Paul Ernst (1899-1985)-Part Two

Paul Ernst lived a long life and enjoyed a long career as an author of stories published in popular magazines. The FictionMags Index has his first story as "Lights Out," published in Breezy Stories in July 1926. (He was then twenty-six years old and presumably living in Chicago with his mother.) Wikipedia gives a very late credit, a short story called "Blackout" for Good Housekeeping, July 1971. (Then seventy-one years old, he was presumably living in the Tampa Bay area with his wife.) In the intervening forty-five years, Ernst penned hundreds of stories for Amazing Stories, Astounding Stories, Breezy Stories, Clues Detective Stories, Dime Mystery Magazine, Droll Stories, Ghost Stories, Horror Stories, Mystery Stories, Nick Carter Magazine, Popular Detective, Racketeer Stories (who knew there was such a thing?), The Shadow Magazine, Terror Tales, and dozens of other titles. Under the byline Kenneth Robeson, Ernst wrote two dozen tales for The Avenger magazine. He was the ninth most prolific author of stories appearing in Weird Tales. As pulp magazines faded, Ernst sold stories to The American Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, The Saturday Evening Post, and Woman's Home Companion. He wrote love stories, detective stories, crime fiction, weird fiction, science fiction, tales of terror and horror (also called weird menace), and the kind of mainstream fiction that appeared in women's magazines and slick magazines for decades after the war. In short, Paul Ernst wrote everything (everything but Westerns), and he kept it up for decades. And still, we know so little about him.

I found an interesting article that mentions Paul Ernst's name, though. It's from the Tampa Times for January 21, 1942, and it describes a winter writer's colony at Anna Maria Key, located ten miles west of Bradenton, Florida. (1) The other authors mentioned as wintering or living at Anna Maria Key included:

• Joel Reeve, Pseudonym of William R. Cox (1901-1988)-A prolific author of Westerns, mystery stories, and sports stories, Cox was working on a Western on the day of his death at age eighty-seven.
• Wyatt Blassingame (1909-1985)-Another prolific author of adventure stories, crime stories, and detective stories, as well as of tales of terror and horror.
• Theodore Tinsley (1894-1979)-A third very prolific author of crime and detective stories. Tinsley also wrote a number of stories of The Shadow for that character's self-titled magazine.
• Norvell Page (1904-1961)-A veteran newspaperman and pulp author, Page is most remembered for his many stories of the The Spider. He also wrote tales of heroic fantasy, one of which was adapted to Marvel Comics' Conan the Barbarian in 1973-1974.
• Margaret Scott (1898-?)-According to the article, Margaret Scott was the sister of Mrs. Wyatt Blassingame, otherwise known as Gertrude (Olsen) Blassingame. I have found Margaret Scott in public records. Her name was actually Margurete or Margurite Olsen, but she wrote under the pseudonyms Margaret Scott, Rita Dever, and (with Will Oursler) Gale Gallagher. Her stories appeared in The Household Magazine, Liberty, Triple Detective, and confession-type magazines.
• Kreigh Collins (1908-1974)-Although he wrote adventure stories for boys, Kreigh Collins was and is most well known for his work as a comic strip artist, illustrator, and painter. He created a number of beautifully drawn comic strips, including Mitzi McCoy/Kevin the Bold (1948-1972).
• Frances Mallory Wykes (1905-1990)-Born in Evanston, Illinois, Frances Mallory Wykes lived in Florida for many years. She was the author of novels, including Wings in the Sun (1941) and The Lady and the Looking Glass (1955). She was married to Frederic Kirtland Wykes (1905-1982), who illustrated Wings in the Sun.
• Fanny Herron Wingate (dates unknown)-A poet whose work appeared in magazines and newspapers.
• Dr. James M. Stifler (1875-1949)-An authority and author of books on Benjamin Franklin, Stifler was a Baptist minster and a secretary of the University of Chicago (1935-1940). He's not the kind of man I would expect to hang around with a bunch of lowly pulp writers, but who said they hung around together? Maybe they all just wintered in the same place.
• Dr. Binford Throne (1873-1952)-Dr. Throne was an expert on skin diseases and served as a physician in New York City for many years. He wrote in his area of expertise for various medical journals.
• Talbot Mundy (1879-1940)-Pulp writer and adventure story author Talbot Mundy also wintered at Anna Maria Key . . .
• Walter Lippman (1889-1974)-As did journalist, author, and commentator Walter Lippman.

So Paul Ernst didn't labor away in isolation and obscurity, but the image of a group of writers wintering on the golden coast of Florida in the mid 1940s is so powerful that I want to go there and be among them. Golden days like that may be lost forever . . . 

Anyway, Paul Ernst wrote thirty-eight stories for Weird Tales, the first being "The Temple of the Serpents," from October 1928, and the last being "Outbound," from September 1945. Ernst wrote one of these stories, "The Way Home" (Nov. 1935), under a pseudonym, Paul Frederick Stern. (His real and fake surnames are obvious anagrams.) Among his other stories was the five-part serial "The Black Monarch," from February-June 1930. Ernst also contributed four stories to Oriental Stories and one to The Magic Carpet Magazine, plus one letter to "The Eyrie," the letters column of Weird Tales. Eight of his stories for "The Unique Magazine" were in the Doctor Satan series. As mentioned, he also penned twenty-four stories about the series character The Avenger for the magazine of the same name, from 1939 to 1942. All or most of these appeared as reprint paperback editions in the 1970s under the Warner Paperback Library imprint.

I wonder what happened to Paul Ernst's papers after his death in 1985. Could they have been destroyed? Or are they still out there somewhere? If nothing else, we have his hundreds of stories, all that remains of his life on this earth.

Paul Ernst's Stories and Letter in Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and The Magic Carpet Magazine

See the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, here.

Further Reading
I'm afraid there's nothing much on the Internet on Paul Ernst except for lists of his stories on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database and The FictionMags Index. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has a brief article on him cautioning against confusing him with other authors of the same name. That makes me wonder if The FictionMags Index, and consequently I, have him confused with the other Paul Ernst. Anyway, there is also Robert Weinberg's long-ago collection, Dr. Satan (Pulp Classics #6), published in 1974.

Note

(1) "Nationally Famed Authors Form Winter 'Colony' at Anna Maria Key," Tampa Times, January 21, 1942, page 19.

A gallery of covers illustrating stories by Paul Ernst. First, Astounding Stories, June 1932, with cover art by H.W. Wesso.

Startling Stories, May 1948, with cover art by Earle Bergey.

Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, March 1932, with cover art by Wesso again.

Terror Tales, March 1936, with cover art by John Howitt. Note the red-robed cultists.

The Avenger, September 1939, with cover art by H.W. Scott.

Finally, a Swedish edition, De mikroskopiska jättarna (The Microscopic Giants), published in 1973. I think A.E. van Vogt's byline is on the cover for his authorship of "The Sea Thing," which was originally published in 1940 and included in this edition.

Text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Paul Ernst (1899-1985)-Part One

Aka Chris Brand, Frederick Carr, George Alden Edson, George Edson, Ernest Jason Fredericks, Emerson Graves, Kenneth Robeson, Paul Frederick Stern
Author
Born November 7, 1899, Akron, Ohio
Died September 21, 1985, Pinellas County (possibly in Largo), Florida

When I first looked at Paul Ernst a few years ago, information on his life was pretty well missing. That has changed, but Wikipedia still has his birth and death dates wrong. His biography on that website is otherwise spare. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is better, but it has a link to the biography of another man (German actor Paul Ernst [1866-1933]) on the Internet Movie Database. It also has a link to the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which has Ernst's place of birth wrong. (His place of death on that same website may or may not be right.) I guess the thing to do is to start with primary sources.

First, according to Summit County, Ohio, birth records, Paul Frederick Ernst was born on November 7, 1899, in Akron, Ohio, to Louis C. and Nellie A. (Ticknor) Ernst. They had married on August 22, 1897, in Portage County, Ohio, and Paul was their firstborn and only child. Louis Ernst worked as a railroad postal clerk. His parents were immigrants from Germany.

By 1910, Louis Ernst was gone. His widow Nellie, then working as a dressmaker in her own home, was in Chicago with ten-year-old Paul. She remarried on October 14, 1915, in Cook County, Illinois. Her new husband was George B. Kerr. He was nearly thirty years her senior. Paul Ernst served in the U.S. Navy from June 7, 1918, to March 19, 1919. In the U.S. census of 1920, he, his mother, and his stepfather were living in Chicago, where Kerr managed a brass foundry. Paul Ernst, giving his age as twenty-two, was unemployed at the time. (Ernst may actually have been counted twice in that census, both times in Chicago.)

The next record I have for Paul Ernst is for a trip he made with his mother to Europe and back. On December 19, 1928, the two arrived in New York City from Naples. They gave their address as 540 Brampton Place in Chicago. That place seems to be no longer in existence.

I have not found Ernst in the 1930 census, but in 1940, he was living in Buckingham Township, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and working as a freelance writer. He was also married. His wife was named Martha, and the two let the enumerator of the census know that they had lived in the same place in 1935. She was the former Martha Jones, who had lived in Chicago with her parents. In 1930, she was single. That narrows down the marriage date for Paul Ernst and Martha Jones to the period 1930-1935. Ernst was in New Hope in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1942 when he filled out his draft card. At five feet, ten inches tall, he was a slight 140 pounds.

That's where the public records leave off until the death of Martha (Jones) Ernst on May 5, 1974, in Pinellas County, Florida. She was seventy-five years old at her death. (She was born on December 26, 1898.) Paul Ernst remarried after his wife's death. His second wife, Rae Ernst of Largo, Florida, died on May 1, 1989, at Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, Florida, at the age of ninety. (May was a bad month for the wives of Paul Ernst.) "A native of Finland," reads her obituary, "she moved to the [Tampa] area in 1953. She was a retired executive for AT&T. She was past president of Telephone Pioneer[s] of America." (1, 1a)

In between those two deaths, Paul Ernst himself died. That unhappy event took place on September 21, 1985, when he was eighty-five years old. At the time of his death, Ernst lived at 202 Crestwood Lane, Largo, Florida. According to his obituary, he had arrived in the area twenty years before from Pennsylvania. "He was a U.S. Navy veteran," it read. "He was a member of the Pelican Golf Club, Belleair." (2)

I guess it's no wonder that the facts in the life of Paul Ernst are so hard to come by. His parents died before he reached mid life. He didn't have any brothers or sisters. He also didn't have any children as far as I can tell. His first wife died before him. And, finally, his second wife, whom he had married late in life, had been married before and had only a daughter, in other words another family apart from him. In any case, Wikipedia is wrong, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database is right but has an errant link, and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has his dates right but at least one of the places wrong. Here's hoping that corrections are on the way. Oh, and by the way, today would have been his 119th birthday, so Happy Birthday, Paul Ernst!

Next: The Writing Career of Paul Ernst

Notes

(1) Tampa Tribune, May 3, 1989, p. 110.

(1a) Rae R. Ernst was also known as Rae M. Keller and Rae R. Lindquist.

(2) Tampa Tribune, September 24, 1985, p. 20. According to public records, Ernst died in Pinellas County. I assume he died either at home or at a local hospital.

Updated on February 2, 2022.

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Doctor Satan on the Cover of Weird Tales

I wrote the previous series on superheroes, supervillains, supermen, and super-words in order to get here today. My hypothesis was that these words and concepts originated in the 1890s, give or take a decade. The evidence seems to bear out my hypothesizing. I didn't realize how strong would be the connection between super-ness and the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, though. Even so, we as Americans more or less took these words and concepts away from European high culture and its distant and abstruse philosophizing and adapted them to our popular culture, in the process making them safer and more immediate, democratizing them, deflating them, and reducing the danger they represented to humanity. (1) There were echoes of words and concepts from Nietzsche--of supermen and super-words--in the popular press and in popular culture as late as the pulp fiction era, but as the twentieth century progressed, the superhero, as the successor to the hero in popular, folkloric, conventional, and sentimental literature, became more positive than negative, a force for the preservation of civilization and society rather than for their destruction, or for his striding over them in Nietzschean fashion. The superhero or superman came first, and in becoming positive, he had to have something against him, an antagonist, a foil, a counterweight. That's how, I think, we came to have the supervillain.

In my search for various super-words, I found a first occurrence of supervillain in the 1910s, significantly, I think, in drama (or melodrama) and in the cinema, in other words, in pop-cultural forms rather than in high culture or belles lettres. Tarzan and John Carter, two of the earliest superheroes, first appeared in 1912. The following year, one of the earliest supervillains, the insidious Fu Manchu, showed his face for the first time. (2) Tarzan and John Carter were and are regular and recurring characters. In that way, they have one of the qualities we associate with superheroes. But neither has a regular and recurring supervillain to oppose him. Likewise, Fu Manchu does not have a superhero against him. Instead there is Sir Denis Nayland Smith, a kind of Sherlock Holmes to Fu Manchu's Moriarty. Perhaps that was the model for the Doctor Satan stories that appeared in Weird Tales, beginning in August 1935.

In 1984, Robert Weinberg collected the Doctor Satan stories in a softbound booklet called, appropriately enough, Dr. Satan. In his introduction, Mr. Weinberg explained the origin of the series as a response to the popularity of the weird horror or terror titles of the early 1930s. These magazines were in competition with Weird Tales. If the editor, Farnsworth Wright, was going to keep up, he would have to feature stories of weird detectives in his magazine, or so he must have thought. "The Death Cry," by Arthur Reeves, printed in the May 1935 issue of Weird Tales, was the first entry in the magazine's journal of weird detective tales. The Doctor Satan series, by the prolific Paul Ernst, followed over the next year or so.

Whether he was ever referred to as a supervillain or not, Doctor Satan fits the bill. He has superpowers (his are supernatural) and regularly wears the same costume, at least on the cover of Weird Tales, making him instantly recognizable to children and fans. His foil is Ascott (or Ascot) Keane, a detective who may or may not be super. (He's definitely no Batman.) The two fought it out, as heroes and villains do, for eight stories spread out over a year's worth of issues. Still, the conventions of the superhero genre were not well established in the early to mid 1930s. There may have been superheroes at the time but not always supervillains to match them. Conversely, there may have been supervillains, like Doctor Satan, but no superheroes in possession of equal and opposing superpowers with whom they might contend.

Doctor Satan was on the cover of two issues of Weird Tales, in his debut in August 1935 and in his penultimate appearance in May 1936. In the meantime, the author, Paul Ernst, had his byline on the cover of the magazine several times. Unfortunately for him and his supervillainous character, the Conan stories, by Robert E. Howard, were running at the same time. Conan won the cover contest by a score of three to two in the year he and Doctor Satan shared space in Weird Tales. Conan the superhero is still remembered today. Doctor Satan the supervillain is, on the other hand, almost forgotten.

The Doctor Satan Stories in Weird Tales
"Doctor Satan" (Aug. 1935)
"The Man Who Chained the Lightning" (Sept. 1935)
"Hollywood Horror" (Oct. 1935)
"The Consuming Flame" (Nov. 1935)
"Horror Insured" (Jan. 1936)
"Beyond Death's Gateway" (Mar. 1936)
"The Devil's Double" (May 1936)
"Mask of Death" (Sept. 1936)

Notes

(1) Here is Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Vintage, 1991): "I will argue that high culture made itself obsolete through modernism's neurotic nihilism and that popular culture is the great heir of the western past." (p. 31)

(2) There were supervillains before Fu Manchu, of course. One example is the Invisible Man from the novel of the same name by H.G. Wells, first published in 1897.

Weird Tales, August 1935. Cover story: "Doctor Satan" by Paul Ernst. Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

Weird Tales, May 1936. Cover story: "The Devil's Double" by Paul Ernst. Cover art by Margaret Brundage.

These covers also appear in my entry "Devils and Demons on the Cover of Weird Tales," from October 24, 2016, here.

Text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley