Reactions and Reactionaries-Part One

From December 2017, updated for 2026.

I have written these past few weeks about the so-called "New Weird," which may or may not have been new (in 2008) and the practitioners of which may or may not have been doing something innovative in their writing. One thing they seem to have in common is their dislike or disdain for convention or tradition, especially for well-accepted and well-liked writers of the past. China Miéville, for example, dislikes J.R.R. Tolkien for his conservatism, evidently also for his Catholicism. (I guess you can take the British Marxist out of the Church of England, but you can never take the Church of England out of the British Marxist.) Here is Mr. Miéville on Tolkien: "His was a profoundly backward-looking reaction, based on a rural idyll that never existed--feudalism lite." (1) I won't go very far into the idea that socialism is the proper successor to feudalism, with the State assuming the role of the king (and God), the intellectual élite taking the place of the aristocracy and clergy, the people being kept in their place as serfs, and of course no usurping middle class in sight. I just want to give you an idea of how a writer of "the New Weird" feels about an old-time fantasist.

China Miéville's near contemporary Jeff VanderMeer had a few things to say on H.P. Lovecraft and Weird Tales previous to and following the end of his wife's tenure as editor of that magazine. You could have read his essay "Moving Past Lovecraft" on the website Weird Fiction Review, dated September 1, 2012, but it's no longer available there. Too bad. The upshot of Mr. VanderMeer's essay is that Lovecraft is dead and gone and that it's time for something new. I agree with some of the things he wrote. (For example, like him, I don't think Lovecraft should be at the center of weird fiction as if he were Azathoth at the center of Ultimate Chaos. There are other writers and other ideas.) But the author gives too much away with his hackneyed language of the left. Talk about needing something new: we all need a break from this old and tired way of writing and thinking . . .

Observe that: a) Lovecraft; b) Weird Tales magazine under editors other than Ann VanderMeer; and c) weird fiction not approved by Mr. VanderMeer are characterized by worn-out leftist pejoratives: conservative, non-progressive, nostalgia, nostalgic, the dead past, cannibalistic, narrowness, etc. In contrast, a) Jeff and Ann VanderMeer; b) writers of their circle; and c) everything they like are described in approving terms, all equally worn out by writers on the left: inclusiveness, progressive, innovative, transgressive, diverse, etc. I understand that Mr. VanderMeer composed his essay in the heat of the moment. Maybe things have cooled off in the many years since. Maybe that's why we can no longer read his essay.

So, if you're keeping track, China Miéville's dragon-for-the-slaying is J.R.R. Tolkien, while Jeff VanderMeer's is or was H.P. Lovecraft. Their fellow supposedly "New Weird" author K.J. Bishop is a little more positive: in an interview from the website Strange Horizons, from October 18, 2004 (here), she admitted, "I was a Lord of the Rings fan, and I have plenty of regard for Tolkien still." She also seemed to recognize that "the New Weird" may not have been so new after all:

Other kinds of fantasy have always been written; the picaresque has been around for ages, as have folk tales about ordinary people to whom strange things happen, and to me the "New Weird" is coming out of those traditions. The elements of decadence and horror are there in the Arabian Nights and the Brothers Grimm. I think that what appear to be evolutions in the writing are really changes in public taste and what gets published. [Boldface added.]

Maybe Ms. Bishop doesn't quite fit in "the New Weird" category after all.

Next is British author Steph Swainston on Tolkien:

The Brontës had a contribution to make to fantasy literature--their Great Glass Town. Sometimes I wish the fantasy genre had grown from Great Glass Town instead of Middle Earth. But they were ahead of their time, and Charlotte Brontë knew better than to go public with such a private world, even though her brother Branwell pushed her to do it and I suspect Thackeray would have loved it. I like to use variety--and as little repetition of words as possible. It amazes me that so much fantasy writing is leaden and conservative, still influenced by Tolkien's use of a solemn, "epic" style. Anything can happen in fantasy, so why use such stilted prose? [Boldface added.] (2)

That's not so harsh; Ms. Swainston may have made a legitimate point about Tolkien's style. But here again is that critical, if not pejorative, term, conservative. On the other hand, I'm not sure that the Brontës or William Makepeace Thackeray could be called liberal or progressive.

Here is a more informative quote from Steph Swainston:

[Jeff VanderMeer]: Do you believe in the existence of Evil?

[Steph Swainston]: Certainly not. 'Evil' is just a strong word for something you don't like.

More on that topic next.

Notes

(1) From "Tolkien-Middle Earth Meets Middle England" by China Miéville in Socialist Review on line, January 2002, at the following URL:

http://socialistreview.org.uk/259/tolkien-middle-earth-meets-middle-england

(2) From "Dangerous Offspring: An Interview with Steph Swainston" by Jeff VanderMeer, Clarkesworld, October 2007, here.

A map drawn by Branwell Brontë of the Brontë family's Glass Town world. The map above is somewhat similar to those showing Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age and J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth in that there is a bulging continent on the north and a great gulf on the south.

Original text copyright 2017, 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett (1883-1948)-Part Four

First Husband

Gertrude M. Barrows (1883-1948) was married twice, first to Charles Montgomery Stuart Bennett (1874-1910), then to Carl Franklin Gaster (1892-1952). She probably met her first husband on the East Coast and her second on the West. Her first drowned near Key West, Florida. Her second lies at rest on almost the exact opposite end of the country, in Portland, Oregon. It looks like liquid played a part in his death as well.

Charles Montgomery Stuart Bennett was born in the period April-May-June 1874 in West Derby, Lancashire, England. His parents were Henry Mellor Bennett (1847-1938), an ironfounder like his father before him, and Catherine "Kate" (Stuart) Bennett (1850-1922). Both lived and died in England. Whether they ever came to America is open to question.

C.M. Stuart Bennett arrived in the United States possibly in the 1890s or about 1896. On October 6, 1897, he married Madeline A. Hobson (1872-1961) in Bristol, Virginia. According to a contemporaneous newspaper article, "The groom came to Bristol a few months ago with his parents, who recently completed a tour around the world." That article continued: "Mr. Bennett is a young man who has seen much of the world, but whose habits and manners are still those of the genial Englishman." The couple was to live in a newly purchased home in nearby Paperville, Tennessee. (Chattanooga Daily Times, Oct. 8, 1897, p. 3.) They had two daughters, Catherine "Kate" (Bennett) Burton Bachman (1898-1984) and Helen Marguerite (Bennett) Biden (1900-1988). I can't help but see omens in that newspaper article from 1897.

I haven't found the young Bennett family in the U.S. Census of 1900, but it's clear that their marriage didn't last long, for on August 3, 1904, Bennett married Luella Wilson Stewart (1881-1965), daughter of Sylvester Noble Stewart and Nannie (Wilson) Stewart (then deceased), at the Madison Avenue (Dutch) Reformed Church in New York City. ("Married" in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Aug. 7, 1904, p. 13.) By 1910, the couple were divorced.

Bennett's marriages kept coming. There are three more to go.

According to her friend, Emma Diffenderfer, Marie La Ton or Laton (ca. 1886-?) of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Manhattan married Charles M. Stuart Bennett in about 1909. Presumably that was in New York or New Jersey. Marie La Ton was supposed to have been the first woman to take out a boat pilot's license or skipper's license in Philadelphia. In 1909, she piloted a boat for her husband, then or later called "Captain," on a treasure-hunting expedition off the Carolina coast. That effort came to grief, and Marie returned to New York City, promising her stepmother that she would never again attempt such a thing. ("Manicurist Says That Laton [sic] Girl Had Given Up Search" in the Press of Atlantic City, Dec. 29, 1910, p. 1+.) On April 18, 1910, Marie La Ton was enumerated in the U.S. Census at 19 East Thirty-Second Street in Manhattan. She was the proprietress of a restaurant, the name of which we know by a later newspaper article was Dixie Kitchens. She was divorced at the time. A month later, on May 12, 1910, C.M. Stuart Bennett became a father again with the birth of his daughter, called Josephine Christy Bennett (1910-2001). The newborn's mother was Gertrude M. Barrows Bennett, whom Bennett had married in New Jersey in 1908. I guess that means that if he and Marie La Ton really were married in about 1909, he was a bigamist. Either that or he and Gertrude had divorced by the time he and Marie were married, and Josephine, later called Constance, was born out of wedlock. Or maybe the year 1908 is in error. Or maybe they were married twice and divorced once. Or twice.

It sure looks like Charles M. Stuart Bennett was what people called in those days a scoundrel. The name Constance would have been in strong contrast to his habits.

Despite Marie's promise to her stepmother, the treasure hunting continued, and on Christmas night, December 25-26, 1910, it came to an end when C.M. Stuart Bennett, also called Stuart Bennett, was drowned after his 45-foot launch, called the Lebra (referred to in some accounts as the Phra), was wrecked against the west jetty or northwest jetties near Key West, Florida. There were six people all together on the boat. Three were rescued the morning after the wreck, while a fourth, Herman Parker, drifted or swam to a nearby key and was thereby saved (or saved himself). Bennett was the first drowning victim that night. His wife, who clung to a mast of the wrecked boat but after six hours slipped into the water, was the second. Bennett's body was found near the western banks the day after the wreck. Hers was never found. He is supposed to have been buried at Key West city cemetery.

Emma Diffenderfer felt sure that the Mrs. Bennett who was lost was not Marie La Ton, even though she had not seen her in five months. For a time there were reports that it was Bennett's newer wife, Gertrude Barrows Bennett, who had drowned. Then, on December 29, 1910, Mrs. Jessie (Newnham) Pillault (1869-1952) of Jacksonville, Florida, came forth with word that it was her daughter, Beatrice Pillault Bennett (1890-presumably 1910), who had drowned. The Bennetts had been married in June without Mrs. Pillault's knowledge and had gone around in Florida by boat before setting off on that fateful voyage. Mrs. Pillault, by the way, was also English and also a proprietress, in her case of an ice cream parlor and/or a small bakery. ("Find Mother of Woman Lost in Key West Wreck" in the Miami News, December 29, 1910, p. 1.)

Christmastime must have been a sad and stressful time of year for Gertrude Barrows Bennett. Her older brother Reginald "Reggie" Barrows (1880-1896) had killed himself on December 23, 1896, in Minneapolis, where the Barrows family were living at the time. (There isn't any mention of her in newspaper accounts of his suicide, but at age thirteen, she must have been at home when the newspaper reporters came around with their terrible news.) And now, in 1910, with her only daughter not even a year old, she learned that her husband, by then obviously a philanderer and possibly a bigamist, had drowned while on a treasure-hunting adventure . . . like her grandfather sixty years before.

Next: The Second Husband.

A map of Key West and the area to the west, presumably the location of the foundering of the Lebra, "Captain" Charles M. Stuart Bennett's boat, on the night of December 25-26, 1910. Look for "West Jetty" in the upper left of this map from 1921.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

W.H. Holmes (?-?)-An Unusual Ghost Story

It seems that for decades a lot of men and even many women used only their initials in everything they did. That habit confounds the people who in later years might look for them, especially when they had common surnames. W.H. Holmes is a case in point. I know nothing about him and have found nothing about him, although there were: a well-known American paleontologist named William H. Holmes (1846-1933) (he was a member of the Hayden Survey of the Rocky Mountains in the 1870s); a school superintendent, Dr. William H. Holmes, of Mount Vernon, New York, who died in 1934; and a newspaper editor and publisher by those initials and that name in Kansas during the early 1900s. I'm not sure any of these men makes a good candidate for our W.H. Holmes. Another possibility is that "W.H. Holmes" was a pseudonym, "Holmes" being the operative word.

W.H. Holmes was the author of six stories published in The Black Mask and Weird Tales in 1922-1923. The following credits are from The FictionMags Index:

• "A Deep Sea Dog" in The Black Cat (Jan. 25, 1922)
• "The Matrimonial Reef" in The Black Cat (Oct. 1922)
• "Creeping Death" in The Black Mask (Feb. 1923)
• "The Weaving Shadows" in Weird Tales (Mar. 1923)
• "Scrambled Motives" in The Black Mask (June 15, 1923)
• "The House in Boney Hollow" in The Black Mask (Sept. 15, 1923)

Who can say why he or she stopped writing after 1923? Or maybe he or she started writing under a different name. In any case, W.H. Holmes appears lost to us.

W.H. Holmes' Story:

"The Weaving Shadows" is a short story of about eight pages. It is set in New York State, with an opening and a closing in New York City and the main action taking place above the city, in the Highlands of the Hudson, more specifically at Sunken Mine. Sunken Mine or Sunk Mine is a real place. I'll have more on that in a while.

Chet Burke and his unnamed sister live in an apartment in New York City. Burke is a Sherlock Holmes-type character. The story itself is constructed like a classic Holmes story. Burke is sitting in his favorite easy chair, "absorbed in a rare book on alchemy and black magic," when his cipher of a sister lets in two visitors. (She's the Mrs. Hudson character I guess.) Burke knows Chief Rhyne of the Rhyne Detective Agency. Evidently he's the Inspector Lestrade character. With him is a Mr. Hayden, a carpenter late of New Orleans and now living with his sister and her daughter in a backwoods house at Sunken Mine. The troubled Mr. Hayden tells his story, just as Sherlock Holmes' clients do. Burke agrees to take the case and goes afield with Hayden. Chief Rhyne is left behind. It would have been better if he had gone with them. Maybe a lot of death could have been avoided.

"The Weaving Shadows" is an unusual story. It has many of the conventions of the ghost story or a story of a haunting. It also has Spiritualism, that hoary holdover from the nineteenth century, as well as suggestions of vampirism. The setting is an old and decaying house in a place long-since abandoned of most human habitation. The ghosts first appear as the ectoplasm-like "weaving shadows" of the title. Hayden is lying in bed at night when he first sees them. He feels constricted in his chest, then paralyzed. The shadows coalesce and Hayden is confronted with two terrible visages. Then blood drips from the air above him. Slowly, then, "The Weaving Shadows" becomes a different kind of story, and though Burke finds some background to the haunting at Sunken Mine, he is not able to explain what happened there. The gist of what I write is that "The Weaving Shadows" appears to be a story at the beginning of a transition from the conventional ghost story of a previous era towards real weird fiction of the twentieth century. That makes me think that Weird Tales was necessary for the evolution of weird fiction into its truest form. How would it have gone otherwise without the advent of "The Unique Magazine"? 

W.H. Holmes wrote five stories published in The Black Mask. I wonder if  Rhyne or Burke were characters in those stories. Rhyne seems to be a conventional kind of detective. Maybe he turns to Burke when he has more outré cases, for Burke is obviously an occult detective, the most fully developed character of that type so far in the first issue. I wonder if W.H. Holmes planned to write more stories featuring Chet Burke.

One difference between Chet Burke and many of the other protagonists in the first issue of Weird Tales is that he fails. He is defeated in his quest to explain the events at Sunken Mine. What is implicit in the story is that the deaths--at least one of the deaths--there may be attributable to his failure. Failure, defeat, humiliation, insanity, and even death are the lot of the weird-fictional protagonist. Contrast that with the triumphant or victorious science-fictional hero.

Although there is Spiritualism in "The Weaving Shadows," there are also more sophisticated concepts, some of which may resonate with us more now than they would have in 1923. One is night paralysis, a phenomenon that is sometimes related to visions, apparitions, or hallucinations of dark forms standing at a person's bed at night. There are also hints of psychopathology in the Hayden family, of schizophrenia, terrible depression, or other psychological and emotional disorders. Long before the Haydens lived in their backwoods saltbox house, it was inhabited by another tragic family with its own unique problems. All of this leads to disaster for the Haydens.

Now we come to H.P. Lovecraft.

There are echoes of Lovecraft in "The Weaving Shadows." Or maybe I should call them pre-echoes. First is its setting in a remote and depopulated place, one obviously in decay. This is the standard setting for a Gothic story. So no Lovecraft in that alone. There is also a theme of decadence and degeneration in families and whole cultures or societies. That's also a theme in Gothic fiction. Still not necessarily Lovecraftian. And then you read about the five-mile journey Burke and Hayden make on foot from the train station to the lonely house--a description that reads like a descent--and you start to be reminded of Lovecraft's version of these places and things.

In "The Weaving Shadows," blood drips from the air above the bed onto the floor. Again, not from the ceiling but from the air. In other words, it seemingly materializes, as if it were coming through what we might call a wormhole into the room. Could it be drawn from Hayden's sister and niece, who are sleeping downstairs and who are showing signs every day of a further wasting away? I remember a similar occurrence in "The Picture in the House" by H.P. Lovecraft (written in 1920; printed in 1921, 1923, and 1937), except that the blood drips from the ceiling and is issuing from the room above, where a ghastly tableau is sure to be taking place, even as the protagonist sits unawares below, at least until that moment.

If you want to read "The Weaving Shadows" but don't yet want to know about its climactic events, you should stop reading this entry right now.

As it turns out, there are two ancient skeletons in the attic of the house. Burke and the local sheriff discover them after the tragedy of the Hayden family has played out. The skeletons show signs of violence. They have been encased in a crypt-like space, lined with plaster, for generations. Skeletons inside of a secret and enclosed space in an old house make me think of Lovecraft's later story "The Dreams in the Witch House" (written in 1932; printed in 1933). In "The Dunwich Horror" (written in 1928; printed in 1929), there is a terrible creature kept in an enclosed space in an isolated farmhouse. 

Burke fails to solve the mystery of the events at Sunken Mine. He confesses as much to Chief Rhyne. The stepbrother of the two women whose skeletons were found in the attic presumably killed them and hid their bodies in a specially prepared place. So was he a murderer and a fiend? Or did he do what he believed was necessary under the circumstances? In other words, were the two women helpless victims, or were they in some way evil, an evil recognized and headed off by the stepbrother when he killed them? And why did Hayden's sister find and choose that remote house for her new home? Was she called there somehow? To liberate the spirits of the two dead women? Hayden's sister and her daughter are Spiritualists. Did they call up the spirits of the dead women? Were those spirits unable to escape until summoned by acts of Spiritualism? These questions are only suggested by the events of the story and never addressed or answered.

I have one note on Holmes' prose, which is mostly okay but includes this horrible clause: "the chairs squatted grimly."

Sunken Mine or Sunk Mine is a real place. You can still go there, for it is located on public land at Clarence Fahnestock State Park in New York. The Appalachian Trail passes through the area, but you might want to go the way Burke and Hayden presumably went. The New York Central and Hudson River Railroad presumably delivered them to Cold Spring, on the east bank of the Hudson River. There they got off the train and began their trek. If you walk east from Cold Spring, in the direction of Dennytown, you will probably be walking in their footsteps.

A little northeast of Dennytown is Sunk Mine, named, no doubt, after Sunk Brook. There is still a Sunken Mine Road east of Dennytown. At one time, it was the main street of a nineteenth-century mining town called Odletown or Odeltown, formerly Odelltown. Men began mining iron ore there before or around the time of the American Revolution. During the Civil War, the ore they mined was used to feed the forges across the river at West Point. Most of the mines in the area were shut down by about 1876. The Sunk Mine was in operation until the mid 1880s. There are still ruins and remnants of mining and habitation in that part of the state. Be careful all around, but be especially careful if you come upon an ancient saltbox house lost in the backwoods. Whatever you do, don't spend the night there.

Finally, in thinking, writing, and researching all of this, I wonder if the author of "The Weaving Shadows" was a New Yorker (maybe Dr. William H. Holmes, the school superintendent at nearby Mount Vernon, is a good candidate after all), alternatively, whether he was in the U.S. Army at West Point and explored the local area during his tenure there.

Putnam County, New York, 1854. The details are too small to see here, but you can view a larger version of this image on the website of the Library of Congress by clicking here. Look for the bridge over Sunk Brook along Eastern Turnpike, which separates two political divisions called Phillipstown (in yellow) and Putnamville (in pink), in the western part of the county. (Coming from the Midwest, I don't know whether these divisions are called towns, districts, townships, or what.) It's a very thorough and beautifully made map and gives you a real sense of the place as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. H.P. Lovecraft made much of the geography, history, and culture of his native New England. Another writer could easily have done the same kind of thing for this part of New York. In fact, it's not too late. Someone should give it a go.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Hamilton Craigie (1880-1956)-The First Detective Story

Henry Hamilton Edmund Craigie
Author, Editor, Poet, Teacher, Amateur Historian
Born July 22, 1880, Round Hill, Greenwich, Connecticut
Died August 9, 1956, Brooksville, Florida

Henry Hamilton Edmund Craigie, known as Hamilton Craigie, was born on July 22, 1880, in Round Hill, Greenwich, Connecticut. I haven't found anything on Craigie from before 1918, when he was already on the cusp of middle age. It was in 1918 that his career as a professional writer began, if the list of his stories in The FictionMags Index has captured his first credits. That career was bracketed by Aprils: from April 6, 1918 (in The Argosy), to April 1956 (in Famous Detective Stories), Craigie had scores of stories in Action Stories, Adventure Novels and Short Stories, The Argosy and its successors, The Black Cat, Detective Story Magazine, Jungle Stories, Mystery Magazine, Short Stories, Western Novels and Short Stories, Western Story Magazine, and other genre titles. In addition, Craigie had stories in Collier's, The International, Metropolitan, and Woman's Home Companion. He also wrote nonfiction articles and items about writing and the writing business.

Hamilton Craigie had five stories in Weird Tales, beginning with his crime/detective story "The Chain" in the first issue, March 1923. He also had three stories in the Weird Tales companion magazine Detective Tales in its first year, culminating with "Derring-Do," also in March 1923. Craigie continued to have stories in the successors to Detective Tales after it had gone to another publisher. He and Otis Adelbert Kline were the only authors to have a story in each of the first four issues of Weird Tales.

Craigie's five stories for Weird Tales include one called "The Jailer of Souls" (June 1923). It's a story of the American West, perhaps an early weird Western. There is mention of Java and other places in the Far East, but it is not set in the jungle and there aren't any flashbacks to a jungle setting. Nonetheless, Craigie had a story called "Jailer of Souls" in Jungle Stories in the Winter issue, 1952/1953. I can't say that these were the same story, as I have not read the Jungle Stories version. As for the Weird Tales version, it looks as though Craigie was working towards a fictional milieu inhabited by smart, able, and powerful heroes, almost like superheroes. In both "The Chain" and "The Jailer of Souls," he used an expression, Criminopolis, as a kind of shorthand to represent the world of crime against which his heroes operated. By the way, there is a book called Criminopolis, written by the French author Paul Mimande (1847-1913) and published in Paris in 1897.

"The Chain" is a crime/detective story, while "The Jailer of Souls" is a Western. It looks as though most of Hamilton Craigie's output was in those two genres. I have found ten books by Hamilton Craigie, all of which, judging by their titles, are Westerns:

• The Longhorn Trail (1931)
• Southwest of the Law (1932)
• Nevada Jones (1935)
• Hair-Trigger Hombre (1946)
• Trigger Trails (1946)
• Feudal Range (British edition, 1948)
• Thunder in the Dust (1952)
• The Longride (1954)
• Rim Rock Range (1955)
• The Ranch of the Raven (British edition, date unknown)

In addition to being an author, Hamilton Craigie also worked as a magazine editor. In 1918, when he filled out his draft card, Craigie was living in Summit, New Jersey, and working as an associate editor for the Frank A. Munsey Company, publisher of The Argosy. He was also on the editorial staff of The Black Cat and Metropolitan.

Hamilton Craigie was born in Connecticut and lived for a time in New York City. I suspect this was in the 1910s and/or 1920s. He appears to have spent most of the 1930s in Chatham, New Jersey. In 1942, when he filled out his second draft card, Craigie was in Essex, New Jersey.

I believe Craigie was married twice, first to Mary A. Melia (1884-1938), and, after her death, to Edith Fulton Martini (1893-1978). They were married in Hernando County, Florida, on December 12, 1944. It looks as though Craigie lived in Florida from the early to mid 1940s until his death in 1956. He taught short story writing at the University of Tampa Adult Education Center as early as 1948.

Craigie's daughter by his first marriage, (Mary) Virginia Craigie, was also a writer. She graduated from Eden Hall Convent of the Sacred Heart Boarding School in Torresdale, Pennsylvania, in 1933, having won the Louise Imogen Cuiney prize for highest average in literary work during her high school career. She had already by that time contributed articles to children's magazines. Afterwards she studied at the College of the Sacred Heart in Manhattan. She married John V.E. Zink.

Craigie's second wife, Edith Fulton, was a writer, too. She had poems in Bozart, Florida Magazine of Verse, Kaleidograph, The Literary Digest, the Tampa Tribune, and other publications. These were collected in Disturbing the Stars, published in 1949. Edith Fulton was also a columnist for the Brooksville Sun newspaper.

Hamilton Craigie died on August 9, 1956, in Brooksville, Florida. He was seventy-six years old.

Hamilton Craigie's Stories in Weird Tales and Detective Tales

Weird Tales

• "The Chain" (1923; reprinted Nov. 1952)
• "The Incubus" (Apr. 1923)
• "Midnight Black" (May 1923)
• "The Jailer of Souls" (June 1923)
• "The Man-Trap" (Nov. 1925)

Detective Tales

• "The Mirror" (Nov. 16/Dec. 15, 1922)
• "The Symbol of Authority" (Feb. 1923)
• "Derring-Do" (Mar. 1923)

Hamilton Craigie's Other Stories Listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

• "The Vengeance of Hanuman" in Strange Stories (June 1940)
• "Swamp of Dread Mist" in Jungle Stories (Spring 1950)
• "Jailer of Souls" in Jungle Stories (Winter 1952/1953)

Craigie also had a story called "The House Without a Door" in Real Detective Tales in June 1924, as well as stories in Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories. Finally, I found a story by Craigie called "Roundup of Reno Red," which was syndicated in newspapers in 1930.

Further Reading
"Today in Tampa" by Leo Stalnaker in the Tampa Times, November 22, 1948, page 2.

Hamilton Craigie's Story:

"The Chain" is a short story in six chapters. It tells of one harrowing evening in the life of a private detective named Quarrier. Although a quarrier is a man who works in a quarry, you can also look at the name as a pun on the word quarry, as an animal that is hunted. In other words, a quarrier might be a man who hunts other men.

I was hoping for a more sustained work in "The Chain." After all, it's fairly long. Instead, all of the events in the story take place in a single evening, beginning with a ride in a New York taxicab and ending at Quarrier's very elaborately made offices. Although Quarrier and all of his attributes are described in detail, Craigie's tale hinges on a physical place and the minute details of that place. Describing a complex physical environment can be a challenge for a writer. I would advise against it if that's at all possible. Fortunately for the reader, Craigie included in his story a map, a floor plan of Quarrier's offices. Even so, it's not quite enough. You still have to read closely if you're going to understand just what has happened and in what way. In any event, that floor plan is the first drawing (not counting decorations) to appear in Weird Tales. I'm not sure that we can call it an illustration, though, as it does not depict a scene from "The Chain." It's there just so that we can understand better what is happening. Call it a graphic version of Craigie's prose, an example of the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words.

There aren't any elements of horror, fantasy, or pseudo-science (i.e., science fiction) in "The Chain." Quarrier has a weird experience, though, when he senses an invisible presence in his office, or recently departed from his office. Craigie's story would seem out of place in Weird Tales. However, I detect a nascent genre or sub-genre here, namely, the weird-hero genre of the pulps, later the superhero genre of comic books. Quarrier is obviously a superior man, almost like a Conan of the city. Nothing can stop him, including a mob of gangsters who attacks him in the street, or an armed guard, whom Quarrier knocks out and disarms, even though he's bound by a kind of Gordian's knot. Nothing eludes him, either, including the lightly swinging electrolier chain of the title. It is by that swinging chain that his enemy the Big Gun's scheme is undone. (That's the Big Gun, not the Big Guy. The Big Guy's crime career began much later.)

I can't say that "The Chain" is a very good story. My main complaint is against Craigie's prose, that awful purple prose so common in pulp magazines. Here is but one egregious example:

Now Quarrier, his mouth a grim line, was reaching with the butt of his automatic to break that glass when, with a grinding of brakes the taxi whirled suddenly to a groaning halt.

I don't know about you, but that reads like an entry in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Fortunately we have to endure only one -ly word in that awful sentence. Pulp fiction authors loved their -ly words, non-words, too, such as "blackly" and "oilily." And this is my continuing complaint against pulp fiction and pulp magazines, both old and new: it and they can never be taken seriously (except by fanboys) and will never gain any purchase in the wider realms of literature (except with fanboys) for as long as the prose is so bad. Quarrier has the makings of an interesting character, but he's mostly two-dimensional. And that gets to a second complaint I have against pulp fiction, one that lies with bad characters, especially with characters who are not recognizably human. Edgar Rice Burroughs' characters, for example, are not human, and so his stories will never rise to the level of literature. In contrast, characters created by Raymond Chandler, who also wrote for pulp magazines, are recognizably human, and so Chandler's stories have attained a higher level of both quality and art.

From the Tampa Times, 1948.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Joel Townsley Rogers (1896-1984)-A Second Story of the South

Joel Townsley Rogers was born on November 22, 1896, in Sedalia, Missouri, and attended Harvard University. His studies were cut short by his entry into the U.S. Naval Reserve in June 1917. He served two years and more, separating in August 1919. Rogers' writing career began right away. From February 1920 ("The Battle Cruiser Lady" in Snappy Stories) until February 1959 ("No Matter Where You Go" in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), he had scores of stories in American pulp and slick magazines, often under the byline Roger Curly (for his curly hair). Rogers also wrote several books, including the murder mystery The Red Right Hand (1945). He was one of several tellers of weird tales who called Washington, D.C., home, and that's where he died, on October 1, 1984. "Hark! The Rattle!" was his only story for Weird Tales. 

I have written about Rogers and his book The Red Right Hand before. Click here for a biography and here for my essay on The Red Right Hand. By the way, one of the characters in the book is Inis St. Erme. His name is an anagram of "Sinister me."

Joel Townsley Rogers' Story:

"Hark! The Rattle" is a brief tale set in a New York nightclub called the Purple Lily. There are two main characters, an intense and agitated young man named Tain Dirk, and an older man, his questioner and eventually his accuser, named Jerry Hammer.

So, Dirk and Hammer.

"Hark! The Rattle!" is an unusual story written in an unconventional style. The main action takes place in the present. An explanation of the current situation comes in the form of a flashback set in the Okechobee [sic] Swamp of Florida. The present is exactly the present, that is, in early 1923. The flashback takes place on the day Dirk was born, January 1, 1899.

Rogers' story isn't exactly a club story, even if it is set in a club. The first club story in Weird Tales is probably still to come. It is a murder mystery of sorts, though, and the first of that genre to appear, as long as we can be generous in applying the label. After "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud, "Hark! The Rattle!" is also the second story of the American South in "The Unique Magazine," and that brings up a matter of interest.

When I was a student of literature, I read a lot of novels by Southern authors, and I read a lot about Southern literature. When you read about Southern literature, you're sure to come upon the term or category Southern Gothic. The works of William Faulkner (1897-1962), Carson McCullers (1917-1967), and Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) are frequently thrown into that category. There are, of course, others, including Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), who contributed to Weird Tales. I didn't understand very well what "Southern Gothic" means when I was a student. I'm not sure I understand very much better now, although Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" comes to mind when I consider it.

Ellen Glasgow (1873-1945), a native Virginian, is known to have used and perhaps to have originated the term Southern Gothic. Her comments on what she called "the Southern Gothic School" first came in a talk she gave in front of the Friends of the Princeton Library on April 25, 1935. Her talk appeared as an article entitled "Heroes and Monsters" in The Saturday Review of Literature, May 4, 1935. The first use of the term that I have found in American newspapers is in a yearend summary of Southern literature, "Hatred, Small Town Tensions Were Major Themes," written by Harnett T. Kane (1910-1984) and published in the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger on December 19, 1948, page 44. Kane wrote:

Eddison [sic] Marshall, with "Castle in the Swamp," presented a heavily hued Southern Gothic tale in the traditions of "Wuthering Heights."

Although Edison Marshall (1894-1967) was born in my home state of Indiana, he lived for most of his life in the South. He also contributed to Weird Tales, although he didn't know it: his contributions were posthumous. The castle or old manor house is a staple of the Gothic romance. If Wuthering Heights is Gothic, then Jane Eyre is more Gothic still. In 1943, producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur set Jane Eyre in the global south, in this case the Caribbean, in their film I Walked with a Zombie. There is of course a big house and a woman who comes from the outside to learn its secrets.

We should remember in all of this Leslie Fiedler's view of American literature, dazzlingly articulated in his Love and Death in the American Novel (Dell/Delta, revised edition, 1966) and summarized in a couple of quotes:

[. . . ] the American novel is pre-eminently a novel of terror (p. 26)

and:

It is the Gothic form that has been most fruitful in the hands of our best writers [. . .]. (p. 28)

In other words, in essence, all of American literature, or the mainstream of American literature, is Gothic.

Joel Townsley Rogers was also a Southerner. You could call his story "Hark! The Rattle!" a Southern Gothic work, for there is violence and murder, superstition and supernatural workings, poverty and decay, and more than one Southern, grotesque type, including "[a]n old crone," a tobacco-spitting man with yellow eyes and a gun in the crook of his arm--Rogers called him "Poor white trash"--and another old crone, this one an American Indian. Inside their "dreary hut," fashioned from the swamp, is an unseen young woman in the process of giving birth. "He dies!" screams the old Indian woman, pointing at Hammer's friend. "We want his soul!" And so a weird twist unwinds in the story.

The point of all of this is that I wonder whether American authors, editors, and readers of the early to mid twentieth century saw the South as a kind of foreign land, replete with its own foreign customs, traditions, cultures, and peoples, a kind of equivalent to the global south and all of its hot, humid, dank, dark, and gloomy places. I wonder if to them the Mason-Dixon Line was like an American equator. Here above it, in the North--in Chicago, New York, and the Northeast--weird things are less likely to come about. But the region below it--the American South--is a place and the proper setting for Gothic terrors and Gothic horrors.

Two more things, first, "Hark! The Rattle!" is written in a strange, dream-like, almost hallucinogenic or surrealistic way. I'm not sure that Rogers' approach and style changed very much between 1923 and 1945, when The Red Right Hand was published.

And second, in "Hark! The Rattle!," just as in "Ooze," a monster comes from the swamp, although this one is of a far different kind. That made me remember that Grendel, the monster in Beowulf, is also a creature of such places:

A foe in the hall-building: this horrible stranger
Was Grendel entitled, the march-stepper famous
Who dwelt in the moor-fens, the marsh and the fastness;

Alternatively:

Grendel this monster grim was called,
march-riever mighty, in moorland living,
in fen and fastness; 

So maybe the swamp monster of American popular culture goes all the way back to Beowulf, just as the idea weird seems to do.

"March," by the way, refers to marches or borderlands. A march-stepper or march-riever, then, is a wanderer, thief, or plunderer of the borderlands. There are marches--the Bossonian Marches--in Robert E. Howard's Hyborea. William Hope Hodgson wrote about such a place in The House on the Borderland (1908), though his use of the word denotes something far different. "On borderland we run," sang U2 in "A Sort of Homecoming," the unforgettable first track of The Unforgettable Fire (1984). And to come full circle, William Faulkner's last book was The Reivers (1962), adapted to a movie starring Steve McQueen in 1968. "Rieve" or "reive" is chiefly a Scottish spelling, and so we're back to Scottish words again. "Reave" seems to be the preferred spelling. Blogger doesn't like either of the first two spellings but is okay with the third.

Edison Marshall's Castle in the Swamp, in a Dell map-back edition from 1951. Note the blurb on the back cover. In addition to evoking Gothic imagery, it is written almost like lines from Beowulf: "Sinister was the swamp . . ." Note also that Dell published both Marshall's book and Fiedler's.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales-The First Issue

The first issue of Weird Tales, dated March 1923, probably arrived on newsstands before that, possibly in mid to late February. (According to the website of the current Weird Tales, the date was February 18, 1923.) I base that only on the idea that magazines usually showed up ahead of their cover dates so as to avoid seeming outdated. For example, Time magazine also started in March 1923. Beginning as a weekly, the first issue was dated March 3. According to Wikipedia--which knows lots of true things but lots of untrue things, too--it was actually put out on February 24.

Indianapolis and Chicago were two likely places for Weird Tales to have made its debut. We can wonder now who were the first buyers of the magazine and how far afield it went. Did "The Unique Magazine" make it as far west as California? As far south as Florida? As far east as Maine? Maybe the early letters columns will let us know. I'm planning to look at "The Eyrie," as the regular letters column was called, for clues about the early days of Weird Tales. Not long ago, I wondered about tellers of weird tales in Alabama and how they might have become connected to the main offices in the Midwest. After reading the first letter published in Weird Tales, I have an idea.

The first issue of Weird Tales was just 6 inches by 9 inches, more or less an octavo-sized volume. Inside, it was numbered Volume 1, Number 1. The cover price was 25 cents, and a yearly subscription was $3. Richard R. Epperly's cover was the only illustration in that March issue, which included 192 numbered pages of stories, fillers, editorial content, and advertisements. The first advertisement to appear in Weird Tales told readers "Get Ready for Big Pay Job" by becoming an "Electrical Expert." Chicago Engineering Works would tell them how to do it.

There are twenty-two short stories, three novelettes, and the first part of a two-part serial in Weird Tales number one. The short stories are called "remarkable," the novelettes "unusual," and the serial "a strange novel in two parts." There are also some nonfiction fillers, the author or authors of which were uncredited. All but one of the stories has the author's name or byline attached to it. Anonymous made his and her first appearance in the first issue of the magazine. There weren't any poems included in the contents. Those would have to wait.

I said that there weren't any illustrations in Weird Tales number one. That may not be entirely true. There are decorations to be sure, but decorations aren't illustrations. Their purpose is to fill space or to break up space or text with simple graphics. There is a map, though, the first map to appear in the magazine, though almost certainly not the first map in a pulp magazine or in a work of fantasy fiction. That map is in Hamilton Craigie's novelette "The Chain," on page 83.

Following are the contents of Weird Tales, March 1923, adapted from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database:

• "The Dead Man's Tale" by Willard E. Hawkins (short story)
• "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud (novelette)
• "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes" by Otis Adelbert Kline (serial, part one of two)
• "The Mystery of Black Jean" by Julian Kilman (short story)
• "The Grave" by Orville R. Emerson (short story)
• "Hark! The Rattle!" by Joel Townsley Rogers (short story)
• "The Ghost Guard" by Bryan Irvine (short story)
• "The Ghoul and the Corpse" by G.A. Wells (short story)
• "Fear" by David R. Solomon (short story)
• "The Chain" by Hamilton Craigie (short story)
• "The Place of Madness" by Merlin Moore Taylor (short story)
• "The Closing Hand" by Farnsworth Wright (short story)
• "The Unknown Beast" by Howard Ellis Davis (short story)
• "The Basket" by Herbert J. Mangham (short story)
• "The Accusing Voice" by Meredith Davis (novelette)
• "The Sequel" by Walter Scott Story (short story)
• "The Weaving Shadows" by W.H. Holmes (short story)
• "Queer Tribes of Savages Found in Africa" by an uncredited author (nonfiction)
• "African Brides Must Be Plump" by an uncredited author (nonfiction)
• "Nimba, the Cave Girl" by R.T.M. Scott (short story)
• "The Young Man Who Wanted to Die" by ? ? ? [Anonymous] (short story)
• "The Scarlet Night" by William Sanford (short story)
• "The Extraordinary Experiment of Dr. Calgroni" by Joseph Faus and James Bennett Wooding (short story)
• "Ten Pallbearers for This Mammoth Woman" by an uncredited author (nonfiction)
• "Woman Starves to Feed Her Cats" by an uncredited author (nonfiction)
• "The Return of Paul Slavsky" Captain George Warburton Lewis (short story)
• "Unearth Vast Wealth in Egyptian Tomb" by an uncredited author (nonfiction)
• "The House of Death" by F. Georgia Stroup (short story)
• "'Evil Demon' Drives Man to Orgy of Crime" by an uncredited author (nonfiction)
• "The Gallows" by I.W.D. Peters (short story)
• "The Skull" by Harold Ward (short story)
• "The Ape-Man" by James B. M. Clark, Jr. (short story)
• "The Eyrie" including an essay by The Editor

My plan is to go through these stories one by one, to write about them and their authors, and to point out firsts and other interesting facts about each. I'll begin with Willard E. Hawkins.

A self-promotional advertisement from Weird Tales, March 1923, page 4, evidence from the beginning that weird fiction crosses genres. 

Thanks to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database for the compiled contents of Weird Tales, Volume 1, Number 1.

Original text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Edna Bell Seward at the Indiana Society Dinner

You may have noticed that I haven't written very much lately. That includes not writing replies to comments left on this blog. I'll do my best to catch up, beginning with a reply to a comment left by Anonymous at the bottom of my article on Edna Bell Seward (1877-1963). I last wrote about Edna Bell Seward on November 16, 2018, here. She wrote one letter to "The Eyrie" and one story in Weird Tales. It's called "The Land of Creeping Death" and it appeared in the issue of June 1927, ninety-five years ago this summer.

Edna Bell Seward was married more than once. Her last husband (I think) was George Morton Seward (1856-1926). Seward was from Bloomington, Indiana, home of Indiana University. In the 1920s, he and his wife lived in Chicago, Illinois. For those of you who don't know where Chicago is, it's slightly to the west and a little to the north of Indiana. I don't have to tell you where Indiana is because we all know that already.

In the early part of the twentieth century, a group of Hoosiers, living in exile, formed the Indiana Society of Chicago. George Ade (1866-1944), famous for his Fables in Slang, was a founding member. Ade's friend and fellow Purdue University alumnus John McCutcheon (1870-1949) was also a member. The comment left by Anonymous is actually a link to a newspaper article about the 18th Annual Dinner of the Indiana Society of Chicago, held on December 9, 1922, at the Drake Hotel. The article is called "Indiana Society Honors Mrs. Seward." It's from The Highland Park Press, December 14, 1922, page 1 (column 6) and page 14. Included in the article is a photograph of Mrs. Seward, the same one I used in 2018 when I wrote about her. Click here to see the article. According to the article, "Mrs. Seward wrote the lyrics for all of the satires and songs that were featured during the evening." This was when Americans still had fun.

Reading about that dinner in 1922 led me to a further search on the Internet. As a result I found images of the original program book for the evening's events. These are on a website called Indiana Memory. Here is the URL:

https://indianamemory.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16066coll66/id/20517

In looking through the book, I made another discovery, namely that Mr. Seward was an artist of sorts. Here is his revised map of Indiana for 1922:

It looks like the revisions are to accommodate the Hoosier State's bulging Literary Belt, which is encroaching on neighboring Illinois and Ohio. Note the "Manuscript Special for Eastern Markets." Some of the references here are probably obscure for the unfortunate non-Hoosiers among us. For example, the southwestern-most county in Indiana is named Posey. Look for the flowers. Still others are obscure even for native Indianians. I would have to do a little research to figure out what a couple of these things mean. By the way, that's Abe Martin in the middle, a creation of Kin Hubbard (1868-1930) of Indianapolis.

George Seward's map is from a century ago. Time flies. At the time, Indiana was in its Golden Age of Literature, hence the bulges. In 1922, in fact, Booth Tarkington (1869-1946) won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel Alice Adams (1921). Katherine Hepburn played the title character in a film adaptation of Alice Adams in 1935. The movie poster puts Tarkington's name on prominent display. Unfortunately for him and his fellows, few of the Indiana writers from that Golden Age are read today. But before you dismiss Indiana and its forgotten writers, remember that Weird Tales had its editorial offices in Indianapolis from its founding in 1923 until moving to Chicago in 1926. Remember, too, that, facing ruin, "The Unique Magazine" was saved by Cornelius Printing Company of Indianapolis and that the magazine originated from the Circle City--or Naptown as jazz musicians call it--until 1938 when it was sold to Short Stories, Inc., and made its final move to Manhattan.

Thanks to Anonymous for the link.

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales and the Inner Sanctum

The Red Right Hand (1945) by Joel Townsley Rogers was first issued in hardback by Simon and Schuster as part of its Inner Sanctum Mystery series. As Mike Tuz pointed out in his recent comment, that was at about the same time that Universal Pictures was releasing a series of horror movies under the same name. If you listened to the radio in 1945, you were likely to hear a sardonic voice and the sound of a creaking door in the introduction to a weekly show called Inner Sanctum Mystery (more popularly known as Inner Sanctum Mysteries). A decade later, you could have watched Inner Sanctum on television, if only for a season. So how were these series related? Where did the Inner Sanctum brand begin? And what did it all have to do with Weird Tales? That's what I'll write about today.

First, I should say that there doesn't seem to be much of a connection between Weird Tales and Inner Sanctum Mystery. In beginning my research, I was hoping to find more. So maybe the title of this article is a little misleading. On the other hand, there are some pretty big gaps in the online history of the brand. For example, a list of radio episodes on Wikipedia includes the names of only a few scriptwriters. Likewise, The Internet Movie Database includes the titles and casts of all forty episodes of the TV series, but the writers' names are mostly missing. And good luck finding a comprehensive list of the titles in Simon and Schuster's hardbound Inner Sanctum Mystery series. So maybe there are still connections awaiting discovery. Weird Tales and the Inner Sanctum had this much in common at least: both began in the 1920s as the creations of enterprising young publishers.

In the case of Simon and Schuster, those enterprising young publishers were Richard L. "Dick" Simon (1899-1960), a piano salesman, and M. Lincoln "Max" Schuster (1897-1970), an editor of a trade magazine. (1) According to Wikipedia, that fount of all knowledge, "Simon's aunt, a crossword puzzle devotee, asked Simon whether there was a book of these puzzles that she could give to a friend. Simon discovered that none had been published, and, with Schuster, launched a company to exploit the opportunity." The year was 1924, plumb in the middle of a decade of fads and other wonderful nonsense. Crossword puzzles became the latest, and Simon and Schuster was off and running.

Almost from the beginning--or at least as early as 1927--Simon and Schuster ran a regular advertising column called "The Inner Sanctum" in the New York Times and Publishing Weekly. Readers may or may not have known it, but "the Inner Sanctum" is the name the two publishers gave to an office within their own suite of offices on 57th Street, just off Fifth Avenue. The Inner Sanctum was in fact a room situated between the respective offices of Dick Simon and Max Schuster. Here is a playful map from 1927, drawn by C. Vernon Farrow:

The legend reads, in part, "The Sun Never Sets on The Inner Sanctum of Simon and Schuster." Before going on, I would like to show another map drawn by the artist Charles Vernon Farrow (1896-1936):

This one is entitled "A Map of the Wondrous Isle of Manhattan" and is dated 1926. The isle was and is wondrous to be sure, and the cartographer Farrow made a wondrous map to match it. This map in particular makes me think of Dell's famous line of map-back paperbacks of the 1940s. Dell was the second major publisher of paperback books in America. Simon and Schuster, publishers of Pocket Books, was the first.

So "the Inner Sanctum" originally referred to the house of Simon and Schuster, then to series of books published by that house. Not all of the Inner Sanctum books were mysteries, at least at the outset. There is, for example, an Inner Sanctum edition of War and Peace, published in 1942. According to Martin Grams Blog (here), the Inner Sanctum series, published monthly, were color coded: blue binding for "serious drama," red for "lighter fare" and/or romance, and green for "detective stories." (Mr. Gram's wording is a little ambiguous. I hope I interpret it correctly.) Later, once the radio show became popular, the Inner Sanctum series were strictly mysteries.

The first Inner Sanctum Mystery was I Am Jonathan Scrivener by Charles Houghton, published in 1930. In 1935, a young woman named Lee Wright (1904-1986) began working at Simon and Schuster as a secretary. The following year, she became editor of the Inner Sanctum Mystery series, and in 1944, senior editor. It was Lee Wright who was so effusive about Joel Townsley Rogers' story and novel The Red Right Hand, and it was she who saw it into print in 1945.

Another Simon and Schuster employee figures pretty prominently in the story of Inner Sanctum Mystery as well. His name was Leon Shimkin (1907-1988), and in 1924, at age seventeen, he signed on with the firm as a $25-a-week bookkeeper. Described by the New York Times as "[t]ireless and hard-driving," Shimkin soon worked his way up to be business manager and eventually to chairman of the board and owner of the company. He was in on the founding of Pocket Books, the first line of mass-market paperback books in America, in 1939. (Shimkin was treasurer of the venture.) "While critics scoffed at the notion of selling 25-cent paperback books in supermarkets and similar outlets," wrote the Times, "Pocket Books was an immediate success." It also spawned myriads of paperback book publishers, many of which lived on the pulp genres of science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, detective, and mystery stories. Paperbacks also helped bring pulp magazines to an end after World War II. Hardbound books survived of course, and the Inner Sanctum Mystery series carried on at least until the 1960s. I have titles for 1960--The Dead Beat by Robert Bloch--and 1966--The Incredible Schlock Homes by Robert L. Fish. I don't know when the last title in the series was published.

In the early 1940s, Leon Shimkin sold the rights to Inner Sanctum Mystery to Universal Pictures. By the time the first movie came out in 1943, Inner Sanctum Mystery, also called Inner Sanctum Mysteries or just Inner Sanctum, had been on the radio for a couple of years. I suspect that Shimkin helped orchestrate that deal, too. In any case, the radio show, which began on January 7, 1941, was a hit. Under producer Himan "Hi" Brown (1910-2010), Inner Sanctum Mystery ran for more than eleven years and a total of 526 broadcasts. The last came on October 5, 1952. (2) As I said, the writers' credits are mostly missing. Stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant, both of whom were in Weird Tales, were adapted for the show.

From 1943 to 1945, Universal released six movies in the Inner Sanctum Mystery series starring Lon Chaney, Jr. These are supposed to have been based on the radio show. The titles are:

• Calling Dr. Death (1943)
• Weird Woman (1944)
• Dead Man's Eyes (1944)
• The Frozen Ghost (1945)
• Strange Confession (1945)
• Pillow of Death (1945)

Weird Woman was based on the story "Conjure Wife" by Fritz Leiber, Jr., and although "Conjure Wife" wasn't in Weird Tales (it was in the rival title Unknown Worlds in April 1943), its author was. The movie title of course echoes that of Weird Tales. By the way, Leiber's father, Fritz Leiber, was in the non-Universal movie Inner Sanctum from 1948. He played a character called Dr. Valonius.

Finally, Hi Brown produced the television adaptation of Inner Sanctum in his studios in New York City. The show ran for forty half-hour episodes from January to October 1954. (The show ended a month after Weird Tales did.) As an early anthology series, it gave a lot of young actors and actresses--Warren Stevens, Jack Klugman, Jack Albertson, Betsy Palmer--a chance to appear on television. It very likely helped pave the way for other anthology series as well, particularly The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), which, like the original radio series, had, in its host, the series' only regular character. The host of The Twilight Zone was of course played by Rod Serling, a most worthy successor to the Weird Tales mantle.

Notes
(1) Simon seems to have been the principle partner. There is comparatively little on the Internet about Schuster. Find A Grave has him, but his birth date--March 2, 1897--and birthplace--Austria--are missing. Schuster's father was a U.S. citizen at the time of Schuster's birth. According to Schuster's World War I draft card, "[the] child came to the U.S. when [he was] 6 weeks old." Max L. Schuster died on December 20, 1970, at his home in Manhattan.
(2) Like pulp magazines, radio drama and comedy were casualties of the post-war world. All survived in one way or another, however. Pulps didn't die so much as simply change form. They became paperback books, digest-sized magazines, and standard-sized magazines. The last true pulp magazine was Ranch Romances and Adventure, which came to an end in 1971 or thereabouts. Radio shows didn't exactly die, either. They simply became TV shows, and most of the old radio stars made the switch to television. Some, like Jack Benny, were successful. Others weren't. Incidentally, Hi Brown produced a later radio show called CBS Radio Mystery Theater (1974-1982), more or less as a reprise of Inner Sanctum Mystery, complete with the sardonic host and the creaking door. I am happy to say that we listened to that show when we were kids, and so we got in on the very tail end of radio drama in America.

Here are some sources:

Simon and Schuster

Wikipedia

Richard L. Simon

Wikipedia

Lee Wright

http://www.threeinvestigatorsbooks.com/LeeWrightEditor.html

"Leon Shimkin, a Guiding Force At Simon & Schuster, Dies at 81" by Edwin McDowell, New York Times, May 26, 1988

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/26/obituaries/leon-shimkin-a-guiding-force-at-simon-schuster-dies-at-81.html

Inner Sanctum Mystery

Wikipedia

"Debunking the Myth . . ."

http://martingrams.blogspot.com/2013/10/debunking-myths-of-inner-sanctum.html

Original text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley