "The Unique Magazine" was "Teoquitla the Golden" from November 1924, the first issue with Farnsworth Wright as editor. Harrington wrote many works of non-fiction under his own name as well.

Mark Raymond Harrington died on June 30, 1971, but his name lives on. The San Fernando Valley Historical Society named its library in Harrington's honor before his death. The society's website has a brief biography of him, here, as does the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, here. Marie Harrington authored something that is becoming increasingly rare, a biography in print. It's called On the Trail of Forgotten People: A Personal Account of the Life and Career of Mark Raymond Harrington, published in 1985 by the Great Basin Press of Reno, Nevada. A quote by Dr. Harrington is fitting for all of us attempting to revive some part of the past:

To follow the trail of a forgotten people, to play detective upon the doings of a man who has been dead 10,000 years or so is a thrilling pastime to an explorer under any circumstances. But when the trail leads into a rich virgin field never disturbed by the spade of the relic hunter, THEN your sunburned desert rat of an archaeologist thinks he has discovered a real paradise.

Ramòn de las Cuevas' Story in Weird Tales
"Teoquitla the Golden" (Nov. 1924)

Further Reading

I have listed some sources for further reading above. Another good source is a biography by Bruce Bryan, a fellow anthropologist and teller of weird tales, published in The Masterkey, the journal of the Southwest Museum, in the July-September 1971 issue (Vol. 45, No. 3).

Dr. Mark Raymond Harrington (1882-1971), one-time "boy wonder of the archaeological world," discoverer of a lost city in the Southwestern desert, father of Johns H. Harrington, and teller of weird tales. Photo from the website of the San Fernando Valley Historical Society.

An adobe house built by Harrington in 1947, located at 11039 Memory Park Avenue, Mission Hills, California 91345.

The Southwest Museum, a painting by Wendy Hultquist.

Weird Tales, November 1924, with a cover story by Ramòn de las Cuevas, aka Mark Harrington, and cover art by Andrew Brosnatch, his first for "The Unique Magazine."

Note: Thanks to Randal Everts for his lead on Mark R. Harrington as Ramon de las Cuevas and for a copy of Bruce Bryan's biographical article from The Masterkey.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Addendum (Jan. 9, 2015): The Indians of New Jersey: Dickon Among the Lenapes by M.R. Harrington (1963). The cover artist may have been Don Louis Perceval (1908-1979), but I can't be sure. Clarence Ellsworth (1885-1961) was another illustrator of this book, though not necessarily of this cover or this edition. In any case, thanks to Bob (comment below) for drawing this book to my attention.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Johns Harrington (1918-1992)

Author, Journalist, Editor, Educator

Born September 15, 1918, New York

Died October 10, 1992, California

Johns Heye Harrington was born on September 15, 1918, in New York. His father, Mark R. Harrington (1882-1971), was an anthropologist, archaeologist, author, and museum curator who worked at the American Museum of Natural History, the Peabody Museum of Harvard, and the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation (where he would have crossed paths with Alanson Skinner, subject of a previous posting). In 1928, Dr. Harrington relocated to California to assume duties as Director of Research at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles (now part of the Autry National Center). Over the course of his long career, Dr. Harrington excavated a number of important sites in the American Southwest, including one called The Lost City, located in Nevada. He also lived among and studied 43 Indian tribes. In 1930, Dr. and Mrs. Harrington acquired an old, abandoned adobe house. They renovated the house and lived there until 1945. Their son, Johns Harrington, must have lived an exciting childhood.

Johns Harrington attended the University of Southern California (USC) for four years, serving on the staff of The Wampus (the college humor magazine), The Daily Trojan (the college newspaper), and The Alumni Review. In his senior year, he served as president of his chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, the National Professional Journalism Fraternity. He was also member of Phi Kappa Phi and graduated in 1940. World war interrupted his budding career. He enlisted in September 1942 as a private.

After the war, Harrington carried on in his chosen field. He wrote travel articles that appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Desert Magazine. He spent many years--perhaps a career--with the Los Angeles City Schools as editor of publications. He also contributed to educational journals and books. His work for Weird Tales consisted of a single story, "The Teakwood Box," from March 1938. At the time the story was published, its author was a student at USC and all of nineteen years old.

Harrington lived in Tujunga, California, for many years. His last residence was Glendale. Johns H. Harrington died on October 10, 1992, probably in California.

Johns Harrington's Story and Letter in Weird Tales
Letter to "The Eyrie" (Sept. 1937)
"The Teakwood Box" (Mar. 1938)

Further Reading
You can read more about Mark Harrington at the website of the San Fernando Valley Historical Society, here, and at the website of the Las Vegas Review-Journal's "First 100," here.

Mark R. Harrington was a prominent anthropologist and archaeologist.

His son, Johns H. Harrington (shown here, top right), followed in his footsteps, at least as far as academic achievement went. Journalist, editor, author, and educator, he also earned a Ph.D.

Harrington's story appeared in the March 1938 issue of Weird Tales. His name was crowded from the cover (drawn by Margaret Brundage) by luminaries such as Seabury Quinn, H.P. Lovecraft, Henry Kuttner, and Jack Williamson.

Note: Thanks to Weird Tales researcher Randal A. Everts for confirmation that Johns Heye Harrington was the writer for Weird Tales and for Harrington's middle name.
Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Mal Bissell (1916-2006)

Author, Journalist, Carpenter, Photographer, Social Worker, Counselor, Teacher
Born October 1, 1916, New Haven, Connecticut

Died January 1, 2006, Arizona

Mal Bissell lived a long life and was supposed to have been well loved, yet he was often overshadowed by his father, later his wife, when it came to the world of work. Malcolm Havens Bissell, Jr., was born on October 1, 1916, in New Haven, Connecticut. His father, Malcolm Havens Bissell (1889-1975), was a graduate of Yale University (1911, 1918, 1921) and a prominent geologist, geographer, and humanist. Professor Bissell worked for the states of Connecticut and Pennsylvania and taught at Bryn Mawr College before moving west to establish the Department of Geography at the University of Southern California. He had a long and distinguished career at USC and was eventually named professor emeritus. In addition to studying in France and Germany, Professor Bissell did field work in the American Southwest and elsewhere. He was at one time vice-president of the American Humanist Association and a signatory to the Humanist Manifesto II of 1973.

Malcolm Havens Bissell and his wife, Ella Mary Taylor, had two children, Malcolm Havens Bissell, Jr., and Elinor Elizabeth Bissell. Malcolm the son, known as "Mal," wandered through Latin America, working as a reporter and photographer. His story for Weird Tales "grew out of a couple of days I spent at a remote mine in Bolivia," Bissell recalled. At the time, he was "wandering about the country on a mule en route to the U.S.," where he enlisted in the Army on May 26, 1943. A member of the 45th Infantry Division, Bissell saw action in France during World War II.

When he enlisted, Bissell reported having three years of college. Those three years were probably spent at the University of Southern California. Bissell had met a girl there, another writer, though perhaps more ambitious than he. While he was in basic training, the couple worked on a mystery story aimed at popular magazines of the day. Set in Acapulco, the story didn't appear in print until after the war. In the meantime, the writing career of Bissell's college girlfriend took off. I haven't found any record of it, but by the late 1940s, Mal Bissell and Jane de Lange Lewis (1915-2003) were almost certainly married.

Jane de Lange Lewis was born on September 10, 1915, and graduated from Los Angeles High School (where she was a member of the Poetry Club) in 1935. Jane was a Phi Beta Kappa student at USC. The first vice-president of her chapter was none other than Kenneth M. Bissell, Mal Bissell's uncle, and a professor at the university. It isn't hard to imagine that Jane Lewis and Mal Bissell met at USC. (She was in the class of 1939.) Sooner or later they would have married. They also collaborated on their fiction, although Jane's career--uninterrupted by military service--proved more successful. Writing under the name Lange Lewis, she published a number of detective novels during the 1940s and '50s. They included Murder Among Friends (1942), Juliet Dies Twice (1943), Meat for Murder (1943), The Birthday Murder (1945), and The Passionate Victims (1952). Her detective was a large and eccentric man named Lt. Richard Tuck. As Jane Beynon, Jane also wrote Cypress Man (1944). Her story, "Murder in Acapulco," written with Mal Bissell a few years prior, appeared in Avon Detective Mysteries #2 in 1947.

Mal Bissell's credits are a little more sparse. He wrote one story for Weird Tales, "The Mask of Don Alfredo," published in the January 1950 issue after it was rejected by The Saturday Evening Post and several other magazines. Having written it in the 1940s, Bissell submitted the story as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. According to the author, his other writing "was limited to short pieces for Popular Photography, a few rejected short stories and at least one unfinished novel." 

Something of a wanderer and one to keep himself separate from his fellows, Bissell worked in construction intermittently for a dozen years and as an adjunct instructor of sociology, social psychology, and psychology. He also worked as a social worker and counselor at the Mental Health Center in Tucson, Arizona. He lived in Tucson for twenty-eight years before moving to a remote house outside of Patagonia, Arizona. After that, I have nothing for Mal Bissell until his death and all-too-brief obituary:

Long-time resident of Tucson and Sonoita [Arizona], born October 1, 1916, passed away January 1, 2006. He was a man like no other, who was much loved and will be greatly missed by his family and friends.

There will be no funeral or memorial services. 

Jane de Lange Lewis continued writing after her marriage to Bissell ended. As Jane Lewis Brandt, she authored several novels of historical and contemporary romance: Love in the Hot-Eye Country (1975), La Chingada (1979; published in Spanish as Malinche in 1980), and Firebrand (1983). She preceded Mal Bissell in death, but only by three years. Her last residence was Sherman Oaks, California. Her death came on February 1, 2003.

Mal Bissell's Story in Weird Tales

"The Mask of Don Alfredo" (Jan. 1950)

Further Reading

Jane Lewis Brandt's novels of the 1970s and '80s, though out of print, are still readily available. The couple's older work is harder to find.

The front and back covers of Lange Lewis' Meat for Murder (1943), one in a series of Dell's popular "map-back" paperbacks.

"Murder in Acapulco" by the husband and wife writing team of Lange Lewis and Mal Bissell appeared in Avon Detective Mysteries #2 (1947).

Jane Lewis Brandt wrote several novels during the 1970s and '80s, including La Chingada (1979).

Thanks to Randal A. Everts for further information on Mal Bissell. The quotes in this article are from a letter by Mal Bissell to Mr. Everts.
Text and captions copyright 2011, 2023 Terence E. Hanley