Earl Peirce, Jr. (1917-1983)-Part One

Introduction

I first wrote about Earl Peirce, Jr., on May 17, 2017. I misidentified him then as Earl Monroe Pierce, Jr., based on his age and his residency in Washington, D.C., where Peirce/Pierce is known to have lived. A month later, an anonymous commenter let me know that I had the wrong person and provided a link to an online discussion about the right one. I removed what I had written and promised an update and correction. By then it was too late: my mistake was memorialized in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) and you can still find it there today. I pride myself on doing good work. It's not such a good feeling to do bad and to know that I have done bad. It's not a good feeling, either, to know that my mistake is flapping in the breeze of the worldwide web. I'm not a member of ISFDb and don't know anyone who is. I hope that once this new series is over, someone will let them know that the whole mess has been straightened out and that it's time to recognize the real Earl Peirce, Jr., for who he was.

The Peirces of Maine

One of the reasons I misidentified Earl Peirce, Jr., is that it just didn't seem to me that his surname was spelled correctly. We once had Franklin Pierce as president. We know Hawkeye Pierce as a fictional Korean War surgeon. (1) We even have Jeremy Duncan's pierced friend Pierce in the comic strip Zits. To complicate matters, Earl Peirce was also known as Earl Pierce. My mistake was in thinking that the correct spelling was a mistake and vice versa. (2) What I didn't know is that there are scads of Peirces who have called Maine home since the colonial era and that their numbers have included militia captains, wealthy lumbermen, a prominent artist, a well-known (in his time) archaeologist and art historian, and not one but two writers of genre fiction. Only one of them was Earl Peirce, Jr. I'll get to the other--his third cousin--before we reach the end of this series. 

To be continued . . .

The first story by Earl Peirce, Jr., to appear in Weird Tales was "Doom of the House of Duryea," in October 1936 (with cover art by J. Allen St. John). Peirce's byline wasn't on the cover, but his story has proved popular and enduring. It was reprinted in Tales of the Undead: Vampires and Visitants (1947), Far Below and Other Horrors (1974, 1987), Weird Vampire Tales (1992), and Bloodlines: Vampire Stories from New England (1997),  suggesting a New England origin for the writer himself . . .

"Doom of the House of Duryea" is also in Acolytes of Cthulhu (2001), in which Peirce's last name was misspelled (see, I'm not the only one to make that mistake) but which was graced by cover art by the late Gahan Wilson. (I apologize for the poor quality of the image: the Internet isn't everything it's cracked up to be.)

The main action in Peirce's story takes place in a cabin by a lake in northern Maine. If it is a Lovecraftian tale at all, it might be on account of a centuries-old family curse and secret knowledge drawn from obscure and forbidden books. Among the books mentioned are Episcopi (real), Nider's Ant-Hill (real, as Formicarius), and an unnamed work by Ludvig Prinn (not real). The last, De Vermis Mysteriis, was created by Robert Bloch as an addition to H.P. Lovecraft's list of grimoires, both real and not real.* Bloch was of course an acolyte of Lovecraft. Younger by a generation, he corresponded with Lovecraft, and together they wrote a series of back-and-forth stories in which they killed each other off. What is less well known is that Peirce also corresponded with Lovecraft and that he was friends with Bloch. At or about the time that "Doom of the House of Duryea" was published, Peirce was living in Bloch's hometown of Milwaukee. (Not long afterwards he moved to Washington, D.C., with his family.) I suppose that's why Peirce was called a "midwestern writer" in the introduction to his story in Weird Vampire Tales (1992).

Earl Peirce, Jr., seems to have been up on his lore. I had never heard of either Nider's Ant-Hill or Episcopi before reading his story. He also made a reference to an "Enoch" and "the terrible drawings by an ancient Dominican of Rome." I don't know and couldn't find for myself a reference for either. The word vrykolaka also appears in "Doom of the House of Duryea." That's not one you see very often in old weird fiction. There is also a word new to me--shocking and disturbing, too: INFANTIPHAGI. (Yes, it's in all upper case in the original.) That word may be new to everybody else who reads it, too, for it seems to have been Peirce's own neologism. Maybe he used it for shock effect, as young writers and artists often do with such things. It's still shocking to me, more than eighty years after he wrote it, but the shock effect can only wear in our current age: I'm not sure that Peirce could have known that we would one day, once again, worship Moloch. One thing to consider here: the eating of offspring by parents (filial cannibalism) and of the mother by her offspring (matriphagy) occur in nature. As a forester, Earl Peirce's namesake--his own father--might have known of such things, or maybe Peirce read of them in his father's library, just as the fictional son in "Doom of the House of Duryea" reads of them in his own father's reeking, mildewy, yellow book of horrors on that stormy and fateful night by the lake . . .

*De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludvig Prinn was first mentioned in "The Shambler from the Stars," published in Weird Tales in September 1935.

Notes

(1) Hiester Richard Hornberger, Jr., better known by his nom de plume Richard Hooker, graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine and later practiced medicine in Waterville and Bremen. (Franklin Pierce graduated from Bowdoin, too.) Hornberger (1924-1997) served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and went on to write the original novel (1968) on which the movie and television show M*A*S*H* were based. I imagine he met more than one Peirce/Pierce during his decades in Maine. Maybe one of them provided him with the surname of his fictional counterpart. Hawkeye Pierce's real name, by the way, is Benjamin Franklin Pierce. Remember this: if you draw any line long enough it eventually becomes a circle. Here's another circle: Earl Peirce, Jr., came from a Maine family and died in New Jersey; Hornberger was born in New Jersey and died in Maine.

(2) The spellchecker in Blogger doesn't like the spelling Peirce, either.

Text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

The Fungi from Yuggoth

Here are the two poems by H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) published in the February/March 1931 issue of Weird Tales and set to music (perhaps even performed) by Harold S. Farnese (1890-1945) (1):

XXIII. Mirage

I do not know if ever it existed--
That lost world floating dimly on Time's stream--
And yet I see it often, violet-misted,
And shimmering at the back of some vague dream.
There were strange towers and curious lapping rivers,
Labyrinths of wonder, and low vaults of light,
And bough-crossed skies of flame, like that which quivers
Wistfully just before a winter's night.

Great moors led off to sedgy shores unpeopled,
Where vast birds wheeled, while on a windswept hill
There was a village, ancient and white-steepled,
With evening chimes for which I listen still.
I do not know what land it is--or dare
Ask when or why I was, or will be, there.

XXVII. The Elder Pharos [2]

From Leng, where rocky peaks climb bleak and bare
Under cold stars obscure to human sight,
There shoots at dusk a single beam of light
Whose far blue rays make shepherds whine in prayer.
They say (though none has been there) that it comes
Out of a pharos in a tower of stone,
Where the last Elder One lives on alone,
Talking to Chaos with the beat of drums. [3]

The Thing, they whisper, wears a silken mask
Of yellow, whose queer folds appear to hide
A face not of this earth, though none dares ask
Just what those features are, which bulge inside.
Many, in man’s first youth, sought out that glow,
But what they found, no one will ever know. [4]

From the URL H.P. Lovecraft.com at this link.

Notes

(1) I'm settling on 1890 as the year of Farnese's birth, as I think it's a more likely birth year for him than 1891.
(2) The word pharos refers to a lighthouse.

(3) Note the phrase "Talking to Chaos with the beat of drums." Is that an allusion to Azathoth, whom Lovecraft described as existing "outside the ordered universe" and as an "amorphous blight of nethermost confusion," also as one who "gnaws . . . amidst . . . [the] maddening beating of vile drums"? (From The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.) There are drums also backing Guy Bevier Williams' chant at the beginning of White Zombie. It seems to me that drums in Lovecraft, along with pipes and flutes, signify primitivism and/or decadence in music and, by extension, in a society or culture. Cultists in his stories invariably play these primitive or pagan instruments.
(3) Note here the reference to "The Thing [which] wears a silken mask/Of yellow . . . ." That makes me think immediately of Robert W. Chambers' King in Yellow, from a generation before. Lovecraft made reference to the same figure in "Celephaïs" (1920) and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath (1926, 1943).
(4) One of the newspaper items I cited previously in this series alluded to Farnese's performance (with Jascha Gegna, in late 1932) of two "oriental" pieces composed by Farnese. Although "Mirage" seems to describe a vision of a more Western or European landscape ("steepled" village), "The Elder Pharos" has a subtle, though not unambiguous, Oriental setting: the Plateau of Leng is placed, in one Lovecraft story at least, in Central Asia, while the color yellow, though also used to connote insanity, is associated with the Orient. (It's why pencils are yellow, but think of "the yellow peril" as well.)

Original text copyright 2018, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

True Detective and Robert W. Chambers

It isn't often that an obscure collection of stories from the nineteenth century draws the attention of twenty-first century television viewers, but such a thing has happened. The collection is The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, from 1895. The television viewers are the people who watched the HBO series True Detective, which premiered on January 12, 2014, and ended its first run on March 9. I say "obscure," but fans of fantasy fiction and weird fiction are and have been well acquainted with The King in Yellow for a long, long time, since H.P. Lovecraft wrote about it in his seminal study, "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927), if not before. I regret to say that I haven't seen the show, but I would like to have a look.

The creator of True Detective is Nic Pizzolatto, a writer and teacher from New Orleans. I'm happy to say that Mr. Pizzolatto has a connection to my home state of Indiana, for he taught at DePauw University in Greencastle, only a few blocks away from where I used to live. DePauw also gave us John Jakes, creator of Brak the Barbarian and countless other genre characters.

Nic Pizzolatto seems to be pretty familiar with genre fiction himself. His TV show is named after a pulp magazine first published by Bernarr Macfadden in 1924--ninety years ago this year. He has drawn on The King in Yellow in his plotting and writing for his show, which is set in the author's native Louisiana, the same country haunted by the cult of Cthulhu in Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu." One of the characters in that story is--like Mr. Pizzolatto's protagonists--a Louisiana detective, John Raymond Lagrasse. Lovecraft's fictional grimoire, The Necronomicon, doesn't make an appearance in "The Call of Cthulhu," but Lovecraft may very well have based the idea of a book that drives men mad upon reading it on Robert W. Chambers' fictional drama "The King in Yellow." In any case, I wish Mr. Pizzolatto and the makers of his show further success.

Text copyright 2014, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Sax Rohmer (1883-1959)

Pseudonym of Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward

Clerk, Newspaper Reporter, Poet, Playwright, Songwriter, Comedy Writer, Author

Born February 15, 1883, Ladywood, Birmingham, England

Died June 1, 1959, London, England

Sax Rohmer was born Arthur Henry Ward on February 15, 1883. Although he came into the world in Birmingham, England, his parents were Irish Catholics. His mother told him stories of having descended from the Irish general Patrick Sarsfield. After her death in 1901, Arthur Henry Ward added the Sarsfield name to his own. Ward also used the names Michael Furey (his mother's maiden name), A. Sarsfield Ward, and Arthur Sarsfield Ward. Today he is known as Sax Rohmer.

Ward worked various jobs before hitting his stride as a writer. In writing for the stage, he met and married a performer, Rose Elizabeth Knox (1886-1979). His first published work, "The Mysterious Mummy" in Pearson's Weekly (Nov. 24, 1903), came when he was just twenty years old. Ward's first book was Pause!, published anonymously in 1910.

Sax Rohmer will forever be identified with his infamous Oriental villain, Fu Manchu. Like John Carter of Mars and Tarzan, Fu Manchu made his debut appearance in 1912. From October 1912 to June 1913, beginning with "The Zayat Kiss," Rohmer's first stories in the saga of Fu Manchu ran in the British magazine The Story-Teller. A book, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, followed in 1913. This year is the centennial year of Fu Manchu in book form.

Sax Rohmer published thirteen Fu Manchu books in his lifetime. In the movies, the character was played by Warner Oland (a Swedish-American actor who also played Charlie Chan), Boris Karloff, Peter Sellers, and the invaluable Christopher Lee. There was also a comic strip illustrated by Leo O'Mealia (1931-1933, reprinted in Detective Comics) and a television show with Glen Gordon as the title character (1956). Rohmer wrote more than just tales of insidious Asians. One series starred an occult detective, Moris Klaw. Rohmer also wrote supernatural horror and non-fiction. His earliest movie credit was the story for The Yellow Claw (1920).

After World War II, Rohmer moved to the United States and lived in New York City, Greenwich, Connecticut, and finally White Plains, New York. He died in a London hospital while on a trip to his native country. He was seventy-six years old. Sax Rohmer was buried in Kensal Green Catholic Cemetery in London.

I'll close with three pieces of Sax Rohmer trivia:

First, Rohmer was friends with Harry Houdini, who also contributed to Weird Tales. 

Second, Rohmer's wife, Rose Elizabeth Knox (1886-1979), a former stage performer, also wrote a mystery novel, Bianca in Black (1954), under the name Elizabeth Sax Rohmer.

Third, the name Sax Rohmer supposedly combines the Anglo-Saxon words for blade and wanderer, suggesting a freelancer. After he created Fu Manchu, there was probably never again a reason for Rohmer to work for another man.

Sax Rohmer's Story in Weird Tales

"Lord of the Jackals" (Sept. 1927)

Further Reading

You can read about Sax Rohmer on a number of websites:

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database

The online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

The Page of Fu Manchu at: http://www.njedge.net/~knapp/FuFrames.htm

Books and Writers at: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rohmer.htm

The Literature Network at: http://www.online-literature.com/sax-rohmer/

Be very careful in reading Wikipedia's entry.

I have written about "The Yellow Peril" and the Oriental villain in a previous posting, here, but I thought I would offer an image from the movies, the poster for The Face of Fu Manchu, from 1965. 

Here's an image from television from about the same time. That's Leonard Strong as "The Claw," a Fu Manchu-type villain who calls himself "The Craw." ("Not Craw! Craw!") The show was Get Smart, one of the great television shows of the 1960s. Sax Rohmer had a detective hero named Klaw. Rohmer's first movie credit was for a film called The Yellow Claw.

I don't know whether this is the same Yellow Claw or not, but he's no doubt related to Fu Manchu.

The Claw in the Daredevil comics of the 1940s was even more monstrous.

Here's a comic book adaptation from 1951 with a cover by Wally Wood.

And another from 1958. That was fifty-five years ago, yet Fu Manchu lives on.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Menace Magazines-Part 1

You can split fantasy fiction as finely as you like. The resulting list of genres and sub-genres might exhaust an ordinary reader. There is science fiction, space opera, planetary romance, science fantasy, weird fiction, supernatural horror, ghost stories, high fantasy, low fantasy, and on and on. Then there is weird menace, also called terror stories, which found a home in the so-called shudder pulps of the 1930s and '40s. Weird menace is distinct from weird fiction, so distinct in fact that the weird menace titles of the pulp era probably can't be called rivals of Weird Tales. But I'm making a catalogue here and I want to be thorough.

So how might one characterize weird menace? I can't say for sure. I have never read anything that I recognized as part of the genre. Maybe the best way to learn about weird menace is to look at the covers of the magazines in which weird menace stories appeared. It's not something you're likely to enjoy, not because the art is bad (it isn't), but because those covers show torture and cruelty, terror and torment, bondage and sadism, in short, every brand of violence and depravity an ordinary reader might want to avoid. In the minds of some, the word pulp means trash if not pornography. My guess is that a good deal of that reputation for pulp trashiness came about because of weird menace.

We can lay the blame for weird menace at the feet of Henry Steeger, president of Popular Publications (not to be confused with the Popular Fiction Company, publisher of Weird Tales). "I got the idea during a trip to Paris," Steeger explained. "They had the Grand Guignol Theatre there, with these violent situations, and the audience was very enthusiastic. I thought, 'We could do a magazine like that with the same sort of emphasis'." (1) One of Steeger's titles, Dime Mystery Magazine, was faltering at the time. The publisher decided to give it a jolt. To quote Lee Server, author of Danger Is My Business, "The October 1933 issue of Dime Mystery Magazine launched what would prove to be the most depraved and blood-soaked chapter in the annals of American publishing." (2) With that issue, the genre of weird menace was born. That was eighty years ago next month. Maybe we should say happy birthday.

According to Mr. Server, two aspects of weird menace distinguish it from stories of supernatural horror. First, there isn't anything supernatural: the events of the story are explained rationally--if not logically--by story's end. Second, the horrors in a weird menace story are recounted in great detail and with extreme intensity. If you detect a pornographic or fetishistic element upon looking at the covers, you're probably onto something. I don't believe it's pornography or fetishism of sex so much as of violence directed at one of the sexes. Weird menace may not be a sub-genre of fantasy per se, but it seems to contain an element of fantasy, perhaps of a different kind.

Because the horror in weird menace is natural rather than supernatural, the monster must be human: mad scientists, cult leaders, psychopaths, fiends, "gnarled dwarves, brainless mutants, [and] horny hunchbacks" abound. (3) Popular culture had placed women in peril before. (A look at the covers of the shudder pulps will show that those being tortured and tormented were mostly if not exclusively female.) The Perils of Pauline (1914) kind of story, from a generation before, comes to mind. The Snidely Whiplash character, who ties young women to railroad tracks or wants to run them through a sawmill, became a cliché early on. (4) I doubt, however, that anything before the weird menace stories was as explicit or depraved. That leads me to wonder: Why then? Why the early thirties? I won't hazard a guess just yet, but I'll listen to opinions. (If you would like to make a comment, please do so below.)

Violence, torment, and torture aimed at women are still with us of course. The hacker and slasher movies of the last half century have thrived on that formula. (5) I have written before about the demise of the supernatural monster in our scientific and technological age. There may not be any more room in the world for a werewolf or a vampire. An ax-wielding psychopath is another story. There's more to it than that, I think. It has something to do with women and sex, and maybe with emancipation. After writing six paragraphs, however, I guess I'll have to leave the theorizing for another day.

Dime Mystery Magazine

Dec. 1932 to Dec. 1949
154 Issues (39 Volumes)

Published by: Popular Publications

Edited by: Rogers Terrill

Format: Presumably pulp size

Notes: According to the cover blurb, Dime Mystery Magazine was combined with 10 Story Magazine with the December 1944 issue. It became 15 Mystery Stories with the February 1950 issue.

Notes

(1) Quoted in Danger Is My Business by Lee Server (1993), p. 106.

(2) From Danger Is My Business, p. 105. The book was published in 1993. I wonder if the last twenty years' worth of depravity would cause Lee Server to reconsider his assessment.

(3) From Danger Is My Business, p. 109.

(4) Relentless Rudolph, from C.W. Kahles' comic strip Hairbreadth Harry, is one example. Dan Backslide in the cartoon "The Dover Boys" (1942) is another.

(5) Other anniversaries: Blood Feast, which was, according to Wikipedia, the first "splatter film," came out in 1963. That same year, the first Italian giallo, La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much), also arrived in movie theaters. Giallo, by the way, is Italian for yellow, the color of mystery/thrillers in the Italian magazine and book market since 1929. Gialli--"yellows" or "yellow books"--is actually the name of the genre. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is an exemplar (if that's the right word) of the hacker/slasher film. That anniversary is still a few months away.

Here's a typical, though comparatively tame, weird menace cover from the pioneering title in the genre, Dime Mystery Magazine. Guys with hoods are pretty common. So are women on tables, though usually they're bound in some way. It's interesting that mummies and Egyptian motifs are pretty common, too. (I suppose The Mummy [1932] was a sort of weird menace story.) I don't know the year or the name of the cover artist. "Harrison Storm" was a pseudonym of Bruno Fischer. "I was a little . . . I wouldn't say embarrassed," Fischer recalled, "but it was the thing to do, to use a pseudonym for these magazines." (Quoted in Server, p. 113.) Wyatt Blassingame (1909-1985) was a prolific author of stories and books, even for children.

Text and captions copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

J.U. Giesy (1877-1947)

John Ulrich Giesy
Aka Jay Ulrich, Charles Dustin
Physician, Surgeon, Editor, Author
Born August 6, 1877, near Chillicothe, Ohio
Died September 8, 1947, Salt Lake City, Utah

John Ulrich Giesy was born on August 6, 1877, near Chillicothe, Ohio, the only son of two Ohio natives and a great-grandson of a Pennsylvania private of the Revolutionary War. The Giesy family did not remain long in Ohio after John's birth. The 1880 Federal census found them in Richland, Kansas, where the boy's father was a farmer. By 1900, the family was in Salt Lake City, and at age twenty-one, John U. Giesy was already employed as a physician. (He was an 1898 graduate of Starling Medical College in Columbus, Ohio.) (1) It appears as though Giesy lived in Salt Lake City for most of his adult life except for his wedding in San Francisco in 1904 and four months spent in the Medical Corps at Fort Riley, Kansas, at the close of the First World War. (2)

Like Edgar Rice Burroughs (and James Fenimore Cooper before them), Giesy began his literary career after remarking that he could write as well or better than the authors he was reading. His wife encouraged him to do so, and so he began selling stories to Western Monthly in 1910. His story "The Occult Detector" appeared in The Cavalier in February 1912. It was the first in a series starring Semi-Dual, an occult detective. It's worth noting that William Hope Hodgson's tales of Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, are from shortly before that date. Many more Semi-Dual stories followed over the next two decades and were published in The Cavalier, All-Story Weekly, and other magazines.

Giesy may or may not have followed the example of William Hope Hodgson in his Semi-Dual series. There can be little doubt that Giesy's three interplanetary novels of Jason Croft (All-Story, 1918-1921) were inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Mars books. (3) The Jason Croft stories proved popular enough that they were reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries in the 1940s, then by Avalon Books in the 1960s.

A third series by J.U. Giesy starred Professor Xenophon Xerxes Zapt and earned Giesy a place on the cover of Weird Tales in October 1925. The title of Giesy's opus is "The Wicked Flea." The cover illustration shows a giant flea chasing a frightened dog. I suppose that was an attempt at humor. Fantasy fans are notoriously serious-minded. I suspect there were a few readers of Weird Tales who objected. I may be a little more forgiving, but it's hard for me to imagine that there wasn't a better subject for the cover of that issue of Weird Tales.

Giesy sometimes collaborated with other authors, especially lawyer Junius B. Smith, whom he met in Salt Lake City. (Octavus Roy Cohen was another Giesy collaborator.) A website called PulpGen, which combines pulps and genealogy, lists Giesy's many writing credits. It's a website well worth a look. That site is linked through another, Science Fiction/Fantasy Authors of Various Faiths, to a Wikipedia entry on Giesy. According to the Various Faiths website, Giesy was "[o]ne of the few s.f. authors who wrote in Esperanto." Giesy is included in the section on Latter-day Saints [sic] despite the fact that his religious affiliation is "unverified." According to an entry on the website of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Giesy also expressed "a devout belief in astrology" in his Professor Zapt series. (4)

Two of Giesy's stories are worth special mention here. The first, In 2112 (1912), is a Utopian novel of two hundred years in the future. That's still one hundred years from our own times, but I suspect that in 2112 we will once again miss Utopia by the same margin Utopia is always missed, i.e., by an infinite number of years. Second is All For His Country (1914, 1915), a novel of future war in which the Japanese destroy Los Angeles and Japanese-Americans in California betray their country. Wikipedia repeats a charge of racism (without citation or attribution) and links the novel in some way to the internment of the Nisei during World War II. We should probably be a little more responsible than that. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is more neutral and merely makes reference to "the yellow peril" in its entry on Giesy. (5)

Six of J.U. Giesy's stories were committed to film between 1916 and 1921. Chief among those are The Matrimaniac (1916), a comedy starring Douglas Fairbanks, and The Eyes of Mystery (1918), directed by Tod Browning. You can find a full list of Giesy's movie credits at the website of The Internet Movie Database.

After a lifetime spent in dual careers, John Ulrich Giesy died on September 8, 1947, in Salt Lake City. He was survived by his wife, Juliet Galena Conwell Giesy (1877-1953), and was buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in his adopted home city.

J.U. Giesy's Stories in Weird Tales

"Ebenezer's Casket" (serial, with Junius B. Smith, Apr. 1924-May/June/July 1924)

"The Magic of Dai Nippon" (Feb. 1925)

"Ashes of Circumstances" (Sept. 1925)

"The Wicked Flea" (Oct. 1925)

Further Reading

See the sources cited above. You can read more about Giesy in Under the Moons of Mars (1970), edited by Sam Moskowitz. Unfortunately, Moskowitz's biographical sketch, in which Giesy is identified as "James Ullrich Giesy," must be taken with a grain of salt. Also, there is a brief entry on Giesy in Ohio Authors and Their Books, 1796-1950 (1962), edited by William Coyle.

Notes

(1) Starling Medical College is now part of Ohio State University. According to Sam Moskowitz, Giesy arrived with his family in Salt Lake City at age thirteen. He also served his medical internship in that city.

(2) I'm not quite sure about Giesy's military career. According to public records, he served as a captain in the U.S. Army between August and December 1918. Sam Moskowitz wrote that Giesy organized an Army camp, Plattsburg Training Camp, in Salt Lake City in 1916, and that he served in the reserves as a major after the war. As for his civilian medical career, Giesy was editor of two journals, California and Western Medicine and Archives of Physical Therapy, X-Ray, and Radium.

(3) By the way, J.U. Giesy (1877-1947) and Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) were very near contemporaries.
(4) Giesy, who wrote adventure, mystery, romance, science fantasy, and Westerns, also used the pen names Jay Ulrich and Charles Dustin.

(5) By the way, the term "the yellow peril" was coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Writers of popular fiction quickly glommed onto the term for their own usage. Also by the way, gialli--literally, "yellows," named for their yellow covers--are an Italian genre encompassing crime fiction, thrillers, and what we might call weird terror or weird menace tales. And of course, The Yellow Kid and so-called "yellow journalism" date from about the same period as the first usage of the term "the yellow peril." So do yellow pencils, which have their own connection with what used to be called the Orient. So what is it with the color yellow? Coincidentally and inconsequentially, Richard Outcault, creator of The Yellow Kid, and William S. Giesy, father of J.U. Giesy, both hailed from Lancaster, Ohio.

John Ulrich Giesy collaborated with Junius B. Smith on stories of Semi-Dual, an occult detective. Here is a Semi-Dual cover for All-Story Weekly from nearly a century ago, August 25, 1917. It looks like the art is unsigned.

The following year (July 13, 1918), Giesy's scientific romance, "Palos of the Dog Star Pack," made the cover of the same magazine. The influence of Edgar Rice Burroughs seems obvious.

The sequel, "The Mouthpiece of Zitu," came along a year--almost to the day--later. The cover artist looks to be different than in the first installment, but I don't know the names of either.

From top to bottom: 1) Another collaboration with Junius B. Smith from People's Favorite Magazine, Oct. 10, 1917. I can't read the artist's signature. 2-4) Three Semi-Dual covers from Argosy and Cavalier. The first two covers are by Paul Stahr (1883-1953), a well-known pulp illustrator.

The work of J.U. Giesy got a first go-around in story magazines of the 1910s and '20s. Readers of science fiction and fantasy got a second look at Giesy's stories in Famous Fantastic Mysteries . . .

and Fantastic Novels (May 1948).

Here's another cover for Famous Fantastic Mysteries (Oct. 1941) in which Giesy shares cover space with H.P. Lovecraft but gets top billing and the cover story. If Lovecraft had written more stories with female characters, he might have received more space on pulp magazine covers. I don't know the artist on this cover, but it looks a little like Virgil Finlay. Likewise, I don't know the cover artists in the first two images.

A nice two-page spread to open "The Mouthpiece of Zitu" from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Nov. 1942. I don't see a signature or credit on the artwork. 

Giesy for a third generation of readers--these three covers are for hardbound editions of the mid-1960s. The cover artist was Gray Morrow.

Text copyright 2013, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Robert W. Chambers (1865-1933)

Fine Artist, Illustrator, Short Story Writer, Novelist, Playwright, Children's Book Author

Born May 26, 1865, Brooklyn, New York

Died December 16, 1933, New York, New York

Robert W. Chambers lived the kind of life any aspiring writer might envy. Talented, popular, and prolific, he wrote nearly one hundred books and used the proceeds to fund a lavish estate, a sizable art collection, an active club life, frequent trips abroad, independent wealth, and plenty of leisure time. He was an outdoorsman, a lepidopterist, a collector, an expert on certain antiquities, and in his early years, a very successful artist and illustrator, counting Charles Dana Gibson (1867-1944) and other artists and writers among his friends. Many of Chambers' stories were adapted to film in his lifetime and after. Chambers' wife, French-born Elsa Vaughn Moller, called "Elsie" and daughter of a European diplomat, bore him one son, Robert Edward Stuart Chambers. The younger Chambers, who also went by the name Robert Husted Chambers (1899-1955), followed in his father's footsteps as a writer. The Chambers family also included Chambers' brother, the New York architect Walter Boughton Chambers (1866-1945), who designed landmarks in his native city and other northeastern states.

Wealth, talent, fame, family--it all added up to a great success, yet, as far as I know, there has never been a book-length biography of Robert W. Chambers. And in the minds of many, Chambers squandered his talent on popular novels produced at a rapid pace and settling somewhere below the ken of literature. "Stuff! Literature!" Robert W. Chambers scoffed in a 1912 interview. "The word makes me sick!" His disdain for literary endeavor may have been the fox talking about the grapes. Either way, it assured that his work would become dated and seldom read in later years. In his time, he was called "the Shopgirl Scheherazade" and "the Boudoir Balzac." Today, Chambers' reputation rests almost solely on a single book, his second, entitled The King in Yellow, published in 1895.

In his survey of the genre, H.P. Lovecraft wrote--in his "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1)--two long paragraphs on Chambers. I'll quote them in their entirety here:

     Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different quality. The King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier’s Trilby. The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is "The Yellow Sign," in which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's. A boy, describing a tussle he has had with this creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a certain detail. "Well, sir, it's Gawd's truth that when I 'it 'im 'e grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted 'is soft, mushy fist one of 'is fingers come off in me 'and." An artist, who after seeing him has shared with another a strange dream of a nocturnal hearse, is shocked by the voice with which the watchman accosts him. The fellow emits a muttering sound that fills the head like thick oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay. What he mumbles is merely this: "Have you found the Yellow Sign?" 

     A weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman, picked up in the street by the sharer of his dream, is shortly given the artist; and after stumbling queerly upon the hellish and forbidden book of horrors the two learn, among other hideous things which no sane mortal should know, that this talisman is indeed the nameless Yellow Sign handed down from the accursed cult of Hastur—from primordial Carcosa, whereof the volume treats, and some nightmare memory of which seems to lurk latent and ominous at the back of all men's minds. Soon they hear the rumbling of the black-plumed hearse driven by the flabby and corpse-faced watchman. He enters the night-shrouded house in quest of the Yellow Sign, all bolts and bars rotting at his touch. And when the people rush in, drawn by a scream that no human throat could utter, they find three forms on the floor—two dead and one dying. One of the dead shapes is far gone in decay. It is the churchyard watchman, and the doctor exclaims, "That man must have been dead for months." It is worth observing that the author derives most of the names and allusions connected with his eldritch land of primal memory from the tales of Ambrose Bierce. Other early works of Mr. Chambers displaying the outré and macabre element are The Maker of Moons and In Search of the Unknown. One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognised master.

That's a lot to digest in a single blog entry, but it's worth reading for a number of reasons. First, it's obvious that Lovecraft drew on The King in Yellow in general and on "The Yellow Sign" in particular for concepts and atmosphere for his own weird fiction. Second, it's illuminating to read of the lineage of Chambers' "names and allusions," which can be traced backward to Bierce and forward to Lovecraft and his acolyte, August Derleth. Third, it's very interesting to read Lovecraft's criticisms of the older man Chambers:

Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers . . . [emphasis added].

One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognised master [again, emphasis added].

Those two criticisms, which open and close Lovecraft's discussion of Chambers, can just as easily be leveled at Lovecraft himself. In fact they sometimes have been.

* * * * *

You can read about Robert W. Chambers elsewhere on line or at the library. (The New York Times wrote of him extensively in his time. You might start by reading his obituary, dated December 17, 1933, page 36.) I'll skip the biographical details and write just a little more. First, as Lovecraft wrote, Chambers authored several works of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. (2) Second, he also wrote a book called Police!!! (1915), which may very well have contained the first cryptozoological fiction ever set to print. (3)

Cryptozoology, founded in the nineteenth century but not named until the twentieth, is the science or semi-science of unknown creatures. Its recognized founder was Antoon Cornelis Oudemans (1858-1943), a Dutch zoologist who attempted to describe and classify unknown creatures in his book The Great Sea Serpent (1892). Robert W. Chambers--Oudemans' junior by only seven years--was an enthusiastic entomologist and lepidopterist; his credentials as a science-minded author would appear firm. The point of this is that cryptozoological fiction would not have been likely before science was brought to bear on what would previously have been the stuff of legend or folklore. It's also unlikely that anyone would have written stories on a sensationalistic topic such as cryptozoology before there was a popular press on an industrial scale. I guess I should ask the question then: Can anyone offer another candidate for the first fiction in the young field of cryptozoology?

Notes

(1) Literature? "Stuff!" Chambers might say.

(2) A story called "The Repairer of Reputations" opens Chambers' 1895 collection, The King in Yellow. Set in 1920, the story alludes to recent events, including the administration of a President Winthrop and recent victory in a war with Germany. Winthrop is close enough to Wilson, and of course the United States and Germany were involved in a little tussle ending in 1918. You might say that science fiction blends into prophecy in Chambers' tale. Mostly, though, his projections are simply nonsense.

(3) There is also a hint of forensic entomology in one of the stories.

Robert W. Chambers' Stories in Weird Tales

"The Demoiselle d'Ys" (Aug. 1928)

"The Sign of Venus" (Summer 1973, originally in Harper's Magazine, Dec. 1903)

"The Splendid Apparition" (Winter 1973, originally in In Search of the Unknown, 1904)

A drawing of the King in Yellow, created by Robert W. Chambers himself, that rare combination of accomplished writer and accomplished artist.

Jack Gaughan, the cover artist for the Ace Books edition of 1965, followed Chambers' model closely.

This Spanish-language version features an Op Art background to Rowena Morrill's illustration.

Unintentionally or not, the color yellow became a motif in illustration for the works of Robert W. Chambers. Here's the cover for The Maker of Moons, an edition from--I think--the 1970s and a West Coast publisher. Can anyone offer any details?

I wish I had a better and larger version of this cover illustration for The Common Law, again, in yellow, and featuring one of the blondest of blonde starlets, Constance Bennett. Filmed twice as a silent picture, Chambers' novel stepped into the era of sound in 1931. By the way, Constance Bennett was a sister to Joan Bennett of Dark Shadows fame.

Another Chambers cover in yellow. As I have suggested before, many artists see yellow as the color of madness. I offer "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the paintings of Vincent van Gogh as evidence.

Here's a nice wraparound cover for the novel Athalie. Chambers started off his career with a bang with The King in Yellow. Thereafter, he wrote historical novels and novels of adventure and romance. Like his friend Charles Dana Gibson, he depicted the new, independent woman of the early twentieth century. (This cover looks suspiciously like a Gibson drawing and the setting is the same as in the illustration above.) Popular with shopgirls, Chambers lost the confidence of critics as the years went by. Today he is a literary footnote except among fans of weird fiction.

Postscript (Jan. 28, 2016): Here is just such a drawing by Charles Dana Gibson, "The Greatest Game in the World," from many years before. Gibson (1867-1944) and Chambers were friends and classmates at the Art Students League in New York City. Later they lent their names to the self-confident modern woman, sometimes called "the Chambers Girl," more often "the Gibson Girl."

Text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley