C. Hall Thompson (1923-1991)

Né Charles John Thompson
Author
Born March 17, 1923, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Died February 11, 1991, presumably in Pennsylvania

C. Hall Thompson's name came up the other day while I was writing about Viking stories. He didn't write any Viking stories that I know of, but he did write a few Northerns--the Alaskan and Canadian type, not the Viking type--and several Westerns. He also wrote four stories for Weird Tales. While looking into his life and career, I came across an interesting bit of speculation put forth on the Internet. I'll get to that in a minute.

C. Hall Thompson and Weird Tales made their debut in the same month, March 1923. He was born on St. Patrick's Day and was christened almost three months later, on June 10, 1923, at Tabor Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. His baptismal name was Charles John Thompson. The Charles part came from his father. Before he was even out of high school, Thompson, a budding author, had adopted a pseudonym: from at least 1942 until the closing out of his career, he called himself C. Hall Thompson. The Hall part came from his mother, Helen Hall Thompson.

Thompson graduated from South Philadelphia High School for Boys in June 1942. He would have been a year older than his classmates, but I don't have an explanation for his delayed graduation. Even then he was a writer, for Thompson penned the review of his graduating class, calling it "Southern for Service." He may have been the Charles J. Thompson who, as a student at Vare Junior High School in Philadelphia, won second prize (junior group) and the grand sum of $3 for his entry in the National Peace Poster Contest in March 1938. Despite his efforts, war came to Europe a year and a half later. Although Thompson was of an age to serve when America went to war, I don't know that he did. However, he filled out a draft card in 1942 while residing in Philadelphia.

Thompson appears to have lived in Philadelphia and nearby places in Pennsylvania for all or most of his life, but I know almost nothing about him, and neither does anybody else as far as I can tell. Like I said, he had four stories in Weird Tales:

• "Spawn of the Green Abyss" (Nov. 1946)
• "The Will of Claude Ashur" (July 1947)
• "The Pale Criminal" (Sept. 1947)
• "Clay" (May 1948)

All have been reprinted again and again and a couple have even been translated and published in European editions.

Thompson's popularity as a teller of weird tales can be attributed in part to his authorship of some of the first Cthulhu Mythos stories told after the death of H.P. Lovecraft--told, that is, by someone other than members of Lovecraft's circle. (Lovecraft died two days before Thompson's fourteenth birthday.) There is a story on the Internet that August Derleth threatened Thompson with legal action if he did not cease writing tales set in a Lovecraftian universe. That story arrives without citation or attribution, but it would seem to go along with Derleth's reputation. (The more I read about him in regards to Lovecraft, the less I like him: Derleth seems to have been a man who loved something so much that he thought it was his.) Chased away from Weird Tales or not, Thompson sold nearly four dozen stories to Adventure, Argosy, Dime Western Stories, Frontier Stories, North-West Romances, 10 Story Western Magazine, and other titles, mostly Westerns, over the next six years. He also broke into the slicks with stories in Collier's and Esquire.

Thompson's magazine stories were published between 1945 and 1954 when their author was in his twenties and early thirties. Then, in the same year that Weird Tales came to an end, Thompson's magazine credits seem to have dried up. Pulps in general were dying off by the early 1950s, but Westerns were still strong, in paperback, at the movie theater, and on TV. Thompson had a few Westerns published in the 1950s: A Gun for Billy Reo in 1955, Under the Badge in 1957, and Montana! in 1959. Ace Double Editions issued Thompson's Western novel The Killing of Hallie James in 1969. Thompson is also supposed to have written stories for Sunday newspaper sections.

There is speculation online that C. Hall Thompson was the pseudonymous author of "The Dunstable Horror" (Apr. 1964) and "The Crib of Hell" (May 1965), both in Fantastic Stories of Imagination. (That thread appears on the website Thomas Ligotti Online, here.) Not very long ago (in geologic terms) I was working on some research to do with Lee Brown Coye. As it turns out, Coye illustrated "The Dunstable Horror," a serviceable pastiche of Lovecraft (and far superior to Derleth's own novel The Lurker at the Threshold, from 1945). This was Coye's final work for Fantastic. By 1964 he had already begun working for Derleth and Derleth's Arkham House. Coye had previously illustrated "The Will of Claude Ashur" and "Clay" by Thompson in Weird Tales. If Pendragon was indeed a pseudonym of C. Hall Thompson, then Coye would already have been familiar with his work.

In the summer of 1951, Thompson married Italian-born Isabella Elda Pirritano (1924-2009), a recent graduate of Temple University who had studied secondary education. She was also a choral singer. I don't know anything about their lives nor their long years together after 1969. Charles J. Thompson died on February 11, 1991, and was buried at Arlington Cemetery in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania. His wife survived him by nearly two decades and was laid to rest beside him in 2009.

C. Hall Thompson's Stories in Weird Tales

"Spawn of the Green Abyss" (Nov. 1946)

"The Will of Claude Ashur" (July 1947)

"The Pale Criminal" (Sept. 1947)

"Clay" (May 1948)

Further Reading

None except to read Thompson's stories.

C. Hall Thompson's first story for Weird Tales, "Spawn of the Green Abyss," from November 1946, was also his first and only cover story. The cover artist was the unfindable Boris Dolgov. His technique was unusual for a pulp cover, as it appears to be a pencil drawing tinted with watercolors.

Lee Brown Coye illustrated Thompson's next story for "The Unique Magazine," "The Will of Claude Ashur," from July 1947. This was also the first issue in which Coye's "Weirdisms" feature began in Weird Tales and the first in which the Damp Man, created by Allison V. Harding, appeared. Despite the eventual popularity of the Damp Man stories, Thompson had the lead story in that July 1947 issue.

I don't know whether "The Crib of Hell" by Arthur Pendragon was the cover story in the May 1965 issue of Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, but I wanted to show the cover because I have detected a swipe, unfortunately made by an otherwise great and very admirable artist, Gray Morrow. You can see for yourself how oddly divided this image is. The part on the right is likely original. The part on the left, executed in an entirely different technique, is obviously a swipe. See the two images below. There is at least one person, by the way, who has speculated that Thompson and Pendragon were the same person. More on that in the next posting.

At the left is Jack Thurston's cover for Satan's Disciples by Robert Goldston (1962), and at the right is another artist's swipe done for the summer 1974 issue of Weird Tales. Who knows where the late Mr. Thurston's artwork will show up next? Update (Jan. 22, 2019): I have been thinking about this image, and it occurs to me that all of the artists who created versions of it may have been guilty of swiping it from an original source, Jack Thurston included. But what would the original source have been?

Text and captions copyright 2019, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Fiction & Fantasy Magazines-Weird Tales Part 3

Sam Moskowitz may have talked Leo Margulies out of restarting Weird Tales in the 1950s and '60s, but by the early '70s, they both seemed ready to give it a try. Margulies the publisher and Moskowitz the editor put out four issues of a new Weird Tales in 1973-1974. Those four issues are roughly in the format of old pulp magazines: 6-1/2 inches by 9-1/2 inches, color covers, black-and-white interiors, ninety-six pages in length. As for content, there was a letters page ("The Eyrie"), editorial content, verse, non-fiction, illustration, and an array of short stories. Most of those short stories were reprints, though only a few came from the original Weird Tales. And thereby hangs a tale.

In an interview from 1976, C.L. Moore discussed her early short story, "Werewoman," first published in Leaves #2 in 1938:

I very foolishly . . . gave it to a fan magazine who wanted to print it. . . . The error that I made there was I didn't realize they had copyrighted it. So twenty years later, who but Sam Moskowitz . . . [ellipses original] uh, performed his usual, um, practice [emphasis hers] of jumping on things two seconds after the copyright had lapsed! So he reprinted it, of course, without paying me anything for it. Incidentally, it is simply not a thing any other publisher I know of has ever done. I have had stories of mine printed after the copyright had lapsed and I've always been paid for them. Publishers just don't do things that way, but Moskowitz is an exception to the rule and nothing can be done about that! (1)

During the 1960s, Sam Moskowitz seems to have busied himself with exhuming old and out-of-print stories from the dusty vaults where they had lain for decades. It helped that those stories were copyright-free. It helped even more when the author was in his grave. In any case, Volume 47 of Weird Tales, published between Summer 1973 and Summer 1974, relied heavily on reprints, mostly from long-dead authors who were in no position to object or to request payment. Even the cover art was mostly old: a never-published painting by Virgil Finlay, a recreation of a painting by Hannes Bok, and a swipe of a painting by Jack L. Thurston. The most conspicuously new material was the interior art, the letters in "The Eyrie," and Moskowitz's three-part critical and biographical essay on William Hope Hodgson.

In its original incarnation, Weird Tales limped along for years before meeting its end in 1954. The second and third (see the next entry) Weird Tales lasted a mere four issues each. Most imitations of Weird Tales have also met an early demise. That poses the question: Is the category of weird fiction and fantasy fiction in magazine form destined to fail? Was Sam Moskowitz right when he warned Leo Margulies against reviving Weird Tales? The latest version of Weird Tales, still breathing after twenty-five years and myriad changes in its staff, would seem to argue against that contention. More to the point, I think, is that commercial success is gravy. The genre itself is the meat. If you can make money off of it, great. Even if you can't, you keep doing it. That's why Jacob Clark Henneberger stuck with Weird Tales in 1923-1924 and why the rest of us (people like Sam Moskowitz not withstanding) still do after ninety years.

Note
(1) From Chacal, Winter 1976 (Vol. 1, No. 1), pp. 26-27.

Weird Tales

Summer 1973 to Summer 1974

4 issues (Volume 47)

Published by: Weird Tales (Leo Margulies)
Edited by: Sam Moskowitz
Format: Pulp size (6-1/2 x 9-1/2 inches)

Weird Tales, Vol. 47, No. 1, Summer 1973, with cover art by Virgil Finlay. Note the blurb: "5oth Anniversary Issue, 1923-1973."

Weird Tales, Vol. 47, No. 2, Fall 1973, with cover art by Gary van der Steur, after Hannes Bok.

Weird Tales, Vol. 47, No. 3, Winter 1973, with cover art by Bill Edwards.

Weird Tales, Vol. 47, No. 4, Summer 1974, with uncredited cover art by Jack L. Thurston, almost certainly swiped and used without his permission. Note the absence of the "fiftieth anniversary year" blurb. Note also the blurb for all-new stories, a rarity in the new Weird Tales.

So did Margulies and Moskowitz publish their new Weird Tales mostly to observe the fiftieth anniversary of the original? Did the wind go out of their sails once that year had passed? Or were they losing their shirts as Moskowitz had predicted would happen years before? Maybe Weird Tales of 1973-1974 was mostly a vehicle for stories Moskowitz had discovered in his reading of old newspapers and magazines. Publishing a magazine is one way of getting stories like that into print--and of making a little money in the process. Maybe "a little money" was actually little or no money. Whatever happened, this was the last issue of the 1970s.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Fiction & Fantasy Magazines-Weird Tales Part 2

Editor and publisher Leo Margulies acquired the Weird Tales property in the 1950s after the original run of the magazine had come to an end. Rather than sit on it and guard it like the fabled dog in the manger, Margulies wanted to do something with his new title and the stories that went with it. Sam Moskowitz, an associate of Margulies, was in a position to advise him. "I twice talked Leo Margulies out of reviving the magazine," Moskowitz remembered, "once in 1958 and again in the sixties, because I thought he would lose his shirt." (1) I can't say that I like Moskowitz's advice, but I wasn't there and I don't know the circumstances. It's worth noting that Robert A.W. Lowndes' Magazine of Horror, one of the longest running magazines in the Weird Tales mold, was in print from 1963 to 1971. If he did it, I'm not sure why Leo Margulies couldn't have done it as well. Hindsight is always 20-20 of course. In any case, instead of publishing a magazine, Leo Margulies issued four paperback collections of stories from Weird Tales between 1961 and 1965. (Sam Moskowitz was ghost editor on at least two of them.) If you wanted Weird Tales in the 1960s, those four books were the place to start. (2) Of course interest in pulp fiction picked up as the decade went on. By its end, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft were household names, at least among fantasy fans.

Mass market paperbacks are obviously not periodicals. They don't really belong in a series of blog postings about weird fiction and fantasy magazines. Here I have included these four books not just for completists but also because they may have been a model of sorts to a later incarnation of Weird Tales, Lin Carter's four-issue paperback series. Before posting something on that series, I'll write about Sam Moskowitz's 1970s version of Weird Tales.

Notes

(1) From Weird Tales #1, edited by Lin Carter and published in 1981, p. 266.

(2) Leo Margulies also published The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine, a digest-sized journal in which he recycled stories from Weird Tales. For example, "Hellsgarde" by C.L. Moore (Weird Tales, Apr. 1939) appeared in the November 1967 issue. "Hell on Earth" by Robert Bloch (Weird Tales, Mar. 1942) was reprinted in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine in November 1966.

The Unexpected, published in February 1961, edited by Leo Margulies, and containing eleven stories, all from Weird Tales. The only original content was an introduction by the editor. The cover art was by John Schoenherr. I believe I have seen this book in red as well. P.S. (Aug. 11, 2013): I was mistaken when I wrote that The Unexpected was printed with a red cover as well. Actually it was The Ghoul Keepers. See below.

Schoenherr returned to create the cover illustration for The Ghoul Keepers from October 1961. Once again, all the stories in the book were originally published in Weird Tales.

Weird Tales (the book) followed in May 1964 with eight stories and an introduction, which may have been written by Sam Moskowitz. The cover was by Virgil Finlay and all of the stories inside are from the original Weird Tales.

Finally, Worlds of Weird from January 1965. (This is a reprint from 1977.) Sam Moskowitz finally received credit for his input. The seven stories inside are from Weird Tales. That's Virgil Finlay's art on the cover.

P.S. (Aug. 11, 2013): The Ghoul Keepers in the original edition with a red cover. Note that the art was cropped and reversed for the later edition with the yellow cover (above). Could Sam Moskowitz have had that process in mind when he reworked Jack L. Thurston's art for the cover of the Summer 1974 issue of Weird Tales? Thanks to Chap O'Keefe for the image.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Jack L. Thurston (1919-2017)

Artist, Illustrator, Sculptor, Movie Poster Artist

Born August 5, 1919, St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada

Died April 27, 2017, New York State

The last issue of Sam Moskowitz's four-issue revival of Weird Tales bears an unsigned cover illustration from an uncredited artist. Jaffery and Cook, in their index of Weird Tales, list the cover artist as "unknown." Earlier today, I posted the image with the same credit: "unknown." Now the mystery is solved and the artist is known. We can thank John at Monster Magazine World for that. Thanks, John!

As John points out in his comment, the cover illustration for Weird Tales, Volume 47, Number 4 (Summer 1974), is a reworked and flipped version of the cover of Satan's Disciples by Robert Goldston from 1962. As an artist, I can see that there's something wrong in the reproduction of the Weird Tales cover. Now I know why. Here's the cover:

Now here's the original:

Now here they are side by side:

As you can see, the whole image has been darkened and recolored, and the background and the other figures have been removed. In addition, the rocks have been replaced with a table, a cup, a skull, and a couple of standing braziers, suggesting a scene of human sacrifice or a black mass. I wonder if another artist or even the engraver reworked the original image somehow. The illustration seems too poor in quality to have been a reworked version of the original art, suggesting that Mr. Thurston was not responsible. It looks to me like a swipe. In any case, the artist's signature is clearly legible in the lower right corner of the cover of Satan's Disciples. It reads "Thurston" and thereby reveals the rest of the mystery.

Jack LeRoy Thurston was born on August 5, 1919, in St. Catherines, Ontario. He's a hard man to track in public records. Although there is record of his crossing over into the United States as early as 1923, I haven't found Mr. Thurston in the 1920, 1930, or 1940 census. The earliest mention of him I have found is in an article on men in the service from The Niagara Falls Gazette, December 26, 1944, page nine. That article mentions his mother (Mrs. Harry L. Thurston of that city), his wife (Mrs. Barbara Fisher Thurston, also of Niagara Falls), his rank in the U.S. Navy (petty officer, third class), and the places where he was stationed (Naval Training Center, Sampson, New York; and Naval Training Station, Norfolk, Virginia). The article also includes a photograph of the artist. Jack Thurston enlisted in the Navy in 1943 and earned his citizenship in January 1946.

In the article, Mr. Thurston was described as a former employee in the art department of Gilman Fanfold Corporation. From what I can gather, Gilman Fanfold manufactured office supplies or forms and had a facility in Niagara Falls. According to AskArt, Mr. Thurston "served during World War II as a sculptor to scale of enemy terrain." His schooling came at the Buffalo Art Institute, Jepson's Fine Arts School, and the Art Center of Design in Hollywood. He was the author and illustrator of The Adventures of Skoot Skeeter from 1948. I don't know when he began illustrating book covers and movie posters, but I suspect it was in the 1950s and no later than the early 1960s. Unfortunately, Mr. Thurston is not included in Walt Reed's otherwise very fine editions of The Illustrator in America or in Vincent Di Fate's Infinite Worlds.

I don't know whether Mr. Thurston is still living. If so, he would be ninety-three years old. I would like to think he's still out there somewhere, drawing and painting, for he created some truly beautiful works of art.

Update: Two commenters below, one anonymous, the other named Christy Kalan, have alerted us that Jack L. Thurston, a longtime resident of New Rochelle, New York, died on April 27, 2017, at age ninety-seven. Ms. Kalan urges readers to pass on to Mr. Thurston's colleagues word of his death. On behalf of the world of science fiction, fantasy, and other genre fiction and art, I would like to offer to the Thurston family our condolences.

Above: A gallery of book covers by Jack L. Thurston. An accomplished draftsman, a fine colorist, and a painterly artist who was good with the human figure, Mr. Thurston was comfortable in every genre. By the way, the last two authors--Edison Marshall and Day Keene--were also tellers of weird tales.

Second Update (Dec. 7, 2018): I have found a few newspaper articles on Jack Thurston and more of his illustrations. First, Thurston lived and worked in Rochester, New York, for many years. He was, in addition to being an illustrator, a writer, advertising artist, and teacher of drawing and oil painting at East Evening High School in Rochester. He was also a member of the Rochester Art Association and exhibited his work in the Rochester area. He illustrated his own children's book, The Adventures of Skoot Skeeter (1948), as well as two books by Karl H. Bratton, Tales of the Magic Mirror (1949) and Tales of Once Upon a Time (1960). (See the comment below.) Thurston's work for these books is charming, maybe a little old fashioned. Then, sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s, Thurston began creating paperback book covers and movie posters and his style changed, becoming dramatic, forceful, energetic. A good example of this style is shown in his poster for One Million Years B.C., from 1966, that high point of pop culture in America. Finally, I have found that Jack Thurston did two back covers for Mad, from October 1971 and March 1972.

The Adventures of Skoot Skeeter by Jack Thurston (1948).

Tales of the Magic Mirror by Karl H. Bratton, illustrated by Jack Thurston (1949).

Movie poster for One Million Years B.C. (1966) by Jack L. Thurston.

Back cover design for Mad #146, October 1971, by Jack L. Thurston.

Back cover design for Mad #149, March 1972, by Jack L. Thurston.

Updated in 2017 and on December 7, 2018. Updated again on April 2, 2023.
Thanks to all who have commented and provided more information on Jack L. Thurston. Thanks also to Doug Gilford's Mad Cover Site for images and information.
Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley