Tellers of Weird Tales

Monday, July 31, 2023

Weird Tales, May 1923-Part Three

Six authors about whom I know little or nothing at all, all of whom had stories in Weird Tales in May 1923:

William P. Barron (Dates unknown)--I found a newspaper item that mentions a Dr. William P. Barron who was president of the Free Lance Club of writers in Washington, D.C., in 1930 and 1931. If he's our man, then I believe he was the same William P. Barron (1877-1946) who hailed from Bonham, Texas, and served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps during World War I. His story, called "Jungle Beasts," is another example of a found manuscript as the basis for a story. One of the readers of the manuscript is a medical doctor working in an insane asylum.

M. Humphreys (Dates unknown)-"The Floor Above" by M. Humphreys is a diary story, a story that begins with a summons from a friend, and a rooming-house story. H.P. Lovecraft liked "The Floor Above," but good luck finding any evidence of that on this vaunted Internet. The status of Humphreys' tale as one of Lovecraft's favorites seems to be based entirely on a single sentence in Lovecraft's letter to "The Eyrie," printed in October 1923:

"I lately read the May WEIRD TALES, and congratulate you on Mr. Humphrey's 'The Floor Above.' [for a moment I had a shiver which the author didn’t intend—I thought he was going to use an idea which I am planning to use myself!! But it wasn't so, after all], which is a close second to my favorite, 'Beyond the Door'."

(The brackets are in the original. "Beyond the Door," by J. Paul Suter, was in the April 1923 issue of Weird Tales.) As for the identity of M. Humphreys, it would be hard to discover one without having a first name.

Herman Sisk (Dates unknown)--There was a Herman Sisk who lived in Los Angeles, California, and wrote plays and other works. I suspect he was the same Herman Sisk who wrote "The Purple Heart," a short short story about a haunted cabin.

F.K. Moss (Dates unknown)--F.K. Moss' story is called "The Death Cell." There is a framing device again, in this case an introduction by one character followed by a manuscript by another. And now I have to say that reading or simply glancing through these early issues of Weird Tales becomes pretty tiresome, with the same kinds of stories, themes, motifs, devices, and settings, very often with the same kind of writing style, over and over again. You wonder where was the imagination. But then you have to admit to yourself that Weird Tales--and in a larger sense, weird fiction--was just beginning in 1923. It would take awhile before things got good.

F. Walter Wilson (Dates unknown)--I found a reference to an F. Walter Wilson who was a newspaperman in Boston and who may have had a connection to Quebec. The story "The Thunder Voice" is set in Quebec, and so we have another story of Canada. There is also a found manuscript in the story. The blurb reads: "The Story of a Hairy Monster." That's an intriguing thing for those interested in cryptozoology. The hairy monster of the story might be a gorilla or a wild-man or possibly a Bigfoot creature before it was so named. I'm not sure.

William Merrit (Dates unknown)--William Merrit is going to be hard to find in any online search because of the similarity of his name to that of William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), a well-known painter from Indiana. Merritt's story is called "The Finale," but it's not the last story in the May 1923 issue of Weird Tales. That position goes to . . .

"The Closed Cabinet" by _____ _____, a very long short story written by an anonymous author and reproduced in the tiniest of fonts, all to make it fit, I guess, in the smaller number of pages in the May issue than in the previous two of Weird Tales.

William F. Heitman's illustration for "The Floor Above" by M. Humphreys in Weird Tales, May 1923.

Friday, July 28, 2023

Weird Tales, May 1923-Part Two

By my count, there were a dozen authors who were new in Weird Tales in the issue of May 1923. Half are known. The other half are not, at least to me. First are the six known authors.

A.G. Birch (1883-1972)--A.G. Birch was Albert G. "Al" Birch, a reporter, photographer, editor, and publicity manager at the Denver Post. He was also in publicity with Famous Players-Lasky and Paramount. His story was "The Moon Terror," a two-part serial and the lead story in that May issue. And because it was the lead story, it was also the first illustrated story to appear in Weird Tales. The illustration was of course by William F. Heitman (1878-1945).

I'll have more on Birch and "The Moon Terror" later in this series. You can also read about both at the following URL:

https://archive.org/details/BirchA.G.TheMoonTerrorAndOtherStories1927/page/n191/mode/2up

Kenneth Duane Whipple (1894-1974)--Kenneth Duane Whipple was a reporter for the Claremont Eagle in Claremont, New Hampshire. There were scads of Whipples in New England during the Colonial and Early National periods, subsequently in other parts of the country. H.P. Lovecraft's maternal grandfather bore the name Whipple as his Christian name. He was Whipple Van Buren Phillips (1833-1904), and he was named, presumably, after his paternal grandmother, Esther Whipple Phillips (1767-1842). Her father was Captain Benedict Whipple (1739-1819). The point of all this is that Kenneth Duane Whipple and H.P. Lovecraft may very well have been related, though distantly. In our family, we have Whipples, too. I wonder if we could be related to Lovecraft as well.

Whipple's story, "The Secret Fear," is described in the blurb as "A 'Creepy' Detective Story." The narrator is a newspaper reporter, just like the author. There is talk of an escaped gorilla. (Another gorilla.) There are also Irishmen, including a beat cop named Corcoran, the dead man Terence McFadden, and police captain Dolan. (The police commissioner in The Spirit comic strip is also named Dolan.) The victim's Irishness pertains because he was superstitious: it was his secret fear that killed him.

Vincent Starrett (1886-1974)--Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett was born above a bookshop in Toronto, Canada. Like Saul Bellow (1915-2005), Starrett moved with his family from Canada to Chicago when he was a child. Starrett was a bookman, author, poet, critic, newspaper reporter, columnist, Sherlock Holmes aficionado, and biographer of Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?). "Penelope," a comic short story about a man's upside-down day, was his first for Weird Tales. If you have ever loved a woman, you understand the pull of gravity Penelope exerts on the main character.

Bruce Grant (1893-1977)--Barely more than a page long, Bruce Grant's story, entitled "Feline," was the first "storiette" in Weird Tales. Grant was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, and worked on a cattle ranch before becoming a newspaper reporter. He was also the author of novels and nonfiction books about the American West. There is a very informative article about him entitled "Native Wichitan Compiles Reference Work on Indians" in the Wichita Falls Times, March 22, 1959, page 69. Like Ernest Hemingway, Grant killed himself with a shotgun, this in the basement of his home in Winnetka, Illinois.

Lyle Wilson Holden (1885-1960)--Lyle Wilson Holden was a poet, school teacher, and school principal in Rochester, New York. His short story "The Devil Plant" should go in the Botanical Fiction Database. For those interested in tentacles in genre fiction, the plant of the title is also known as "the octopus plant."

Mollie Frank Ellis (1880-1948)--Author, lecturer, and clubwoman Mollie Garfield Frank Ellis was born in Greencastle, Indiana, and attended DePauw University in her native city. Her story, "Case No. 27," is set in an insane asylum. Mollie lived in Indianapolis late in life and died in a sanitorium in that city.

Next: The Unknown Authors

William F. Heitman's illustration for "The Moon Terror" by A.G. Birch, the first illustration to appear in Weird Tales. In the story, the woman is described as nearly nude. That wouldn't have worked, I guess, in the popular press, and so here her nudity is concealed by a cloth. Human sacrifice and execution were common themes in Weird Tales and in other genre fiction or pulp fiction from the 1920s onward. This is the first instance in "The Unique Magazine."

Monday, July 24, 2023

Weird Tales, May 1923-Part One

Weird Tales, May 1923, was the first issue with interior illustrations, all by William F. Heitman, a sketch artist for the Indianapolis Star. Heitman also did the cover art. It was the first of his two covers for "The Unique Magazine."

The May issue is larger than previous issues in terms of its dimensions, but smaller in terms of its page count. Robert Weinberg called it a bedsheet-sized magazine, in other words, 8-1/2 by 11 inches, or about the same dimensions as a quarto-sized book. There are 120 interior pages and three columns of type instead of the two that appeared in the previous two issues. If you're going to read it on line, you'll have to enlarge it a lot more than what it initially appears. There are twenty-one stories in the May issue, plus ten non-fiction fillers, plus "The Eyrie." The amount of content, then, appears to be about the same as in the March issue, which has twenty-six stories, and the April issue, which has twenty-one. The cover price is the same, too, 25 cents.

Returning authors were Julian Kilman, Hamilton Craigie, William Sanford, and with the second and final part of their serial "The Whispering Thing," Laurie McClintock and Culpeper Chunn. Firsts include the first story in Weird Tales by Vincent Starrett of Chicago, as well as the first reprint, an abridged version of "The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain" by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, originally in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, DXXVI, August 1859.

There is one anonymously written story in the third issue of Weird Tales, "The Closed Cabinet." There are also lots of stories by little-known authors, a focus of this blog. I'll have to look into some of them. Finally, there is one story by an author known to have been a woman, "Case No. 27" by Mollie Frank Ellis of my Indiana home.

I have written before about nine of the authors in the May issue. They are:

Click on their names to read what I have written.

Next: More Authors & Stories

Wednesday, July 19, 2023

Weird Tales, April 1923-Part Three

More authors from the second issue of Weird Tales:

Victor Johns (1882-1960)--I assume that Victor Johns was Victor Emanuel Philip Johns of Kansas City, but I can't say that for sure. Online information on him is nonexistent. In any case, Victor Johns wrote a story of France in Weird Tales, "The Hideous Face." It ends with all italics.

Laurie McClintock & Culpeper Chunn--Culpeper Chunn was Seymour Cunningham Chunn (1889-1927), a young man of Washington, D.C., who tried to kill himself in late 1914. He was paralyzed by his self-inflicted gunshot wound and thereafter went around in a wheelchair. After his wounding, he was committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in the nation's capital. Chunn co-authored "The Whispering Thing" with Laurie McClintock. It was the first story by an author known to have been an inmate.

I had thought that Chunn and McClintock might have been a husband-and-wife writing team. Once I learned that Chunn was an inmate, I considered the possibility that McClintock was his nurse or some other kind of helper. I looked for a nurse named Laurie McClintock and found one. He was Gustus Laurie McClintock (1889-1956) of Missouri, nicknamed Guy and Gus. In 1918, when he filled out his draft card, McClintock was a graduate nurse at the Kansas State Hospital, an asylum for the insane at Osawatomie. So if Guy Laurie McClintock was Chunn's co-author, did he go to Washington, D.C., or did Chunn go to Kansas? It must have been the former, although I haven't found any record for him in that city. Or maybe they wrote their collaborative stories by U.S. Mail. "The Whispering Thing" is another story of a Frenchman. France and Frenchmen seem to have been a theme in the April issue of Weird Tales.

Ted Olson (1899-1981)--Theodore B. Olson was a native of Laramie, Wyoming. "The Conquering Will" was his only story in Weird Tales and his only known work of science fiction, weird fiction, or fantasy. It's another tale told from a found manuscript, another tale of the Far North, and another tale of bodily possession by the spirit of a departed person.

Carroll F. Michener (1885-1970)--Carroll F. Michener was Carroll Kinsey Michener of Spring Valley, Minnesota. He wrote two stories for Weird Tales, "Six Feet of Willow Green" (Apr. 1923) and "The Earth Girl" (Dec. 1924). I haven't read "Six Feet of Willow Green," but I can tell you that it's a story of the South Seas and of the Orient, also another story about snakes and snakebite. It might be worth a look.

C.E. Howard (1858-1930)--Clarence Everett Howard was a satirist and humorist, among many other things. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, he lived a life of accomplishment in Orlando, Florida, and that's where he died in 1930. I assume that he was our man, as "The Parlor Cemetery" is called "a grisly satire," and much of the story takes the form of Southern-inflected dialogue. Howard was known as a satirist and was at one time mayor of Orlando. There is or was a school named after him.

The second issue includes:

The first voodoo story and the first story set in Central America: "Jungle Death" by Artemus Calloway. The story ends with a smart observation: "Voodooism loses its strength when it mixes up with white men."

The first story set in historical France: "The Affair of the Man in Scarlet" by Julian Kilman.

The first Oriental adventure: "The Forty Jars" by Ray McGillivray (Anthony M. Rud). I haven't read "The Forty Jars," but it looks promising.

The first story by an author known to have been born in Ireland. Though set in England, it is also the first story about Egypt. Entitled "The Hall of the Dead," the story is by Francis D. Grierson.

More stories of insanity, murder, infidelity; more stories that end in places of confinement, mostly, in this case, in asylums for the insane; and even another short snakebite story, "The Snake Fiend" by Farnsworth Wright.

A call for contributions, on page 184, beginning with these words: "The Skeleton in Your Closet." The result, I believe, was the first Weird Tales feature and the first readers' contribution feature other than "The Eyrie", "The Cauldron: True Adventures of Terror," conducted by Preston Langley Hickey in four installments, June through October 1923.

Carroll K. Michener, from a newspaper article called "Michener, Defender of Bread, Retires" by Ralph Mason in the Minneapolis Star, July 25, 1957, page 18A.

Sunday, July 16, 2023

Weird Tales, April 1923-Part Two

Authors in the April 1923 issue of Weird Tales about whom I have not written before:

Carl Ramus, M.D. (1872-1963)--Carl Ramus' name is misspelled in the table of contents of that first issue as Carl Rasmus. His story "The Scar" was the first by a medical doctor to appear in Weird Tales. It's also the first involving the Mafia, referred to in the story as "black handers."

There aren't any supernatural elements in "The Scar." Instead it's a crime story. I'm beginning to sense that many of the stories published in early issues of Weird Tales could also have been in its companion magazine Detective Tales. Maybe they were submitted to the former but were printed in the latter as a kind of surplus or overflow. Then again, maybe they were a little too outré for Detective Tales and so ended up in Weird Tales, although that seems unlikely to me.

In any case, "The Scar" was written by a medical doctor, and a young medical doctor is its protagonist and ultimately its hero. Ramus' story reads in fact like a young, real-life doctor's fantasy of heroic action and the rescuing of a damsel in distress. There is mention in "The Scar" of an International Journal of Surgery, a title similar to that of Surgical Monthly in "The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni" by Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding. There is also mention of Rush Medical College in Chicago, where Ramus went to school, also where Anthony M. Rud studied medicine.

By the way, Carl Ramus was the brother of Sybla Ramus (1874-1963), who wrote one story for Weird Tales, the three-part serial "Coils of Darkness" in the issues of February, March, and April 1924. I never associated the two because of my reliance on Jaffery and Cook's index of Weird Tales, which, again, misspells Ramus' surname. I previously thought of him as Carl Rasmus. You can read about and see a photograph of Dr. Carl Ramus on the National Park Service website on Ellis Island by clicking here.

Paul Suter (1884-1970)--Joseph Paul Suter was a prolific author of pulp fiction. By day he worked as an accountant and in other jobs in Youngstown, Ohio. His story "Beyond the Door" is the first in Weird Tales to rely heavily on diary entries to advance the plot and our understanding of its events. Only "The Grave" by Orville R. Emerson before it has a similar kind of approach in its storytelling. However, in that story, the written narrative is more of a manuscript than a conventional diary, which has dated entries and and is usually written in a diary book. In any case, call it another case of a found object--a letter, a note, a diary, a newspaper article--used in the telling of a weird tale. There would be another diary story in "The Bodymaster" by Harold Ward.

"Beyond the Door" is an uncle story, too. Maybe we should start thinking of that as a subtype of genre fiction. Uncle Godfrey's diary begins on June 15, for us, an anniversary just passed. After a space in the diary of removed pages, it picks up again on July 16, an anniversary as of today. There is a well in the cellar of Uncle's house, its opening covered by a large stone. That makes me think of "Pickman's Model" by H.P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, Oct. 1927), also the movie The Ring (2002), which is already two decades old, believe it or not. Readers liked "Beyond the Door." It was reprinted in Weird Tales in May 1954.

You can read more about J. Paul Suter on a blog called Pulp Flakes, in an entry called "Author profile: J Paul Suter (Newspaper article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, 1951)," posted on May 17, 2013, here. You will find a newspaper photograph of him there as well.

Roylston Markham (1885-1950)--Roylston Miller "Roy" Markham was the author of just one story in Weird Tales and, it appears, in all of the science fiction/fantasy/weird fiction genres. Born in Michigan, he grew up in South Dakota and worked as a newspaperman in Sioux Falls and in Chicago. In later years, he called Florida home. His story "The Tortoise Shell Comb" is brief and has many of the same elements as the stories in the first issue: a first-person narrative; suggestions of a haunting or supernatural events; infidelity, murder, revenge, and insanity; a final explanation provided by someone in the know; finally, a setting where murderers are kept, though in this case it's an insane asylum rather than a prison. I wonder what Culpeper Chunn thought of that. (Tune in to the next episode of this blog for an explanation.) Markham's tale is another of American servicemen in France during the Great War.

Paul Crumpler, M.D. (1883-1966)--"A Photographic Phantasm" is the first non-fiction item with a byline to appear in Weird Tales. It was written by another medical doctor, Paul Crumpler, M.D. (1883-1966), who practiced medicine and served as coroner in Sampson County, North Carolina, for many years. His account of a ghost-photograph is just one page long. You can read more about him and see a very small photograph of him on the website Find A Grave, here.

To be continued . . .

The obituary of Roylston Miller "Roy" Markham in the Tampa Bay Times (St. Petersburg, Florida), February 7, 1950, page 7.

Friday, July 14, 2023

Weird Tales, April 1923-Part One

The first two issues of Weird Tales are of a piece. Both are pulp-sized, or approximately 6 by 9 inches. Both contain 192 interior pages. Each has its own unique main title logo (although the logo for issues beginning in August 1925 are similar to that of the April 1923 issue). Neither has interior illustrations, only decorations used as fillers. (The first issue also has a map in Hamilton Craigie's story "The Chain.") The cover of the second issue, like that of the first, is a two-color image. The cover art for the first issue was created by Richard R. Epperly. It was his only cover for "The Unique Magazine." The cover artist for the second, R.M. Mally, returned for several more issues. In fact, half of the covers published in 1923--four out of eight--were his.

There are twenty-one stories, plus seven non-fiction fillers, plus "The Eyrie" in the issue of April 1923. Returning authors were Hamilton Craigie, Harold Ward, Farnsworth Wright, Anthony M. Rud, Julian Kilman, and, with the conclusion of the first serial in Weird Tales, Otis Adelbert Kline. Rud actually had two stories in the second issue, "A Square of Canvas" under his own byline and "The Forty Jars" as by Ray McGillivray. There was one woman author in the second issue. She was Myrtle Levy Gaylord. There was also an author named Laurie McClintock, but that person might have been a man. For some reason, I guess because of its brevity, Myrtle Levy Gaylord's story is not listed in the table of contents. No, that's not an instance of men's trying to erase or silence women, so don't even start.

As far as I can tell, there were two pseudonymous authors in the second issue, Anthony M. Rud writing as Ray McGillivray and Seymour Cunningham Chunn writing as Culpeper Chunn. There weren't any anonymous authors except for in the non-fiction fillers. It's probably still safe to assume that Otis Adelbert Kline wrote those items. The identities of most of the authors are known. The identities of certain others are questionable, but I have what I think are good candidates for each. Those authors will appear in part three of this miniseries.

I have written before about many of the authors who were in the second issue. They are, in order of their appearance in the magazine:

Click on their names for links.

Next: New Authors.

Weird Tales, April 1923, with cover art by R.M. Mally and a cover story, "The Whispering Thing," by Laurie McClintock and Culpeper Chunn.

Wednesday, July 12, 2023

"Historic and Unprecedented Vermont Floods"

As I write, there is flooding in Vermont. I don't want to take anything away from real-life peril and loss, but there is flooding in Vermont in weird fiction as well. In August 1931, Weird Tales published "The Whisperer in Darkness" by H.P. Lovecraft. Once you get past Lovecraft's first introduction, there is this second:

The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. [. . .]. Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organised [sic] relief which filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers [. . . ].

The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper cuttings; though one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a friend of mine in a letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The type of thing described was essentially the same in all cases, though there seemed to be three separate instances involved--one connected with the Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third centring [sic] in the Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville. Of course many of the stray items mentioned other instances, but on analysis they all seemed to boil down to these three. In each case country folk reported seeing one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging waters that poured down from the unfrequented hills [. . .].

We recently saw the place name Winooski in "The Ape-Man" by J.B.M. Clark, Jr. (Weird Tales, Mar. 1923). There is also mention in "The Whisperer in Darkness" of newspaper clippings à la Charles Fort. (Fort is a character in the movie adaptation of Lovecraft's story.) And there is mention of the Mi-Go:

No use, either, to point out the even more startlingly similar belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or "Abominable Snow-Men" who lurk hideously amidst the ice and rock pinnacles of the Himalayan summits.

I'm not sure how anything can "lurk hideously." Remind me again of how Lovecraft belongs in any canon of American literature or how he might be the equal of Edgar Allan Poe.

The Mi-Go or Abominable Snowman was also mentioned in a letter printed in the September 1945 issue of Weird Tales. The writer of that letter gave a pretty good account of evidence and supposed sightings of the creature. He referred to "The Whisperer in Darkness" in his letter and asked that others who knew about the things about which Lovecraft wrote, including the Mi-Go, write to him, and he provided his address in Sharon, Pennsylvania. His name was Paul Doerr (1927-2007). Last year (in 2022), one or more investigators publicly made a case that Doerr was the infamous Zodiac Killer. There appears to be some good circumstantial evidence that he was in fact the killer. Among Doerr's habits were clipping items from newspapers and making collages. I have written about both of those things recently as well.

I have heard about the flooding in New York and New England. I have also heard that a woman drowned while trying to flee her flooded home. Let's pray for everyone to be protected from harm, for comfort for those who have suffered losses, and for strength and courage for everyone who goes to the rescue. There has been more than enough tragic death recently. We don't need any more.

C.C. Senf's illustration for "The Whisperer in Darkness," in Weird Tales, August 1931, page 33. The story starts on page 32, and already Senf is giving away the game. Lovecraft's story got short shrift, too, because this is the only illustration in his very long work of fiction. By the way, that's a reaching hand on the right. Senf specialized in that device.